Summer Sailstice 2020. Rolled ZIP out early morning, after looking outside and seeing a nice 10-12 knot breeze coming in from the NNW.
ZIP is the oldest Sunfish in existence, built 1953. She has had a few changes along the way. One change was that she came from the factory painted red, with the coaming and rub rail finished bright. We changed that up a bit to showcase her wooden heritage. Her solid wood mast is now a hybrid mast, aluminum bottom section with tapered wood top, circa late 1950s. She also got a bigger rudder at one point, the spoon tip that was used in the 1960s, and we changed out her 31 inch daggerboard for the 39 inch Barrington board of 1980s vintage. Her 1980s North Sail by the Fogh loft in Canada was retired and replaced by a beautiful sail cut by Hunter and his team at Schurr Sails Pensacola. And we replaced her wire 3 loop bridle with a line bridle.
Skipper took out ZIP for the first Functional Check Float (FCF) where she checks control rigging and watertight integrity. She also sailed backwards a bit, I'm sure that was intentional and took ZIP up to Vne (Velocity never to Exceed).
She was chattering as she rolled out on Final Approach with the discrepancy list
Skipper liked how ZIP creaked like a square rigger while she was on a run. Wooden yard on wooden mast. And she liked the wave sounds on the hull.
Maintenance Discrepancies:
1) Sheet rigged wrong, we missed the forward block. Did you notice in the pictures? Here she is trying to sort it out during a tack. We caught the aft block and the two sheet hangers, but missed the forward block.
2) Forward sheet block too far aft.
Skipper called out the Flight Line crew aka Boat Captain (me) and we looked over the rigging and discussed block placement, we felt that the forward block was too far aft and interfered with movement in the small cockpit. Another factor we discussed was that ZIP did not come with an open fairlead/sheet hook in the cockpit like later boats did, and we had added a ratchet block to the forward cockpit lip. A quorum of The Usual Visitors was present and consensus was reached to move the forward block forward to place it over the ratchet block, that's when the tool box came out. We used an awl to unscrew the old block, they are screwed in with a wood screw on a bronze eyelet that captures an eyelet on the Wilcox and Crittenden block. We drilled a tiny hole about 7 inches forward on the boom, 7/64th inch bit on the DeWALT drill, as a pilot hole and screwed the block into the new position. Rigged the sheet correctly and Skipper declared "TLAR" (That Looks About Right) from her vantage point on the Gun Deck.
Salty Dog Rigging aka Marine Carpenter Clark.
3) Sail too low. We like the Geezer Rig (copyright claimed), it gets the sail up where it catches the breeze and up out of the cockpit, where it knocks hats off and catches on PFD collars. The Geezer Rig reduces the use of Skipper's salty vocabulary. We raised the rig by moving the halyard down one ring on the luff of the sail. The gooseneck could be moved forward an inch or so to raise the aft end of the boom a bit, but we'll get to that later.
Skipper launched for FCF 2 and had a great sail.
My turn, I took ZIP out and sailed her flat. Luckily for me the wind was dying off.
