Back in Oban – Day 2

Kyle gets his workout for the day
[Kyle]After a good night’s sleep, and some coffee, and some breakfast, we felt more ready to take on the tasks ahead of us. The weather was forecast to get worse and worse as the days went by so I wanted to get up the mast as soon as possible in order to avoid the worst of the rain and wind.

It took us a few hours to get the deck cleared of the tarps and get everything ready to go, and then I went up. It was fuh-reezing up there. I had two things to do. One was easy – replace our tricolor masthead light. The other was hard – Remove the mast cap so that I could replace a worn sheave. This turned out to be one of those jobs that got more complicated with each step. What started out as: remove two screws, remove cap, slide pin out of sheave, quickly degenerated into a full disassembly of all masthead equipment. Why can’t they make stuff easy to take apart?

After three and a half increasingly uncomfortable hours supporting myself on foot straps, with one arm wrapped around the mast and the other doing all of the disassembly work with ever colder and more useless fingers, I finally got the thing off and in front of me where I could look at it. You could imagine the wave of depression that swept over me when I discovered that the pin I needed to remove had been put in with a hydraulic press and would need to be removed with one, something I definitely couldn’t do up there.

It took me another half hour go get everything reinstalled (I knew how everything fit together by then) before I finally arrived back on deck freezing, exhausted and completely cramped up. I had a talk with Maryanne and we decided that, since both sheaves were identical, we would swap over the mainsail halyard and the topping lift so the heavily used mainsail halyard would get to use the less worn sheave until we can get the mast unstepped at some point in the future.

While I was up there, Maryanne, between helping me, managed to reconnect all the mast wiring, install a replacement deck electrical box/cover, and make really good progress on getting the interior of the boat back to a livable state. Most everything had been stowed except the tools and parts in current use. There was still grit and mud all over everything, but at least we could sit down and eat.