Re-rigging the halyard

Yesterday we had the pleasure of re-rigging a halyard line while on the hard.

The halyard is the rope that runs through the mast of the boat, used for lowering and raising sails. We've got three on our vessel, which are the mainsail, headsail and the spinnaker.

When we bought our boat, our mainsail halyard was mysteriously removed from mast, neatly bundled in the cabin. If we ever planned to actually sail this boat, we needed to rig it in order to use our mainsail. We don't have contact with the previous owners to know why the halyard was removed, but we're guessing it was in need of some type of replacement or repiar.

Ben had been very excited to climb the mast to re-rig the halyard himself. Primarily he wanted to learn about the halyard and the mast, but also he wanted to do it because the steps up our mast are considered pretty cool according to sailors apparently. Everyone in yard has been commenting about them. We feel like a pretty big deal, basically... :) But, it turns out the yard management doesn't allow boat owners to climb the mast while on the hard, for fear that inexperienced riggers could allow their weight to offset the boat, making it fall from the stands and domino into the neighboring sailboats. We decided that was a valid point, and we'd best leave this one to the professionals.

So, a friend here in Key West suggested we call John, a local rigging expert, to come by and help us re-rig our halyard.

John showed up, quickly shimmied up the mast and began dropping a mousing line through the top of the mast, down towards Ben at the base. A mousing line is a small, flexible line with a weight on the end, used to navigate a route down through the mast. Ben was supposed to grab the line from inside when it reached the base, but we ran into a literal snag, when something in the center of the mast blocked the route down.

Instead, John attached the mousing line to the spinnaker halyard where it exited the bottom of the mast. Then, he pulled the mousing line upwards through the mast to the top instead of the other way around. At the top of the mast, John attached the main halyard to the mousing line and Ben pulled everything back down through the mast.

Easy as pie! As long as you're not afraid of heights, like me!

An hour later, we have a fully functioning mainsail halyard. Although we would have liked to learn to do this ourselves, John was very helpful and we did learn a lot from him. Plus, we avoided possible boat dominos.

One more thing off our checklist before SV Wanderlust is ready for the waves!

Thanks for reading,

Quinn, Ben and Ruca

#diyprojects #svwanderlust #boat