Newport 41 Raft Up

We took the boat out again. Very low tide today. The bar alongside the Emeryville channel looked like you could walk across it. We sailed from Emeryville out to Angel Island where we picked up a mooring and met Good Grief for lunch.

The mooring field at Angel Island here is set up for bow and stern mooring. Eric rigged the Happy Hooker to a stern cleat and picked up the stern mooring at the bow. With that attached, it was easy to motor forward to the stern mooring, stopping ourselves from running over it by adjusting the stern line.

Russ and Maureen arrived a little while later and we rafted up.

This was our first raft up and I think that our technique worked pretty well:

• Set fenders and prepare a long stern line on the downwind side.


• Have the arriving boat prepare a long bow line on the opposite side on their boat.


• Have the arriving boat pull up from downwind, bring their bow to your fenders, and exchange lines from their bow.


• Pay out and let the wind blow you apart until you are parallel.


• Set the length of the stern line to allow the boats to come parallel alongside each other but offset by a 1/3 boat length (i.e. allow sufficient slack to ensure that the rigs don't collide).


• The arriving boat motors forward and slack is taken up on the bow.


• Keep in engine in gear until a spring line is secured that prevents parallel motion and the rigs from crashing.

I'm not sure this is exactly what happened, but its what I imagined, and it all turned out very well.

In our case, we were moored bow and stern. If we were anchored or moored at the bow only, the last steps would need to run in reverse: set the bowline to allow the boats to sit offset by 1/3 and run the engine in reverse. This would prevent the engine from pushing the boats over the anchor or the mooring.

Fired up the BBQ for lunch. We drank beer and eat steaks and talked about Newports until Russ and I bored everyone with our boat talk. We headed out towards the gate after lunch. Wendy tipped 9kts reaching across the slot.

The boat felt quite a lot overpowered today. We reefed the jib. It would be nice to find a way of doing this more tidily while headed upwind so that creases don't get wrapped in the furler. Downwind's much easier and tidier, but is not always where you want to be going.

Here's the track Eric made. 26nm.

 

 

Wendy also got some great shots of Good Grief:

 
North Star 

We flushed and refilled the tanks water when we got back. When the tanks were filling, there were a couple of pops, that I assumed was just the tanks flexing. I have two deck water fillers and two tanks that are connected by a valve. Adding water in one side fills one tank. Filling in the other side fills both tanks. When I was filling, the deck filler overflowed, and then the level dropped. I topped off and again and the level dropped again. I figured that this was just water moving from one tank to another. It wasn't until Wendy found a small river running into the bilge that we discovered that one of the water hoses in the shower had popped out of one of the foot pumps. My yard had taken apart the cabinet that this was attached to in order to fit new ball valves. I figure that, along with poorly tightening the clamps for the pressure water system, they also didn't tighten the hose clamps for the shower footpump. I should really had checked over all of the hose clamps. It would be a good idea to make it part of regular maintenance checklist.

Also, some of the hoses looks pretty rank. Will make a point to replace them.