Secondhand LionsSecondhand Lions

Sunday morning 28 miles from our Gulf stream entry point

rkvh@kvh.com — Sun, 22 Jun 2014 10:58:39 +0000

Our boat is definitely showing speed. We have moved up in the fleet so much that we are no longer in danger of winning the Cook’s trophy. Still having teething problems. When we went to the Jibtop sail, it kept pulling out of the foil groove at the top when we tensioned it. Looking at it closely, we can see the the turning sheaves for the jib are too far below the forestay attachment point on the mast. Net result is that we pull it out. The previous owner used hanked on sails and so never had the issue. The permanent fix is to move the sheave box, which means taking the mast down, drilling a new opening, and putting in a new one. Not happy.

For now what we are doing is lashing the snap shackle of the halyrad to the foil.Right now we are flying the code zero, so haven’t tried out the fix.

The boat is doing 9.6 knts and flying. we are heeled over quite a bit. We are approaching the wind range limit for this sail.

Nav Station on Sunday afternoon

rkvh@kvh.com — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 21:53:13 +0000

Panic Time for the Bermuda Race.

rkvh@kvh.com — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:06:07 +0000

It’s June 15th, and the Checkin for the race opens at noon. I have all the documentation done, and I’m ready to check in. The boat, however, is still in Stonington, frantically being worked on. Dave Maguire, his co-worker Scottie, and two amazing guys from Dodson Boatyard, James & Casey, have been working the boat for 2 weeks in a mad dash to get things done. Because of the the size of the boat (40 ft), 4 people is the max number of people you can get on the boat working on it. More than that and they keep getting in each others way, and the amount of things done actually goes down.

The list of things we have done to this boat is so long that I’ll detail it in another post. suffice it to say that we now have the strongest and safest J/120 in existence. Which is a good thing because the ocean is an unforgiving place.

The crew (and Dave is part of the crew), have also been working on the boat since I purchased it in January. Most weekends and nights have been dedicated to working on the boat since then. But the scale of the amount of repairs required dwarfs the amount of time we had (since we all have day jobs).

Lesson number 1: Never buy a boat in the same year as the Bermuda race you plan to sail it in. I should have learned that when my dad bought the Swan 48 “de Halve Maen”. That didn’t need any work done to it except shipping it from Majorca, plus commissioning and the extra safety gear that is required for the race and I still ended up standing on the boat with Sheila McCurdy our Safety Inspector as the boat was in the slings being lowered into the water.

Lesson number 2: Since I clearly am a slow learner, see lesson number 1.

The Story Starts

rkvh@kvh.com — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 10:14:25 +0000

This blog is about the “Secondhand Lions” the J/120 owned by Rob & Deb Kits van Heyningen. But it’s also, and maybe moreso about the crew: we were the crew for my father’s boats, starting with his first boat, a van de Staat 28, named “Summersong”, then a J/35 also named “Summersong”, then a Sceptre 43 “Dragonsbane” that we both owned, then a Swan 48 “de Halve Maen”, and finally an IMX-45 “Temptress”.