Trial and Error and Error

After our awesome first trip aboard Tri-oomph we were eager to get out again and really sail, so we headed out the following weekend with a nice stiff wind.  Everything was going great, Cody at the tiller and the main sail flying.  Woooo hooo!  I took the tiller so he could haul up jib.  We were moving on a pretty good tack with strong wind and it took a little muscle to hold her where I wanted her.  I was thinking, "This is going to be difficult to do for a long time . . . "

And it happened.

Crack!  Pop!  Crack!

And suddenly I was holding a tiller handle that had dissociated itself (via breaking off) from the rest of the tiller.  I was like -

We're gonna die!

Cody, who is less of a spazz, climbed into the cockpit and grabbed hold of the rudder itself to hold us from running aground on some shoaling, while I got a grip on myself and climbed up to drop down the main sail.  

Ha.  Haha.

Well, we reasoned, the plywood was old and there was some rot where the bolt goes through.  We just need a new tiller.  It's cool.

So we did this.

We built a new one out of marine plywood donated by our good friends.  We modeled it off of the old one.  Should be great, right?  Right?

Right???

That's the new tiller.  Yeah.  New tiller, same problem.  Slightly less freak out, same sad return to shore.

After informing my much more ocean-worthy friend Jenny about our ongoing tiller woes she sent me a message saying something like, "[Our super experienced sailing friend] Gary's dad always says you want the tiller to feel light and easy. If there's a lot of tension on it you need to adjust your heading or your sail or something.  At least that's what he says."  It was a super tactful way of sort of suggesting that it was maybe user-error.  (A good friend will always find a way to tell you when you might just be sort of an idiot, and a great friend will make it patently clear without being a jerk about it.)

We built a new tiller, bearing in mind that we (I) might be responsible for the continued cracking of apparently sound tillers, but also deciding we might as well beef it up.  We doubled up on the plywood, applied lots of gorilla glue, and put lots of silicon on our bolt holes.  And!  With a new skill (that of not man-handling the tiller) in our arsenal and a nice beefed up tiller we made it through the entire summer with no tiller-related grief.

It's currently hanging above the stove 2, coats deep into what we hope is 7-8 fresh coats of spar urethane.  

Lesson - if things are breaking you're probably doing it wrong.