Up the Mast!! (At last)

Am I afraid of heights?  I’d say I’m more “appropriately respectful.” But, in recent years as we’ve done things like the Treetop Adventure Park near Lake Tahoe, or hiked Angel’s Landing in Zion, I’ve noticed that I’ve been a bit more nervous than others when the ground starts dropping away.  I really enjoy my life and I don’t want to see it end prematurely!

So, it was with some trepidation that we tackled the task of going up our mast.  Going aloft is an essential sailing skill, required to check the rigging, repair things like lights or antennas, or even retrieve a broken halyard.  Although Kay is less nervous about heights than me, I’m the one who usually is fixing things, so it’s pretty important that I be able to go aloft.  And we certainly didn’t want the first time we ever tried it to be offshore with waves aplenty. We needed to learn how to do it safely, in calm water, before we really needed it.

 We had been putting off the task for a year now. A couple of times we broke out the harness, puzzled over the myriad of straps and attachment points, and then put it back away.  But yesterday was a clear day, we were firmly secure in our marina slip, so we decided to make a go of it.

We broke out all the gear, read the instructions, YouTubed some advice, and then I donned the harness.  The way it works is that one person gets pulled up by a halyard (line going to the top mast for hoisting sails), and the other person cranks the winch handle to lift them up.  Most instructions recommended one halyard as the lifting line, and a second halyard for fall protection.  We added a third line for extra measure, since the previous owner had put an ascender (fall arrester) in the bosuns bag.

 Properly secured, Kay began cranking me up! Luckily we have 2 self tailing winches at the mast, with the halyards running through clutches, so we could make extra sure there was never a loose line.  I’m not usually described as “svelte” so the cranking was not easy, but little by little I inched my way up the mast, with Kay taking up slack on the safety line periodically.  I got up high enough to put my feet on the first spreaders (probably about 30 feet off the water), and that was high enough to prove we could do it.  And the view from up there was pretty great.  And I might add it looked a lot higher from up there than it looks from the deck!

 As with most of the activities on the boat, Kay and I both want to be proficient in performing it, even if one person is the one usually doing it.  That also gives both people an understanding of what the other person is experiencing so they can be more helpful (i.e. less critical).

So, once Kay lowered me carefully to the deck, she dutifully put on the harness and I started cranking away. She’s a lot lighter, so she went up faster, but I had to make sure to carefully take up slack in the safety line so if the main line failed she wouldn’t have far to fall.  Of course, she also had the ascender in place so if the primary and secondary lines both failed she still wouldn’t drop very far.  Kay also enjoyed the view from up top, and although less nervous than me she still remarked how much higher it looked up there.

In the end, it actually wasn’t that hard – we took our time, made sure to think through each step before loosening any line, and we both made it up and down without any incident at all.  It was a great feeling to accomplish this long procrastinated task, and we both felt a lot more confident in ourselves and each other as we set off for more open water.