RE-SPLICING HALYARDS ON THE NORTH SIDE OF NUKU HIVA
Following through after our June 9th article:
Chafe: Find It, Fix it, Get Ahead of it
(LINK????)
Cruising offers so many takes on life.ย Among them “Boatwork in beautiful places” rings true time and time again aboard SV WHIRLWIND.ย Granted this ‘grind’ is part of the fun of raising our sails, putting miles beneath our keel, watching dolphins surf our bow, sharing sundowners, and sailing for days and days to distant shores.
This week Captain Mike set about to re-splice the portside Spinnaker halyard that had chafed on our Pacific Crossing in May. Once we found the trades en route to French Polynesia we had the opportunity to fly the spinnaker for days on end before the conditions changed and a new sail was required.ย ย It was on one of these sail changes that we noticed that the head of the halyard had been chafing on something at the top of the mast.ย While the cover was shot, the core was fine and we had to put that halyard to rest until now.
(Side note: Redundancy to the rescue!ย Thankfully, when the conditions called for a spinnaker again, we were still able to raise ours as we have a starboard spinnaker halyard that carried us the rest of the way.)
Getting geared up to Re-splice the halyard where it was damaged, Mike took the opportunity to do a few upgrades that had been on hisย ‘list for sometime’.ย We hadn’t had a shackle in at the head of the line.ย We had been attaching the halyard with a bowline.ย Additionally, he put a new eye splice in the bitter end.ย See photos below for Re-splicing inspiration.
SY WHIRLWIND ๐บ๐ธ Maurisa, Mike, Russell & Josea โ Alajuela 48โ