We fix up our free cruising chute

Published on 26/01/2023

The weather was calm so Beverley flew the drone over the marina. I have to say I love drone footage, it gives a sense of place. Viewers really get a good idea of where we are, while our blogs show what we are doing. Well the only thing we were doing was getting cold, but there is a great solution for that and it is called buy diesel to burn. At Bangor there are several ways in which we can do this. Walk, it's not too far and you can take a trolley to carry the diesel. We could move Salty Lass, to refuel and we have done that several times, but today, we decided to use our small dinghy. Our petrol engine needed a run and using the dinghy this way was a lot more fun. While we were lifting the sail off the fore deck, we flew the drone again and used the drone as a third camera person, it did a great job and we will certainly use the drone in this way again.

Cruising Chute

We had been given an old cruising chute be our friend Karen, in 2020 and my first task was to remove all the rotten rope that was around the sides. I did this in Strangford lough and since then it had been in our V berth gathering dust, so it was about time that we got it out and work out what we needed to do.

The main repair that I did was replace all of the original fixtures with new fixtures which I attached to the old sail with rip stock nylon and bonded tape.

The other thing I made out of fabric that another subscriber was throwing out was a snuffer. It was far too short for the sail, but it would take a lot of the belly out of the sail. When I was thinking about the ropes that I would used, I tried out lots of things in my mind until I came to our solution. I have to say it looks quite good and I just hopes it works when we have the wind in our sails.

Snuffer Lines

To secure the snuffer and make the snuffer go up and down, we used three lines

Snuffer Line - Used to attach the snuffer to the top loop, which is the loop the halyard is connected to
Halyard Line - This goes from the bottom loop, the top of the sail, to the top loop which is used to attach to the halyard, to the middle loop, which is a frictionless ring. It is important that the frictionless ring is some distance above the top of the sail so that when the snuffer is crunched up, the bottom of the snuffer is away from the sail
Continuous Line - This is attached to the bottom of the snuffer and one line goes up the snuffer to the frictionless ring, then down around the outside. The purpose of the continuous loop is to pull the bottom of the snuffer up and down.

Other sewing tasks

Chafe protectors - I use Beverley's old jeans for these, and they usually last about a year.

Extension for our extension - Two extra side panels for our extension. To make this I used some of our Kofi money to buy some grommets, on top of this I just added some anorak toggles and some little bits of rope to make a fixture to secure the new extension to our extension.

Ko-fi

With our Ko-fi money we had to buy a different camera because the one we bought originally was not fit for purpose, so we had to trade up to the next model

We fix up our free cruising chute

Cruising Chute

Snuffer Lines

Other sewing tasks

Ko-fi

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