Prepping for the New Rigging

Since the mast came down, I've been working on getting everything ready to put it back up, which has consisted of a few small projects. I had to have two little mounting brackets built for where the headstay and backstay attach. The old ones were corroded and bent and one had an elongated hole in it. Unfortunately, these aren't stock parts and so I couldn't just buy replacements. I had to have Svendsen's metal shop custom build them for me. That meant paying for an hour's labor, and at $102/hr, these two brackets ended up costing almost $60 each. Oh well, at least they're done and I'm ready to put the stays back on the boat.

I cleaned and polished up the spreaders and the mast. I did sort of a half-assed job on the mast. I waxed it, but I didn't put nearly as much energy into it as I could have. It really needs to be painted to look new again. Maybe I'll do that someday, but it's not on the radar in the immediate future. I attached the new upper shrouds to the masthead today, and replaced the mast boots. They're ready to go on Saturday when everything goes back together.

I also replaced both halyards. I was planning on switching to all-rope halyards, but it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, so I just bought a pair of wire/rope spliced halyards from Svendsen's. These went on no problem, and they should last me a good long while. After the new halyards were on, I mounted the bracket for the roller furler that goes over the jib halyard to move it away from the headstay to avoid wrapping the halyard around the furler. I hope that works out well -- it seems like the angle that the halyard will be tensioning the headsail from will be too far away from directly up the headstay, where it should be. It's hard to tell though, without everything being mounted on the boat. We'll see once it's up there, I guess. I forgot to take pictures of this and the new halyards, sorry.

I also tore out the old mess of an electrical system, and started cleaning out the inside of the boat a bit. The boat's more cluttered than usual with my toolbox and all my new parts in there until the mast goes back up, but even still, it's less of a mess than it was before. I've got an old sail bag full of junk in there that just needs to be thrown out. Once the inside's clean, it will start looking a lot better, but it really needs to be repainted, and I want to replace the floor at some point, too, with a floor that actually fits. That's one more project to add to the list.

I've scheduled the raising of the mast for Saturday, so sometime before then I want to get out and have everything else attached and ready to go , so that all that needs to be done Saturday is bolting the mast back in place and tilting it up to vertical. There are plenty of things that could go wrong with that, so if everything else can be done ahead of time, that eliminates sources of potential problems. Assuming the mast gets raised on schedule, I may try and put the furler on the boat on Sunday.

Tyler Karaszewski

Prepping for the New Rigging

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