Stepping the mast. Boom gooseneck modification
It was foggy Saturday morning, raining the whole night. Anders agreed to squeeze me into the queue - but I needed to be very early to prepare everything.
I came at 6 a.m and started with relocating 10 ton Staika which was blocking Meritaten in the slip. I could then motor out of the slip, around the harbour and into the crane.
Mast was prepared the evening before so now I just inspected that everything was rigged as it should. Checked navigation lights on mast top, prepared tools, tidied the deck and then Anders arrived.
We stepped the mast in 20 minutes. I motored to temporary mooring where I can stay until next weekend, preparing the boat for sailing.
At this point I did not fully tension standing rig. Too early for Meritaten - she needs some more days to fully swell her planks. I noticed that after stepping the mast we took water a bit faster. However - after partially tensioning the rig water inflow diminished to original level.
Before I instal boom I wanted to modify gooseneck. The original has no hooks to attach tack pennants when reefing with slab-reefing method. The boom has build-in rolling mechanism to roll-in the mainsail as reefing. This works somehow for the first reef but after that the sail becomes baggy and looses its form. It’s also very slow. I’ve decided to abandon this method and go with time-proven slab-reefing method.
Börje gave me boom track with two sliding cheek blocks - to handle clew pennants for 1st and 2nd reef. My gooseneck lacked any connection for tack side so I needed to fix that.
Benns sells custom made fittings and I was able to find one which should fit my hardware. The problem was that I could not remove the original bolt in the fitting - the nut and thread were smashed to form a rivet. I needed to remove the whole thing from the mast to take it to my workshop for proper procedures.
Trying to unscrew stainless steel screw which blocked gooseneck on the mast resulted in breaking one of my forged-steel screwdriver bits and bending the other. Only bit brace worked here - half century for stainless screw inside aluminium mast means it was welded in its place. In the end I twisted and broke the screw, releasing the gooseneck. I’ll need to make a new screw later.
Back in the workshop I cut the nut/rivet with angle grinder. Carbide blades are really something - they cut A4 steel like butter.
Benns screw fitted ideally, just one nylon washer was needed for spacing the nut from Tufnol block for mainsail downhaul.
One more screw - also “riveted” - needed to be grind, this time with hand tools as access was very limited. The same evening I came back to the boatyard and tried the modified gooseneck. It fits perfectly!
I read few reports that these bull-horns sometimes loose tack ring, resulting in unexpectedly shaken reef. I’ll see how it works. It should not be difficult to modify them anyhow.
As with most mast stepping activities - there can be one of more halyards which happen to be on the wrong side of the mast. This time it was just one. I climbed the mast and corrected that.
I take a mental note to change all running rig at the earliest convenience - old spinnaker halyard broke when I was testing it as my security line, just before climbing!
Kitchen was installed back into pentry, following the ship’s bell and my huge oil lamp which also serves as heating element.
I’ve connected navigation lights and checked them. Green, starboard lantern, was malfunctioning. After I disassembled it I found that plastic housing developed cracks, resulting in loose electrical connection.
I need to change all these lights anyway - they are ugly and have aged to the extend of being unreliable. Toplicht has a range of nice lights, matching more my old boat than these plastic ones I have.
Yep, one more item on the to-do list.
So now I have few days to clean-up the boat from all tools and rig sails and sheets. Water and food provisioning on Friday and Saturday - if weather allows - would be a departure day.