Sovereign Nations

…Life gets in the way of blogging.

You know, as a member of this global community of hyper-opinionated end users I feel a certain responsibility to the art-form but lack of interaction ultimately has it’s effect on the priority of such discourse.

It’s a responsibility, yes, but not big on the “Go, No-Go” list.

Ok, so…

Dena’s been working on the little boat, S/V Tinker, and the bow roller project with the same amount of intensity given to both – switching back and forth from each just long enough to let the chemistry dry.

…On the bow.

…And, between glove changes, behind the camera.  Tinker’s fiberglassing had to happen on two separate days, but it makes for a good before/after photo.  Both sides are done now and the bow has been cleaned up and layered.  Some fiberglass cloth across the stern and a good coat of epoxy throughout the interior and we’re good to start putting it back together!

I did my share on my good-weather days off…

But once again, Dena gets to do most of the boat work and she does it well!

…For instance,

The above photo was shot over our last work week and because Dena has such a keen sense of project timing, the jobs that absolutely had to have two people on them, such as bolting through the deck,  happened when we were both available.

So, yesterday was one of those rare days when the weather was so perfect, all day, that it inspired us both to work straight through till sunset.

The new bow rollers are in place with through-bolts, starboard backing plates and lags and have no problem supporting my weight. The bollard is backed with stainless steel plate and bolted with 1/2 inch bolts.  If the true strength of a cleat is in the fasteners, this bollard will beat out any cleat I’ve seen on a boat this size.  Just behind the bollard is the deck pipe for the Bruce anchor’s rode and chain.

I feel as good about this project as I felt about all the other work we’ve done on this boat; it’s as over-built as the original vessel and I think the designer, Philip Rhodes, would approve.

So, the fog of reconstruction has ultimately hindered our blogging abilities.  So what? In the end, our lack of communication has accelerated the checks on our project list and really, the blog should be about the adventure, right?

One or two more preparatory blog posts and then it’s all travel and sailing for months!

…One must have a completely different rig than the one we had, and I do mean, had.

…As jankey as it looked it was a workable rig for gunkholing up the Chesapeake bay which it did for us very well over the past 3 years. But, for our future adventures, we’re going to need a much more substantial rig to help us sleep at night in our busy anchorages to come.

The rig above shows off a very simple Bruce claw with 25 feet of 5/16th galvanized chain attached to 150 feet of 5/8 inch 3 strand rode. It works great in mud up to 15 feet…

…And this will not do.

Although we did manage to pull ourselves off a pretty nasty grounding once, this windlass set up is just not strong enough for deeper water anchorages using much more chain and a longer rode.

So,

… We got all dressed up and demo’d that old anchor roller that was knocking the anchor against the fore-stay, the flush-deck, feather-weight Simpson-Lawrence windlass and those god-damn-loose-ass bronze cleats on the bow.

Now we can work here!

…Well, maybe I didn’t get so dressed up, but we did get an idea for what we were going to put on the bow to replace our old and inadequate system of anchoring.

With the fore-deck cleared of all the old deck fittings, let the repairs begin.

…Ground and filled.

Now we get to build a twin bow roller system that  won’t chafe on our sailing rig but will carry our trusty old shallow-water anchor rig along with a brand new 35# CQR with at least 200 feet of 5/16 chain. Both anchors will run  through our new above-deck windlass into our newly partitioned chain-locker.

…And this is how we’re doing it.

First we took the deck all the way down to the original fiberglass (L).

…We built a jig for the epoxy bases that will support the bow rollers (M).

Then we mixed the epoxy up with some colloidal silica and poured it into the jig (R).

…Now we let the thing set up.

The next step will be to fill-and-fair the epoxy bases so they make a good and fair mounting surface for the two bow rollers to bolt to.

We lifted the stripped mast on to the deck and rigged it up on deck. The day was, at this point, perfect…

… With the wind generator tied off and the boat and crew ready to DO THIS THING!!!

… We hoisted our mast. The new wind-direction-indicator was telling us that it was our last chance to “beat the storm” (HA!!!) back to the slip. It kicked up a bit on the way back home but the rig was totally in place and the crew was elated, The Mast Was Back UP!!!

Not a creak, not a groan, every single piece went in place and it was an awesome feeling.

We even beat the storm that put the rig to the test that night. (When does that ever happen?!)

…So, next!

The repaired bulkhead is now clad in 1×3 tongue and groove oak boards.  There are some trim issues to be sussed out, and the fasteners need to be bunged, but it’s as solid as it gets.  Here’s the story.

We bought two bundles of oak, which seemed likely (but not guaranteed) to be enough.  We won’t be able to do all the surfaces we’d planned with the wood we have, but we’ll give it a go.  I broke the bundles and rebundled them so I could carry the wood from the truck to the boat.  That shit is heavy!

My first job was to mock up the boards, trying to avoid putting board-ends near one another.  I taped across where my rows of fasteners would go, to give me a good visual.

Another factor was allowing access to the mast compression system’s fasteners.  I had to make sure that they would be covered, but not by more than one board.  This was a good try, but partially covered a fastener.

I changed things up a bit as I went, but mostly followed the plan.  When I took these boards down, I numbered them and arranged them on the cabin sole.

I couldn’t decide which picture I liked better, so you get to see both.

Then I started putting the boards up.  At first, I tried to gauge the proper angle using my smart phone’s spirit level.  That was a massive failure, as I was doing this during peak water-traffic time.  Every time I tried to figure out whether or not something was exactly vertical, another wake would toss the boat around.  I cut three pieces (incorrectly) before I gave up in frustration.

That meant I needed to work from my one and only guide line – the hatchway.  Working with tongue and groove boards, that meant that I’d reach a point where I couldn’t wedge more boards in.  The plan got tricky at that point, but first I did the clear field.

I pushed the boards into position and then clamped them against the ones I’d already installed.  That got rid of most of the gaps and resulted in a nice tight fit for all the boards.  I worked this way across until I got to the complicated bit where the deckhouse dives toward the deck.  I had to make my measurements and cut the next board.  I couldn’t try my board in place, though, without taking a couple of the boards next to it out of place.  I put the new board in place and then replaced the one next to it, screwing it in place.  If the screw holes in the board matched the screw holes in the bulkhead, I had cut the new board correctly and I could fasten it into place.  This took a few tries, and a very few boards took me an obscene amount of time.

This picture shows the bulkhead after I cut all the pieces.  I couldn’t put them all in place, but I wanted to see it as complete as possible.

Sorry for the horrible lighting.

When I had all the pieces cut and temporarily fastened, I was ready to start the final installation.  That involved removing the boards a few at a time, working from the hull side inward.  I gooped them with polysulfide on the back, wedged them into place, and refastened them.  As I worked, I realized that I couldn’t clamp the boards as I had done working from the middle outward.  I had to shove the boards together as hard as I could in order to make the fastener holes line up.

I got smart and pounded spacers between boards after a while.  I took only two rows down at a time and then pounded very short board-ends into the fastener line.  That gave me the spacing I needed, and the job picked up speed again.  Once I had all the boards in place across both sides, I made a batch of epoxy and removed the first fastener.  I injected a little epoxy into the hole and put the fastener back.  Next fastener.  I epoxied them one at a time until every board was glued and screwed properly.

And then I moved on to the little pieces over the arch.  This has give me fits, trying to figure out how to add strength to this area while maintaining the aesthetic across the top.  James borrowed Raf’s belt sander and I turned these out.

Shrug.  That’s what we get.

And then the trimming began.  Turning these long tongue and groove boards into trim boards – not the easiest thing I’ve ever done.  I cut the tongue off with the jigsaw, used the new flat edge as a guide for the router and rounded the edge, then cut the to the width I needed.  I spent that whole project wishing for a table saw.

That picture shows one trim piece in place, though it’s hard to see because it fades into the rest.  The wall looks striped because I used sanding dust to make up a filler that I forced into the seams, smoothing them and hopefully making them invisible-ish.

This really feels like the project that will never end, but I’ll just keep on trucking.

That’s my dad.  Dean Hankins.  He spent a couple weeks with us, during with time I put him to work about half the time.  We also managed to do some fun stuff, like go to the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center.

He pulled the chainplates for us and put some electrical muscle into cleaning them up.  As he reached past the minor corrosion, he discovered…

All of the chainplates had corroded, some more deeply than others, and patches had been applied.  The part circled in green?  Perhaps you can make out the difference in the metal inside that area?  Anyway, that’s how extensive the old repairs were.  And does anyone remember the time when one of our chainplates broke?  Yup – must have looked a lot like this right before that happened.

Rather than clean them up and put them back, we found ourselves in the unenviable position of needing to have new ones fabricated.  If you need stainless steel fabrication work done, talk to Dex.  He did great work, within the original time estimate, and at a better price than we were quoted elsewhere.  Even at a better price, we were out $600, just like that.  Ouch.

Meanwhile, I kept sanding…

And sanding…

Patching…

And fiberglassing…

And fiberglassing…

And fairing and sanding…

And Dad went to work on sanding the hatchway, an inverted arch that holds the hatch to the head.

It was great to have him around.  He does great work and has a good problem-solving brain.  And the weather, though somewhat gloomy, did give us one of these sunsets:

Let’s see.  Where were we?  Oh, right.  Bulkhead.

This is structural filler.  It’s also called cat hair, because it’s shortish strands of fiberglass chopped up and mixed into an epoxy resin.  It comes in a big can with a small squeeze tube of hardener (like bondo).  Its working time is only about 5 minutes, so I couldn’t make up batches that were too big.  Kept having to dig more out and mix it with more hardener.  I was doing all this by hand, so I went through a lot of gloves.  I like the feeling of it on my fingers, though.  Through the gloves, of course.

And on the back side.

Meanwhile, I decided that the wavy fiberglass near the settee was a drag.  Someone repaired the other side of the bulkhead at some point in the boat’s history, and the fiberglass was delaminated from the repair.  Or never had adhered.  One or the other.  So I chiseled out the stuff that wasn’t stuck.

This picture was taken after I filled some remaining gaps with epoxy mixed with colloidal silica.  That’s why it’s shiny.

What comes after applying structural filler?  Why, sanding structural filler, of course!

That’s a drag because of the fiberglass aspect.  It’s best to make the structural filler fit the repair as best possible, but I was hurrying and left some pretty good sized lumps.  The sanding blows fiberglass bits at me, so I gear up.

With the delaminated section and the filled section sanded, it was time for the fairing compound.  I like this stuff once it’s mixed into the epoxy, but it’s a light dust and I always end up coughing while I mix it up.  Oh – maybe I should try a dust mask…hmm…

The clamped-on wood was supposed to help make the shape match the tabbing on either side.  The wood was too thin, though, and it warped a bit in the middle.  Oh well…

And the delaminated sections below.

While I was doing the fairing, James was working on the compression bar.

He put a lot of work into that thing, and it looks great!

And when he was done there, he came aboard to see what I’d been up to.  It seems that fairing compound gives him the same urge as wet concrete…

The last post was about forming the patch at the top of the arch.  I got stymied when I couldn’t lever it into position.  Well, I cut the piece out and made this work.

As you can see, I’m trying to protect our living environment.  The plastic sheeting makes the cleanup easier, but it also keeps us from having the sanding dust sift into our sheets, where we won’t see it.  I’m not even sure if we feel it, really.  Directly, I mean.  It’s just, well, creepy.

The patch in the picture above isn’t fitting quite right, and the arch isn’t cut into it.  In order to shape it, I pulled out the following tools.

You can’t see the chisel, but it was in the mix somewhere.  I didn’t get pictures of the process, because working, right?  But basically, I fucked it into place and slipped the other piece under it.  Voila!

By the way, we were given this wood by a man named August.  He had a bunch of marine plywood left over from a project and gave it to James.

It’s rough, but the next step is structural filler, epoxy, and fiberglass.  Once those are all applied, we’ll be ready to do some finish work.

As usual, clean-up was a long process.  It involved more sawdust than fiberglass this time (yay!), which reminded me of one reason wooden boats are wonderful.

Last thing we wrote about the mast project, we were going to hang tight through Irene and then get back to it.  As we posted, the hurricane wasn’t so bad up here in Fells Point.  When I got back to work, I pulled out the grinder again.

I wish I’d gotten pictures of it, but…I taped thick plastic sheeting all around my work zone, trying to contain the fiberglass dust I would create.  It was not a complete success.  Three straight lines with the grinder = 5 min.  Set up and clean up = hours.

Fiberglass dust makes you itch – it irritates your skin – it hurts!  So I filled a bucket with water and wiped down every single surface that got dusty, from the cabin top to the cabin sole.  It was far more of a cleaning than I felt like doing, but I made the mess.

The whole reason I made those cuts?  In the picture below, you can see that I had chiseled the lower part of the plywood.  I got up to the fiberglass tabs that fix the bulkhead to the cabin top and wow.  The wood wasn’t rotten enough to come out!

The wood is obviously not in the pink of health, but it was too strong for me.  The arch is the part I removed with the grinder.

And then I chiseled.  Oh my.  I kept turning away, thinking there was a quicker way.  If there is, I don’t know it, so I turned back to the job and got it done.

And then I cut the piece that would replace the old plywood.  I made patterns of the front and back, transferred those to a piece of plywood, and got out the jigsaw.  I love the jigsaw.  It makes such disciplined cuts, for a freehand tool.  However, I got fancy and tried to get the poor jigsaw to behave in an undignified manner.  I tried to angle it manually in mid-cut.  And I burned the wood and the blade.

That picture’s actually from after I used the Dremel to take off the knob that was left.

And then I went to fit this in place, figuring I would need to do a bunch of subtle shaping to make it fit perfectly.

Except it doesn’t fit!  I mean, it might fit when I can get it into place, but there’s no way to lever it into the groove between the two existing pieces of plywood.

Major bummer!

I put the project aside so I could ponder.  What I’ve come up with – I’ll cut a rectangle out of the good wood underneath (the darker stuff in the picture).  Then I’ll pound the top piece in place from underneath and push the other piece in place afterward.  It’s not ideal, but it’s the kind of thing I sometimes do on this boat.

Of course, when I walked to the hardware store to get a thinner grinder wheel for the cut…well, it’s Labor Day.  They were closed.

So another day with very little accomplished.  Ah well, I did get some writing done!

When last you saw us, we looked like this:

Once the mast was secure on the dock and the storm passed, it was time to remove the mast step.  In order to do so, we first had to remove the compression posts below decks.

In the picture above, the compression posts are the pieces of wood standing vertical.  They have a curve to them that makes them wider at the top.  Note the bar sitting across them at the top.  The mast step is bolted to the deck via the holes you can see (sort of) in the picture, but two of the bolts come through the mast step, through the deck, and through the compression bar, where the washers and nuts appear.  Of course, you can’t see that, because the compression posts are right underneath those nuts.  This is the whole reason we have to take everything apart – because we couldn’t tighten the bolts from the top and we couldn’t get to the nuts from below.

The compression posts are well supported by the bulkheads (one of which is cracked, remember?) and so we commenced to scraping paint away where we thought the fasteners would be.  Then we dug out the bondo-type filler someone had packed on top of the screw heads.  Then we tried to move 50 year old bronze fasteners in damp, swollen wood.  Every fastener was an adventure.

Turns out the compression posts were attached to the bulkhead, but also to the door frame for the head.  We ended up struggling 24 of these fasteners out of the two posts.

Once we had all the fasteners out, the posts creaked their way free.  First the aft post…

Note that the wood is darker at the top – that’s where water has been leaking in.  The posts are bad-ass oak, so they’ll be fine.

The forward post was a pain in the ass to remove because the fasteners had been fiberglassed over when a previous owner had altered the forepeak.  Our Chesapeake has a double berth rather than the usual v-berth, with a cabinet to the starboard side.  When we finally cussed our way through that process, James pulled the post, which looks to be in fabulous health.  Yay!

And that gave us access to the hidden nuts.  Some very light sweating got all but one bolt out.  The bolt that had pulled up in our knock-down was a mess because we tried so hard to get it to re-seat.  Eventually, with somewhat heavier sweating and slight sharpening of tone between us, we got that damn thing out.

Chisel and scraper brought the mast step loose.  It was not bedded with an adhesive, just with Dolfinite.

With the mast step unbolted and removed, we could now knock the compression bar loose.  It isn’t fastened directly to the deck, only to the mast step.  These three pieces of oak are getting the royal treatment.  We figure we’ll put a clear sealant on them and always know their state of health at a glance.  It’s not like UV is a problem up under there!

I took the head’s door frame apart and chiseled out the delaminated fiberglass skin that covered the bulkhead.  Anywhere the fiberglass has rippled, there’s likely to be some reason, so I wanted to see all of it.

Not bad.  This side isn’t wet and molded.  It’s been under a lot of pressure, but I think it will be fine once the other repairs are made.

Not good.  But I expected it.  This side is wet and needs to be replaced as part of the repair.  I didn’t cut up any higher because that section is very thick (it’s called tabbing, and it’s extra fiberglass that holds the bulkhead to the cabin top).  And here’s the other side:

You can see the corresponding rot on this side, though I put the door frame back on before taking the pictures.  The wood on the right of the photo is fine, though.  The plan is to cut the tabbing and chisel out the plywood about three inches back from the rot on one side and about four inches back from the crack on the other.  Once that wood is replaced, the bulkhead should have most of its strength back…except…well, that will wait until below.

And the other bulkhead looks fine.

No rot, doesn’t give when I poke it with an ice pick.  Good stuff.

The propane tank used to be under the mast, but that was a sucky place for it.  We moved it to the aft deck and left the bolts as they were.  Turns out this was not the best move – the area around the bolts was sopping wet.  That’s okay – it’s a honeycomb material and doesn’t rot, exactly.  It’s strange stuff, but we didn’t want any more water getting in there.  We allowed all that to dry for a few days and it seemed fine when we moved on.

One of the things I love about working on boats – things make sense.  We’re not dealing with cosmic string theory or – horrors – weather prediction.  This is very physical and, usually, something that’s a great idea will make sense to me.  One example.  I’ve read on many sites that, when bolting something through a cored deck, one ought to give the hole special treatment.  This involves digging the core material out around the hole, creating a void between the top and bottom fiberglass skins.  Then one tapes the bottom and fills the hole with epoxy (nice and runny) so that it will soak into the core material and get the fiberglass skins nice and wet.  Then one pokes a hole in the tape and reclaims the epoxy, which gets a filler added called colloidal silica.  This makes it very hard and durable.  The mixed epoxy/filler goes back into the hole from the top (don’t forget fresh tape to cover the hole that was poked in the old tape) and is allowed to cure.  When this hole is redrilled, it leaves a plug of filler epoxy.  That way any water that sneaks in around the bolt – it can’t get to the core!  Shazam!

We drilled out, reamed out, and filled the old propane bolt holes, the old propane hose hole, the hole I made for the extra solar panel connector, and all of the mast step holes.  When we filled the holes, some of them took so much epoxy that we were shocked.  That means that the epoxy was running through the core material, filling up holes and voids, and hopefully saturating any bad wood.

See the places that are yellow, where I pulled the paint off?  Having the mast off the boat has made the whole thing flex some – back into its original configuration, we hope.  Those places, the epoxy coat under the paint cracked with the flexing and I scraped the loose bits off.  Strange part – some of the thickened epoxy seeped from those spots – must have been weak, eh?

Another thing that came to light as the cabin top flexed – it seems that someone recored a portion of the cabin top.  I believe this photo shows the edges of a repair that was done with the mast in place, meaning that the cabin top was flexed down.  When we pulled the mast, the repair kept its flexed-down shape.

Great – way to repair the boat, previous owner!  Except…this boat spent a long time in Florida, where (I hear) it gets hot.  Heat makes epoxy cure faster.  Some people try to extend the working time (pot time) of epoxy by mixing less hardener into the resin.  I do believe that this was a weakness of the previous owner, because the areas that have been exposed by this flexing?  All sticky.  Like they NEVER FULLY CURED.  Not in all the years since the epoxy was mixed.  This is not cool; I am not copacetic.

Don’t do this.  Okay?

Ahem.

Another aspect of the cabin top flex – all our doors are closing better now.  Including the companionway.  I’ve known that the companionway was the next big project, but the de-flex has turned it into a smaller project than I’d anticipated.  Rather than having to take it all apart and do a complete rebuild, we can repair the crack that developed over the last few months.  Yay!

So here’s the crack after I ground down the surrounding fiberglass and filler, and pulled out the loose filler in the thick spots.

Oooooh – so that’s why it’s been leaking?  Yup.

This got a good sanding and then James mixed up a batch of structural filler, which stinks like sin but works like the heavenly host.  Or vice versa.

This part is practically done!  Except that sanding that shit is hard.  Oh well.  At least it’s not leaking.

And now for the big-badness.  The fugly part.  The scary bulkhead.

We realized that this bulkhead was scary a little while back.  It’s not hard to figure out.  It flies its scary-flag high and proud.

This weirdness is the other reason we knew we’d have the mast off for a while.  The bulkhead isn’t under pressure with the mast down, so it’s the right time to figure out how extensive this badness is.  To give you an idea of the information we started with, the empty dark space under the not-so-good-looking plywood?  That gets really soaked with water.  Like, glisteny.  And it’s really soft.

So it was time to explore the scary bulkhead.  I deconstructed the cabinet face and two of the shelves inside in order to chisel out a section of fiberglass.  And this is what I got.

In the trash can (also the crab pot, were we to catch crabs), you can see the fiberglass I removed.  The odd shape that is dark with rot.  Yep.  Also in the can and in front of the can – the former plywood.

As an exploratory foray, this worked just fine.  It showed us that the bulkhead is rotten against the hull.  We don’t know how far the rot continues as the hull curves, but we’re figuring that it goes pretty far.  Also, we’re going to have to remove the plywood up quite a bit higher than I’d hoped – see how the middle of the plywood is more rotten than the outside?  I will be excavating a lot of this bulkhead.

And just to pound this home.  This is the wonderful soil that used to be plywood.

I didn’t hyperventilate.  Instead, I tore the head compartment apart.  I wanted to know what that side looked like.  Would we need to remove the entire bulkhead?

Nope.  The port side must have rotted a while back.  Someone already replaced the plywood on that side.  But check out the size and shape of the dark portions – that’s a pretty good sign of how much material I’ll have to replace on the rotten side.

In order to do the bulkhead repair, I’m going to have to cut the water fill.  It’s PVC, not hose, so I’ll cut and cap it, then use couplers to put it back together afterward.

I was raring to go, not really thinking about anything but getting this project done, when James slapped me in the face with a wet fish.

The wet fish has a name.

She’s called Ms Irene.  And she’s a hurricane coming up the East Coast bringing tropical storm winds and a storm surge that will flood every basement within a 1/4 mile of the waterfront.  Or not.  Either way, we’re not tearing anything else apart until she spanks us and passes on by.

Because guess what.  You don’t want a hurricane to hit when the boat looks like this:

See how happy I am?  Why am I so happy?  I don’t think this post will really answer that question…so it must be because I love the photographer.

What is that, you ask?  Why it’s the crack in the bulkhead under our mast.  I uncovered it a little while back when I took the veneer off.  That’s the forward side.  The aft side is no better.

That is also the reason for this post.

Remember way back when?  When we got knocked down and broke the port side forward lower chainplate right in half.  Weeeeelll, that also had the effect of pulling loose the bolts holding down the mast step.  We tried tightening, we tried loosening.  We learned that two of the bolts were installed between the horizontal and vertical parts of the compression system.

Invisible.

And untouchable.  In order to re-seat the step, we were going to have to take apart the compression system.  Which you don’t want to do with the mast in place.

So we researched getting the mast pulled and every yard we talked to quoted megabucks.  The last quote was such an insult that we left the marina we were berthed in, in order to get away from the madness.

Then we read about and discussed pulling the mast using a buddy boat (I’d do it with two boats, but our one “buddy” wasn’t really an option).  And then it was all about building an a-frame mast tower on the deck.

There are plenty of resources about doing this already on the web.  Suffice to say, we went and bought some 2x4s and a bunch of big ol’ bolts.

And we cut and we bolted.  After wrestling this contraption onto the deck, we attached the mainsheet rig to the apex and prepared to haul it up against the mast.

And up it went…

TOO SHORT!

The rig was beautiful and would have worked perfectly.  It was completely stable fore and aft, port and starboard.  But alas.  It was too goddamn short.

We needed to be able to pull from several feet above the spreaders, but this thing barely reached them.  So it was back to square one.  Now that we’d moved the boat, however, the nearest boatyard was Tidewater Yacht Services.  So perhaps that other yard did us a favor by running us out of their marina with their silliness.

On our way in, we had some military scenery.

Ominous, yes?  Those guys are always good with the names.

And we met a yard worker named James, who drove the crane over and left.  We waited for the yard’s rigger.

The whole experience was fantastic, once it got going.  The workers were efficient and treated us with respect.  We’re the kind of boaters who want to do our own work and many other yards wouldn’t have let us aboard, let alone take part in the mast’s actual removal.

You are looking at James (right) and Steve from Tidewater Yacht Service.    Steve is the rigger and James seems to be a crane operator, though I doubt that’s the extent of it.  For one thing, he climbed our rickety ratlines after they’d been disconnected from the chainplates and were hanging loose at the bottom.  This was a nerve-wracking procedure.

The crane is in place, the rig is loose, and the lower shrouds are disconnected.

The two Jameses worked together on disconnecting the aft stay.  Removing the SSB antenna from the insulator at the base of the backstay was a bit of a science project.

The last stage was removing the upper shrouds, and he’s still smiling.

I guided the wires through the pipe between the mast and inside the boat, then ran back on deck to get the photo above.  With the backstay removed and the forestay, roller furler, and foil pulled to the mast, the crane lifted the weight of the mast straight up.  The aluminum extrusion slid out of the stainless step without a hitch.

James and Steve guided the base of the mast toward the bow and the other James lowered the weight of the mast directly onto the hard dodger.  It worked.  There were handshakes and thanks, some flashing of plastic money, and we motored back to our slip.

We stripped the mast of all parts that could get caught on things as we maneuvered it off the boat.

We marked all the pieces as we took them off: spreaders, stays, shrouds, topping lift, and all the halyards.

While removing the halyards, we had to leave pull lines in the masthead.  Leading the halyards over the sheaves with no line?  Not to be considered.

We left this block because we were going to use it later…keep your eyes peeled.

Looking up the mast from the base, it looks like it’s in pretty good shape.  The wires are in good condition and it’ll be easy to put that back together.

Next step – get the mast off the boat.  This is a big deal.  This is two people maneuvering hundreds of pounds of expensive bulk from one moving surface to another moving surface during peak water-taxi hours.  Meaning: wake.

We get tossed around a fair bit in this slip, and we knew we couldn’t count on a calm spell.  We had to be ready to keep working and protect the mast and boat as best we could.  So we didn’t take any pictures during that part.  So sue me.

The answer was to use the toerail as the fulcrum point and then treat the mast like a lever.  We slid it forward until it touched the ground and then heaved the high side off the boat.

This is how heavy that mast was:

Taking the mast and rigging off raised our waterline by three inches!

Once the mast was on the dock (so much easier said than done), we had to move it into position.  Note the whisker pole topping lift sheave – the one you’ve already seen.

We had to pull the mast onto the finger pier so that it wouldn’t block traffic and so that we could make sure it didn’t get bounced into the water.  Shiver.

Our boat is in bits and pieces, but they’re well-secured bits and tightly tied pieces.

Then the storm hit and we took the rest of the day off.  Next, removing the mast step from the deck.