To all our colleagues, at TRL and wider afield, for your many good wishes and gifts. It feels very strange not to be coming back to the office tomorrow. Richard A and Dave G we would particularly like to thank for your kind words, so much appreciated. Looking forward to the champagne! Also to learning to fish – thanks Matt – an inspired present.
The mast is out and Ventata seems bare without her rig! The marina staff thankfully made a good job of taping over the hole in the deck; even with all that rain it hasn’t leaked a drop. We weren’t really expecting them to leave the boom inside the boat. Good for security but rather an obstacle in the saloon – making tea has become rather an acrobatic feat so I don’t think it will be staying there.
Seeing the mast on the floor gave me a renewed sense of the scale of this boat. The size and weight can be frightening. The longest room in our house is 19’; at over 16 metres the mast is about three times the length. It’s heavy, and complicated: nav lights, anchor light, steaming light, deck light, wind instruments, vhf antenna, radar dome. An unidentified aerial – the cable we labelled Coax1 inside the boat last week goes to a flimsy piece of wire at the top of the mast that does… who knows what?! We have 2 sets of spreaders, 4 pairs of shrouds, a forestay and split backstay holding the mast up, each one something of an effort to handle. Halyards for the mainsail, genoa, spinnaker (x2) and spinnaker pole (x2), and that’s not counting the ropes associated with the boom.
Lots of stuff; everything with its own function and, on a 1994 boat, potential for failure. Visual inspection isn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of condition (does that sound familiar?), and there’s never a good time for it to go wrong.
Ventata 