going up the mast

I've rock climbed. I've even skydived. That's all well and good but I do not like heights. I don't like 'em, no sir. Never have. Never will. So when we needed to get someone up our mast to fix our spreader endcap, I cashed in the boy,-I'm-too-heavy card and got out of mast climbing duty. Of course, Christy is fearless and was nearly shoving me out of the way to get hauled up the mast. (How do you not love this girl?) So haul her we did.

Here's the setup we used. We tied our jib halyard off to the bosun's chair using a figure-eight loopback knot and then attached the shackle back to the chair to prevent the knot from slipping through. We used our spinnaker halyard as safety and attached it to her climbing harness using the same knot/shackle backup. With this setup, the only single point of failure we had was the mast itself. Either halyard could fail and the other would back it up. The halyards were on separate sheaves on separate pins. The chair could fail and the harness would back it up. The shackle would prevent the knot from slipping through. The shackle could open but the knot would be the primary attachment point.

Fisher tailed the safety halyard on the mast winch while I hauled her up on the cabin top winch. Les stopped by and tailed the jib halyard for me on the primary sheet winch. Ben was good enough to warn me that he had been properly lubricated on Jack&coke so we put him on photograph duty. And like ever, his photos kick ass. Nice to know he can photograph under the influence.


Haulin' away.










Checking out the ailing spreader endcap.








We got the jib halyard secured off on a rope clutch, the cabin top self-tailing winch, the port side primary self-tailing winch and the starboard side primary self-tailing winch and then I handled the safety line while Fisher ran to get some 4200 so we could seal up the end cap good and keep it on the spreader until we can get a replacement. (My junior year English teacher, Mrs. Chenoweth, would be aghast at that run-on sentence. Sorry, Mrs. Chenoweth! I really did pay attention in your class. Most of the time.) (She also hated parentheticals. Man, did I ever stray from the grammatical path she laid out for us.)


Les gooping up the endcap with 4200.


We did eventually let her come down.

Rest of the pictures here.