Out She Comes

And so the mission begins. Can honestly say nothing makes me more nervous than pulling the mast. But the team at Doyles were very professional and super organised and it all went extremely smoothly.

Readying to pull the mast at Half Moon Bay marina.

Taking the boom off.

Big Boys Toys.

Easy does it...

Something is missing...

Pardon the cinematography fail. But you can see the size of her...

Now the real work starts. We have already pulled all the standing rigging and spreaders off, and have removed all the spreader brackets. These will all be checked over and given a birthday. I have applied several coats of varnish to the mast as well, the first of many to come...a lot easier when the mast is out of the boat, though surprisingly not that much faster.

The shipwright has had a look at the masthead and, as I figured, it's all coming apart. Exactly how much has to be rebuilt is to be determined, however, before we go opening her up we need some spar grade sitka spruce to do the repairs. Surely that's available in New Zealand. Surely. Anyone? Hmmm, "Hello, Seattle....?"

The fun commences.

Moving On

Long-time followers of this blog will have noticed that my posts have dried up over the last year. Unfortunately life gets in the way of sailing sometimes, and that is how it has been for us this last year. After eight years of hard work and big fun, joy and anguish, it has sadly come time for us to move on from Kamalii, and we will be putting her on the market soon.

Looking at her now it is hard to believe she is the same boat we bought eight years ago. We saved her, and that is something to be proud of. We've poured ourselves into her, our kids have spent a big chunk of their lives growing up on her, and I have certainly learnt an awful lot, about boats and about myself.

In preparation for putting her on the market we will of course be doing the obligatory check-overs of all systems, which is what I did when I went up the mast the other week to put on some fresh varnish and check things out. Unfortunately, when I got to the top of the mast I found something Not Good: some soft timber right under the masthead hardware. It was a real surprise as a year ago there had been no sign of any issues, but it looks like some old repairs in the masthead had failed, allowing water to seep in through a crack and slowly soften things up from the inside. Cue moment of crestfallen silence...

Unfortunately there is no way the repairs can be done in place, so the mast has to come out...