Winchrite revisited

A little over a year ago I wrote a post where I discussed a product called the Winchrite. You might want to go back and reread that post before continuing.

Did you read it? If yes, feel free to continue. If not, what are you waiting for? Get busy! 🙂

Anyway, we have had the Winchrite for just over a year and in spite of being asked to comment on it several times, I have neglected to write any more about it. Here’s why… we hadn’t been using it.

Our main purpose for wanting to acquire the Winchrite was to help us with raising our large tender, one of the toughest jobs on the boat. We had already purchased a Milwaukee 28V right-angle cordless drill and winch bit, and by the time we received the Winchrite, we already had our system down for using it. While large and heavy, the Milwaukee drill had plenty of power to get the tender up into the davits, if we ran the davit line up to the main helm winch.

Fast forward to today, we now have a powerful electric winch at the helm and with a bit of creative running of the davit lines, we can use it to raise the heavy engine side of the tender, no large Milwaukee drill required. That still leaves the bow end though. While I can get that end up using brute force, once, having to do it several times in one day is a bear! Because of the fact that we often have to raise it more than once per day while on charter, Rebecca and I developed a system where we’d trim it in together. Now that she had that nice electric helm winch though, I thought that perhaps I’d be able to use the Milwaukee. Sadly, that was a no go.

Because the winches on our davits are single speed, the drill needs to be operated in reverse to raise the tender. This, unfortunately, loosens the clutch on the drill, making it inoperable, No matter how hard I tried to tighten the clutch, it would still loosen up. Loctite also failed to solve the problem.

It was at this point that I decided to revisit the Winchrite which we had safely tucked away. Guess what? It worked! Perfectly, in fact. We’ve been using it to raise the bow end of the tender every day since we converted the helm winch to electric, over 2 months now. Cool, right? We think so.

Now, a couple of factors may be contributing to our newfound success:

1. When we were last in St. Martin, I replaced the davit lines with Dyneema which is much more slippery than the old lines and thus runs through the blocks with much less friction.
2. I serviced the davit winches, and they are running much better since being properly lubricated.

I’m sure both of those things are helping. Regardless of why though, we’re just very happy that we now have a virtually effortless system for getting the tender up into the davits.