We do not have any financial deals or arrangements with any of these companies and got no special deals when we bought their equipment with one exception: we 'beta tested' a very early North Marathon 3DL sail, appeared in one of their ads, and got a great deal on it and on the following Spectra sail.
As we have sailed Hawk over 65,000 miles we have modified, developed and evolved her details. Below are some of the biggest changes we have made:
1. We have changed all the windows and ports from Lexan to tempered glass. The Lexan both scratched and expanded & contracted a lot when the temperature changed, which eventually broke the seal around the edges causing leaks.
2. We have added 2:1 halyards on the main, furling jib and Code Zero. The 2:1 on the main is to give extra mechanical advantage so Beth can raise the sail most of the way by hand. The 2:1 on the Code zero allows us to get the luff tight for good upwind shape. The 2:1 on the furling jib orients the halyard load pull directly up the stay and thus reduces furling friction when the halyard is tight.
3. We have replaced our washboards with a watertight aluminum door. Ours is a 'Dutch door' - that is it has a top panel and a bottom panel that can be opened/closed/dogged separately. The top panel has a small window in it. It is foam-cored/aluminum skinned. It was made by DIAMOND/SEA-GLAZE Mfg LTD., 26995 Gloucester way, Langley, BC. www.diamondseaglaze.com
4. We had a new 'higher performance' shaped rudder built in Chile.
5. We switched from a B&G autopilot ram to a Robertson Ram (HLD2000L 160). The autopilot electronics are still B&G. We also have a Windpilot Pacific Plus windvane which has been temperamental. It has its own auxiliary rudder, which is nice both because there are no lines to the wheel and it can act as a back-up steering rudder if we have a problem with the main rudder. However, we have had two of these rudders break and are on generation three now, which finally seems to be right. The vane has 'sleeve' bearings which work great when clean but jam up pretty quickly with dirt and salt. I have progressively bored out most of the bearings to increase their tolerance to contaminates. Note, we had a Monitor on Silk, which performed very well (with excellent bearings) except by the time we had arrived in South Africa most of the stainless welds were coming apart. That was easy to fix but frustrating.
6. We have refined our boom preventer system, with 2 Spectra lines spliced to tangs on the aft end of the boom, led forward to cleats on either side of the forward end of the boom. These lines have eyes with stainless thimbles on their forward end. We also have lines running from the cockpit through clutches mounted on the toe rail, forward to blocks mounted on the toe rail just in front of the stays. These lines have shackles on their forward ends. When we want to deploy a preventer we uncleat one of the boom lines and clip it to one of the side deck lines, close the clutch and pull the line tight, and it is all set. We now use a preventer almost all the time we are running, or when light air reaching in waves
7. We gave up on our wind generator (an Air Marine). It was too noisy, did not generate much power, and I felt it was dangerous. This was our second biggest equipment disappointment, next to the Glacier Bay vacuum panels.
8. We left with a pretty conventional asymmetrical spinnaker. We still carry that, but at least offshore we have now switched to mostly using two different 'Code Zero' style sails (an upwind, flat-cut, low-stretch one and a down-wind fuller-cut more-elastic one), with a Facnor 6000 continuous line furler.
9. We switched to Spectra single-braid line for many applications, including reefing lines and check stays as it creates much less friction and chafe.
10. We developed custom mesh bags with wire rims for our shore lines. We found that tall and narrow bags work much better, with fewer tangles when the line is pulled out, than the more common short and wide duffle shape. Pictures of line bags (pic1, pic2).
11. We added an iridium phone and a world GSM cell phone.
12. We had new a boom gooseneck and vang fittings built, as the original ones were not engineered strong enough.
The white line (1/4" spectra single braid) running through the block below the vang is a 'safety line' to contain the sheave if the block breaks (an idea I borrowed from the Volvo race boats).
13. We replaced our 8D (truck size) batteries with 6vt T105s (golf cart size).
14. We have now had three mainsails. The first was a Quantum Spectra laminated sail with a 'standard' roach that we got in 1998. This sail quickly developed a shape problem at the join between panels of different weight cloth and the laminate in the luff started coming apart (Spectra fibers popping out of the mylar) pretty quickly also. We got about 20,000 miles from the sail.
We then got a 'beta version' North Marathon 3DL sail with a very big roach (about 24" overlap with the backstay). The roach was a bit too big as the sail would not come through in light winds unless we dropped the halyard a couple of feet. However, we loved the sail. It had the prettiest shape you could imagine, and we got pretty good life from it (about 30,000 miles) but finally destroyed it through 'operator error'. We had it double reefed for several days, close reaching into 30kts, and let the sail fold below the 2nd reef flutter against the lazy jacks (should have tied them with buntlines) and the lazy jacks wore holes through the sail. As a note of caution, we used this sail in mostly cold weather and had no delamination at all but have friends who got 3DL at the same time and used them in the tropics and did have delamination problems. North has switched adhesives since to one more heat resistant which hopefully has cured that problem (but don't let a sailmaker tell you delamination is all ancient history).
We tried to get a replacement 3DL but the factory was too busy to meet our timetable. So, we got a North Spectra laminate sail with a smaller roach. This is an 'ok' but not excellent sail. The shape is not ideal and we had a seam open up on our second passage with it. The first sail had two deep reefs. With the second sail, because we were sailing to Cape Horn, we kept the two deep reefs but added a third reef. We never used that reef, so on the third sail we went back to the two deep reefs, but we added a very short 'light air reef' which just pulls out the roach/backstay overlap.
Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.