We spent the morning finishing up with all the things you need to disconnect when you take your main mast down. Finally around 11:30am we pulled the anchor up and slowly turned up the shallow creek. The marina we were going to was all the way at the end of the creek. We knew we were going to have to be careful because the creek gets very shallow. We didn’t have any issues with depth though. A couple of boaters going by told us to stay near the docks for the deep water, so we made sure to do that.

We got to the dock by the travel lift and let the marina yard workers help us tie up. They told us they were going to lunch so we had about a half hour to relax a little bit. Finally they brought the crane over and attached it to our mast. They pulled but it didn’t quite come out that easily. Bill had to go below and hammer out the wedges that were holding the mast in place. Once the wedges were out they successfully pulled the mast out, as you can see in the picture above. The mast is now lying on the ground next to the water. Bill tried to pull the wire that caused this issue through, and it worked for a few minutes but then it got stuck again. Tomorrow we are going to run a smaller wire through for our VHF and hopefully that will leave enough space for the big wire that was the problem to begin with. We will see. The rigger is coming mid-morning to help us out and to inspect the mast and the rigging while it is out of the boat.

If we are very lucky we can get the mast back in the boat tomorrow. In the meantime we are anchored relatively close in the creek. There is still a lot of work to do to put the mast and sails all back together. We are optimistically hoping we will be ready to sail down the bay again by Friday.