ALL NEW LINES from EBAY, Boomkicker, Custom Adjustable Backstay and more!! In this week's episode of sailboat living with SailAway we switch it up a little bit. Learn all about the improvements and sailboat maintenance we did in the first 15 days of owning Layla, all while traveling down the Atlantic coast. And we also clue you in to the changes we've made in preparation of our next big trip down to Florida and sailing the Bahamas.

Let us know if you have any questions or comments on the things that we changed, or if you know of any better way to do things! Be sure to SUBSCRIBE for WEEKLY CONTENT! Cheers!!

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Music in this episode:
"Tropical Love" By Del
"Island Summer Breeze" By Coyote Hearing
"Yard Sale" By Silent Partner
"Daily Beetle" By Kevin MacLeod



Daily Beetle by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1500025
Artist: http://incompetech.com/

Closed Captions:

I'm just playing in poopy water.
Who doesn't do that?
This week on sailing SV Layla we thought we would show you some of the modifications and
improvements we've made to the boat since we've bought her.
But before we get started on that, here's some gratuitous sailing footage.
Today I thought I would take you around the boat and give you a little bit of an idea
of some of the modifications and improvements we've made to Layla since we've bought her.
So lets take a look.
Ok, one of our very first mods that we did was to change up on navigation.
This had a very nice by older unit on it and we knew we wanted to start fresh as far as
that goes.
So we added this whole set up right here.
With the new nav pod.
And Raymarine touch screen.
I'm sure in that first episode you noticed us messing around with quite a few things
and we mentioned a couple of those.
One of those was our bluetooth fusion stereo.
Which we are not sad about at all, it's been amazing.
But its nice to just have a good solid stereo that you can pipe your phone to anywhere in
the boat, which we do.
We also added and mounted the charging bracket for the new standard horizen gps hx870 gps,
this also has DSC on it.
Just a good all around unit.
It floats, waterproof, etc.
Then of course our baby swing, which mounts up right here.
Which he's actually already grown out of by was indespensable for the short amount of
time that he used it.
I'm not sure how we would have handled him without it.
New fire extengishers placed in the cabin where they are easy to reach.
Also a very useful item if you're in any kind of hot climate at all, or even just a little
hot and you're trying to sleep down below.
Are FANS.
So we put several of these bad boys in.
They don't hurt you if you smack them with your hands, or on your face which I do all
the time if I'm standing over they sink.
That one I placed right near one of these lights, since thats a good way to mount these
kind of things so you can find the electricity you need to get to them.
What do you think of all this dog?
Am I boring you?
Then the last thing you may have seen us messing with was the depth sounder and knot meter,
upfront.
We wound up taking a lot of that stuff apart to try and get the depth sounder to work properly
and we think it might have just been a bad wire because we did finally get it working.
The knot meter it's self is the retractable kind and after messing with the paddles some
and just cleaning it off its worked fine ever since.
And so really that is the list of things that we did before leaving from atlantic City.
And this was all while arriving at the boat, stocking it with groceries, getting all our
stuff on here, making sure the baby had a place to stay, to sleep, and getting to know
the boat well enough to take it 600 miles down the coast.
And here we are, so it worked out pretty good.
Ok now the list of things we did before heading down to Florida and the Bahamas.
So lets get on it.
Zeke is deminstrating one of my personal favorites.
So this is a cascading backstay.
Well, we've decided we would like an adjustable backstay, for racing purposes.
So that we can help flatten our main sail.
And so I've put one together, a cascading version of the adjustable backstay using dyneema
and 3/8ths line and some blocks and stuff like that.
So this being a fractional rig with swept back spreaders the backstay doesn't actually
do much as far as like just holding your mast up.
Its more for sail shape so we can ease these all the way off, going to take off these two
pieces and replace them with dyneema and a whole new system.
Just like that.
Piece of cake.
And we used these aluminum eyes instead of blocks.
Both here and up top.
The reason for using those is taht you wind up with a lot less moving parts to go bad
when they are sitting out in the open the way they are, especially that one up top.
And so far its worked great, we can pop this thing virtually all the way off when sailing
down wind, like so.
And then for sailing up wind we want to flatten the sails out and in higher wind, just give
this a nice easy tug.
And that brings that in.
Next item we added was a Cunningham.
Which meant adding this Schaffer deck block and a new line.
Which runs all the way up here and to this little beaut.
And also meant having to rearrange some of how our lines work.
And one of my personal favorites we added spinacker gear for an asymetrical spinnacker
that we bought in the winter.
We got our spinnaker second hand from a fellow down in Panama City, Florida.
And got a really good price on it, its barely been used.
Beautiful condition.
And a whole lot cheaper then what we would have spent new.
But that meant we had to add a whole lot of gear to make it all work.
So, what we have here is our tack line, and again we used one of these low friction aluminum
eyes and on this particular model of boat hooking it right to that bail on top of the
anchor roller works amazingly well.
We've got a little fairlead here and then these fairleads lead us to right there.
Something else worth mentioning is we've put all new lines pretty much on the whole boat.
I think the only ones that aren't knew are the reefing lines and they're in good shape.
We do have one friend who helped us with a couple, he's a rigger.
But most of these, this is ebay line.
You can find really good deals, i;m talking about you know the spinnacker halyard we got
I believe cost about $35.
But anyway all this line, incrediably cheap and if you buy a fid set and just get on youtube
and check out some of the videos that are available to show you how to do some of the
splices its really easy.
Save a bundle, learn how to splice, and do it yourself.
Basically one thing I've never cared for are toping lifts.
As you can see this one no longer has one, and the reason for that is the boom kicker.
This is the most simple unit you can get, which is why I like it.
And this is just about the biggest boat you can probably use it on.
The other thing we did is these boats are all fitted with a Dutchman reefing system,
which I flat out hate.
So I removed all that patched up all these little holes and replaced it with this handy
dandy lazy jack system.
Which is a combination of a couple of designs I found online and kind of put them together.
And then hoist, using this line as well, you want to clip it in right there.
As you can see, that brings your lazy jacks up.
And there you have a lazy jack.
We've got one on the other side as well.
As you can see right there.
And so when its time to take the sails down, you hoist those up, point her into the wind
and just drop the sail and it pretty much flakes right in to that, pretty nicely.
And then I designed ours to just stow away so the cover goes over everything.
And it works really nice.
Alright, im really proud of this next one, this is a big one.
Wasn't as big of a job as you might think.
What I'm talking about, is our new electric head.
We wont show you too much of it.
And right here is our button for it.
Thats what i'm talking aobut right thtere.
We replaced all of our hoses, leadign back to the tank.
I'm just playing in poopy water.
Who doesn't do that?
And wired it in, it has been an excellant escellent add and I would hightly recommend
it.
It you know, just feels a little more civilised.
So again there's some of the things we did both right when we bought the boat and also
after we had it over the winter leading up to our trip down to florida and the Bahamas.
And you know we don't consider this a DIY channel by any means but you know we hope
if some of that stuff gives you ideas or helps you to see what we do with our boat we hope
it helps.
By all means, please comment below if you have any suggestions or any questions aobut
how we rig this stuff, or how it works by all means we'd love to hear it.
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Thanks for watching, Cheers.