Winch Wench

Now the decision here was whether to have a wife with big arm muscles, or whether to get bigger winches. Martin got some Andersen 52 winches.

These are lovely and shiny. We got the full stainless version, of course - well if you're going to do it, do it right! The plan is to use two of the Andersen 18s from Sarila (our previous yacht) as main sheet winches, at least for now.

That's the straightforward part over.

Here is a picture of the previous winches, which incidentally are incredibly heavy - and almost completely useless, as they don't grip the rope any more at all - even Martin said he couldn't use them.

The bases were very rusty, and really not nice. The wire winch, for the jib furling, just behind the primary winch in the picture, was particularly unstable, moving around just under slight hand pressure.

We decided to get them replaced. Cooney Fabrications, who had done work for us on Sarila before, were asked to quote. Now they did say they were busy and didn't really want the work, but their quote was more than the winches cost!

Plan B was to get a friend to make them. Unfortunately, although he came down from Warwickshire to measure the winch bases himself, and Universal Metre Shed (now Universal Yacht Care) helped with the design, they were made wrong - the holes are in the wrong place, and the angle of the top of the mainsheet winches does not match the primaries. This may be partly down to us asking him to prioritise some work for Cetewayo first - he made the new instrument panel for Cetewayo, as he has access to a laser cutting machine, and Martin wanted to help Universal Yacht Care, who couldn't find anyone to do this locally.

So frustratingly, even though Marelle is now back in the water, we still can't sail her as we are still sorting out the winch bases. Martin has asked Roy, a friend we met at Universal Marina, to take a look, and he is going to fix them for us.

I wanted to remove the wire winch altogether. I had read nasty stories about wire winches breaking people's arms, plus it did not look very nice. Martin didn't really share my opinion on this I don't think, and left it to me to find the equivalent Dyneema rope. I asked Universal Yacht Care for advice, and they said to make sure that the breaking strain was equivalent, but didn't give me any other guidance on size (diameter) of the rope. I checked the YBW forum for information, and found some posts talking about 8mm rope for jib furling, then on the ropelocker site found some Dyneema rope specially designed to replace wire winch wires, complete with a table that listed the breaking strains of wire and Dyneema. Based on this I ordered 24m of 8mm Dynaline rope. Big mistake. Apparently this is way over the top for jib furling rope, and won't fit on the furling drum. Who knew?

Martin took over, after pointing out how ridiculously useless I had been - several times, including to my Mum! - and went and got the right size and type of rope from a local chandlery. Well at least we have an emergency forestay should we ever need one, and the wire winch has gone.

Update May 2012:

At last... we have lovely new winches fitted!!! So exciting. Martin dry-fitted the first one, here it is in all its glory:

The bases had to have their holes filled in and re-drilled (or should that be milled) which Martin got done at a small engineering firm in Swanwick. Owen is fitting them for us, and this involves some teak padding for the mainsheet winches, as those bases don't quite fit against the cockpit sides as snugly as they should, and copious amounts of Sikaflex to stop any water getting underneath. Of course, nothing is ever straightforward, and with the new winch bases' metal being a lot thicker than the previous ones, now the original bolts are too short. We have used temporary ones in some places, but want to get the original bolts lengthened (or at least reuse the heads) as they are lovely and shiny, and unusual in that they have no thread or allen key slot cut into them.