Why is it that, on a boat, what should be a five minute job almost always expands to fill half a day?
With a list of jobs, mostly quite small, needed to get our boat up to Category Two for the Fastnet, we set aside the whole of last weekend for fitting out chores. By the end of it, we'd suffered a great deal of delay and frustration, and only managed to tick one item off the list.
There was one case where, getting down into the bowels of the boat to prepare for one job, husband found something else, not on the list, that desperately needed to be done.
So desperately, in fact, that it instantly jumped to the top of the “to do” schedule - and of course, because it was unexpected, he hadn't got the right tools on board, so he had to dash home and get them before he could even start.
Thank Goodness it's only a ten minute trip each way. But then coming back along the pontoon he got diverted by someone else in urgent need of a hand with something - “it'll only take a couple of minutes,” he said. Oh yeah? - and so it goes on.
We decided to run a second spinnaker halyard. Having only one has not been a problem while cruising. But we thought it would be tempting fate to race offshore without a spare. Fortunately the mast was already equipped with the necessary sheeve and exit point.
So it seemed a simple matter: go up in the bosun's chair, drop down a mouse line to pull the new halyard through, do a small rearrangement of the order of ropes through clutches and jammers on the coach roof - job done!
Of course, it didn't work out like that. I managed to wind he who must be obeyed up to the masthead, to check that everything up there was OK, before lowering him down to the hounds. It was quite an effort as it's quite a long way up!
He duly threaded the mouse up through the “spectacles” and back round the sheeve into the mast. He'd first measured on the outside to see how much string needed lowering to reach the outlet. So it ought to have been a simple matter of hooking it out through the slot.
The snag was that the outlet was too high to be reached other than by bosun's chair, so it wasn't simply a case of someone at the bottom of the mast checking that it had worked before he came down: I had to lower him most of the way, so he could to do it himself. And naturally, the mouse string was nowhere to be seen.
We could only assume that we hadn't put a big enough weight on the end of it, and it was hung up somewhere higher up. Giving the string a tug, to see if we could free it, or hear it rattling anywhere, seemed to confirm this, as this only succeeded in pulling it back out at the top.
So it was back to the drawing board. A single cotter pin was always enough weight on a mouse for the Sigma mast, but of course, this one is taller, which means more weight of string. So he tied a second cotter pin in line with the first, to double the size of the mouse weight, and I wound him back up again - rather more slowly this time.
He lowered the mouse inside the mast again, and standing at the bottom, I heard the weights rattle past the opening. So had we won? No such luck. I lowered him down to the outlet, and there was still no sign of it.
“It must have gone down the cable conduit,” he said. Unwilling to be beaten, he went off to craft a special tool to push the mouse over the sheeve and right to the back of the interior of the mast, to be sure of clearing the conduit before dropping it down.
And then he was wound up for the third time. Fortunately by this time a friend had come to help, so I only had to do half of the winding. I was starting to feel rather tired. And the skipper was starting to feel rather bruised by the bosun's chair.
Well, the third attempt failed, too. This time we didn't hear the weights rattling down. There was still absolutely no sign of the string. And there was no question of yet another attempt until we'd all had a rest.
Two evenings later, we returned to the boat, armed with a new improved “push me pull you” (a piece of garden wire with hooks at each end, one designed to push the mouse over the top sheeve, the other to pull it out of the lower exit.)
I wound the skipper up the mast yet again, he fed in the mouse, and guess what? It fell so accurately that a loop of it actually bulged spontaneously out of the desired exit.
It really was a five minute job, in the end. So why had it already taken a fruitless half day? Something to do with sod's law of the sea, I suppose.
