Dockline chafe gear at the stern
"It was raining hard, but the fiddler didn't care,
He sawed away at the popular air,
Tho' his roof-bottom leaked like a waterfall,
That didn't seem to bother the fiddler at all."
So the stranger said Now, the way it seems to me
You'd better mend your roof said he,
But the old man said as he played away,
I couldn't fix it now, it's a rainy day."
"Arkansaw Traveler", Traditional American Folk Tune, 19th Cent.
Yup, it was that kind of weekend. A few weekends back, I had found a couple small deck leaks that I had fully planned to fix this Saturday. You guessed it, I couldn't fix it now, it's a rainy day..:" Plan 'B' was to fix it on Sunday. But sunday was to cold to caulk, so I decided that I would check a few other maintenance items off my list.
While my dock is very protected in most wind conditions, it is much more exposed to winds from the North, or Southeast. This winter saw an incredibly large number of gales from the North, so I decided to check the chafe gear on my docklines. I had checked them all before the winter, At that time, the chafe gear had all been in good shape. But the winter winds had chafed through in all of the usual suspect locations and in a few additional unexpected locations as well.
Years ago I ended up with a couple yards of very heavy duty balistic nylon (the fabric that high quality cloth-covered suitcases have as a covering). I typically stitch that onto the line as chafe gear, and that was what I did on Sunday.
But even installing the chafe gear was a bit of an Arkansaw Traveler kind of an undertaking as in "I can't fix it now its a windy day".
While I felt compelled to replace the chafe gear on the docklines due to Sunday's very high winds, replacing the chafe gear on the dockines was made much more difficult by the strong winds. Rgging temporary docklines was much harder as the boat slammed hard up against her lines, first on port and then on staqrboard. Lassoing the windward piling was harder for the line blowing back towards the boat. Timing was critical between the gusts, as the l\ines loaded up more than I could simply hold in my hands. I was not always successful in gaugung when the next gust would slam the boat hard up against her lines, and engaged in a losing tug of war against the forces of the wind as Synergy heeled and slammed hard against her lines.
Even threading the needle was tougher as the wind blew the short length of whipping twine away from the eye of the needle. Cold hands do not make neat stitching easy or even possible.
On occasions like this I simply repeat the mantra, "The perfect is the enemy of the good".
What would normally take me an hour or so if I was sitting comfortably in my living room, chewed up most of the afternoon hunched over in the bucking bull ride that was Synergy's cockpit. It could have been worse, looking across the creek where white caps were slamming into the moored boats and docks, I felt lucky to be tucked away in the relative protection of the cove.