Finally, we can see some progress.
This week Joe stopped by Reuwer Boat works and low and behold the masts are painted. We spent 4 weekends during the hottest part of the summer dry fitting all of the mast and boom hardware. All that hard work and sweat have finally paid off. Mark's attention to detail resulted in this beautiful paint job. Oh so very exciting!

It all started last October after we looked so smart taking the boat out of the water the week before Hurricane Sandy. Ok we looked pretty smart until we started tearing apart the spars in preparation for painting. Sure let's take down the masts to address the corrosion on the bottom of the main mast where the aluminum of the mast meets stainless steel mast step. You know the old dissimilar metal thing.
So while we have the masts down to address this issue, we might as well have all of the spars painted. Whose bright idea was that?
After 4 weekends of offering clinics on how to remove stainless hardware from the aluminum spars (again with the dissimilar metals) and not having any takers, the result was lots of reference photos, maps of where the hardware was on the spars, bagged and tagged hardware in our basement, and a lump in Joe's hand from holding the impact wrench.
Well now that we have that all torn apart, why put it back together to be torn apart again when we have the boat painted? So we sucked it up and decided to do a total refit all at once rather than over 15 years as we did with our Pearson Vanguard.
Wow did we ever open a can of worms.