That big hole in the top of our boat…
I didn’t realize just how many holes there are in a large boat. Despite not wanting to have holes, since they seem to be how water gets in, there are several. One of the larger ones on the topside of the boat is for the mast.
Some boats have a deck stepped mast and some have a keel stepped mast. A keel stepped mast is one where the mast goes through the top deck of the boat and then rests on top of the keel at the bottom of the boat. A deck stepped sits on a foot on the deck. Under the foot on the inside of the boat is a compression post that goes down to the bottom of the boat.
On Rána we have a deck stepped mast with a solid stainless steel compression post. This has the advantage of having a much smaller hole in our deck than if we had a keel stepped but that doesnt mean we have no hole.
When we took the mast off the boat it seemed like the right time to take apart the mast step and work on rebedding it. This is where we completely disassemble it, remove it from the boat, clean it, then remount it with new bedding compound in the hopes that it will not leak on our heads.
Upon taking apart our mast step we found that ours had a mast foot, which is the dark grey plate, a stainless steel plate with wings to hold the turning blocks, and another stainless steel plate which was welded to the compression post.
Someone got the wild idea that we could try rebedding just the mast foot and leave the rest in place since it looked as if the whole compression post would have to be removed to rebed all of it. As I am sure you can imagine that did not go well.
A few days after we bedded the mast foot we were sitting at our table as it started to rain outside. It didn’t take long before it was raining inside as well. I suppose it was better than having it leak after the mast went back up! So we went to work taking it all apart again and cleaning it up. This time we took the whole compression post out and cleaned everything.
Once we got it all back in place it looked pretty good. We waited a few days for the bedding compound to cure then we did some wet tests to make sure it wasn’t going to leak. The only thing left to do now was to take apart and rebed all of the chain plates…
