Two dismastings dodged

Mast and rigging problems bedevil a Pacific voyager in harbor and at sea

- J.R. Williams

In the first few days of January 1999, I was busy getting my 59-foot steel ketch Havaiki ready for my first passage from Honolulu to Papeete in Tahiti. I discovered that the boat was close to being dismasted as it sat at the dock! We found one of the drawbacks of wooden masts. Even after fixing that issue, we still almost lost the mast while en route to Tahiti. Both times I was lucky indeed.

The Good Lord was looking after us on the Friday morning when I cranked my friend Mike up the mainmast so he could begin sanding the wooden stick. All went well until he got down to the lower spreader. To my surprise and consternation, he yelled down to me that he had found dry rot in the mast on the starboard side. Thankfully, we found it at that mooring instead of at sea when a mast failure would have been disastrous.

When Havaiki’s builder, Samuel Kerr Robinson (see sidebar) constructed the yacht, he designed it to go through the canals in Europe. To accomplish that, he built it with a shallow six-foot draft and with its wooden masts on tabernacles so they could be lowered fairly easily to go under the low bridges. To aid in lowering the masts, Robinson had two long, aluminum running poles that would act as a tripod to spread the weight as the mast came down.

Since the masts were heavy with plenty of inertia once they got going, I read and reread the mast-lowering instructions that Robinson had written up to make sure I understood how his system worked. Then I worked diligently to get everything set up properly. I had three friends to help me and after finally getting the base of the mast out of the tabernacle, the mainmast finally began coming down properly.