| Mainsheet system |
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The existing mainsheet setup was a miserable affair. Although initially fairly standard, with a traveller on the bridgedeck, hauling on the sheet was done by a self tailing winch that was mounted so that the sheet very easily came loose. If you touched it when moving in the cockpit. Or looked at it. Or sneezed anywhere on the boat… A simple figure lifted from Harken's web pages explains:  The existing spinnaker winches (which I rarely use), serve as mainsheet winches. Easily reachable from behind the wheel, and also for other crew in the cockpit. I put a solid stainless steel bolt through the boom close the the goose neck, with an eye nut on each side of the boom as recommended by my rigger. Remember to use a "permanent" thread lock on those nuts... I use a single, sliding-bearing, block at the this eye nut, and an identical block lashed to a port chain plate with high strength dynema lashing. From there, the sheet is led aft to the spinnaker winch, by way of the original foot block at the toe rail. My initial plan was to go for a symmetric setup like in the figure above, but for the time being I've set it up only on one side. This means that I can use the existing main sheet, which now has a 2:1 purchase to the traveller, rather than 4:1 as before. It works great, although there are some drawbacks: It requires a few blocks, and it gives one more thing to trip over on the side deck. I may later make it double sided, so that I can always release the main sheet from my perch on the "high side". So far, there has been no need...
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