A New Mast?
Calypso’s beautiful wooden mast is original to the boat. Made of solid spruce parts that are glued together, it requires (ideally) 2 trips aloft each year to varnish - after the base 10 layers we put on the last time we pulled the stick and stripped it all down to bare wood. We’re not as good at those “2 trips a year” as we need to be, so one of the jobs on the already-daunting spring list was to take it back down to bare wood and start again.
45 feet of varnish glory.
The mast seems to be in pretty good shape. What we can’t see, though, is inside the glue joints - and it’s our understanding that wooden masts tend to fail at the glue joints. Given that our plans in the next couple of years involve ocean crossings, with their attendant 30+ days at sea, having a mast that we’re not 100% confident in is not high on our list of priorities. Note: if our cruising was to be mainly focused on the US East Coast and Bahamas, this mast would be far less of a worry. It’s the distances.
The standing rigging, the wires that hold the mast up, are all due for a replacement. This is a good idea to do on some kind of regular interval, and we have replaced only one or two pieces of the wire since we did all the rigging in 1993. The regular interval is much more frequent than 30 years, I can tell you right now. Replacing this stuff is not cheap; we have a quote just for the wires and the hardware needed (no labor involved) for $2500 - and this is not including the wires for the bowsprit and the boomkin.
Strike 1 against keeping the current mast: ongoing maintenance requirements, involving aging bodies hauling themselves up the mast on a very regular basis. While we love the look of the wood, and it definitely fits with the traditional aesthetic, we’re not going cruising to spend all of the time working on the boat.
Strike 2 against keeping the current mast: inability to be totally confident in this critical piece of the boat when our plans involve long distances away from land. Is any mast going to be 100% guaranteed to not have a problem? No. We do feel like going with a mast that has a more-readily confirmed status when we want to sail across the Pacific is a prudent thing to do.
Strike 3 against keeping the current mast: the expense of replacing the rigging, which would have to be done again when a new mast came into our lives. In the same vein, we still are planning to order a new jib from Zoom sails; it’s best to size the jib to the mast you’ll be using.
The boom, but still a work of art
None of these strikes mattered much until the end of December, when we really started thinking about it all. Originally we were pretty set against a new mast right now. Between the added expense and the additional project load, we didn’t think we could swing it.
I’m not 100% sure why the perspective shifted. It might have been that we are in a really really great yard in Deltaville, where we can do all the work ourselves and it’s not breaking the bank to keep the boat there for an extra month or so. It might have been our realization that replacing the mast (for us) was a matter of when, not if - and would be in the next 2-3 years. The idea of tackling this project in an unknown place, when we might not have easy access to transportation or parts, was a bit daunting. It might have been when we realized we knew the local Selden dealer, someone we trust implicitly (even though we will be doing all the work ourselves; his guidance and advice is invaluable).
In any case, Calypso’s new aluminum mast is in production and should be here hopefully the beginning of April. Her old mast is already off of the boat, all rigging removed; we’ve begun the process of getting the deck and keel ready for the new stick. (I think we have found the perfect new home for the mast and boom too - I’ll share more details about that when it’s all finalized.)
A huge part of this massive refit we’re doing is trying to simplify maintenance and minimize worry. Replacing the mast definitely fits the bill on both fronts.