Mast dismantling

Wednesday 7 Oct, HHN, boat winterizing day 7:
After the excitement of the mast coming down yesterday, today is a nice easy day. And yet another beautiful day to be working outside, once it has warmed up a little.

During the morning I make some calls. First, to inquire on re-galvanising the anchor chain. Price is between $250 and $450. A new chain of this metric size in USA is over $2000. So I’m thinking I’ll get it done, then it can last another 5+ years. Second call is to Bacon Sails. They will take our old sails in and see if they are up to standard for selling. Looks like I’ll be having a day trip in the coming days, using Ray’s pickup. Third call is to confirm the boat is booked for shrink wrapping on Friday. A weather front is coming through over the weekend, so will be good to have Cloudy all covered up.

Mid-morning, I’m back outside where I continue with the mast dismantling and formulating decisions on what to get done and how. I remove the last of the standing rigging from the lower 2 spreaders and lay out all the lengths of wire next to each other on the ground. If we replace all the standing rigging, there will be 34 (!) swages to be made on 12, 14, and 16mm wire. My brain roughly calculates the cost per swage …. then I have to sit down because I get dizzy at the thought! This is going to be an expensive operation.
We have the choice of normal swages (as they are now) or what they call swageless connections, which are twice the price. The advantage of swageless is that I can make them myself, and more importantly they can be unscrewed (with tension released of course) to inspect for any corrosion. Whereas the standard swages are impossible to inspect internally once the swage if made. But will I ever actually loosen off individual pieces of rigging and inspect the connections? I doubt it. Both types will last the time that we plan to keep the boat, but I’m quite tempted to go swageless and do it myself. I’ll do more research on this when I have more time, back in Bucharest.

Next, is to remove the spreaders. Easy job. Just 2 pins holding each spreader where they join the mast. But first, I have to disconnect and pull through the electrical wires to the AIS Antenna on the uppers, and the spreader lights on the lowers. I have replacement LED spreader lights so I’m happy to remove these because they have standard 50w bulbs. With current bulbs, when we have the 2 spreader lights on, we are drawing 4amps at 26v! But on advice from a neighbouring yacht owner, I manage to find LED bulbs that will replace our current power-hungry bulbs. So I think I will do that, and use the new spreader lights to face upwards, to illuminate the sails at night. Currently, when furling or trimming the spinnaker at night, a head torch really doesn’t illuminate the sails very well.

And while on the theme of electrics in the mast, I make a good inspection of the condition of the through-mast wiring. I had wanted to replace it all, while the mast is down. But thankfully, anywhere a wire was exposed to daylight, they had been covered with an extra protective layer. This layer is now destroyed by UV and just crumbles in my hands, but the original wire it protected still looks as good as new. So I’ve decided not to re-wire after all. I’ll just replace the UV protections.

As the sun goes down, I start tackling disassembly of the top swivel which I removed from the genoa Furlex. The smooth rotation of the top swivel is vital. Within a month of buying Cloudy Bay (back in 2016), we had a halyard twist situation which torqued and broke several Furlex extrusions and damaged the forestay wire, all because the upper swivel bearing was caked in debris (after 8 years of Sahara dust on grease). The repair cost us Euros 2,500! The bearings is now ready for another good clean out. But 5 minutes into the disassembly job I am snookered by an internal nut that spins freely, not allowing me to take an external bolt out ☹ So I decide to leave that problem till tomorrow, when my brain is a bit more alert!

My evening is again quiet inside the boat, cooking and a bit of cleaning while listening to the vice-President debate. Very civilized compared to the previous President debate. Didn’t anyone brief them that “civilized” is not entertaining? How disappointing! I am obviously joking, it was a breath of fresh air to hear a close to normal debate. I generally don’t like to air view political views, but I have to say that I find it a bit odd that out of a population of 360million people, they only have a choice of just these 2 candidates.