No system is perfect from the get go, so we’ve been steadily iterating and improving the systems on the boat. For example we accidentally, well T-Bear got his maths wrong on the shroud tensioning system which ended up very over powered and almost impossible to ease under normal sailing loads. Nice and easy to pull on though.

When we originally set the forward control bank up, we used a double blocks to run the shroud and forestay tensioning systems (The Orange and Blue lines). However due to the differences in tension on the different systems, the block started to twist and jam. The only reason we were doing it was to try and avoid lines crossing in the middle, but it didn’t work so we decided to remove the double block and replace them with single blocks.

The only slight issue this caused was to have lines across the foredeck but it is not enough to affect any of the other systems

Early in the program we discovered we’d underestimated some of the loads and hadn’t reinforced the anchoring points enough, unfortunately we discovered this half way between Ireland’s Eye and Lambay Island. So it was a bit exciting, the anchoring point for the Forestay tore while twin wiring upwind. Fortunately we were able to do a temporary fix to get home.

The reason the reinforcement pulled off was we had accidentally squeezed the SpaBond adhesive out to much and it hadn’t glued on with sufficient contact area. With these adhesives you actually have to a couple of millimetres of the adhesive to bond properly. Given how important this anchoring point is we decided to add carbon laminate for the repair.

3mm carbon plate spa bonded onto the composite and then we sanded the plate and surrounding area and added 2 layers of carbon. as we were working in the same area we decided to also reinforce the other anchoring point as well. It doesn’t add any real weight and makes the area much stronger.

We will detail some of the other changes in the next article.