Mast

First look from the top

April 2022, a very hot day. I was too lazy to climb, so I sent my phone up the mast to do at least some inspection.

In June I identified the furler: a Hood Yacht Systems 800. I still need to check the size to know the exact model. The manual is online on sailboatowners.com.

In July my friend Eugene Konovalenko climbed up to look at the stays, the connections, the masthead and the blocks. Here's the starboard spreader, then the port one.

The spreader boots were almost gone. They need replacing.

That same weekend I put a rubber gasket on the engine compartment lid (window weatherstrip, OK for now) and trimmed the top of the bulkhead where it hit the lid's thicker core.

Making my own mast steps

I really need to be able to service the mast myself. I'd seen a YouTube video of home-made steps and wanted the same.

For stock I used 6063-T52 aluminum bar, 0.1875 x 1.25 x 12 inches, from Xometry, at $1.44 a piece. First I tried bending in the vise, but bending 90° over a sharp corner puts too much stress in the metal, the vise jaws leave marks, and the vise screw gets in the way of the middle bends. I needed a bender with a radius. Buying one for a single job was too much, so I built one from scraps in the garage: a 10-inch piece of 1.5-inch steel angle, two 1.5 x 0.25 x 16-inch steel bars for the lever, three 1/2-inch bolts, and four ball bearings with a 1/2-inch bore. Drill, cut a little with the grinder, bolt it all together, screw it to the bench.

The gap between the axle and the bearings is tiny. I filed the bearing holes so the bar just fits between them. Three holes in the bench, with a center punch stuck in them, stop the bar at exactly the same spots every time, and a vertical post shows the right bend angle.

Thirty minutes to build the tool, twenty minutes to bend all the parts. Twenty-six identical steps.

Then I installed them, permanently. Why permanently? Because 99% of the time I'll sail and look after this boat alone, and I want to get to the masthead easily and safely. And before anyone says I shouldn't: yes, I lose a bit of performance, add some weight, and maybe lose some strength. Two 4.7 mm holes at one level on a 500 mm mast perimeter is about 2%, nothing compared to the halyard exits and cable holes. 6063 is weaker than 6061 or 5052, but it handles corrosion well. It looks a little odd, but while I was putting them on, two people walking down the dock said they wanted the same.

Forestay and furler back up

The forestay had a broken strand at the top. At first I wanted to replace the whole wire, but the damage was most likely from the jib halyard wrapping, and the rest of the rigging was in fair shape. Only the top 2 inches were damaged. So I shortened it at the top, put a new wedge in the Sta-Lok, and added two custom 0.137-inch plates at the bottom. Luckily the furler can take that.

Getting the clevis pin out was a challenge. The previous owner had used mild steel split pins on both sides, and they had rusted in place.

Then we put the forestay and the furler back, and the mast stood with no extra support! Funny thing: after tightening, the forestay came out exactly the right length to connect the foil to the drum. Ready for the genoa, and repaired for $140.

August: getting ready to sail the lake in two weeks. All the stays were tight and adjusted, the furler fixed, and the genoa back on. The sail repair fixed a torn UV cover and some stitches where it touches the spreaders. It looks like new. And yes, a 34-foot boat's genoa is a lot of cloth. The furler works well.

Then one more trip up the mast, very easy now with the steps. I wanted a Windex, but first I had to make sure the VHF antenna didn't get in its way. So the antenna went up too, and since its cable was very old, I replaced that as well, down to the molded connector at the masthead.

Little notes

In November 2024 I noted some dimensions for a boom kicker bracket.

The gooseneck is really tired. I need to think about how to rebuild it, or at least repair it.

In January 2025 I added a halyard to the boom end as a spare topping lift. I know the topping lift should take 400 lb, but I want to be 100% sure.

Measuring everything

In September 2025 my son went to the top of the mast, and we spent the weekend measuring everything for synthetic rigging. The plan: keep the forestay in stainless and replace everything else with Colligo Dux Dyneema. I put it all in a table for the Irwin 34 '78: the mast height and every dimension, down to each clevis pin.

I'll make custom parts for the ends, at least at the mast and at the spreader tips.

The most fun part to design was the spreader tip. The boat has discontinuous shrouds joined at the spreader ends, originally with a kind of small chainplate. Fine for wire, not so nice for rope. I wanted the two parts of the cap shroud joined as reliably as possible: no tight bends, no rope rubbing on rope, no bending load on the spreader tip, and all the forces meeting at the center, right where the bolt holds the cap. I ended up with two splice ends interlocked and twisted against each other, and a cap with built-in thimbles to follow that shape.

The hardest part was the spreader root, where the lowers attach. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to do it at all. In the end: splice in place. Push each lower through both slots, over the spreader root, and splice it below. The bend radius comes out at 1:4.4, less than recommended, but I convinced myself that losing 10–20% strength there is OK. I designed an insert that guides the ropes and spreads the load into the root. The slots are 10.5 mm now, so I'll file them to 12 mm. The bottom is tilted so the shrouds leave in their own direction without bending, and the holes are shaped to continue the radius. The worst case is the forward lower, which goes to its chainplate at 6° in plan view.

Taking the mast down

In October 2025 the mast had to come down for the trip to the coast. The furler came off first. Maybe we could have done it all together, but it's extra weight, and I was worried about bending the foils. Step by step:

• Ease the backstay.
• Take the forestay load on the jib halyard, so the forestay goes a bit slack.
• Climb the mast with the main halyard as a safety line. With the steps I don't need a second one.
• Use a spinnaker halyard to lift the furler foil with a slipknot and take the load off the pin. I didn't have one, so I hung an extra block at the masthead.
• Pull the top pin and let the furler and forestay hang on that halyard.
• Disconnect the forestay at the bottom.
• Lower the furler onto the dock by walking away with the bottom end while easing the halyard, so the foil never bends.

The A-frame had been up since the week before, held by two levels of rigging plus an extra top "backstay", all 5 mm Dyneema. Since the frame leaned a couple of degrees forward, the front side didn't need much tension.

The lifting point was a wide flat strap under the spreaders, crossed around to make a tie point about 18 inches above, at the expected center of gravity. A 4:1 tackle ran between the eyebolt at the top of the frame and the mast, with the tail led to the jib sheet winch through two snatch blocks. I also tied the mast foot to all four sides, loosely, just in case the lift point was below the center of gravity, so the mast couldn't flip over when it left the step.

My friend Eugene helped me. I tightened the lifting line, then eased all the stays as much as possible. After three or four rounds of that I was sure: the mast was going up with no wish to flip, and all the load was on the A-frame. Then we disconnected all the shrouds and stays and kept lifting until it came out of the step.

Then the lowering. The mast is tied at the middle; in the picture it looks like it hangs from the end, but that's an optical illusion. When it was almost down at the pulpit and the pushpit, I was so busy looking where to land it that the line end slipped out of my hand. Good thing it was only about 2 inches above the landing spot. A hard landing, but no damage. A cursed day.

Then it was tied down on the boat, almost ready to move. The picture of the day.

Sanding, Nyalic and hardware

At the boatyard in January 2026 I sanded the mast enough to remove all the pitting.

Then I cleaned it and coated it with two layers of Nyalic. After 48 hours the hardware started going back on: the mast steps riveted back, new backing plates for the mast winches printed in ASA, and the winches reinstalled.

All the hardware went back, with Tef-Gel everywhere stainless touches aluminum, against galvanic corrosion. The custom radar mount went on. The masthead instruments stayed off, to keep the height down and keep them safe in case we touched the bridge.

Because I had a small problem: the boat plus the mast is 46.2 feet tall, and the bridge on the way out has 45 feet of clearance. The plan was to heel her 20 degrees with a 50-gallon barrel of water tied to the boom. I calculated the height at different heel angles. (How it really went is in the Jailbreak story.)

Tuning and more tuning

March 2026, in Kemah. I checked the mast's fore-and-aft angle.

The sail pack makes the boom useless as a step, so I put a folding step on the mast a little above the boom.

The masthead camera is connected and working well.

At the end of April I tried tuning, without success. I was just learning that more prep is needed. I eased all the stays and shrouds and checked the masthead position with a halyard, as well as I could: ±5 mm over the halyard length, since rope stretch makes it hard to measure exactly. Next time I'll use Dyneema to avoid stretch, and make a jig from a caliper to measure exactly to the chainplates. I tightened the uppers and the backstay a little, with the mast vertical.

Then a laser check: relaxed, the mast has a slight, steady belly to port, about 2 inches. (It would be nice to make a laser holder that mounts in the sail track, with fine left-right adjustment.) I tried to take out the bend with the aft lowers. AND THAT WAS WRONG. The manuals say to straighten the mast with the forward lowers. Counterintuitive, but it sounds more logical now. I did get it straight with the aft lowers, but with unequal tension, and under load the same bend came back. On starboard tack at about 15 knots the port lowers go noticeably slack, while on the other tack the starboard lowers stay tight. Next time I'll try a different way.

In May I readjusted the mast again, using the forward lowers to straighten it. Not easy. At some point I realized that the upper shrouds have a big effect on what I thought was a "natural" bend to port at the spreaders. Playing with the forward lowers and the uppers, I got the mast almost straight without big differences in tension. The sea trial showed it's not completely fixed, but it's progress. Now I think it's more about the upper shroud settings.

On Monday I "confirmed" it with ChatGPT. The proper name for my rig is a masthead sloop with discontinuous standing rigging and single inline spreaders. Really, my mast "virtually" has two spreader levels, but the upper spreader is missing, and the intermediates run from the spreader plates to about 3/4 of the mast height. That changes the whole tuning strategy. It's becoming a long saga. I'll try again next time.

Stripping the boom

In September 2026 I stripped the boom to put backing plates inside for the new reef blocks and winches. Screws sticking in from the outside don't help.

In my dreams it all looks easy, until one stubborn screw won't move. I think engineers who use slotted round-head screws where they can seize have a special place in hell. The impact driver did most of them easily, but one screw out of twenty gave me more trouble than all the others together. After the bit jumped out a few times and scratched my hands, I understood why nobody makes slotted bits for impact drivers.

What I did: I took a nut with a hole the size of the screw head and duct-taped it to the boom around the screw. Then the bit couldn't jump out, and the screw came right off. The bastard, in my hand.

Then everything went back. Starboard: reef 1 and reef 3 (I kept the original reef 1 block). Port: reef 2 and reef 4, with the outhaul line on top. A winch and a cleat for the reefs on each side. Not bad for an adopted mast: it now carries better gear than it ever did on its native Irwin 30.