Location 17° 35.2S, 149° 37W
Sunday, 10.14.2007

The Schooner Maggie B is safe in Marina Taina in Papeete at 17° 35.2S, 149° 37W. We are pretty much fully recovered from the equipment problems of last week. We have re-rigged and fixed most everything that was plaguing us. Minor things still need to be done like fixing more “protection” to the masts and properly routing the wired for the replacement GPS antenna. The mast protection is flexible plastic that we glue on in the positions where the gaff saddles ride. It reduces or eliminates wear on our strong, expensive carbon masts.

It looks as if a nice system is going to go through Tahiti Sunday night and hopefully have a nice broad shoulder of a northerly that we can ride down the line. We hope to be off Monday, though now Tuesday seems more probably. The rather complex report from Commanders Weather will soon be up on the web site.

There are a bunch of new photos up on the web site which hopefully will be interesting to all.

I got one interesting insight while trying to find replacement blocks. The first thing that I found is that there are no blocks “our size” in French Papeete, let alone the kind of triples we need for the throat halyards. But the critical insight was that the blocks weren’t broken, it was the connectors that broke. I was astonished to see that the beefy Antal triple block was only rated to 3.5 tons according to the catalog. And that is presumably from bench tests, not anything like real life, banging around on the top of a mast, with loads coming from a variety of directions and in shocks. But in buying additional rope and checking its lab tests, I got some eight mil braided line that is rated to 4.5 tons! So we are going to ditch the easily-broken metal shackle attachments and use the high-strength line. Three wraps of the eight mil and the Antal block goes from 3.5 tons to 13.5! And the line is “honest” and shows when it is over stressed, where metal is there and then is broken.

Learn something every day!

It is now Sunday, October 14 in Papeete, my birthday. It looks as if it is going to rain all day. But…

All is well.