Thursday, August 13, 2009

Repairs after the sail

After over a month on Lake Michigan, Speakeasy is dirty and needs repair. The cleaning is the usual tidying, washing, and waxing. There are a couple of broken parts that need attention: the boom vang and the head plunger.

Speakeasy has many Garhauer parts including the boom vang. Garhauer gets high marks from sailors for quality, durability, and cost. However, the boom vang fitting to the mast sheared in half a couple of days before we came back home to Chicago. I made a temporary repair with lines so that the boom vang would not harm us, the boat, or itself, but it was useless as a vang.

I wrote to Garhauer, which wrote back immediately with a part. I sent a photo of the broken part just to make sure and got an immediate varification. That's good service. The part will arrive in a couple days.

I'm not sure what is wrong with the head, but the stool no longer holds any water--it drains out. I think this is due to a faulty valve in the plunger. The result is that we often have stinky air in the head coming directly from the holding tank. I've got a new plunger, but don't relish the task ahead.

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