Current Location: Petronella, Lanzarote. Us, UK.
It looks as though the long running windlass
replacement saga may be drawing to a close. Following my unsuccessful attempts
to purchase a secondhand SL500 to replace our knackered one I finally decided
we must have a replacement of some sort before we leave for the Caribbean. Gill
wanted to change to an electric one but I didn’t want the huge cost and disruption
involved in going down this route. She took a lot of persuading though. I
finally convinced her by telling her that she would probably lose the benefits
of my amazingly toned upper body if we went down the electric winch road! Anyway,
enough of that. Before we left Lanzarote Jack from Carpe Diem (thank you Jack)
had shown me a secondhand SL555 on eBay. Not the same, but thought by some to
be even better than the SL500, this manual windlass was for sale in Bristol. I
bought it for a not overly expensive price. Here is a picture of it.
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| My new Sea Tiger windlass. Note label on top suggesting it might actually be old but actually unused. |
It won’t fit straight onto the mountings for the old one but I think I can mount it without resorting to welding. Welding on the boat is
expressly prohibited when you are in the water and the last thing I want to do
is lift out just for twenty minutes of welding. Hopefully this approach will
work. The new windlass (the bit we use for hauling the anchor chain up) came
with the option of either a gipsy to accept 8mm chain or one for 10mm chain.
This is great except that we need one for 12mm chain. So that means finding a
12mm gipsy which hopefully fits both our old chain and the new windlass. I’ve
emailed a guy in Scotland who purports to stock these gipsies but as yet no
reply. I hope he does reply or else I could now be left with two ancient windlasses neither of which
have a 12mm gipsy. Watch this space!
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