Sail Life - Downwind setup for 2700 mile passage ⛵️ Atlantic crossing 2023 ⛵️

Overseas this week we have some maintenance items on the to-do list as well as some upgrades but most importantly I want to do a test sale and test our

downwind

setup

and we also have this pretty old

sail

for light wind we have. I've never used it. I would like to see if this can still be used before our next Atlantic

crossing

. My name is Miss. This is my wife Ava. I've spent the last five years on a somewhat extensive renovation of our 1987 Warrior 38 called Athena, which was a DIY fun-filled Adventure complete with a very extensive osmosis treatment, building a new rudder using vacuum infusion, rebuilding the entire deck, cutting and then rebuilding most of the interior, painting the top sides, and a bunch of other projects.

In the summer of 2021, we start

sail

ing full time now. We are finally ready to begin our adventure. Our

downwind

setup

will be two successful sale retreats, which is a bit dated, but should also be very easy to handle for a short-handed crew. This is not true for All furlers except our furlers here should allow us to put two headsails on the same furler for that setup to work well and for it to be as easy to use as possible. Ideally, the two sales should be identical. New sales sponsored by Precision Sales for Athena. Last winter, so we had to make two sales of 100 identical heads.

Now we haven't had a chance to really sail downwind, so this will be the first time we've leaned into the second successful sale. We will use the same halyard for both. sales, so to increase the new sale, we must first lower the first one. These are heavy sails designed for offshore sailing and are still like new so they are a little stiff and difficult to manipulate while Ava was launching. on the halyard doing a good workout and guided the two sails through the furler, there isn't much to bend in the two sails at the same time but it does take a bit of time so I think a setup like this really makes sense.

If you are sailing downwind for several days both headsails are now on the ferlex and we are using the same shackles for both sales and that is one of the reasons why it is good that the sales are identical now that we can . Go ahead and cast both sails into the furler to fill the two successful sells it took a little more force than with a single sail. Normally I can fill the headsail by simply pulling on the furling line by hand but with both sails up. I needed a little help from a winch. One of the big advantages of a downwind setup like this is that it is very easy to reduce the sail area and everything can be done directly from the cockpit, it is just a matter of loosening the sheets and furling both sails at the same time, As you have seen, if we were to sound the wing using our mainsail and a single blow sale to reduce the selling error, you would have to do each of the sales separately, another interesting thing about the double blow setup. headsail leaves us free to use the main as a stabilizing cell, which means we can center the boom and pull the mainsail nice and tight, and that should help reduce roll a bit, as you may have noticed at the beginning of the video. that I had one of our mustache poles spread out because I was measuring to see if I could get our two poles to be about the same length.

This is a telescopic pole that reaches a length of approximately 6 meters in increments of a little more. Half a meter, this is our other pole. It is 4 meters in fixed length. From what I've read, a whiskered pole should ideally be the same length as the foot of the sail, which in our case is 6 meters, meaning this telescoping pole is basically perfect. To get two successful sales, I think it makes a lot of sense for the two poles to be identical or very close to each other in length, ours are not, so I ordered a new Selden telescoping pole which should arrive here in a couple of days and once we have it we can go out for a small test sale.

I've been working on my own little project today. When we got here, we noticed that there is a tradition of painting the name of your ship on the wall and I know it's a pretty big tradition in Horta and the Azores and we were very excited to get there one day to do it, but that's why we were very We were excited when we got here and noticed that it's a tradition too, so I've been working on that. I'm not a painter, so in true satellite style, I made a stencil out of this foam material, but I thought it would be nice so we could keep this in case we have to paint our logo and other walls in the future, but yeah.

I simply printed the logo and then cut it out into this foam. I bought this paint and brushes at the hardware store and then I have some chalk that we already had from our sewing kit to make some stencils and that's pretty much it. everything we need, we are ready to start. I actually went out earlier and scrubbed the wall area with some soap and water per Matt's recommendation, so now I'm going to do the first phase which is painting the red square and I'll probably have to wait all night to let it dry and then I can paint the rest and here is our beautiful spot on the wall next to the steps, it's pretty much the only empty space, okay, the first coat is done, I think I'll leave it.

Dry and then apply a second coat so you can get that nice bright red candle. It's the next day. I got another coat on the red last night, so I'm going to go check it out, make sure it's dry and see how it is. looking I wanted to leave early while it was high tide so I could get to the plaza oh it looks so good it's so red it's actually very bright compared to all the others but now comes the scary part which is stenciling. in the letters and this is where you can't go wrong foreigner oh, it looks great.

I love it so far. I'm going to do this part here freehand, so wish me luck. It looks very good and very bright so far, but I think I'm. I'm still going to apply a second coat all the way and then I'll come back and show you the final results. I get the second coat on the logo, it looks pretty good if I do say so myself, but I'm just going to grab mats and We can show you the final results. Quality control time. I may have Mads Mads on this project. Yeah, we'll see about that, we'll see about it before someone accuses us of graffiti and vandalizing the marina.

These are all the other ships that have done the same. thing that includes this ship that just um I guess they just put a plate. I love the tile idea. I think that's what we should do. I bet that thing will be here long after all these paintings. Are you ready. I'm oh, that looks very pretty. great I think Ava did a much better job than I could have done. I think it looks very, very good. We don't have a task here on the board to graffiti the marina, so we can't close that except the downwind test.

Setup is in progress and next step I think we should start polishing all of our stainless steel. Our stainless steel is not in bad condition. There are just a few areas where there is a slight reddish sheen to the metal or some small rust spots. I think it makes a lot of sense to bite it in the butt before it gets worse. I bought a couple of products from the local candle shops. I know this brand from Denmark. I have never seen this gel before, but we have some. tight places for this rust and I thought a gel might be good to get in there.

Another place where I think the gel could be useful is here on the helm where we have some welds that have a little bit of texture to them, so that's nice. It's hard to get in and polish according to the instructions, we just add this stuff in there and leave it for 7 to 12 minutes. In my opinion the other product is much more fun to use because the result is instant now than the supports for our solar system The panels up here are the crustiest oxidized material we have because they were never polished and they were never passivated a little dead and then it's just a matter of rubbing after just a couple of minutes of rubbing, this seems like a lot.

Better now, the next time we are somewhere for a month or a couple of months, I will remove the solar panels and polish them so we don't have to do this as often, but for now this looks perfect. About 10 minutes in and this gel doesn't really seem to do much, it didn't even remove this slight rust here, so yeah, oh, Gloria polishing pretty much falls into the same category as glorious sanding. a mind-numbingly boring task that is well suited to zoning out and simply thinking about other things. I really like jobs like this where I just fall asleep while you're doing it and suddenly you realize two hours have passed.

After liberally scrubbing the stainless steel, I'm delighted to say that all the little spots of rust have disappeared and it still works. I don't know if I didn't leave it long enough the first time or if I just hadn't stirred the gel yet or anything, but after the first try it worked. I only use this in a few places for almost everything. I used the rubbing material, but what turned out to be really cool about this is that it worked to remove some of the rust. stains in the paint here near our engine controls, there were some small rust spots down there, maybe from a Duster angle grinder or something, but there were some small rust flares and that gel removed it all while we were polishing A local sailmaker stopped by and together we inspected the light wind sail which turned out to be an asymmetrical Spinnaker.

The sail itself is perfectly usable, we just need to find a way to attach the sail attack to the boat and there is room for some. improvements to the sock in terms of attaching the tack of the sail to the boat. I think there are two ways we can do it: we can use a tack belt that wraps around the bow support or we can use a mouse, but I think we have everything we need here on Athena to Cobble together a tack belt, so we might try it next week when we take out the candle, the sock, which is the blue thing you see here that contains the sale, it's a little worn, there's some rust.

There's a little irritation and a repair up here, but that's not that important. What would be good to do is improve this situation here a little bit. I think the way the previous owner used this is this shackle here attached to the Spinnaker Hyatt and then all that was hoisted up, but that means the entire load of the sail will be on this piece of tape that looks a little worn out, no so bad, but this block is broken, but there's also this little shackle here. which would support the entire load of the sail, which yes, seems a little light.

I think I can tighten this setting up a bit easily enough, but we'll save it for next week when we get the sewing machine clean. So from now on we can go ahead and close the all stainless steel polish task, but we will have to add two new tasks to do it: extend the bow or herd the belt and sock. Improve as my last action of the day. I set up a fishing rod. doohickey holder to The Grille stand, after a bit of trial and error I found what I think might be a good solution, but I've never fished from a sailboat before so we'll see.

I'm very excited to see what I'll catch across the Atlantic. The next morning I decided to put aside the task of cleaning the engine compartment. When we returned to France, we picked up this bottle of bilge cleaner. If this color doesn't scream effective cleaner, I don't know what does after spraying some everywhere. the engine compartment and do a little scrubbing I hooked up the water hose and rinsed everything off Another one of the smaller jobs on the to-do list was replacing the activated carbon filter under the sink this is the only place on the boat we bothered to filter our water recently.

The water started to taste a little chlorine and that's a good sign, it's time to replace the filter. There was no dirt or anything else on the filter housing, so I simply installed a new filter. I think so. I'm supposed to rinse the filters before using them. I always forget to do that, but yeah, it hasn't killed us yet. With the new filter in place, the chlorine taste disappeared. Work done. With those three small jobs ready, we can continue. go ahead and close the rod holder and fishing rod storage, we can also close the clean engine compartment and last but not least replace the water filter.

Last night our new telescoping mustache pole from Selden appeared. It was a pleasant surprise that it was more or less the same. The price here in the Canary Islands is the same as in Europe. I think we paid 1064 euros for the mustache pole. Now there is only the small matter of removing thehandle of the stick abroad. It's much prettier than our old creaky pole. I think next week. We will try to replace the mast post with the fancy new Sultan to be absolutely sure the new mast doesn't overdo it. Now we'll keep the old four-meter fixed pole as a backup for now and uh. yeah we're all set in the pole department, talking about the pole on the mast, the last time we played with this I actually got hit in the head because the pole fell off due to two very very old clamps that's it this guy up here. and the guy down here is used to holding on to this line that is attached to the cart that connects the pole to the mast.

Fortunately, the local boat accessory pusher had some suitable replacements that have the same hole spacing as the old ones. A little potential challenge and that is the fact that the heads and rivets here look like six millimeter rivets to me and the riveting tool I have only goes up to five millimeters, but yeah, let's take the old ones off and see what's weird there. Just as I feared, these are six millimeter holes, so I need a new riveting tool. It never ceases to amaze me how a seemingly simple task on a boat can turn into a multi-day task.

After a frustrating marathon, two days have passed and now it turns out our neighbor boat had a riveting thingy that can make six millimeter rivets, but when I went to Chantry to pick up the new clamps, they only had one of this style which is the old style and then for the second one I had to use one of these which is now proving challenging with the old style clamp heat. I can put the riveting tool here all the way down and make contact with the rivet head flange there, so that's perfect, but on this new style there's no way for this tip to fit in there, it's too narrow, maybe if I could find a small piece of thick-walled pipe and slide it down over the river, that might take up the space between the head and the rivet and the tool, but even if I do that, I'm not entirely sure the tool has enough to bite anyone.

I can still go ahead and get the first of the guy wires on the mast so far, so good, at least that's something like that. Half of our problem is solved, of course, I have no idea how I'm going to solve the second half, but all the chantillies are closed today and tomorrow, so this puzzle will have to wait until next week, as soon as the Chapel is open again, I will go. there to see if they have a solution to the rivets conundrum or maybe there is a clutch we can use instead of some other workaround.

I think we have everything we need to make the attack belt. This week I was able to find some really good ones. nylon straps and also some stainless steel rings, but I still need some twine, a sheet and also a block for the slogan, so that's also on the list for the chandlery. The next few days will be too windy to test our downwind setup. I mean the setup should be able to withstand a lot of wind, but when it's the first time we set it up, it would be nice if we had a little less wind this week.

I spent quite a bit of time looking for the various embellishments we need to finish off the last few tasks, such as finding the two pleats I thought we needed for the cleats for the headsail sheets in the cabin head, but then it turns out that they actually I would like a couple more cleats so I found two and So yes, I hope the Chantry has another two in stock after checking the weather. It looks like Wednesday morning could be a good day for our test sale. I think it makes a lot of sense to go out and try the two sales - the Spinnaker and Our two took out the main sales at the same time - so we'll keep our fingers crossed that they'll be ready for Wednesday morning and, on that hopeful note, we hope to see you at everyone here at Athena next week for hopefully a test sale, yes I hope so.

I'm excited to try it, yes I'm very excited too, yes as always feel free to leave a comment below and don't forget if you liked this video remember to leave a like see you around.