The main halyard on the P-Cat is a steel cable that hooks onto the mainsail headboard, runs up and over a sheave on the masthead, down the track on the mast (new to me) and onto a winch that's built into the mast (also new to me.)
Other P-Cat sailors have complained about this winch arrangement. The winch is only about 1.5" in diameter, if that, so it has to be one of the slowest ways to raise a sail. The winch handle also has a tendency to fall out of its socket. I've rescued mine off the bottom of the harbor once already. But this was the clincher: the cable fell off the winch drum and jammed between the winch drum and the inside of the mast. No amount of roll-it-back-and-forth got the cable back on the drum. So eventually I had to pull out the cutters and snip my main halyard.
Now I'm in a bit of a quandry. I still have to clear that winch drum, and I need to figure out how to rebuild it or at least remove it. From what I saw, there should have been a single set screw that removes the hub from the winch drum and lets you take the whole thing apart. But just like my mainsail battens (which were bolted into place and peened, if you can believe it), it looks like this set screw was mangled in some way to make disassembly damn near impossible. Right now I may be drilling it out and making new parts.
My plan at the moment is to move forward with rebuilding the thing as-is, with the possibility of adding cheek plates that prevent the halyard from falling off the drum and wedging. But I'm also fishing for ideas for how to do this differently.
The sheave on the P-Cat masthead hangs out aft of the track, so there's no real way to get an "up and over" arrangement like you have on the Hobie or Prindle without making a new masthead. I might be able to modify the masthead to take a larger sheave that would let the main halyard run down inside the mast. This is probably my best approach for a new routing of the halyard, but I'm nervous about it for a variety of reasons. One of them is that my mast is sealed, and this would involve cutting out a bunch of foam. It would also make for an unsealed mast in the future.
Another possibility would be to make a new masthead crane that would bolt to the existing masthead, and supply an additional sheave to bring the halyard down the front of the mast. This leaves me with a sealed mast, but doesn't play nicely with the mainsail arrangement on the P-Cat, which isn't outfitted for a downhaul. Unless I came up with a different way to rig the boom, I don't think I could add a downhaul, either.
I'm guessing the end result will be a rebuilt or a replaced mainsail winch. But if you have any ideas, I'm in the market.
Thanks,
Tom
P.S. I hope some of this makes sense...
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Tom Benedict
Island of Hawaii
P-Cat 18 / Sail# 361 / HA 7633 H / "Smilodon"
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