Our mast is up!!!!

Today Buckleys Crane Hire arrived in an enormous crane to lift our mast back up.

Adam was incredibly efficient and supportive of very nervous Sustainable Sailors :-) Only took an hour in total.

The only scary but for us both was that the strop around the mast that the hook attached to got jammed (we had rigged a line to pull it down but it got stuck behind the staysail/storm jib halyard lead). So it was a sooner that expected test of our new winches and new bosuns chair. Jane had to pull me up to just above the spreaders so that I could free the strop.

This was exactly why we upgraded the winches from non self tailing sizes 8 and 10 to self-tailing two speed 30. I was impressed that Jane was able to pull me up without any problems, even more so that she let me down safely as well. Note I used a safety line with Prusik Hitch onto the spinnaker halyard (I couldn't use the main halyard as that had got routed the wrong side of the spreaders (and I was able to fix that while I was up there).

No other issues at all 😀

Just for the moment we are using temporary paracord for the lashings on the stays and shrouds. This afternoon we can make custom lengths of 5mm dyneema for each one.

After making our mizzen shrouds a bit long we did err slightly on the side of caution for the main mast. So the lashings are slightly longer than we would choose in a perfect world.

Later in the week we will be collecting our sails from the storage container to check they fit. However, we are feeling pretty confident at the moment 😄