Busy summer

It’s been quite a summer for Image. We have tackled several projects in order to make Image a great charter boat.

Engine

Image is equipped with a 24hp Universal 5242 Diesel engine which had trouble starting earlier this year. In order to mitigate this problem, the engine was thoroughly inspected and the head gasket was identified as the culprit. The faulty gasket was replaced as well as the fresh water pump, heat exchanger, transmission linkage and levers and the engine control panel. As a result the engine now runs cool as ice and starts reliably. One less thing to worry about..

 

 

Dodger

Image has been equipped with a brand new dodger made by Iverson’s. The result is quite stunning as is the way Iverson builds their dodger: The design crew comes to the boat equipped with the tubing which then gets bent in shape and becomes the dodger frame. After that, a pattern for the canvas cover is created.

 

New Sails

After more than 2 decades of use, Images sails were pretty tired as you can easily tell from these pictures:

  

Ballard sails built a set beautiful sails for Image: A full batten mainsail and a 135% LP genoa. We decided to go for a 135% genoa with foam luff instead of a 150% which was the size of the old genoa. Even though the 135% has a little less horse power in light air, but it can be reefed to 100% in a blow while keeping decent shape. The sails are built in cross cut from Dacron and will both as cruising and racing sails for the time being.

 

Flying the kite

Once the engine was taken care of and the new sails were on the boat, we had a chance to go sailing. On a light air day, we couldn’t resist setting the spinnaker. Image is set up for dip pole, but since we only had one set of lines (they look like they were intended as spinnaker guys rather than sheets), we sailed with what we had while jury rigging a foreguy from an extra block and tackle assembly we had on the boat. It turns out the kite is very pretty, behaved well in 3-5 kts true wind and was a lot of fun to sail.

  

 

Sloop Tavern Fall Regatta

First race – yay! We entered into the Sloop Tavern Yacht Club Fall Regatta with no flying sails and did pretty well considering we were the new guys. The fall regatta was a 3-race event.

With our 6-person crew we were in a very good spot in the downwind leg of the first race. The rounding of the top mark was a challenge since the most of the fleet the conditions were light air and significant currents around West Point. The race was unfortunately abandoned while we were on our downwind leg since no boat finished within the time limit.

We kept up the good work in races 2 and 3 and finished within less than a minute (corrected time) of our closest competitor.

Floorboards

The wooden floorboard on Image were pretty old and worn and have therefore been replaced with new ones. Take a look.

Running Rigging

Typical of her age, Image was originally equipped with some wire / line halyards. We replaced most of the running rigging with new Samson Yacht Braid – 7/16″ for the halyard, 1/2″ for the main and genoa sheets. The new genoa sheets are also a bit longer than the old ones, making them more comfortable to use.