Maintenance break in Newport
Here's the view from Beutiful Newport Oregon:
Things are going well here in Newport. It's not much of a sailing town, but there's a strong fishing fleet here and they have two well stocked chandleries. As an added bonus, the Rouge Brewery is about a half mile away at the other end of the marina. Since we don't have a car here, we haven't really been able to venture out and have been forced to hit the brewery for dinner every night.
A couple of days ago I was able to open up my diesel tank. Inside I found three good size paint chips that were undoubtedly the source of my fuel problems on the way down here. Otherwise the tank was nice and clean. I also made a permanent installation of my bicycle pump. Now if I ever get anything in the tank that's clogged the draw line, I just turn one valve, give a couple of pumps on the bicycle pump and then turn the valve back. Hopefully now that I have it installed, I'll never need it again.
Wednesday also saw the rebirth of my mainsail. There's a good size table for folding clothes in the marina's laundry room which was transformed into my sail loft for most of the day. The sail tore at the same place as the first time. It ripped along the second batten from the bottom and then hit my patch from at sea and tore down through the panel. This is another good lesson. Where I added new sail cloth, the repair held and where I just sewed the sail back together at the batten pocket, it ripped again. So I used up a bunch of my sail cloth on hand and patched both sides of the sail all the way around the batten pocket and along the tear to the bottom of the panel. I think that the main is in better shape than when I took off, but only time will tell.
My Dad and I finished caulking the outside of the cap rail yesterday and will do the inside today. That should wrap up everything I wanted to do here in Newport, so if the weather cooperates, I'll be setting off down the coast tomorrow. We'll see how Dad and I do with just the two of us. If the weather looks good and things are going well, then we'll sail all the way down to San Francisco, otherwise we'll head in at either Brookings OR, or Crescent City CA.
And thanks again to Peter for sticking around and helping on the boat:
