The weather is not on our side this spring, it way to cold an rainy for us to work with plastic repairs right now, so in the meantime we started prepare for rigging the masts.
We have a keel-stepped main mast. As we understand it, it is very hard to get rid of all leakages in a keel-stepped mast but we will do everything we can to prevent leakages.
A sign of old leakages is our rusty mast butt. We will get rid of the rust and paint it so that it can withstand potential future leakages better.
Our main mast is keel-stepped, and goes through the deck where we have our bathroom.Our mast butt, a lot of rust here that we started removing.A closer look at the mast butt.For the first layer we painted with Isotrol which is a primer based on linseed. It is highly penetrating in to rust and very good for places where it is not possible to do proper surface preparations. After painting with the primer, Isotrol.After painting with two layers of Isoguard. Looking much fresher than before and will probably survive rainwater sipping in via the mast. The wire seen below in the picture is copper wire connected to a keel bolt to ground the mast if it would be hit by lightning. It is doubtful how good it works and hopefully we will never have the opportunity to find out.
Now the mast butt is ready to have the mast connected, which will hopefully be soon.
As mentioned earlier it was time for a rig and mast overhaul. The masts hasn’t been used in a couple of years and our hopes before starting this overhaul was that we wouldn’t have any major issues, since these parts aren’t exactly cheap… But before starting the overhaul of the masts and the rig we had to get the main mast of the boat so that we could easily go over it.
During the latest years the main mast has been laying horizontally on the boat. We started looking at the mast onboard the boat but quickly realized that we need to take it off the boat and onto land in order to do this properly. We tightened all the stays and halyards before doing the lift.The mast on the boat.On the derrick dock, ready to start the lift.Lifting the mast. It was at this point we realized how big the mast is.Anne-Mon without the mast. Really nice to test how it feels to walk around on the deck without having to duck under the mast all the time.On land and ready for an overhaul.Not so short mast. And pretty heavy as well. It was not easy to lift it of the carriage onto the tretsels, but we made it.
Next up will be a blog post about when we started go over the masts, both the main mast and the mizzen mast 🙂