Evidently I, Bob, am a rigger’s apprentice now. As we get closer to the bottom of the projects list, rigging has become higher-priority. Sailboats have a lot of lines. Not ropes. Lines. Again I will say it: NOT. ROPES. But, you ask, aren’t they the same thing? Oh no. There is a fundamental difference, at least on a boat. A “rope” is cordage without a purpose. Let’s say I need to buy something to secure my boat the the dock. I may go and buy 3/4 inch polyester double-braid ROPE. I put said rope in the trunk of my car and go back to Meraviglia. I use the rope to secure the boat to the dock. It is now a LINE. A dock line to be specific. A rope is aimless cordage, wandering the wide world in search of meaning for its existence. A line, on the other hand, feels fulfilled because it is carrying out an essential function! Ah, to be a line-it’s every rope’s dream. (I’m now humming “I’m Just a Bill” from Schoolhouse Rock.)

Anyway, Meraviglia has a lot of lines. Some of them, like our dock lines, we have already replaced. Many of them are actually in decent shape. Some are missing completely. Case in point: our boom vang. Or lack thereof. First, you are probably wondering what the heck a “boom vang” even is. No, it’s not a 1960s dance craze. A boom vang helps control the, you guessed it, boom, which is the horizontal pole extending aft from the mast upon which the mainsail rides. The boom vang can be loosened or tightened in order to adjust the angle of the boom relative the the mast. Why do we care you ask? Well, honestly, you probably don’t. But we do. Because adjusting that angle allows us to control the amount of “twist” in the mainsail. And a sail’s power is partly a function of it’s twist. More twist means less power and vice versa.

So, a boom vang is sort of important to maximize Meraviglia’s performance. We need one. And we don’t have one. So I built one. And it’s cool, because “PHYSICS”!! I haven’t thought about “simple machines” since physics in college. But that’s what a boom vang is. It’s a system of pulleys that gives us the mechanical advantage we need to adjust the boom angle. If you look closely at the photo of our shiny new vang, you will see 4 blocks (pulleys). That provides an 7:1 mechanical advantage, meaning when I pull on the vang line (LINE!), I am exerting 8 times as much force as if I was pulling on the boom itself. Cool! Anyway, to build it, I not only had to connect all the blocks to the various lines, I also had to splice lines. Splicing is a way of connecting lines without knots. In my case, I used a Brummel locking splice to create eyes in the ends of lines and also to make continuous loops of line. Gotta love YouTube!

Eye splices in Dyneema rope using a Brummel locking splice with buried tail

Anyway, we now have a boom vang. There are a bunch of other rigging projects too, but this one was the coolest.