The new mast step fails

This was meant to be a shake down cruise for Little Dragon's handsome new mast. Jan Davis flew up for 3 days. We had planned to head out of Rudy Maas marina near Jacob's Well on the Gold Coast and sail to Jumpinpin in company with Peter Barnes in his Farr 6000. Storms and gales meant we cancelled that plan.

Instead we waited a day for the weather to improve and headed off to the Tweed River, which is close to the Gold Coast Airport, for an overnight sail. Peter came along as well (see last photo).

Problems arose as soon as we tried to raise the new mast - the mast step started to pull of of the deck a bit. We persisted and once the mast was raised it seemed pretty stable. So we sailed off from an excellent ramp on the road to Fingal Heads.

We enjoyed some excellent sailing mixed with a few dramas. The first drama was that the shackle holding the jib clew to the jib sheets came undone so that the jib was flailing around and had to be sorted out. We thought that we had the problem licked but it recurred the following day. Now I have an entirely different system which I am pretty confident is secure. The other drama was when I tried to pull up the anchor after our night afloat. To put it bluntly it didn't budge. I worked out that it was caught round the keel. Then I made the situation worse by trying to raise the keel which jammed the line inside the keel case. Peter kayaked over (he uses a kayak as a tender) to see what was going on. His analysis was the same as mine, next step was for someone to dive down and have a look. I was quite prepared to do that but he volunteered and managed to release the line in a few seconds. Peter suggests that in future I always take the keel up when I anchor - so much to learn.

After that we spent a pleasant morning sailing the Tweed. Rather like the estuary at Ballina there are so many sandbanks that except at high tide there is a very limited area of navigable water - not a patch on the Clarence River.

It wasn't all sailing and drama. It was the day after full moon and we had a magic time watching the moonrise. Also Jan amazed me with her knowledge of the bird life and recognising their calls. I have never been any good at that.

We returned to the ramp and all went well until we started to lower the mast. The screws on the mast step immediately pulled out making it hard for us to lower the mast safely, especially as there was again a strong cross wind. Peter showed up and we all looked at the mast step. It was buckled and the screws projecting were less than 5 mm - far too short.

I was pretty shaken at how close we had come to injuring ourselves and disappointed that what I hope would be a successful shake down cruise for the new mast and a chance for Jan to join me on a sailing trip had ended so badly.

PS The next day S & H Spars (who had supplied but not fitted the mast step) kindly welded it back together and did a couple of other minor modifications to the new mast. That left me with the problem of how to get the mast step securely fastened to the deck. More of that later.