Here sits our 58′ mast in a building owned by the Port of Skagit. How did it get here? Well that’s just a bit of luck and never being afraid to ask. We knew this nearly 50 year old spar needed a refresh. The paint was too old to retain a shine and it just wouldn’t come clean any longer. We started looking for an indoor space to repaint it, and were not having much luck. The boat yard where Yohelah has been all winter suddenly wanted a tented space with a 60′ solid floor underneath. I asked Google who had commercial space to rent in Skagit County, and the response was “Port of Skagit”, where we had our travel trailer while we worked on the boat. So I went into the marina office, and who knew, I walked out with the card for the property manager for the Port, and a meeting to see the space inside a building right behind the marina.
LaConner Maritime is the boatyard where Yohelah has been all winter and also a customer of Port of Skagit. They knew just where we were going, so they loaded up the mast into this nifty machine and moved her out of the boat yard and into the building
We are following Ethan’s guidance about how we strip and paint this mast. First thing we needed to do was build the structures to hang it. Rob and I spent today building three of these gantries, which will suspend and hold the mast while we paint. Once the mast is stripped to bare metal it’s a big dance to get the paint on correctly, and having it suspended is a big part. We’ll cover the floor and build a tent around the top to contain the sanding debris.
In the meantime we’ve been working on other pieces in the shop at home. This is the samson post that Rob is replacing. This original piece is obviously tired, and cracked big time when we pulled off the bowsprit.
Rob has brought that home to the shop and bought a piece of purpleheart that he laminated into one piece to replace this. The hard work is getting the remnants out of the chain locker and then fiberglassing the new one into the bulkhead. That work is coming soon in another post.
Another project at home is the install of the new windlass. Our Muir Cheetah windlass has served Yohelah well for 40+ years. And that same windlass may continue forever, but we thought this was just a good time to renew it. Our main goal here is to make the boat easier to sail and enjoy. If we have windlass fail somewhere in a remote anchorage in Alaska, that’s no good. But of course the new case is a composite instead of the original metal case, so we had to find a welder to fabricate changes to the bracket to modify it for added bolts. Also, Rob does not want to drill through the new bowsprit for the power cords, so he is offsetting the windlass and adding a connector box and running the power outside of the sprit. That will be in another blog. I will just be super excited to see the other end of this new bowsprit take shape.
