Blue Peter Sailing Dinghy - Centre Main Conversion
With a Topper, centre main conversion is trivial as you can get to the bottom of the dagger board holder. With the Blue Peter, it is a twin skinned hull so reaching inside to apply nuts is impossible. The solution recommended to me by a couple of members of of my (Reading) Sailing Club was to install an access hatch. This worried me a lot due to "what happens if I mess it up?! - I've ruined my son's boat!", but in actual fact, was a relatively trivial exercise and I think it looks really neat. Thank you Brian and Richard.
With the access hatch installed, I was able to drill holes through the dagger board housing for the pully block mounting feet and I inserted a piece of wood on the inside to spread the load across the fibreglass and alleviate any risk of it damaging the fibreglass when shock loaded in a sudden extreme gust and a gybe perhaps.
The block is just a simple one, no ratchet or anything fancy. I was going to buy one, but then I was offered this one for free - Thank you Brian! I'm really pleased with it and a ratchet is totally unnecessary due to the added friction of the extra pulley blocks. Note, the mainsheet shown is an 7 or 8mm one I use for my laser, but I bought a 6mm one for this boat because there was too much friction in the blocks for it to feed smoothly on days with light wind.