Sail repairs and Harken Battcar maintenance……

Lucey Blue has sailed a long way in her time and while the last set of sails were new in 2005-2006 it was clear we needed to do some routine maintenance. A good friend of mine Ben Gemmell dropped by to help remove the mainsail and blade jib.



The full battened main is enormous and it took forever to extract it from the reefing lines, lazy jacks and Harken batten cars etc, however, I have known Ben since school and capsized/broken more 12 foot skiffs than I care to remember, so the job was fun.



With the main out of the way I took the time to inspect the rest of the sail-related hardware. The Harken Battcar system is really well made, but after 19 years of use and many tens of thousands of sea miles later the aluminium toggles that connect the fibreglass battens to the Battcars needed to be replaced. The guys at Harken Australia were really helpful and managed to obtain the correct spares for the Battcars within a week– at $25 Australian per toggle the repair bill was much smaller than I had expected.


After a few repairs at Ben’s sail loft and with refurbished Harken Battcars it was time to reinstall our working sails. Everyone helped out and after much fiddling around pushing the 18+ foot battens back into their batten pockets, the job was done!!!



To celebrate another job complete Sam gave the saloon cabin a festive feel with her new tea-lights and we sat down to a well-earned dinner.