Getting it out & getting it up !

Pathfinder project post – last one of the year.

Note to readers – I think I will make this my last post of the year and then come back to regular posting in the new year – in fact I am thinking about taking a complete internet break over the holiday so I have de-scheduled all of my pending posts.

What I am going to concentrate on next, over the Christmas break, is filming and editing more video segments to go with my blog posts : the video post that belongs with this one I have embedded at the end.

Happy Christmas everyone and have a good break.

Heaving the boat out from under the shelter , up the drive and getting the mast up for the first time.

As the singer ‘Sade’ said……”it’s never as good as the first time”.

Blog time : as I write it’s late October 2022 and we’ve just had a weekend of good weather so for the last main jobs of the year I decided it time to heave the boat out from under it’s build shelter, up onto the awkwardly sloped drive and then right at the end of a long working day to get the mast up for the first time.

It was a useful, even essential, job at this stage because it meant that I could see the whole boat ‘in the round’ and at a little bit of distance rather than just seeing bits of it close up : that was nice and even my neighbour came around to admire the nearly complete boat. Aside from that it meant that I could measure up for the permanent shrouds, adjust the heel of the mast a bit and then have a thorough wash out of the build space as it smelt as though several tom-cats and a fox had had a party under there.

Rather than giving you all lots of spiel about setting up multi-part tackles and heaving the boat up an awkwardly sloped drive on a very dodgy dolly – it felt like a very heavy and badly steering supermarket trolley – that instead I would just do a quick photo tour of the various stages today. If…….if it all worked out then I may have some video footage of the whole process.

Getting it up…….!

With the stern of the boat just inside the shelter I was able to pin the mast in it’s tabernacle, lace up the temporary rope shrouds to approximate length and then pause ; both my partner and my great neighbour were out so I had to wait for one or the other to turn up and be free to heave and cleat to order. Steve, my excellent neighbour turned up first so we had one try but the heel of the mast caught on the ‘floor’ of the tabernacle so I had to take the mast down again and trim that to a slight angle – the eventual plan is that it will sit on a hardwood wedge.

Right at the end of the afternoon we got the mast up by having it’s tip resting on the shed roof, me heaving it up into position and my partner cleating off the heaving line which was acting as today’s temporary forestay. It was hard to tell the side to side position exactly today because the drive is tilted slightly to one side and I hadn’t added a long tape to the shroud cleats so I couldn’t do a side to side measurement – I think though that a good visual guess is good enough at this stage and all I really needed to do was get the actual shroud length measured each side and I can just average out the 2 sides.

During the winter I will get a pair of shrouds and a forestay made up and while that’s being done I will trim and shape the heel of the mast a bit more and then carry on with fitting the various running rigging attachment points. Next time I put the rig up will most likely be in early spring, by then I hope to have a trailer and the heave out should be a lot easier – then also we can measure the ‘hole’ for the first sails.