Sailing Positive Waves

Cascais and a visit from family There is always boat work, no matter what. I went up the mast for the gazillionth time to try to figure out the loud creaking when we fly our downwind sail. Our first fix was to replace the badly chafed halyard with a dyneema line, not cheap. That immediately showed evidence of chafe and on the sail to Lagos it was creaking so loudly that we pulled the sail down for fear of causing bigger problems. The chafing is occurring right where the halyard exits the mast so our current best solution is to take the halyard out of the mast completely so it has nothing to chafe against. For landlubbers, Cascais is Lisbon’s seaside resort town with hotels, a few beaches, restaurants, and more souvenir shops than grains of sand on the beach. For sailors like us it was a meeting up point on the way to the Canary Islands. Portugal is rightly known for its long surfing beaches, so it follows that small boat harbors are few and far between along the west coast of the count