[/quote]
RobH912 wrote: I'll cut to chase... gooseneck strayed attached (yeah !!
) and we had a lot fun with the "first sail" on a day with some wind. If we had had the jib up we would have been ripping along.
Glad to hear. Good call on the wind range for your testing. However, you might be surprised how well a DS sails even in lighter winds - not ripping, but can be making good progress. But then, we have a lot of lighter wind days here for me to practice.
RobH912 wrote:We used some cord to tie down the main sail tack, cranked the boom vang medium tight, raised the sail, and then additionally tightened the vang as tight as it would go. Someone had given me advice to also tighten up the outhaul as much as possible (to keep boom attached to gooseneck... not for optimum sail shape) and we found that we could not pull the foot of the sail completely out and you'll see that in the pictures below.
First, from your picture, it's clear that that bottom slug belongs in the mast track. I think if you let the outhaul all the way out, you might be able pull a bit of the foot of the sail out so it can reach the feeding gap. Or enough to take the boom out of the gooseneck, then put it back in.
Second, for the lashing I had imagined something thinner, so you can wrap it two or three times. Easier to snug it up that way. But yours seems to do the trick.
Third, you definitely want to be able to sail w/ the full range of adjustments for vang and outhaul; how far can you loosen them w/o losing the boom?
RobH912 wrote:There is a thin yellow cord that is the outhaul line near the front of the boom. At the clew end of the boom there is a piece of rope (look like same size as the red main halyard in the pictures) and I am attaching the clew to that outhaul rope with a bowline knot. Some how / where in the boom there is a transition from skinny yellow cord to the rope, maybe to a block that is giving some mechanical advantage?? Something in the boom with this set up seems jammed or not working properly.
Many boom-internal outhauls have a "floating" block to give a 2:1 advantage. It may reach the end of its range. Also, sometimes people tie bowlines that are so long as to limit the travel that way. I assume that your case isn't just the bowline getting stuck to the end of the boom. You might try pulling on the outhaul to see if it's perhaps too long (but make sure you don't loose either "cord" or "rope" into the boom...
RobH912 wrote:...there needs to be some work with the halyards, maybe switching spinnaker with jib halyard... but you can see that with the current set up the spinnaker halyard rubs up against boom vang and I am not sure that under tension (sail up) that the spinnaker halyard would not just pull out of the cam cleat. For your questions, gooseneck firmly attached to mast, it does not slide or move. Not sure which rivet on the boom you are asking about. There is a lot hardware, connectors on the boat that not sure what they would do... or if they are all from many POs upgrades and changes, but next PO left them behind.
In the picture, on the other side of your mast, there's another halyard that appears to have a block on deck acting as fairlead. Unfortunately your photo doesn't show the port side of the deck near the mast, so if there's no block there, you perhaps need to add one. The way the halyard leads to the cleat is totally bogus, even without the vang.
RobH912 wrote:Have no idea what the blue line is. There is a hole drilled up from the bottom of the boom and this blue line just hangs out... not able to push it up into the boom, nor pull it any tighter
Could have been for a reef line, but then it needs to exit near the outhaul on the end of the boom.
RobH912 wrote:... there is a picture of the boom vang so with 3 on each side is that 6:1 ? Had a DS sailer at the club look at it and he thought it was odd that the cleating mechanism for the vang was on the bottom. Maybe just switch it around and put the cleating mechanism on the boom side rather than mastoid? Had two DS owners tell me that the boom is only held on by the outhaul, so it doesn't seem like they use it as a sail / boom control tool... set it tight and just forget about it ?? I'll ask them.
On cleating a vang there are many opinions. If you want to lead the line aft you'll be able to release the vang from anywhere in the boat, but it may not be possible to cleat it again. Also, you get a 6:1 this way, but could get a 7:1 if you turned it around. But you'll have the line dangling into the cockpit. . .
RobH912 wrote:Lots of work to do, need to get a shake down sail in with jib, then try to figure out spinnaker rigging. There are blocks / cleats all around the boat and had a DS owner scratching their head some on where spinnaker sheet & guy would go.
You really need only two blocks, near the stern quarters. You can lead the sheets forward along the side decks to turning blocks w/ or w/out cleats near the crew position. That would make four blocks. Anything beyond that would seem to be extra. I tried to collect all I've learned so far on rigging spinnakers in
this post. (Personally, I'm a bit of a minimalist who only grudgingly adds a new piece of hardware if there's no other way, but other people like a cleaner setup that keeps sheets out of the cockpit).