Posted by fanning.david (DEFanning@…>)
Hi everyone, I just want to introduce myself, and my boat. I have a
Freedom 21 - “Eros” - which is moored in the British Virgin Islands. I
don’t know anything about her history. There’s a number forward of the
stripe on the hull - 145 - but I keep forgetting to check the transom
plate. I’ve had her for about 7 years - we salvaged her off the beach
in Trellis Bay after Hurricane “wrong-way” Lenny (it came from the
west). I found the owner, who didn’t want to deal with it, and
bargained a low price. We dug her out of the sand, pulled the mast out
of the mangroves, and began cleaning her up and fixing her. We got her
sailing again.
She has been a delight. I can jump in and put a tack out of the bay,
and then a long reach out towards Anegada. I love bobbing out there on
the deep swells, as the big catamarans come rushing downwind from Virgin
Gorda, looking curiously at me, wondering how far I intend to go, headed
towards Spain. Sometimes, running home, I tighten down the Tiller Tamer
I installed, and nod off, quite content to keep going.
But the tropical weather has been hammering her over the years, the
running rigging has been feeling iffy, the rudder gudgeons and pintles
dodgy, and with her bottom desperately in need of a clean, I decided to
put her on the hard for hurricane season. Running downwind to Road Town
in Tortola in 15 knots, I watched the gooseneck twist and flex, and
rounding up into the boatyard, it snapped. I just made it to the dock.
Time for an overhaul.
I just came back home to New England, after two weeks working on her.
Over the summer, I had the local rigger fix the gooseneck, free some
frozen sheaves in the boom, re-rivet the track for five feet of the
mast, and secure the traveler where it threatened to come loose. The
yard carpenter replaced the old cracked and leaking plexi that covers
the ports, and the sail went to a local sailmaker.
I arrived with new hardware for the rudder, and a new tiller. With my
local helper, Andrew, we began cleaning her out. She was smelly and
moldy down below, and we pulled all the cushions, sent them off for
cleaning and resewing, and spent a couple of hard days scrubbing her
with anti-bacterial cleaner. We put on the first of what would be four
coats of varnish on the wood interior. Suddenly she began to smell and
feel fresh. Perhaps now my wife will even consider going into the cabin.
We went over the hull with West system, patching nicks and filling
cracks, and mixing little bits of gelcoat to cover our work. Some of
the paint on the anti-skid surfaces is wearing thin, but that’s for
another day. After a summer and fall, my new plexi had been streaked
with runoff from the oxidized topsides, and minutely speckled with spray
from random paint jobs in the yard. I finally found a compound
(Finesse) with a very fine abrasive that took lots of elbow grease and
hard rubbing guaranteed to cramp my right hand for days, but it brought
it back.
I took off the pulpit and walked it over to an engineering shop, where
they welded some cracks. I’d brought new lifelines. I replaced the
broken handles on the Easylocks with parts I had found on the internet.
Every few hours I’d walk across the yard to the chandlery for
another bolt or something I’d forgotten.
Most enjoyably, there was the day when I attached a line to the halyard,
and watched it disappear into the mast and reappear new and bright. A
new mainsheet, and reefing lines, and others for the traveler.
Then it came time to attach and hang the rudder, which had Andrew and me
in contest for how to do it. We’d managed to fill and gelcoat over
all our previous marks. Eyeballing and measuring and remeasuring, and
arguing, finally, with one bolt in place, a leap of faith, a
quarter-inch bit through the transom, and she seemed to hang true.
When it came to fitting the mainsail, it turned out that the cars that
run in the track were jamming on the new rivet-heads. We ran around
every chandlery in Road Town, but in a lucky break I found the manager
at Doyle’s sail loft on a Saturday afternoon. He rummaged at the
back, and came up with a set of cars with a slight indentation on the
face, which would ride over the obstruction.
The manager at the boatyard had promised me that I could launch in the
morning, but when I got there, the boat had been moved across the yard
and the lift was occupied with much bigger and more lucrative customers.
I waited, and steamed, and complained that I had a long hard sail upwind
to get home, but he cheerily told me it would be soon…. It was after
2:30 when I finally got in the water, and after 3 when Andrew gave me a
shove away from the dock. I edged away, caught in the wind shadow
behind the hills that shelter Road Harbour. I don’t have an outboard
on Eros, so it was a little uncertain getting out into the breeze. But
what I love about this boat is that she sails like a dinghy, responsive
and lively, and I squeaked around a tug and its barge, and found the
wind.
The Christmas winds have come early this year, and they were coming hard
out of the northeast at 20 knots straight down Sir Francis Drake
Channel. I had considered putting in a reef, but what the hell, I laid
a long port tack out towards Cooper Island. I tried to match a big 55
foot sloop with her rails under. I couldn’t of course, but it was
fun to try, and instead almost held course with a catamaran with a jib
up. Eros sailed well, angling up the channel, but my next, starboard
tack took me across at a right angle, and I felt like I had lost some
way. On the next tack, I found that I was pinching into the wind, the
luff vibrating. Perhaps nervous about having a bit too much sail up, I
was overcompensating, so I pulled off a few points and she surged over
the swells. But I found that I was not fetching as good a mark as my
first port tack. Then, I realized that there was a good current running
against me down the Channel. I was sailing faster, but in fact, I had
lost some way.
It was now almost 5 o’clock when I came about off Ginger Island and
I knew I couldn’t make it around the headland of Beef Island to get
my leg home. It gets dark by 6 in the tropics in winter, so I pushed her
hard towards every puff, like those days I raced dinghies as a boy, and
Eros rode up over the steep wind-driven swells, taking each push to
windward, and sure enough, boat length by boat length, we edged up past
the headland. Then, the wind sheered between the gap in another island,
and I was able to let out a bit of mainsheet, and we headed for a set of
breaking rocks that signal the end of the reef that protects Marina Cay.
All I had to do now was to make it through the narrow cut between Great
Camanoe Island and Scrub Island, where the current runs really hard, and
the wind funnels through the gap. The channel is deep, but on one side
there are shallows, where the color changes from deep blue to turquoise,
dotted with dark coral heads. The current is weaker there, and I sailed
Eros up the shallows in short, twenty yard tacks, standing behind the
boom, bringing her right up to within feet of the reef, and popping
around onto the other tack. The sun was already down, and I was relying
on memory to judge the depths, but one last tack into the edge of the
current, and I shot off around a headland and into our bay. It was
almost dark and I could just see my wife running down the dock. I
locked off the tiller, released the main halyard, and ran up to the bow
to catch the mooring.
This has been a long story, and interesting only to me, for which I
apologize. I started it to try to introduce my boat, and just kept
going. As you can tell, I have had a particularly intimate time
recently. My enthusiasm for this little Freedom 21, and thinking of her
now, new sail cover on, facing the strong winds that are still blowing,
makes me dream about what adventure we should have next.
That’s how I came to find this forum a few days ago. I read all the
postings until 1 a.m. one night, and found all sorts of advice and
experience – suggestions about replacing that hatch-track (I spent too
much time with epoxy and resins trying to repair mine!) with one from a
J-22, and what Bomar hatch I need to find… Then there’s that
new mainsail… I look forward to keeping in touch.
I think the next voyage is to get all the way to Anegada.
David Fanning
Marblehead, MA