Of mice and men

We sent Jacob up the mast twice yesterday. The first time he was armed with a “mouse” made of fishing weights. We had high hopes that this would have sufficient mass to pull the mousing line down to the bottom of the mast. Getting him to the top of the mast requires a lot of winching, especially in the heat of the day, but it isn’t as though Jacob can just sit there in a sedan chair enjoying the view. He has to try and stop himself swinging wildly into the rigging and getting tangled up in the plethora of wires, ropes and sticky out bits of metal, some of which seem to be designed with the sole purpose of catching any passing bit of rope and clinging on to it stubbornly. (I’m using the word rope in its loosest sense. Sticklers for nomenclature would tell you that the only piece of rope to be found on a sailing boat is the one attached to the ships bell).

After much strenuous winching Jacob arrived at the top of the mast, only to discover that his mouse was too fat to fit through its hole! The sensible thing to do at that stage would have been to get him down and rethink, but instead we thought we’d abandon the mousing line altogether and try and force feed the halyard back down the mast. This proved to be hopeless. All it achieved was a very seasick Jacob. This time he was actually sick, but knowing how much his dad loves his new teak decks, he was considerate enough to wait until the top of the mast swung over the sea!

We got Jacob back down and decided to delay any further attempts until late afternoon when the sun had lost some of its heat. In the intervening period I made a new mouse out of four AA batteries taped into a long, thin cylinder. The tape I used was blue and I was a bit worried I wouldn’t be able to see it inside the mast, and so I added some yellow tape stripes. The end result was very aesthetically pleasing, which, as we all know, is the most important thing. At around 5 o’clock we regrouped around the base of the mast and once again winched Jacob up to the top. The multi-coloured mouse dropped through the hole and headed downwards. As on the outside, there are a whole host of sticky out bits on the inside the mast waiting to catch an unsuspecting mouse and so it took probably 30 minutes and much jiggling before it finally made it to the bottom. It was with a huge sense of relief that I fished out the mousing line attached it to the halyard, but that was only half the job done. We then had to gently pull the halyard back up through the mast on the mousing line, and at one point it got stuck and refused to go any higher. We jiggled it around for around 5 minutes and then suddenly it was free, and a few minutes later Jacob shouted down triumphantly that he had it in his hand.

Having got Jacob down and tidied all the bits away, we then set about hoisting the Blue Water Runner on the new halyard. There was very little wind but as we hoisted it we saw that one of the sheets was caught around the wrong side of the forestay. The Blue Water Runner sensed our hesitation and took the opportunity to leap into the sea again (I can’t really blame it, it was so hot yesterday I also jumped into the sea at one point). We wrestled it back on deck, got it into a neat roll and repeated the orange wool trick that worked so effectively before. This time it went up perfectly, and, with just enough wind to fill it, we had a peaceful night accompanied by the gentle chuckle of the water going past the hull and the occasional flap from the sail as the wind shifted.