Wansworth
Well-Known Member
We are unfortunately two of a kind.The idea of spending money on what seems a problem that can be solved without involvement of professional s………and the complete relief when the responsibility I’d taken by the yard who go about competently fixing the jobI once raised a deck-stepped mast on a Hurley 22 without crane or A frame (only to find that Jimmy Green had cut some of my new rigging shorter than the lengths I'd specified, so I got to immediately lower it again using the same method in reverse). I did the operation using a complicated contrivance of ropes and blocks of my own design, and the assistance only of my then not especially strong girlfriend. Long story short (and previously told here), it worked fine, but with more expensive boats packed in all around us the thought of what would happen if it went wrong was so stressful I henceforth coughed up for the boatyard crane to do it. (Not that they didn't sometimes cause damage themselves, I found).
However, a bit more confident in my ability to solve such conundrums, I some time later raised the much lighter and shorter (also deck-stepped) mast of my Express Pirate by fixing the two aft lowers in place between the mast and their chainplates, and attaching two long ropes leading forward 45 degrees either side of the bow from near the same point on the mast. The mast was laying along the side deck, top forward, lines slack. My theory was that once I had lifted the mast so that it cleared the cabin top, as long as the forward leading ropes were kept in light tension against the aft lowers this would keep the mast hounds(?) central on the boat as I lifted the mast. The higher and more vertical the mast was lifted, the further back along the boat the mast hounds would be, while remaining central laterally. A subsequent girlfriend was my sole assistant on this occasion, but I needed another hand to complete the task. Other boat owners were either absent or keeping their heads down when my preparations were completed, but soon a boatyard hand happened to wander past and was pressed into service. All seemed to be going well until with the mast now almost vertical and its foot close over the mast socket, the boatyard hand let his line go slack. The mast tipped over in the opposite direction, and to my horror the top of the mast crashed onto the deck of an adjacent boat. Amazingly there was no damage, but again the experience persuaded me that maybe I could in future afford boatyard cranage after all.
I’m perfectly fine with the XOD mast and a crane. Obviously we put up bigger masts, Dart and Hurricane cats, by hand. The DF920 mast can, the hand book says, be raised with the gear on the boat. I’ve done that with our 800 back in the day too. But the 920 mast is the best part of 14 metres, and even though it’s light, about 35kg with the diamond shrouds, that is just too much. The yard does it. This Junk mast though, I feel is well inside the diy parameters. Care will be necessary, it’s really that it’s keel stepped that is the hard part. But then, that’s also a blessing, it’s instantly stable once it’s in. I might be tempted to try a mini chain hoist at the top of the A frame, a lot of control with those.
