Sorting Sails
A-frame house in Kapaa with huge garage and driveway, perfect for doing inventory.
Working out Elixir’s sail configuration on the lawn.
When we arrived on Kauai, Elixir’s parts were spread all over the island, and our first days were spent finding the stashes, and collecting everything in a central location. This turned out to be a two-car garage in our A-frame house in Kapaa. Piles of spars, boxes of mast collars, crates of bronze and corroded old standing rigging, barrels of blocks and dead eyes, baggywrinkle and a whole truck bed full of unlabeled line. All of it crawling with roaches and centipedes as big around as my finger. All of it reeking of mildew and mold.
We started by taking an inventory of each category, each piece, and all their measurements.
The sails were loose, unbagged, unlabeled, and in a huge messy pile, fifteen-hundred square feet of dirty, worn Dacron, a bigger laundry pile than I had ever seen. But there were only fifteen pieces in this pile, as good a place to start as any.
We needed a picture of how the sails go on a schooner and the only one we had was the one on the Canadian dime. (The most famous ship in Canadian history, the Bluenose, was both a fishing and racing vessel in the 1920s and 1930s.) In our first weeks on the island, we had not yet acquired the extensive library of boat building books that we gradually collected to assist us in completing the project.
That day, Tosh stood up on the veranda and directed my sister-in-law and I to move the sails around on the lawn until the layout matched the famous Bluenose rig. We labeled each sail and its corners that day. These are only eight of the 15 pieces and as it turned out, we didn’t get it exactly right, but it was a start.
