Ethan and Michael made great progress removing all the hardware from the decks. First project was removing stanchions, which are a pain because they’re screwed into the bulwarks. What that means is that someone has to do boat yoga inside and climb into cabinets and get their hands up into a tiny little space to hold the nuts while someone else outside removes the fasteners.
On Tuesday the crane operator was back from vacation and showed up promptly at 9am to pick the stick and pull it off the boat. Monday night Rob & I had made sure all the wiring that ran up the mast was disconnected from the other end inside the boat. That meant pulling cables from the VHF radio, wind instrument and the big radar cable that runs all the way back to the radar repeater. The boat was already a huge mess inside from emptying lockers to get to the stanchions, making this task even more challenging.
Ethan works with Ian from Anacortes Rigging, and we couldn’t be happier with this choice. Ian is an avid sailor and racer, and definitely knows his way around the rigging on our boat. He went aloft to rig up the crane hook.
The team worked together to get our very “bottom heavy” mast off the boat and onto some sawhorses.
Now it’s time to strip off all the hardware, lines, wires and tracks. We have three tracks on this mast – one for the mainsail, one for the storm trysail, and one for the spinnaker pole.
When Ian was prepping to go aloft, he made a comment about the age and shape of the halyards. My comment was that they’re only 20 years old. He reminded me how long 20 years was in the life of a halyard. These are all now home to measure and replace. They still look pretty good, but Ian is right.
This is a little panorama of the decks after they have been mostly stripped of hardware. There are still some deck plates and the jib tracks to remove.
Now it was time to build the cover. Ethan uses eye bolts in the bulwarks to tie pvc pipe to. Unfortunately the bulwarks aren’t thick enough to secure the bolt, so back into the boat and time for more boat yoga. I had to get back into all those cabinets and hold up a little square of 3/4″ plywood to screw the eye bolts into.
The pvc pipe will hold the shrink wrap and create a dry space to do the fiberglass work.
They haul up huge sheets of shrink wrap.
Meanwhile Rob continues to remove hardware from the tracks. The trysail track is riveted to the mast with 170 stainless stell rivets, and Rob has to drill them all out. Meanwhile I’m down below in the boat continuing to remove the headliner so they have access to all the hardware that is through bolted to the deck.
Here is the mast with the tracks removed and most of the wires gone. The remaining wires are attached to lights at the top of the mast that are also riveted and need to be drilled out.
Ethan is using a huge propane heat gun to shrink the wrap all around the boat.
And here she is at the end of week two. We had a delay waiting for the crane operator to get back from vacation, but it was worth the wait watching how well Tim & Ian work together pulling that 60′ of mast up and off the boat. Next week we’ll sand the mast to ready it for paint. I also need to continue removing headliner inside. Everything in the main salon comes down so they have access to the cabin top hardware for removal. They’ll need to grind down the non skid on top of the boat so they can put down new finish that matches what they’ll do on the decks.
