[Public-List] A cautionary tale...

[Gordon Laco]

So there we were, happily launching SURPRISE yesterday.  Aside from an ugly panic ransacking my office looking for the knot meter through hull the day before (yes, it turned up in a tidy forgotten location I’d placed it last fall so I wouldn’t lose it…) all went painlessly.

I went back to my office and worked away merrily till late afternoon when I decided to down pen and head back over to see how SURPRISE was doing.  She was fine, so I decided to stroll further out on the docks to invite my friend Pete over for the first boat beer of the season. On the way to his boat, I heard a familiar sound… a combination of soft cursing overlaying the squeaking of a jammed genoa furler.  

The source was a lovely Alberg 37, with its new owner in the cockpit hauling on his furling line with his portside primary self tailing winch.  There was a small working jib on the furler, half furled.  Glancing up I could see the usual cause of stiff or jammed furling…. the hoist of the sail was short of the full length of the forestay, so the halyard had taken advantage of the five feet or so between the swivel (shackled to the head of the sail) and the halyard block… wrapping three turns around the extrusion.  That of course results in plenty of friction, enough to jam the furler.

I introduced myself, said I was a fellow Alberg owner, and suggested that I could fix his problem.  I always have a terror of being a ‘helpoid’, which is what I call those who press unwanted (and usually useless) help on people.  My offer was gratefully accepted.

I hopped aboard and explained the halyard wrap issue, and suggested that all would be well if the owner put a pennant or leader on the head of the sail so that the top swivel was up near enough to the halyard block so it couldn’t wrap the halyard.  I said I could whip one up for him if he had some light line… his furrowed brow smoothed out and he said ‘oh, something like this?’ and produced a nice wire pennant, which he said he’d removed from the sail, not knowing what it was for.  ‘Perfect!” cried I, ‘let’s get that sail down, put the wire back on, and I expect all will be well’.

So I walked up to the half furled sail and after calling to him to cast off the furling line, waited for the breeze to unfurl the sail.  It didn’t.  I reached up to the clew and gave it a tug… and something very very bad happened.

There was a small ‘twang’ up at the masthead, and the whole forestay fell off.  At first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but as the heavy gear started coming down on me, I shouted ‘THE FORESTAY BROKE - LOOK OUT FOR THE MAST!’   

Well the mast didn’t fall.  The deck hounds and forward lowers were enough to hold it up.  The forestay with its half furled sail on the furler extrusion came down till its head was resting on the spreaders, with a ragged headsail halyard coming out the top holding it up.  I scrambled back to the mast looking for his #2 jib halyard or a spinnaker halyard; of course there was none.  So I found the main halyard, whipped it around the shrouds so it led forward, lengthened it with a sheet, then cranked that taut with the halyard winch after making it down to a bow mooring cleat.   Hokay… the mast isn’t going to fall, but what the hell happened?

We eased the genoa halyard till we could pop the top of the headstay/furler assembly under the spreaders and lower it to the deck.  There we beheld something I’d never seen in 30 years of rigging yachts.   The halyard led INTO the top of the furler’s extrusion.  it was wrapped around the 5/16” 1x19 wire of the forestay hard tight and had burst the aluminium alloy extrusion for about two feet.  Then it made the two or three leisurely wraps that started the issue, ending at its shackle on the furler’s top swivel, which was shackled to the head of the sail.

So here’s what happened as best I can reconstruct it.  The owner removed the jib’s pennant.  He hoisted it, probably with not much halyard tension, then tried to furl it.  The exposed upper part of the halyard between the top swivel and the block made its wraps, stiffening up the furling process, perhaps stopping it.   When the owner found the furling stiffening up, he put the furling line to the port primary self tailing winch.  After a few turns it wouldn’t move… even with a strong young man leaning red faced with all his strength on a 10” handle…. as he was when we walked up.   The few turns the winch imposed on the jammed furler served only to wind the halyard around the forestay, and the immense force being applied wrapping the rope onto the wire cause it to grip the wire so well, that it started turning the wire itself.  Repeated attempts to unfurl, then furl again, turned the strands of the wire back and forth, fatiguing the steel so that when I came the last strand or two broke when I tugged on the clew, applying only a few pounds of force.

The owner came back to our boat to share that beer… my wife commented that if this had happened out in the open sailing back to Windsor as he’d planned to, that mast almost certainly would have come down if the boat was pitching.  He might have been killed… at the least he’d have had a terrible issue to deal with out there.  He profusely thanked us for helping him, agreeing that it was better this happened in the marina that out there.  I put him in touch with a good man I know who still does itinerant rigging house calls - he agreed to come the next day.  The marina agreed to lower the mast the next day… that was fine because we’d cut the mangled jib halyard and extended it with another sheet to hold the mast up.

So what happened today?  The broker who’d sold the boat to the new owner a few days ago called me asking for a statement about what I thought happened… it turns out the new owner is trying to pin the damage on the previous owner and the broker.  Oh dear, thought I, what am in involved in now…  So I reported to the broker; ‘the halyard was hopelessly jammed in the top of the extrusion… if it was that way before he took possession of the boat, he couldn’t have hoisted that sail.  You decide’.

As I returned to my work today, I had the thought while pondering what was going through the owner’s head as he ground on his self tailing primary winch harder and harder… ‘perhaps sometimes, when something sticks, hitting it with a bigger hammer isn’t the thing to do’.    What’s going to happen next?  Perhaps this might get ugly...

Gordon Laco
www.gordonlaco.com
#426 SURPRISE