Sanding, sanding and more sanding

I'm trying to restore the for'ard cabin, so most of the week was spend sanding down teak or carefully sanding down teak veneered marine ply. The high point was to discover that the shelves in the peak came out to make sanding them easier. One more week and I hope to have finished.

Water tank guage

My intention had been to remove and clean the water tanks and fit a new depth gauge. So I removed all the nuts and tried lifting the cover.

No way on earth was this going to move - the bolts had nicely corroded themselves to the metal panel. Hence it would require manufacturing a new panel to remove it.

Taking photos inside the tank showed that the tank was actually amazingly clean, so other than a small amount of cleaning I left it as it is, and will check water purity some time in the future.

The depth gauge mounted easily and works well. Shows up how we need to repaint the bilges with bilge paint sometime.

Reefing lines

A very pleasant morning was spent fixing cheek blocks, clutches and rope tie offs to the main and mizzen booms. We finished the reefing for the mizzen, but still have to run the lines for the main.

Sea Trials with new sails

18 nautical miles

The aim for our sea trials with the new sails was to sail to Agia Napa and back. The wind looked fairly reasonable for this, with a northerly 12 knots gusting 15. We started early, motoring out of the marina before 8:30, but the wind was higher than forecast, being 15 gusting 18, so we decided to start with new genoa and the old mizzen.

This worked very well indeed. We had also changed the running backstays, to being two rather than one. This made tacking a whole lot easier. The mizzen sheet we had changed to a bridle fitting. This wasn't quite right and we will work with this to get it right.

The wind dropped slightly so we decided to raise the new main sail too... the stack packs made this a lot easier.

Actually, when we came to drop the main, since the wind picked up, and despite gusts, it dropped easier than we ever have before, this was definitely a major plus for the new stack packs.

The new main, a Long Distance Cruising Sail set beautifully. The shape significantly better than the old sail.


King Malu felt very much more in control than she had with the previous sails.

However, it was definitely cold... at least for those of us who are Mediterranean summer sailors. I toughed it out to start with then gave in and put on my foul weather gear!  I think I need some better base and mid layers.

Jacob, who normally runs around in shorts even when there is snow on the ground even had on a hoodie, though he wasn't running his feet in the water.

The genoa was very slightly smaller than the old sail, but being a Performance Cruising Sail, made out of Hydra Net, it set better and the speed was slightly higher than before.

Being cut higher also meant that we could see under the genoa, which made keeping watch easier.

For the final 30 minutes or so we even raised the mizzen staysail for the broad reach back to the marina. This gave us about half a knot of extra speed.

Coming into the marina we always try to keep at least part of the genoa up. It's often a little choppy just outside the marina and with an outboard on the back it tends to cavitate. The genoa holds King Malu on a constant angle and also helps to hold the bow down. The new Furlex meant it furled very much easier, so I think we can hold off final furling of the genoa till we are through the marina mouth now.

So, if you want to know the summary of our feelings about the new sails...

just look at the smiles!

Tidying up

Today was just loads of whippings on the lazy jacks to tidy up the sail packs.

We also created a bridle for the mizzen sheet. This will enable the mizzen to be closer hauled than it had been, and therefore sail better.


With all the lines now tidied away King Malu now looks very smart.

New Sails

All week I had been hoping the new sails would arrive in time for the weekend. I'd been watching the tracking on the courier's website. The sails first went to the wrong place, then returned to the correct port of departure eventually making it to Milan and waiting there for a few days...

Finally, on Friday, we are told they arrived. So off I go to collect them. That they had arrived many hours earlier in Cyprus was true, that the courier's Cyprus representative had collected them from the airport and I could thus collect from them was not true. When I arrived at the collection point an hour and a quarter before they closed for the weekend I was told that their driver was at the airport now and he would be back in a hour, with the sails. 'Please come back in an hour' was what the clerk advised. That would leave only 15 minutes before they closed. I wasn't hopeful.

I arrived at the duly appointed time: Everyone was packing up for the weekend and the computers already switched off. The clerk found some paperwork and said, 'Let me see if it has actually arrived'. Yelling in Cypriot across the warehouse gained the information that yes, our package was here. So I signed for it and took the car round to the loading bay. I had taken our Mitsubishi estate car, since I knew the package would be long as the battens for the fully battened main were long. They were in two pieces, since airlines will not fly any package over 2 metres, but had been led to understand that the package was about 1.75 metres, which would just fit into the car. However, it was actually only a few centimetres short of the 2 metres and I was not sure after all this it would fit in the car! We moved the front seat forward as far as it would go and then folded it forward and the package fitted with maybe 1-2 centimetres grace.

Saturday turned out to be God's grace on us weather wise, it was pretty close to dead calm all day. Whatever wind did happen should come from the north so we motored King Malu over to the wet dock which meant she was facing north and started unpacking. Laying it all out on the ground beside the dock we saw for the first time our logo on the sail bags.

The old sails were quite soft and we had been able to fold and bundle them quite easily. The new ones were directly the opposite, especially the genoa, which was made of Dyneema Hyrda Net. This is the balanced weave material that the sailmaker uses for the Performance Cruising Sails. This is the same as Ellen MacArthur uses on here round Britain yacht Skandia.

The sail had been neatly folded to a barrel on the floor of the sail loft in the UK, which made it easy to get on board.

To my surprise it also went up the new Furlex easily. Now we see our logo flying on the corner of a sail. It also furled very easily, the padded luff making it a smooth roll on the Furlex.

Fitting the main with its stack-pack and refitting the old and cleaned mizzen with a new stack-pack would definitely need more than just Tim and me, so my son Daniel and daughter-in-law Becky came down to help. Becky to take photographs and video.

First discussion was the battens: There were flat and round battens... the old main had flat battens, but the new one had round, the flat were for the stack-pack. The technology of sails seems to bear little resemblance to the old sails, which had been on the boat for goodness knows how many years. The round battens were impressive, with locked and threaded screws to tension them meaning the sail could be set to a very much better shape and the battens would also fall into the stack-pack easier when dropping the main.

But... what really concerned me was getting the bolt rope around the stack pack into the slot along the boom. We decided to raise half of the sail up the mast to get it out of the way and then have less marterial to try to deal with along the boom. This proved a good move.

The sailmaker had added a piece of white cloth along the edge that went into the slot. It looked much tougher than the blue of the stack pack, which seemed sensible. However, what we also found was that this material was slippery and made the whole process of getting the sail plus stack-pack onto the boom very much easier.

We then tied the lazy jacks to the stack-pack and dropped the main into it.

The main is a Long Distance Cruising Sail, made by the same sailmaker and to the same specification as Gypsy Moth IV used in the second round the world trip. This is cut from Bainbridge Ocean Sailcloth, not quite as crisp as the Hydra Net, but stiff nevertheless and dropping it into the stack-pack for the first time was interesting to get it to flake correctly and actually fit.

We raised it again and then dropped it and the second time was very much easier.

Finally, we fitted the old, now cleaned mizzen into it's stack-pack on the mizzen boom. We now have three sails to demonstrate Premium Cruising, Long Distance Cruising and old technology cruising sails.

Time for lunch!

After lunch we move King Malu back to her berth, except we couldn't resist taking her out and seeing the new genoa filled with air.

The shape of the new genoa was excellent, it filled and sailed like a dream. The forecast for next Saturday means, if it holds, we can have a long full day sailing to see how the new suite of sails performs.

The wind was too light to get a real feel for the new sail, but the shape was fantastic even in light wind.

Tomorrow, time to do whippings and clean up all the little fiddly bits.

Cold, wet and thundery

It's cold, wet and thundery here in Cyprus. Not the weather for being outside doing woodwork or in King Malu sanding woodwork with the for'ard hatch open letting in the rain.

So today I will try to rebuild the position plotting system having moved it to another server. Basically when you click the button on the spot device it receives a code at the control centre and you can configure it to send out either SMS or emails to whoever you want. One of the addresses will be a specially set up gmail account.

So I will then download that formatted email message, setting it up to check every 15 minutes for new emails, extract the lat/lon and using gmapez plot the position on Google maps,  which displays at the top of this blog.

We are very impressed with the Spot Locator system buying into the technology very early on. Recently Spot have brought out a new system called HUG, which is specifically designed for boats.

This system can be integrated into the yacht system to also send alerts if the boat is stolen and also four monitors for things like battery, water increase in the bilges or other sensors of your choice.