i must say i have never got more comments on the blog than i have gotten over the latest mast issue! i am adding this to cover everyones current concerns and comments.

i really think we are ok here, the gooseneck is bolted on more securely than the original rivits and with the new weld more secure than the previous bolt configuration. i really do not think a "new mast" is necessary and i am pretty sure i am out of warrantee here! if you look at the picture showing the whole mast you can see that we are only talking about the aft 1/3 of the mast that contains the roller furler asm. the crack its self only extended about an inch from one bolt hole. there is another 2/3 of the mast that is a closed tube that holds the wiring halyards and everything a standard mast does. i believe this is responsible for the structural load not the aft 1/3 with the main rolled up in it and the slot all the way up and down it.

finally, i did get this from jim at the spar company after i sent him the final pics today.

"I think you are good to sail. I know it is not perfect but you are better off now."

at the same time i have been getting some great advice from everyone. here is a great email comment from dave (my thesis advisor back at stanford)

"As I pondered the whole situation, including the comment about "Catalina never planned on anybody using the boat like you do", I started wondering what level of fatigue analysis they did on other key parts of the boat.... like the standing rigging, keel bolts, and rudder shafts. I have no idea what the design is like for either rudder or keel on your boat, but I do know that some modern boats, if not most, have the keel bolted on to the hull. I have also heard of keels departing the hull. In a storm, either a rudder failure or a keel failure would put you in a more dire situation than a loss of your mast. I also understand it is standard practice to replace all the standing rigging every so often on sail boats, I assume due in part because of their fatigue life, and part due to corrosion.

You seem to have access to the Catalina folk, so it might be useful to ask them about their design margins when considering fatigue life of the various parts, or if they did a fatigue analysis! As I see it, you have not only been sailing a lot more than most owners, and in lots of unprotected waters that put a periodic load on the craft, but it sounds like you have spent many a night at poorly protected anchorages, which also puts a lot of periodic load on the mast, rigging, and keel. (not sure if it does on the rudder). I have little knowledge of fatigue (not since MIT days in the 50s!), but I do know that the first commercial jet airliner (BA comet) crashed due to fatigue, and 737s have been losing skin sections due to fatigue on high cycle aircraft."

i do plan to ask about the rudder, i ordered a second "arm" for the second autopilot and i noticed it was for a bigger diameter rudder post than i have, perhaps this has been upgraded as well! i have a spare prop and prop shaft and now that i have a conventional packing gland can change this with the boat in the water if necessary. and yes, caston i have rigging cutters among everything else! fortunately i had a J-O-B when i outfitted palapa so did not spare many expenses in the spare section.

i am looking for someone to help with the trip across the pond in this very SAFE and nicely set up vessel! no experience required just a positive attitude! so if you know anyone excited about this let me know. i hear the Caribbean is a great place to spend christmas and winter in general :)

cheers, roger

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well today i got up bright and early at 930am again and decided i needed to get things back together. i decided to keep the fix simple with no additional grinding and no new hole in the mast. i was able to get the 7 screws in with just a little drilling of the old holes of course i had to tape the nuts to an open end wrench and hold up inside the mast but this was a piece of cake compared to everything else.

on a sadder note karli left to head to london and then onto bali this afternoon. as she put it just before leaving she had spent the last year "living my dream" and it was time for her to live hers (or something close to that). separating is never easy especially after all we have been through together over the last year but hopefully this will lead to us both being happier long term. here is karli on the helm for the a little over a year ago heading across the top of australia to darwin for the beginning of her crazy adventure.

tomorrow i will probably get underway as the weather right now is crap (raining). this is presuming i get the genset oil light fixed although it looks like it will be mostly a motor with light winds predicted.

cheers, roger

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well this morning turned out to be quite calm and amazingly enough the welder actually came by. he found me up at the cafe having coffee working on emails. to make a long story short after about 1.5 hours x 2 people = 120 pounds i had the result shown. i sent out the following to "jim"

thanks for the help on the phone yesterday.

the welding guys came by this am and did the welds. can you take a look at the photos and tell me if you think it is ok to reinstall?

a couple comments

1. they pointed out the existing welds where quite shallow, makes sense

2. the piece in the middle actually fell out when they where prepping, ie the cracks extended all the way up and down on both sides

3. after re welding with no pressure the bolt hole rows are now 2 mm closer together (this means the mast is narrower than it was)

4. they filled the bolt hole where the crack came from

5. they added a piece of aluminum in the channel that was cracked and then welded it in

6. my plan is to put the goose neck on with only 7 bolts, no re-drilling of the one hole

7. i will need to redrill either the goose neck bracket to (make holes wider or re drill the mast to account for 3 above, which do you recommend.

i got back a decent response except for the following comment

"I want to say just take it easy and if you get into some heavy weather, use the jib as much as possible."

i think it is 10 x better then it was so i will try to get the boom on tomorrow and underway the next day if weather still good. the inly wrinkle seems to be the goose neck bracket will not mount flush with the mast so i will have to remove material from the mast or the gooseneck fitting with the grinder. should make a major mess.

cheers, roger

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i dont even know why i bother planning anymore. today after giving up on the welder ever coming and starting to make plans to leave, he finally called looking for me. i managed to get the goose neck off before his arrival and shot this pic which i sent back to the mast guys. i even got "jim" on the phone again this time he was much more negative about the situation and recommended fixing it now before "the crack ran away". the good news is the welders did show up and actually think it can be done for a reasonable amount of money. the bad news is it has to be completely calm to weld aluminum and his guy is going to Morocco this weekend so we are looking at next week at the best. by then we will have another weather pattern. perhaps this will give me time to line up someone to go with me but i was kind of looking forward to trying a (short) offshore passage alone!

the plan by the way is to just weld all the cracks and then eventually replace the goose neck outline shown in solid with one shown in dotted sharpie. i asked "jim" what the cause was and he told me "you use your boat the way people only dream of using it" and in that configuration apparently the stock goose neck bracket is insufficient, go figure. i will try to use the time to work on a few other projects. my current thinking is to try to get south to the verde islands as fast as possible where the water is actually warm but who knows perhaps this plan with change as well!

i got to talk to stu this am about his generator exhaust leak. he is still in ibiza in an 80 euro per night marina trying to get it fixed. he was talking about the "civilized" way of circumnavigating again thinking about shipping his boat across the atlantic. at least he made me feel better about my 18 pounds per night slip but also reminded me i have a genset oil light problem i need to fix!

cheers, roger

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well as some of you may have suspected there was more than just the mast and the Genset that caused me to come back to the marina a couple of days. in retrospect it would have sucked to be on anchor for the last couple of days due to the weather but that was not it either. the primary reason for the abort was karli was having second thoughts about continuing on the trip. i will let karli go into the detail but bottom line is she has started to focus her thoughts on her life going forward post sailing (what exactly is that?) and will be flying to bali this week to start begin this new "journey". ironically it was about a year ago we where in bali and the weather should be much better than the med and even the Canaries right now. This leaves me in a bit of a lurch but i have encouraged her to do what will make her happy. alas, apparently a never ending "plan" to sail the warm parts of the world is not every ones "dream", especially with a larry visit on the horizon :)

i will probably go ahead and do the trip to the canaries my self only about 500nm (half the baja peninsula) so i can get out of here sooner or later. did i mention there apparently is only one guy in Gibraltar that does stainless and he will not return my calls, so i will be doing the mast fix there. i will be looking to find some one to "share" the "dream" of crossing the atlantic to the beutiful Caribbean in the the next month or two so if you know anyone please send them my way!

cheers, roger

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well this morning we dragged our selves out of bed around well after 9am again. alas we missed the local "cruisers net" at 9am on chan 69. it was pretty calm so karli decided to do her yoga before we headed over to the marina. as she was doing this i got a few blog posts out. alas by the time we got underway around noon it was really blowing gusts to 20kts as we motored the less then 1nm back to the marina. of course in spite of this short distance the boat got covered in salt!

it was not and we managed to get back into our previous spot. not quite as smoothly as the first time but no yelling and no crunching. we had a few spectators on the dock by the time which was great as the marina elected to not send anyone down to help with the lines. after we got in the weather proceeded to get nastier and nastier with the marina reporting may boats had called to cancel after turning back because the weather was so bad. its great make the call to come into a marina and then have the weather get worse!

tomorrow i will try to find a welder, how hard can this be?

cheers, roger

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well i managed to finish up all the critical pre under way things on the todo board this morning. swapped books at book exchange, filled water thank, syphoned last 2 jerry jugs of fuel into empty tank stowed two cases of duty free alcohol, tightened packing gland etc. i still have fuel filter swap, parts stow and a few others to be conducted on anchor. we got out of the marina just after noon and motored over to the fuel dock over at the other marina.

i always hate going into a fuel dock but this one was amazing. great dock plenty of bumpers and the nicest fuel guy i have ever met. he told us we would get 10% off if we took 500 liters or more. i did not think we could do it but in the end took exactly 500. this puts our max capacity at about 550 liters or 145 gallons. fuel was .90 pounds per liter so still a big price tag but it always feels good to be topped off and ready to go anywhere!

after this we motored another 500 meters over to spain and anchored in this nice free protected anchorage near a spanish marina. we dropped the anchor right next to our friends on chalupa who we had not seen since aden (its a small world). i dingied over with a couple of cold beers and chatted with them about their plans. they where drying fish for the upcoming passage as they dont have refrigeration so it was a good thing i brought cold beer!

armed with a bit of info on the town from chalupa i headed to shore to refill our cell phones and get more internet. of course i forget my flip flops on the boat so i had to walk around town barefoot like a homeless person. eventually i found a a store toped off the phones with a vending machine (it was sat afternoon and most every thing was closed) and got back to palapa with very dirty feet!

alas after getting ready to leave i think we will have to return to the marina. the genset is giving me the low oil light and i am having second thoughts on leaving before fixing the crack in the mast. i called them and they still have space so we will probably head over tomorrow.

cheers, roger

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well when i got up this am i had another email from jim at the spar company about how the worm gear bearings where set up. based on this i elected to not try to remove the bearing asm from the mast as the bearings where not captive. instead i would have to drill the stainless bolt in place through the mast, arggg! i had already tried this the day before but had managed to break off the requered 3/16 cobalt drill bit, crap!

after karli an i finished a long talk about the future and "life the universe and everything" and wanted to head down town for a change of venue i readily agreed thinking this would be a perfect opportunity to get a new drill. after a beer or two and an ice cream for me i found a 4.5 mm cobalt drill for 2 pounds and we headed back.

in the end i was able to drill the bolt out in place but not extract it. i re-tapped it as will as i could with my 1/4 20 tap. i was only able to go about half way down so i ended up cutting the bolt in half and now only have about 1/3 of the threads in the aluminum i did before. jim recomending replacing the bolt with a 5/16 bolt but alas i do not have a 5/16 tap or bolt but will arrange to get these brought over with the goose neck on larrys next trip. i managed to finish this up just as the sun was setting.

we are kind of done with the marina so i decided to treat us to a celebratory "last dinner" at the "upscale" restaurant. i even wore shoes and long pants! karli got a delicious steak and fries and i got a massive burger. the best part was we managed to us up all of our english money (all 42 pounds). tomorrow we will try to get fuel and head a few 100 meters to spain!

cheers, roger

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