Repairs

La Sonrisa's windvane - the Arrow and the V

Learning to sail on La Sonrisa you can get a stiff neck. That’s because you are always looking at the arrow on the top of the mast for wind direction. Thomas would always say to me “Keep the arrow out of the V,” when sailing into the wind or with wind on our stern quarter with 2 foresails. You pretty well have to “Keep the arrow in the V” sailing wing-on-wing. But now that basic La Sonrisa wind orientation is missing. One day I noticed half of the V had disappeared. Thomas found it on deck. He hinted that I could be hoist up the mast to re-attach it, but we kept saying “Let’s wait til Noel comes, he likes it up there!”

By the time Noel arrived the other half of the V had fallen, and the arrow itself had lost its tail and no longer pointed in the direction of the wind. Here is Noel on June 15, heading up the mast.

Here are Thomas and Cosmo cranking our mechanic up the mast.

And here is Frankie, at the wheel with Susan, waiting for his dad to come down the mast.

I’ve just finished reading The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin. In the spirit of Thor Heyerdahl, Tim and crew set out to recreate the travels of the sixth century Irish Saint Brendan. The Navigatio is an account in Latin of Brendan and his crew of Irish monks sailing in a skin curragh from the west coast of Ireland to North America. I‘ve read about Brendan’s voyages in a Celtic spirituality context – the image of sailing in a skin boat with no keel, trusting in where the Spirit takes you. Tim Severin believed that the accounts of Brendan’s voyage were not just holy legend but travel records full of practical details. So he set out to show how it could have happened. With the help of various creative and skilled craftsmen, he built a boat of strong ash wood, covered with sheep skin leather and sealed with grease, and learned how to sail it from the locals. One of his most important learnings on his Brendan voyage was how often simpler is better. You can’t sew up your fiberglass hull and cover it with grease while bouncing in a gale after being ripped opened by a sharp lump of sea ice. This 1970’s curragh crew did. They also discovered that smoked meat is much more edible after being doused in seawater than dehydrated food in plastic bags. Brendan landed in Newfoundland June 26, 1977.

On La Sonrisa we are often discovering ways of doing things simply, or as Thomas says “dumbed down.” Here are our dumbed down wind indicators: the little orange tapes.

We have a new Arrow and V on order – and I hope it’s not me that has to go up the mast to put them in place.

Like Tim and the Brendan crew we’ve had many repair challenges. The stuffing box is an ongoing project. Advice from the caretaker in Namu to load in the grease is our stopgap measure that’s still working.

The depth sounder quit. Or it sometimes works when the motor isn’t running, which isn’t much help. So here is Cosmo using our simpler method of discovering how far down the bottom is.

Cosmo offered to bring us a new depth sounder that also shows the fish down there, but we still hold to the simpler is better philosophy. We can always put the anchor down and see when it touches. But again, I hope we can take advantage of some appropriate technology for anchoring. For fishing, we can say thank you to “Bottom Woman” for whatever she chooses to put on our lines. Who needs fish finders?

There are many more repairs to keep us happily busy, both on the boat and the cabin. Tune in for the next positing about the new stairs for Daisy and Frankie to climb up the rocky point on Crippen.

To read about the Sustainable Coast Project see the May 16 posting.
To find out more about our sailing charters see Welcome to La Sonrisa, April 30 posting.
Contact us: elizabeale@yahoo.ca