2015-07-06

A Busy Day of Not Sailing: Mounting The Outhaul and Tiller Stay

Spring line to the concrete
post.
Whipping indicating where to tie up.

We did a lot more maintenance on the boat today.

We bought another snubber yesterday for our fifth dock line. This allows us to keep the boat nicely away from the dock in all directions. Our host moved a cleat for us on the dock, and the new position really helps. We also are whipping the dock lines to mark them at places so that we can very quickly get them adjusted just right when we pull in. This will make docking faster.

Pulpit eyes for spinnaker sheet blocks.

We put on new pulpit eyes on the stanchions for the spinnaker sheet blocks. Catalina Direct says that Catalina 22s have always used 1" thick tubing for the stern pulpit, but ours is made of 7/8" tubing. The pulpit eyes that we got were too large. They worked for our first time out, but we needed hardware that fits for a more permanent mounting. We found some hardware that will work at Fisheries Supply that fits the 7/8" tubing when used with a couple of D-shackles.

Blocks for the mainsail outhaul.

We mounted new blocks for the mainsail outhaul

Tiller stay.

And finally, we added our new tiller stay tiller controller. This was from a kit from Catalina Direct. They have several videos of projects to perform on a Catalina 22. The demo for installing this is on the Video Projects DVD volume 2. This allows the captain to leave the tiller for short periods without losing heading, as well as not having to fight the tiller so much. It also means that we do not have to tie up the tiller when we dock. It took us maybe two hours to install the whole thing. We did not do the complicated epoxy thing on the tiller.

Note that the video and directions are not clear on where to mount the fairleads that direct the line to the tiller. They say to mount them one inch inboard from the thingy on the side, but not how high off the seat. We mounted them just a little too low when the seat cushions are in place and will need to move them up an inch or so.