Day 6

The second week of senior project began today. It has only been a week, but this morning when we arrived at the loft it felt like we had been working there for a while because I have gotten so familiar with the place and what we are doing. Emily and I finished repairing sails. There was actually a pile of sails that had been put aside for us to repair. We ended up repairing all of the sails today. The sails were all from a boat club in New Bedford, called the Community Boat Club. Sperry Sails was doing community service for the boat club by repairing the sails at no charge. There were a lot of sails and I didn’t expect to finish them all within four days, but we did! The last sail that we did today was a sonar sail. We had to replace the luff tape, which is the side of the sail that hooks into the mast. It has a piece of rope in it, which hooks into the mast. It needed repair because the piece of rope was chaffed in some parts and was broken. After we were done with the sonar sail, we helped Rich finish making his sail. We both did different finishing touches to the sail. I put the grommets onto the sail, which was really fun. I had to use a big hammer to hammer the metal together. Grommets are the metal rings in a sail that hold different pieces of line on them like the reef knots when you reef a sail. Reefing means to shorten the height of a sail. When I was on Ocean we made ditty bags and there were different required features that we had to put on them. One of the things that we were required to do were grommets. Except they were stitched by hand instead. So the way that I put the grommets on at the sail loft was much easier than on Ocean! After we were done with the new sail we started repairing a whole new set of sails that belonged to someone else. The sails were old but they didn’t have too much damage. There were some seems that needed to be re-stitched and tell tails had to be put on. We still have a couple more sails to do, which we will do tomorrow. So far the week is off to a good start!