CS34 De-masting

Got down to the club at 4:30pm to take my mast down.  David, Harvey, Sherry Lynn, and Peter came down to help me out.  At about 5pm, I went up the mast on a bosum's chair to place a lifting strap.  When almost near the balance point, lightning started around the area.  I quickly set the strap and got back down.  Then the clouds let go with major rain and thunder/lightning.  We just left the boat and went inside the clubhouse.

The race was cancelled because of the lightning storms.  After a dinner and beer, the weather had cleared, and we went back out and dropped the mast.

Thanks to my friends for their help!

A rigging inspector from Swans came out today (Thursday) to inspect the mast

Here you can see the scratches on the mast

Some more scratches

Lower spreader casting

The guy from Swans reported:

Good afternoon Bart,

My rigger was over at WYC first thing this morning and has completed his inspection of your mast. He examined the spreader brackets and the welds and noted no defects whatsoever with them. While the new spreader does appear to be a little different than the original, he says that it looks fine and should present no problems in the future. He did note a small scratch on the front of the mast in the area of the lower spreader connection point, but he said that it was very minor and didn’t compromise the integrity of the mast at all.

It is his opinion that the mast was not damaged by the other mast that fell onto it with the exception of the very minor scratch (likely caused by the windex or mast-head transducer). All of the damage sustained by your mast was limited to the starboard, lower spreader which you have now replaced. My rigger did not remove the spreader that you had installed, but from examining the bracket and welds, he’s confident that it is structurally intact.

We’ve used replacement spreaders from Klacko on several occasions in the past and have never had any problems with them – even those that were not exact matches for original equipment (and we’ve had a few of those).

Thanks

Now that I have the mast down, I had a chance to inspect why the wind instrument is not working and the TV antenna.  I took the wind instrument down and will troubleshoot hopefully tonight.  It physically looks fine; thinking it must be the wiring.

TV Antenna

The mast must have clipped the antenna dome on the way down.  In the picture, you can see marks on the plastic, and the dome is loose on its mount to starboard.  This will need to be replaced.

So doing the following before putting the mast up

• Fix wind instrument
• Replace TV antenna
• Add lazy jacks
• Add spinnaker halyard
• Add skinnaker topping lift
• Add longer boom topping lift line to run back to the cockpit