Hi all
Sorry the blog is very late this time, it has been a very busy few weeks!! I am wirting it on passage to Lanzarote, our longest sail yet. Getting in practice for the big one.
At the end of June we both went back to the UK for my nieces wedding. What a fantastic day that was, it was almost perfect appart from my daughter going into hospital that day and missing it all!! It was lovely to catch up with family and friends and the champagne flowed all day and all night!! Liz, my niece, looked absolutely stunning and my grandaughter was a little star.
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| Wonderful Day | My little star |
We returned to Sardinia beginning of July along with Caroline and Richard afer a very frantic 2 days clearing up after the wedding!! we were all ready for a rest. We had left Nimrod on a mooring buoy in Porto Pozzo, a realy nce place to visit. We came here 7 years ago and were made most welcome by a lovley couple Jenny & Tito. They had a boat and a beautiful house ashore which they invited us to and made us feel part of their family. We promised to visit if we came back this way but sadly Tito died 2 years ago. Jenny was still there waiting on her Jetty with big hugs and smiles to greet us. The plan was to sail around Sardinia and Corsica and then cross to Majorca. We had 3 weeks to play with so what could go wrong!! The weather!! We sailed across to the Maddalena Islands for a few days then across to Corsica and eventually back to Sardinia. Ended up with Caroline flying home from Sardinia and Richard stayed on a few extra days and we managed a night passage to Menorca, which was what he wanted to do in preparation for our bigger crossing the end of this year.
We still all enjoyed our 3 weeks together and did some lovely hikes and exploring as we always do. The Cork Museum was fascinating and we visited the oldest olive tree, estimated to be between 3000 and 4000 years old. It’s quite ironic that 7 years ago they came out to Majorca intending to cross to Sardinia with us and we didnt make it that way either!!
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| Cork Museum, Olive Tree and Valley of the Moon | Chilling and Hiking |
At the end of July my daughter and her partner Pete and my grandaughter came to visit to Santa Ponsa. Courtney celebrated her 11th birthday onboard, the last time I was with her on her actual birthday was when she was 1!! We had a really lovely time with them but the end of the holiday had a dramatic end. My daughter hadnt been feeling well the last couple of days and ended up being met by paramedics and ambulance at Manchester airport. She spent the night on resus ward with multiple clots on both lungs and legs and it was a very fightening time. I flew home the next day to be with her and look after Courtney. She is recovering well now but a very lucky girl to have survived that and I have a few more grey hairs and wrinkles!!
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| Family having fun in the sun | A beautiful mermaid onboard |
So after my unexpected trip home for 10 days I few back into Alicante where Chris had sailed Nimrod to in my absence. We were now on a mission to get to the Guadiana River where Chris planned to make a new mainsail, quite, quite mad!! The plan was to anchor in the river at the bottom of our friends garden and set up a workshop there. Isn’t it nice to have really good friends, especially with a pool and bar in their garden!! Thank You Claire and Eddie
I am now going to let Chris tell you about the making of the mainsail. I am very proud of him as it was an awful lot of hard work, I was just the little helper and we also had other friends who arrived to help us just at the right time. Thank you Gilly & John
So – how to make a mainsail in a Spanish Garden?
The mainsail on Nimrod was the original so was nearly 16 years old and had a good few patches and the sailcloth was very weak and easily torn – it was pretty clear we needed a new one so time for some research. Obviously most people would have just got a few quotes from Sailmakers and choosen the one that they felt was best, but where is the challenge in that? The original sail was made by Jeckells and talking to them they were amazed that the sail had actually lasted 16 years, we must have looked after it very well.
Prices for a new sail were in the £5,500 to £7,000 range depending on specification etc so lets have a look at making our own – how difficult can it be? You only need to stitch a few panels of sailcloth together, add in some corner fittings, reef points and battens and you have a new sail – it was actually close to that simple, just did’t realise how difficult it is to manouvre 65 sq m of sailcloth on a sewing table that was not quite big enough.
First thing to do is get the new sail designed so we took very careful measurements of the existing, drew up a specification and sent all the info to Ultimate Sails. They produced the sail design on their state of the art software and we get an assembly plan and a cutting file for the sailcloth. Very simple process and only about £180 – good value we thought.
Next step is to get the sailcloth cut to the cutting file specification. We used Contender Sails for this and they were very efficient. We sent them 2 rolls of sailcloth from our supplier and they then cut all the individual panels on their computer controlled laser cutting bed, panels were also plotted with identification numbers, joint lines, reef points and luff connection positions. They packed everything up into 2 big boxes and shipped it to Spain all for around £300.
So we now have two boxes of sailcloth panels, batten pocket strips, edging tapes etc, all ready to sew together. The sail was made up of 12 main panels, another 60 panels to make up the corner and reef point patches plus the strips for 5 batten pockets and the tapes around the edges of the sail – basically a big jigsaw puzzle.
Now we needed a sail loft and a sewing machine and a big open space. Friends Claire and Eddie have a Finca on the banks of the Guadiana River with loads of space and they were great hosts while we were there. Claire and Sue went off walking one day and met the neighbours who turned out to have about a dozen 8x4 sheets of OSB and some trestles – perfect start for the sail loft. The next neighbour had also heard about some locals who had a large sewing machine that was free to a good home.
Eddie had a good few trestles and frames so the sail loft table was put together and covered with a couple of tarpaulins to make it smooth and slippy for sliding the sail around on, the garden was also on a slight slope that meant some gravity assistance for feeding things through the sewing machine. We had already ordered a heavy duty zig-zag sewing machine for the project but we also collected the free machine from Sam and David, this was a very heavy duty Seiko machine that would effortlessly sew through 14 layers of sailcloth and a couple of thicknesses of webbing, ideal for the multiple layer corners etc. We also used our existing mainsail as a sunshade cover over the whole sewing table, this was brilliant since it would have been impossible to work in the Spanish sun without it, daytime temperatures were mid to high 30’s so the adjacent pool and bar were great.
Then it was just a matter of assembling all the patches and panels to make the sail. We started from the head of the sail and worked towards the foot, things got progressively more difficult as more panels and patches were stitched together. Sewing the last panels on meant feeding through about 6m length of sail with all the rest of the sail folded up on the table to slide past at the same time, this needed 3 people to keep it all under control but it worked pretty well. The biggest job was having to unroll the sail from how it had been assembled and re-roll it length ways to allow us to stitch on the edging tapes etc. We had to take down the old suncover sail and spread it in the garden so we could unroll the new sail on it and then roll it up the other way.
After something like 2 weeks of sewing we had a complete sail ready for fitting – the moment of truth!! On a nice calm morning the sail was hoisted up the mast and connected to all the fittings, it fitted perfectly and looked brilliant. The shape of the sail looked great and barely a wrinkle to be seen, it was to be another 3 weeks or so before we finally got out to sea and were able to actually test the sail but it seems to work extremely well, very pleased with it.
Was it worth it? It was certainly a major project and about the limit of what you could do without full size industrial sewing machines and large sail loft space and it was an awful lot of work. However with computer design, cutting and plotting the sail is exactly the same shape as we would have got from a proffesional sailmaker, certainly some of the stitching would have have been neater and more consistent from a sailmaker but otherwise not much difference. The main problem we had was actually feeding the cloth through the machine at a constant rate to get nice straight and consistent stitches, the sailcloth is very slippy so the foot of the machine does not grip it efficiently and the cloth slides around a bit too much causing uneven stitches, broken thread and bent needles, we used about 40 needles overall.
Finally it was a great achievment and we saved about £2,500 even after buying an expensive sewing machine to do the job – so now we have the sewing machine for new headsails??
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| Looking Good | Maybe a New Career!! |
Whilst I was Chris’ little helper I also found some other activities to keep me busy. Picking grapes and all the follow on preparation for wine makeing was great fun if a tad messy!! We visited many old friends and made many new friends all who contributed to making our extended stay up the Guadiana River a brilliant time. We apologise for any hangovers we caused but it was all great fun amidst the hard work. Thank you to everyone involved in helping and partying with us and we will be back one day!!!
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| Grape picking and pressing | Fun times |
We finally managed to make our way out of the river as it was time to move on. Culatra was our next stop, where we waited for the perfect weather window to cross to the Canaries. Ha Ha!! if only these forecasts could be believed. It was a very mixed crossing with all sorts thrown at us but we survived and we even caught two Mahi Mahi along the way. It was a great experience for our next long passage across the Atlantic to Barbados. Menus all planned, just provision shopping to do. Getting excited now!!
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| Sunrise on leaving Culatra | Mahi Mahi |
