Stepping a Mast – 8 November

First, I apologize for some of these out of sequence posts.  On account of the inaccessibility of our blog site provider, blogger.com (one of the many subsidiaries of Google), I am catching up on posts while in Hong Kong. My first burst of posts were simply restating what I had sent out in e-mails to some people. Now that I’ve caught up with those, I am doing new posts and filling in the “blanks.”

The Seahorse (SHM) “duck” boats come with a large, for power boats, masts about 10 meters (33 feet). When they are mounted 10 feet above the waterline, as ours is, it makes for a very tall boat. The purpose of the mast is to support the steadying sails, which reduce the rolling of the boat to due to beam seas (see roll stabilization). In addition, the sails serve as “get home” propulsion should the main engine fail. True sailors dismiss the paltry pieces of canvas we call sails on our boat and say our sails provide more of a “get to a continent” feature as you can’t really sail upwind with them. Since we aren’t sailors, will take what we get and deal with their limitations at some future date.

Anyway, when the boat is launched there is no mast mounted on the boat. Two reasons are: 1) the mast gets in way in factory; and 2) wires for lights and electronics have to be stuffed into the mast which is easier when the mast is horizontal.

A few days after SD462-02 was launched its mast was “stepped” (i.e., mounted). In boat yards where fewer strong backs are available, cranes and winches are used. At SHM, lots of hands are used. It took no more than 15 minutes to take it down the dock and get it vertical and secured on the boat.

The mast is walked down the ramp to the dock. You can see all of the rigging, lights and antenna are mounted on the mast.
The bottom of the mast is lifted onto the boat deck of the receiving (SD462-02) boat deck using a combination of ropes from the boat deck and poles with a mast saddle from the dock. Clearly they have done this before.
The top of the mast is raised to the boat deck of our boat using the same technique. There is a support saddle for the mast at the end of the boat deck on SD462-02. This saves a lot of backs of the workers and allows them to rest and reposition themselves.
A rope is attached to the top of the mast and the mast is slid forward until the bottom of the mast can be put into the tabernacle on the boat deck where a hinge pin is inserted keeping the bottom in position but allowing it to rotate forward.
A team hoists on the mast from the bow while others push from the back and others are prepared to use the back stays to keep the mast from going sideways.
Most of the hard work is done and now it is time to secure the rigging to the boat and tighten them down a bit.