Cutting rigging in an emergency

A bit of advice from my own dismasting - singlehanded. For at least for 15 seconds after the mast falls, you should give consideration to tieing the mast onto the boat, rather than cutting it away. We've all been ingrained with this idea that the mast should be cut away to save the boat. And I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying that for 15 seconds, think if it would be better to tie it on rather than sending it to visit Davy Jones locker.

And if you do decide to tie it on, then tie it quickly and well.
 
We use 3' bolt cutters on site which i will happily chop through 10mm tensile bar without breaking a sweat, wire may be more tricky....if they were on board and its wire i would probably use them next to the swaged terminals or through the sides of the tensioners for the adjusting screws. Personally I only carry a couple of hacksaws on board but then i have just renewed the whole standing rig.
 
I've had one mast come down and it confirmed everything that I'd imagined. It wasn't such a big deal. We were going downwind at about 15Kts in a gust of maybe 30. There was a bang from inside the boat which distracted us, and then the rig looked a bit 'odd' for a moment before falling gracefully over the bow. If you think about it, the mast is almost never going to fall into the cockpit because you're hardly ever pointing straight into the wind when sailing hard enough to do damage. (The bang from downstairs was the boat acting as a sound box for the snapped spreader root).

I've used big bolt croppers on land, but there are two problems on a boat. Firstly the rolling increases markedly, and you'll need one hand to hold on, which is a problem using croppers. Secondly, on land you can put one arm of the croppers on the ground and use all your weight on the other for a really good push. Not on a wet glassfibre deck though. As I'd hoped, the clevis pins all came out easily enough (don't remember having to use anything other than pliers). We cut the mainsail off because it was trapped by the luff, but the spinnaker was fine, as was most of the rigging (again from ageing memory). As mentioned previously, we'd secured the broken tube pretty quickly, mainly because I'd read that it may flail about and do damage, and that may have stopped it getting further underwater.

My toolkit for this is now various pliers (waterpump type too), hammer and suitable drifts, and finally a junior hacksaw and plenty of fine blades. All easy to use with one hand.
 
It is not just dumping the rig.

Recover the boom it makes a nice temporary mast to sail home with.

A keel stepped mast may not break clear through. it might collapse and stay put.

There is a lit of string to loose. all these nice bits leading back to the cockpit, your once sharp breadknife may not work.

A lit of cables in the mast. That Radar cable is big.so are some of the instrument land light cables, and remarkably tuff, however easily it was damaged on installation.

Head torch to see what you are doing.

White flares/ emergency VHF aerial. Those pesky fishing boats and ships that were dodging earlier in the night become more of a more of a problem.

Fuses. You just cut through the power cables things may not work.

Sea sick tables. The motion is awful and different.

There is lots to do, and always something you have not thought about.
 
Just a quick video here (take a couple of years ago) of our Baudat KS13 rigging cutters.. Just showed them to a colleague and this was his first attempt with them on 1x19..

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=D57B857B59D08B86!1922&authkey=!AI23J_1TbSWlOw8&ithint=video%2cmp4

It could have been cut quicker but we spent a little time discussing how far the cutters cut on each squeeze.. You'll see that he was not having to lean heavily on 3' long handles and even with no sticky tape around the wire to hold the strands together, the cut looked clean enough to use Sta-lok style fittings on the cut end.

It really is worthwhile trying your cutters on a sample piece of old rigging wire.. and would I be correct in assuming that used rigging wire is much tougher than brand new wire since it's been work hardened (by stretch)..
 
Jim Schofield said:
Not wanting to hijack your thread, but may I ask Peroo, what circumstances resulted in a dis-masting and what type of vessel was involved ?

I've often wondered what level of stress it takes.

Jim
Click to expand...

In truth neither we nor the surveyor appointed by the Insurance Company could be certain. The rig was checked by 4 separate riggers before we left for our Atlantic crossing. The vessel is a Contest 42 Ketch built in 1977. The conditions were 15kts just aft of the beam and the rig was set up for the night - preventer on the boom. The sea state was a typical Atlantic long swell with small wind waves. Nothing untoward as far as we were concerned.

We and surveyor suspect that there was a catastrophic metal fatigue failure in the bolt that held the two forward and 2 aft lower shrouds to the mast below the spreader - she had a single spreader mast at the time. Despite the visible checks by the riggers, something went wrong and we can only surmise this as a potential cause. The port side lower shrouds started moving significantly, then there was a loud bang and the rig went over the side - none of the crew can remember anything else despite several interviews with the surveyor.

Hope this answers some of your questions.
 
I have a small set of bolt croppers which I tested on some wire in the shop when i bought them.
I do not use them for anything else because they need to be sharp. Blunt bolt croppers will not cut wire very easily. But they do like butter if sharp. I think they are made by Sealey & cost less than £ 30-00

I keep mine on hooks on the engine side of the engine access panel so there is never any problem with rust & easy to find in a panic
 
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