Boat Projects

As most cruisers know, if you're not sailing, you are looking for ways to improve your boat for the next time you are sailing.  Working on the boat makes us feel productive and we always learn something new, which is fun and a great boost to the confidence.  Now, it's not always an easy lesson learned and sometimes it takes quite a few tries to get it right, but being that we are both extremely determined, we end up benefiting from the experience.

This week, we gave it a go at splicing.  Did I know what splicing was before I lived on a boat?  Uh, well, I had heard the word but really never paid attention.  For those of a similar mind, splicing (in "Molly" words) is creating a loop in the end of a rope and then putting it back within itself.  You can also splice two ropes together, but for our purpose in replacing some of our worn running rigging, we are making a loop which will wrap around a critical piece of equipment.  The benefit of splicing is to have a strong point of attachment without using a mechanism that could fail.  When you are sailing and the wind load on the sheets (ropes attached to the sails) is high, you cannot depend on something that could break or snap.  And so we researched and followed the New England ropes instruction on splicing.  It was a great video and now I keep thinking there must be a way to make money doing this - I am actually having fun!  Instead of paying someone to do this, which would probably cost 10x as much as it did, we figured it out, replaced the line ourselves and now know the process so we can repeat as necessary.  I would go as far to call us splicing machines.