Sunday, Easter, April Fool's Day, the day we were to replace the rigging while the mast was standing. Wrong. The good news: no one got hurt; we didn't break anything; we didn't spend $700 on the crane. The bad news: the rigging is all wrong. To begin, Steve from Cinnamon Girl showed up ~9:00 to get the job done. He had done several cats with the mast up and was not at all intimidated by the task. We decided to do the forestay first since, with the roller furler, it would be the hardest. First, we secured the genoa halyard to the cross beam and tensioned it as the temporary forestay. Then, we slacked the two shrouds by 10 threads each and pulled the mast forward with the temporary genoa halyard/forestay. This slacked the real forestay to the point where we could (with some difficulty) remove the bolt securing it to the cross beam. Once it was free, Steve went up the mast and, after securing the top of the forestay to the spinnaker halyard, removed the top pin setting it free. We then lowered the spinnaker halyard and fed the roller furler/forestay off the boat. Deb caught the drum as it went down and then Steve went down and helped her as I lowered the whole thing to the ground. It went smoothly.

Then the problems began. The Facnor furler was very skinny (which is good aerodynamically) but it had no turn buckle and no room for one. The forestay length was fixed. Neither Steve nor I had seen this before. From a manufacturer's point of view it made some sense. With a fixed forestay, the rake was fixed and the owner could not "adjust" the rake thus screwing up the handling of the boat. Of course, the replacement had a turn buckle - one that would never fit in the furler. Also, the eye in the top was 7/8" and the pin of the old one (and thus the tang on the mast) was 20mm (~3/4"). That would not work and turned out to be true for both the shrouds as well.You cannot put a 3/4" pin in a 7/8" eye as it creates point loading which is not good. Then I got an idea: a machinist could make a bushing 7/8" OD, 20mm ID, and ~1/4" long. That would allow me to use the current replacements with the 20mm pin. Much better than redoing everything (at $$$$). Except for the forestay. I could use the current swaged eye, with a bushing, for the bottom, but I'd have to get a new Sta-Lock top with an eye with pressed in pin and a 'U' toggle. That would work. Tomorrow, I'll contact Kiwi Dave in Bocas and see if he can make the bushings. Then I'll contact NE Rigging to get the Sta-Lock (and return the parts I cannot use). And since Steve is at Red Frog Marina, he can come over to our dock and we can do all the work there where it is nice and calm. At least it is a plan.

But for now we needed to get everything back together. Which went fairly well. It was basically the reverse of taking it down: raise the forestay/furler with the spinnaker halyard, attach the bottom, tension it, attache the top, slack the genoa halyard/ temp forestay, and re-tension the shrouds. All went fairly well.

So we are back where we started. Today I will finish sanding the Coppercoat touch up and Tuesday AM we will launch. We will need to spend a day in the slip to reattach sails and all that, but then we can be off. Too late to go to the San Blas, but we can enjoy a couple of other islands on our way back to Bocas.

I guess the day was not a total loss, but it sure felt like it at the time.