The bow pulpit has vexed me for years. Mabrouka has a club-footed staysail (i.e. one with a boom) that I've hardly ever used because the side bars on the pulpit kept the boom from swinging out far enough for the sail to be useful outside of a very narrow range of headings. Since I do need to have that smaller sail available for heavy weather, I've recently replaced it. Heaven knows how the old one got sooooo worn out with sooooo little use. That meant I was finally forced to do something about the interference.

I'd been trying for weeks to get a stainless steel guy down to the boat to discuss modifications, but he never returned my calls. Eventually I got a referral from the Coho Ho Ho organizer for someone who moonlighted in stainless steel, so I called him up. Chris was pretty easy to get down to the boat but, as I later determined, was not really equipped to do the job. All I wanted to do was to tweak the existing configuration, supposedly just bending the upper, aft corners out a bit so they wouldn't inhibit the swing of the staysail boom.








Keeping in mind that one of Chris' first questions was, "Do you care very much how it looks?", the project did not come to a good conclusion through his craftsmanship. We tried, but he only had brute force methods in his tool bag that resulted in something that looked more like a head-on collision than an intentional modification. I cut the project unceremoniously short and sent Chris on his way with a little cash for his trouble.











In the end, I cut the aft-most section of pulpit completely off the boat and extended the lifeline forward to meet the remaining stub ends. It actually looks pretty good and gives the added benefit of easing the passage up onto the bow sprit platform.