Well, as I’m sure you gathered, things didn’t go quite as planned. It was quite a haul out to the Montego in our little inflatable with broken oar locks, and then I found both sails to basically be in tatters… The genoa is on a little harken roller furler that barely turns, and the stay is really loose. The main is severely ripped near the head of the sail. I got some sail repair tape to try and get by, but it’s basically not sailable. The motor had been stowed in the cabin (so it wouldn’t get stolen), and I managed to get it on the mount without donating it to Neptune. Then, however, it took a long time, and one more dinghy trip back to the van for tools, before I was able to get it started. See, the previous owners had told me the recoil spring was bad, and you had to manually wind the pull rope back each pull – so I had ordered a new spring and brought it with me. However, after many pulls and rewinds, I decided to take it apart and put the new spring in, only to find that it wasn’t the spring that was broken, but the bottom of the spool. I ended up taking the rope off, and manually wrapping it around the flywheel – old-school – to get it started. We finally got it started and moved into a slip for the night at around 3:30. We decided to regroup at home and come back in the morning.
–arthur
Amazing and brave story. Good luck today! Sherri