Today after an extremely pleasant sail, we turned the boat and I flipped open the clutch to drop the main sail… and nothing happened! It didn’t even go down a few inches. Not good at all! I had to run up forward and grab the line by hand to pull it through to get the sail de-powered. That’s not a safe thing to have to do repeatedly, so after we got anchored we started to investigate. Luckily we’re near a cell tower and pulled up a YouTube video on how to clean and maintain the line clutches.

it was surprisingly easy to pull the clutch innards out of the housing.  Literally it was one tiny screw and the handle in the correct position and it just slid out.  As predicted, the inside was filthy.  I made pretty quick work of that in the kitchen sink with the toothbrush that I keep there for occasions just like this! Unfortunately, I realized that the dirt wasn’t the problem. It looked like the metal hinge pieces were bent causing the whole thing to bind up and not release.  Guess that was the problem.

Since the main halyard is one of the most important lines on the boat we decided to swap the broken one out with the jib halyard that we rarely use. It’ll still need repair parts when we get back to Florida but shouldn’t affect the rest of our trip and now we know it’s a thing that needs to be done more often!