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What Rig should I use?

I did not consider a schooner rig, just because I am somewhat prejudiced against them. They always seemed too complicated for a relatively small vessel. The other four that I considered are Sloop, Cutter, Ketch, and Yawl. My initial take was a gaff rigged ketch. I bought books on gaff rigs[1]and read and read. The plus of a gaff rig is the relatively large sail area with at short mast. The gaff rigs can accommodate a topmast for additional sail area, and the topmast can be lowered in bad weather, or for inland cruising where a shorter mast may help for bridges. By the time I finished reading about gaff rigs, and the books that I read were really into the traditional look, I decided that the negatives far outweighed the positives. The  disadvantages read like a litany. With a gaff, you can have no permanent backstay. This requires running backstays to be used all the time. Livable, but not convenient. Hoisting and lowering a topsail is a tricky business, and trying to find a mechanism to make this easier, and to secure the sail to the mast is not easy, and adds lots of complication. The gaff requires it's own vang to control the twist. The gaff rig requires a throat halyard and a gaff halyard. All of these seemed to be workable, then the crowning touch was rough weather. If you are short handed, trying to reef the main or lower it in bad weather a gaff rig has the gaff, a pretty hefty spar, potentially swinging around in a dangerous manner. Considering all the complications, I said, enough. No gaff rig for me. So what about a ketch? A yawl ? A sloop? A cutter? Right or wrong, after examining what two authors of cruising rigs suggested[2] I decided on a cutter. The rational is this: Both cutters and sloops typically sail better on most points of sail than a ketch. Particularly they perform better to windward. (A yawl will sail as well as a cutter or sloop) Cutters an sloops have a single mast which simplifies the rigging, thus beating out the yawl as well as the ketch.  A cutter almost always has multiple headstays, which allow for a lot of shortening sail combinations, and additional reliability vs. a sloop, which is usually set up with a single headstay, thus the decision of a cutter. There are some reasons for advocating a yawl, but you can usually add a small mizzen later. The small mizzen of the yawl is not for additional sail area, but for balance and aiding in heading to windward when hove to. The small mizzen also provides a mount for various antennas, a wind generator or anything else that you want to mount off the deck. A yawl kind of seems best to me, but I am going to start with a cutter, then see. It is interesting to note  that Joshua Slocum converted the Spray to a yawl in spite of the praises sung about the sailing characteristic of the Spray rigged as a sloop! (Interesting).

I look at the previous paragraph, and it looks pretty simple to make the decision to rig the boat as a cutter. The paragraph does not capture the agony of decision making and the extensive reading that went into this decision. It is not an easy decision at all. All of the decisions are compromises. Who knows how they will work out. It probably turns out that all of the rigs work pretty well, they have historically, so why not just pick what you like and go with it. I have tried to lay out my rationale, but that rationale only works for me and the built in prejudices that I have developed over years of sailing and talking to other sailors.

Once the rig had been decided, mast height and mounting had to be decided. "From a Bare Hull" has some tables about sail area to displacement. From what I read, (I probably should check that I have the right reference) my boat, with its large beam and displacement needs about 1200 square feet of sail area. I do not know how they calculate sail area when overlap is involved, but here was my calculation. My boat is 45 feet long if you include the bowsprit, and since the jib will be tacked to the end of the bowsprit, this seems right to include the bowsprit. So if you use length times height divided by 2 as a general rule for sail area, (L X H)/2=SA, solving for H we get (2 X SA)/L, which gives us a height of  53.33 feet. There is a practical restrictions on mast height in the U.S. One of these restrictions is the height of fixed bridges over the intracoastal waterway. The required minimum height is 65 feet for all fixed bridges; however there is a bridge between Ft Lauderdale and Miami with a fixed height of 56 Ft. Watch it!! Note that for the Okeechobee waterway there is a 49 foot bridge. Anyway I decided that my mast should not be over 60 feet from the waterline. This ensures that with an antenna there is no problem on intracoastal bridges except the one between Ft. Lauderdale and Miami.

So with a height of 53.33 feet above the boat needed for the sail area, I next needed to decide whether to keel step or deck step the mast. The authors of both books about rigging that I have, agree that for a cruising boat, the mast should be keel stepped. Their reasons are twofold: the additional support for the mast may keep it in the boat when a deck/cabin top stepped mast may go over the side, and the additional support reduces the "pumping" action of the mast, allowing the same size (cross section) mast to handle more of a load and be less likely to fail. Both authors state their position in no uncertain  terms.

Based on what I had learned, I decided on a mast that is 60 feet long and keel stepped, a mail luff of 50 feet and a height above the deck of 55 feet. Given these numbers, if you ignore any overlap then I will be close to having 1200 square feet of sail area with the main and a non-overlapping jib. The minimum recommended sail area.

Knowing what mast I needed I proceeded to try to find a mast for my boat. I started looking for a used mast because I instinctively knew that a new mast and rigging would be frightfully expensive. I found several masts that were close to what I wanted, but since I wasn't ready for a mast, I decided that by delaying maybe I would find a mast that was closer to what I wanted at a reasonable price. I did find a 57 foot mast (relatively new) in Florida, but I delayed too long because I thought that they wanted too much for it. (about $5000). So while I waited I got a quote from a mast manufacturer, and found out that a new mast would cost upwards of $15000. To me, that is pretty expensive! So I waited, and I waited. I keep searching e-bay, especially after the particularly active hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, but still with no luck. In 2004, I made the trip to Punta Gorda, Florida (about 6 months after hurricane Charlie) to look at a temporary salvage yard that had been set up to dispose of damaged boats. Nothing. It was a strange drive even 6 months after the hurricane. Light poles along the interstate were bent over to the ground. The devastation was still very evident with billboards bent over to the ground, blown over trees still lying in place, some roads in Punta Gorda still closed. I have lived in Florida for more than 30 years and I have not seen anything like this. (The only other time that I can remember such devastation was after Andrew and I have never been to that area). Back to the mast. I have been waiting a long time and I am getting very frustrated when a mast shows up on e-bay that is local. In fact, I knew the seller and had seen the mast in place on "his"[3] boat. (He had "his" boat in a boatyard and was doing a major overhaul). So I paid $4200.00 for the mast, a couple of booms (that didn't fit the mast) a bunch of sails that I do not know if they fit anything, and a bunch of turnbuckles, wire rigging, and Norseman terminals. Until I do a more thorough look at the pieces, I still won't know what is workable and what is not. The major problem with this mast that I purchased is that it is 57 feet long and not 60 feet. So what is 3 feet? It ends up being 75 square feet of sail area, which is about 5 % of the total. Pretty significant. I decided that I wanted to add that three feet to the mast. From all that I had read, this seemed to be a relatively easy thing to do. Using a couple of pieces of the same extrusion, cut the track out of one piece, compress it a little bit, shove it inside the pieces that are to be joined, spot weld the pieces to the sleeve, and voila! I had not counted on the fact that this was such an old extrusion that I would not be able to find additional pieces. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough. Without pieces of the original extrusion, all other efforts to increase the length get much more complicated. I am still without a decision on this. One option is to work harder to find pieces of the extrusion, another is to make an extension out of epoxy, fiberglass and wood, and the last, which I was not going to consider is to shorten the mast by three feet. Hmmmm! I didn't know about the 56 foot bridge between Ft Lauderdale and Miami. Maybe I ought to shorten the mast to 56 feet off the water?? Hmmmm?

Deciding what kind of rig, the mast, the mast height, keel stepped vs deck stepped has stretched out over years, and the tradeoffs for each option seem to keep the decision in flux. This is particularly true because I keep reading about different issues. The latest, which I had considered but not spent much time on, is the halyard layout. The decision about keel stepped vs. deck stepped affects this decision as well. Geeez. I probably would have saved myself a lot of grief by hiring a marine architect to make all of these design decisions for me! The problem with that is that money would not be that great a consideration for the architect and the decisions would be made based on best practices. Money, for most of us, is a large consideration. I am still trying to figure out how I will have enough money to afford health insurance if I quit working for corporate America before I am eligible for Medicare. I can learn to eat and shelter myself inexpensively, but I cannot control health care costs. That's not really true. I can just ignore health issues and either recover from any ills, or the other alternative, die! I do consider this an option. Just to complete the thought, halyard layout. If you choose to run your halyards to the cockpit, through blocks, and you have a keel stepped mast, this generates a potential problem with the upward pull on the cabin or the deck, that is not a problem with a deck/cabin stepped mast. With the deck or cabin stepped mast, the mast itself will keep the cabin/deck from being raised. With the keel stepped mast, there is not structural connection between the mast and the deck or cabin. This sets up the situation where the halyards provide an upward force on the cabin/deck relative to the mast. This is resolved by mounting the halyard winches on the mast, or, providing some sort of structural link between the cabin/deck and the mast. An alternative may be some sort of collar around the mast to which the turning blocks are fastened. This would be my preferred alternative. This would take the deck/cabin out of the vertical force equation.

The used mast that I bought has some serious problems that need to be resolved. None of the fittings on the mast are acceptable, at least to me. The spreader fittings were made of ¼ inch stainless steel, were not fastened well, were mis-aligned, and were pretty crude. The crudeness I could live with, the other issues I could not. The mast has been through two lives, one as a single spreader rig, and the other as a double spreader rig. In the first life, it looks like most of the fittings help up reasonably well, except that somewhere along the line it looks like the mast had been broken and spliced. It may be that it was put together from two sections initially, and not broken, but I have no way to determine that at this point. The second life started and ended before the boat was ever launched. This was the two spreader life. In this life, none of the old tangs were removed, and the new, crude stainless steel fittings were just added, along with their associated mounting holes. The masthead fitting was simply a 2 inch by 5/8 inch bar welded across the mast cap and extending about 2 inches both the forward and aft of the mast. This bar had several holes in it, and the halyard blocks and the fore and backstays were shackled to these holes. I had been looking at this mast for about six months, trying to determine what the new rig should look like, and I was having no luck. My mind would constantly be distracted by the multitude of fittings that were still on the mast. I finally decided that the only way I would be able to decide how to rig the mast would be to remove all of the old fittings and attachment points, and start from scratch. That is what I did.  I also checked on the old splice (it is sleeved on the outside) by removing part of the external sleeve. What I found was that it was not a solid sleeve but was a 3/8 piece of sheet aluminum that had been scored so that it would bend around the mast. This was then screwed and epoxied in place. Interesting enough, when I removed a piece of the sleeve, it showed that the mast was sleeved in a similar way on the inside of the splice, and the splice showed little to no signs of corrosion. I was going to take it apart and redo the sleeve, but I think I can live with the sleeve that is there. I do need to repair the damage that I have done. That has been a common refrain throughout the project. Mistakes, missteps, and the work necessary to correct them. A  learning experience, an experience.

So, now that I have effectively removed all evidence of the previous lives of this mast, heavy sigh here, not really. There is still the issue of the winches that were removed. The material of the winches were a horrible match with aluminum. The amount of galvanic corrosion under the winches was amazing. The four inch footprints of the winches was eaten away. Not only that, but the winches had been moved once because of this corrosion,  so there were two corrosion holes for each winch. The earlier corrosion hole had been covered by an aluminum patch that was screwed on, so I initially thought that it was a hand hole to get inside the mast to tighten bolts. Wrong!!! Just a covering for a corrosion hole. It looks like there were different winches mounted in the two places, but you have to wonder. Why was the corrosion so bad? And Why didn't the previous owner mount things differently so that it didn't happen again. I have read in "Metal Corrosion in Boats" that the copper alloys really eat aluminum. I need to check the material of the winches, and make sure that this problem doesn't recur. A winch pad with proper insulation seems to be the answer. So I have read. I reckon that I will find out!

With all the fittings gone, I need to find a person that has portable aluminum welding equipment and knows how to use it. I intend to have all of the fastener holes filled and to figure out how to fill the corrosion holes. I hope that I can find someone to do it for a reasonable price. I must admit though, price is not my first consideration. Finding someone who is good at aluminum welding is more important. The mast, after all, is a reasonably important part of a sailboat.

So there you are. I am done with this subject, at least finished writing about it. I reserve the right to agonize over these decisions privately at some future date.

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