Rockport Beach, Texas

Pull up your pants!

Cheyenne scratching mosquito bites. The mosquitos surrounded us in thick swarms to feast on deet.

You can see the 8000lb electric winch setup for a 2:1 pull. The blue truck in the background also has a winch connected to the brown truck to help anchor it in place.

Bill arrived and found us in contemplation of the jacking.

The slide wasn’t supporting enough of the minikeel so we had to jack up the boat by the amas and lever the slide further under the boat (it wasn’t long enough to get it far enough under the boat at first). It seems scary to support the whole boat by the amas, but it has to be that strong to sail. The static weight of the main hull is only a fraction of the forces applied to the amas when beating to weather.

You can see another problem here… The hull is too wide to fit through the gap in the bulkhead.

Jeff operating a chainsaw dangerously close the hull. We had to cut away part of the bulkhead to allow the hull to pass through because we couldn’t jack it up high enough.

At this point the winch failed us. Mostly because all of the weight was still resting on a single roller that had jamed sideways. We had to do some more jacking to straighten it out.

An unexpected collision with a Nigerian dugout.

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At some point near the top the winch failed again. It just couldn’t pull it any higher. Maybe the truck batteries were low. Anyhow, Jeff jumped in the truck, put it in drive and yanked it the rest of the way out with Cheyenne and I shouting “Whoaaaa! Stop. stop. Wait!”

Due to the rapid ascent we couldn’t block up the amas fast enough. You can see that the entire boat is balanced on the main hull. Cheyenne is on the other side holding it up with one hand. After this, we had to jack it up by the amas again to pull the slide out.

Rockport, Texas

Isla Holbox, Mexico

I hope this isn’t too many videos. They’re backlogged since I only recently learned a good way to post them. By the way, I fixed (or worked around) the problem with getting flash to work with internet explorer.