New mainsail

The existing mainsail suffered some damage during storm Eunice this year, my fault as I had not taken the sails off for the winter as I normally do, I had removed the spray hood. The damage was not serious some stitching had come undone on the leech but as the sail was old possibly as old as the boat I decided to replace it, two years ago the local sailmaker said it was on its last legs something like if you get another season out of it you will be lucky. I did a temporary repair to the old sail with some sail repair tape and ordered a new sail from Crusader Sails also a stack pack. The aim was to convert to slab reefing from the old roller reefing so I also ordered a new Barton 32mm slab reefing kit

Barton slab reefing kit

The new sail arrived a week ago so the first job was to temporarily bend it on to make sure that the major dimensions were OK, it fitted without any problems.

Trial fit

Once I had established that the sail would fit I went ahead and drilled and tapped the boom for 6mm countersunk machine screws, the track and screws were anointed with Duralac paste to prevent corrosion from the dissimilar metals, namely the stainless steel screws and the aluminium track and boom, in contact with each other.

Barton reefing kit attached to the boom

I put a couple of cleats at the forward end of the boom to make off the reefing lines I had originally intended to machine a radius on the bolting face of the cleats to match the boom which is circular in cross section however there was not sufficient material on the cleats so I had to machine a couple of pads to fit under the cleats.

Cleats with backing pads

The boom was again drilled and tapped for 6mm countersunk machine screws and the cleats secured again using Duralac paste.

Cleats fitted to the boom

The sail has in fact got three reefing points but as I was only expecting two for some reason I only purchased two cleats I will therefore obtain and fit a third cleat, the other outstanding detail is to fit some means of supporting the reefing lines along the boom to reduce the sagging. Lazy jacks were already rigged on the mast so I reused them to support the new stack pack, they could possibly do with being a bit higher up the mast I think that the recommended height is 70% of the mast height, at present they are just under the spreaders I shall see how they work before changing them.

Stack pack and lazy jacks

Several weeks ago I spotted another Moody 33 mk1 project on E-bay she was in a similar dismantled condition to New Morning when I bought her, I immediately thought do I want to do it all over again, there was a resounding do not even think about it from several friends and so common sense prevailed. However I had a Baldrick* moment. The boat had been professionally fitted with a new 37hp Beta engine eight years ago which had never been run and with a starting bid of £3000 and no reserve I thought if nobody else bids I could come in at the end and obtain a new engine for £3000, I would then swap it for the Perkins currently in New Morning and put the other boat back on E-bay 99p starting bid with no reserve and any money made would have been an added bonus. There were some possible problems the main one was that the other boat was in Emsworth so the storage fees were fairly high and any delay in selling would have reduced any financial advantage. However the whole project was scrubbed when the boat was taken off the auction site maybe it was no bad thing in the end.

* For those that do not reside in the UK Baldrick was a rather scruffy manservant played by Tony Robinson in a TV comedy series called Blackadder also staring Rowan Atkinson as Sir Edmund Blackadder. It was set in various periods of history. When the chips were down and they were about to lose their heads Baldrick always came up with the immortal words 'I have a cunning plan' and would then go on to outline s stupid plan to save themselves.