It's the little things that are BIG

Sea Day 14 San Diego Bay and Ocean to Mexico Waters 10/14/2016

Lynette: Today we sailed into Mexican Waters to the north of the Mexican Coronados. We left at 1130 and returned at 1730. It was a nice sail but we sure wish that we could get some stronger winds to sail with and work out our gear. I’m very tired just being back from driving and then sailing all afternoon.
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While we were our sailing I noticed that the dutchman had come undone, not just one but both of them. The Dutchman allows the sail to come nearly straight down and flake back and forth for an orderly and quick drop of the sail. That meant that when Tim lowered the sail it would pile in a heap rather than fold. As Tim lowered the mainsail at the end of our sail, a screw landed on the deck. A large screw…uh oh! Where did that come from? That is the second screw we have had fall to the deck, the first was quite small, this one was from a larger item. As soon as we were back in the slip, Tim went to work hunting down where it came from, knowing that it could have come from higher up the mast.Tim also rethreaded the dutchman lines and was able to reconnect the lines.

The screw…it came from the gooseneck. What is the gooseneck? It is what holds the boom to the mast. There are 6 screws in our gooseneck. Now one was missing…what about the other 5? Are they in bad shape about to shake out too? I will let Tim fill in these details…

Tim: When I was lowering the mainsail, a screw hits the deck, hmm, that's not good! So when we got to the slip, we started looking for where it might belong. Well, we found it, the gooseneck, which holds the boom to the mast-- one of the most important connections on a boat. Tons of forces gather at this junction. It is not the heavy gale that breaks this, but the rolling and flopping in light winds and big swells. So since we want to go sailing again, I began to investigate how the other screws were doing. Out of 6 1/4-20 screws on the gooseneck, 2 were solid, the others were either stripped or about to be. It's called galvanic corrosion where two dissimilar metals are in a solution like salt-water, it creates a battery where in this case the aluminium (aluminium for my UK friends) gave electrons to the stainless steel screws and gooseneck. See the pictures below. It ended up taking 3 days to get completed, several trips to the store, advice and replacing broken parts. 

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