A halyard is the rope that holds a sail up at the top of the mast so it is a pretty important item on a sailboat. Halyards rarely give much trouble and they tend to not get much attention. At the end of a halyard is a shackle – a stainless steel clamp thing that allows the halyard to be attached to the top of the sail. We have many halyards on our boat – the mainsail halyard, the genoa (jib or foresail) halyard, the staysail (sail forward of the mast but behind the genoa) halyard, the spinnaker (big light sail for low winds) halyard, and a couple of spares, which turned out to be a good thing.
During our daughter Kate’s visit we had just turned into the wind to lower our sails before going into an anchorage when I noticed that something did not feel right. I looked around and saw that the mainsail had become loose and fallen partway down. This is not too weird since lines do slip on occasion, but when I looked closely I saw that it was continuing to collapse on to the deck instead of being tight against the mast as it should be. Thinking the rope clutch had failed I pulled the halyard to get it back where it belonged but it was slack in my hand.
The good news is we quickly diagnosed the problem and have a spare halyard so we were still able to sail. The bad news is that the end of the halyard that should have been at the top of the mast appeared to be gone. Yes, gone, as it was no longer seen anywhere. We still had the end that we pull to raise the sail, but the end that was attached to the sail was nowhere to be seen. How does that happen?
Mary Beth pretty quickly realized that it must have pulled over the sheave (roller) at the top of the mast and just dropped down inside the mast. In other words, most of the rope was in a pile inside our mast and at the bottom. Our mast is 58 feet high…Oops……
We discussed strategies to recover it, one of which was leave it until we get home since the spare worked fine, but that is not our nature so we thought through approaches to recover it since we always like to have redundancy and “hot spares” available as much as possible.
It turned out to be not so hard. Step one: we sent MB up the mast to confirm that it was not snagged up there. This would have been nice and would have made the whole thing trivial, but apparently it really was at the bottom of the mast in a pile. In a few days, when the wind was fairly calm, MB went up the mast again. We were able to pull the halyard out from the inside of the mast by pulling on the lower end and she took it up to the top of the mast with her.
She dropped it over the sheave and down the mast with the hope that David could capture it at the exit plate near the bottom and pull it out through the side of the mast. After a few misses we were in fact able to do this with the help of a coat hanger and we are back in business.
Luckily we have mast steps all the way to the top of the mast that makes climbing the mast fairly straightforward. The climber wears something called a bosun’s chair which is attached to a primary and a back-up halyard. Once the climber is at the top of the mast, they have to sit back into this chair so that their hands are free to do the work needed. The halyards are locked down so that the climber doesn’t slip. This system also ensures that if the climber slips while climbing up or down the mast steps, their fall will be broken by the halyards and the bosun chair. It’s actually very safe. You have an amazing view from the top which is 62 feet above the water! The one stressor is the fear that you will drop one of the tools you are using up at the top. As you can imagine, the top of the mast moves around a fair amount as the boat swings in the wind as it is bounced by the wakes of passing boats, especially in a crowded anchorage like Georgetown where there are dinghies zinging every which way and creating wakes. We kept yelling at people asking them to slow down as they passed the boat. David tried to signal that MB was at the top of the mast and people were very surprised when they looked up. Most of them did slow down.
View from the top of the mast (taken earlier at our marina before we left)
We really appreciate how Regina Maris works so hard to give us so many opportunities to learn new things, gain new skills, and practice our teamwork. Yes, that is sarcasm. Actually, she has been on her best behavior this cruising season so we shouldn’t complain!
Flying the assymetric spinnaker on a light air downwind day
We so enjoyed having our daughter Kate come visit us for a week!
Snorkeling at Thunderball Grotto
Thanks for Reading,
David and Mary Beth