After yet another year with a lot of miles under the keel, it was time to pull Tioga out of the water early and start the maintenance and winterization process before it got too cold.
The week before we pulled Tioga out, though, we had already tied her up to the dock in Lynn (thanks to harbor master Dave Mcqary) to investigate the no longer furling forestay and found that some wire strands were broken and that the entire forestay had to be replaced. Kevin, Cal and our own, Nick (who worked for NE rigging before going to Japan for his ski instructor training), did as always perform well and made it all happen in one afternoon.
During the last sail of the season from Lynn to Nahant, we used the opportunity to hoist our latest sail addition: an almost new gennaker – a big thank you to Bob Anderson for this extremely generous gift!! Look out for the blue paws on yellow ground (Bob breeds dogs…).
After the significant amount of maintenance we went through in Trinidad over the winter, we were quite surprised to see the cracks in the hull after Tioga was out of the water. Carefully peeling off the layers, Sean Antrim determined that some of the bottom fiberglass layers were delaminated and went to work to put all together again.
The next big topic was the left-over rigging backlog we did not have time to address when replacing the mast in Germany.
As we had to pull the mast, we decided to replace the entire electronics setup and install a new NMEA 2000 backbone while we had the chance (most of the equipment had given up during the long trip around the northern Atlantic). New wires for radar and wind instrument were pulled into the mast and a new radar dome installed.
The newly installed partners had to be taken out, fixed and installed back again. The old instruments in the cockpit had to be uninstalled, the resulting cut-outs resized to accommodate the new B&G instruments. Of course, none of that proved too hard for Sean who as always left hardly any trace of the work he performed.
In parallel the boat was winterized,
some of the broken parts repaired and the broken staysail halyard winch replaced (the drum had cracked and the winch could only be disassembled by destroying it.). The new winch is from Lewmar (Ocean Series).
For good luck, Peter, Dan and Philip placed their lucky coins on the mast base before the mast was stepped again.
While the list for the remaining winter work is still quite long, we managed to get most of our action items taken care of and have the new B&G system almost fully working. Pretty cool to have radar, wind, log, depth, temperature, AIS, instruments etc connected into one system and accessible via iPad etc.
A huge thank you to Josh and Rex Antrim for allowing us to store the mast in the yard during this time. It made working on the mast so much easier and kept the mast out of the way. – Thank you!!