Projects for When the Mast is Down

I had several projects to take on while the mast was down and within easy reach. La Vida Dulce was trucked up from Florida in October '09 and her mast has been sitting on saw horses ever since, almost 7 months now, just waiting for some attention. When the mast was removed, prior to loading on the truck, two things happened. One, they busted the navigation light at the top of the mast and two, they cut the wire for the wind speed and direction sending unit (transducer) leaving the wire too short to make a connection.

I decided since I had to replace the light I might as well do it right. I invested in a tri/anchor light made by OGM (Orca Green Marine) that has some really nifty features. It uses LED's which are really bright and can be seen from 2 miles away but just as important, they draw very little current. This is important on a sailboat because we don't run our engine all the time which can be used to recharge the batteries. There are other ways to recharge them such as a generator, which is expensive ($20K installed), noisy, requires gas or deisel fuel and is expensive. And noisy. We don't have one of these. We do have two 85 watt solar panels but they don't provide much backup and don't like shadows or clouds. The best way to keep the batteries charged is with a wind generator and we do plan to add that as soon as our oil well comes in. So the point of all this is that we need to watch our power consumption to prevent depleting the batteries. LED's draw about 1/10th the current of a comparable incandescent lamp. We'd like to change all of our navigation lights as well as all the interior lights over to LED's eventually.

The new mast light combines the 3 navigation lights used on boats while they're underway (Navigation Lights) and a white 360 degree light that's used while at anchor. The anchor light is set up with a photo-diode to sense when it gets dark out so you can turn it on when you go ashore during the day and it'll come on by itself as night sets in. This'll make it easier to find the boat after a late night on the beach. Another cool feature is a super bright strobe that's built in and can be used in times of distress to help other boats find you.

Installation was pretty straightforward requiring drilling and tapping two holes at the top of the mast for the bracket and then connecting to the 4 conductor wire used by the light that we're replacing. Down below I had to trace out these four wires at the DC power panel and wire them into a control switch. I also had to locate the wire for the compass light and wire that in with the running lights. Not too tough.

The major part of this project was placing two antennas, cell phone and Wi-Fi, at the top of the mast. There's not much room up there to start with and the specs call for having antennas 3' apart. That's not gonna happen! There's already a VHF antenna mounted up there, centered on the port side of the mast, pretty much hogging all the space on that side. This left me with mounting spots on the starboard side. The mast is something like 60' long and it's laying on it's side across 4 saw horses. There are 2 sets of spreaders sticking out from the sides at approximately 1/3 and 2/3 the way up. The spreaders are positioned in such a way that they prevent the mast from being rolled side to side and of course the side I wanted to work on was facing down towards the grass. I had to drill a 1/2" hole for cables to run through and then drill and tap 8 holes to mount the brackets. I had to pull the top off the mast and then remove the sheeves (pulleys) for the lines that hoist the sails. Inside the mast are two conduits. One runs half way up to the lights mounted at the spreaders, the other conduit goes full length to the top and runs the wires for wind speed and direction sensors, VHF radio antenna and now cell phone and Wi-Fi. I'll probably decide to mount a TV antenna up there some day too. For now that skinny little 1" conduit is getting pretty full.

Island Packet ran a length of braided cord through there to be used for pulling wires. What a great idea! Of course I didn't see it beforehand and managed to pull it down into the mast where it bunched up into a knot about 2/3 of the way down. Great. Now I've got a real problem. I spent all day trying to pull 2 cables through there, got one through and finally gave up. I have everything mounted and ready to go except for the cable for the cell phone. I don't want to leave things as they are because some day I'm gonna want to run more wire through there and I'm gonna get really upset with the creep who made this mess. I think my only option now is to remove all the wire from the conduit, clear the snag, and then re-run all the wire again.

On my next attempt I pulled all the wire out to remove the blockage part way down the mast. As the last wire came out it brought the knotted up braided cord I had lost the week before. The mast is about 60' long and I'm using a 65' fish tape to pull wire so theoretically I should be able to see both ends of the fish tape sticking out of the mast at the same time. Theoretically. For those who don't know, fish tape is a long coil of 1/4" wide flat metal tape with a hook on one end for pulling wire through walls and conduit. My first attempt I had the entire thing in there and when I walked down to the other end there was nothing sticking out. I was scratching my head over this as I walked back when I noticed a large coil of fish tape sticking out the side of the mast. I went over and looked and sure enough, it was sticking out the hole for the Main halyard. This is the part in the cartoons where the lightbulb goes on over the guys head. What I had been struggling with all along, the blockage 2/3 of the way down the mast, was actually a gap in the conduit inside the mast. It turns out that the conduit is made up of six 10' sections of PVC pipe split lengthwise down one side and slid onto a T track to hold it in place. There's really nothing else holding them together. I took my hammer and a 3' length of 3/16" x 2" bar stock and tapped on both ends of the conduit to drive it all back together. I then ran my fish tape through the entire length of the mast with no problems. Eureka! Progress at last! I laid all the wires out full length on the grass and taped their ends together with electricians tape and then taped that onto the end of the fish tape with the hook. I went to the other end of the mast and slowly pulled the fish tape through. Some resistance is expected because it's a pretty large bundle of wire and it's 75' long. This went through like pulling a hot knife through butter. The worst is over. Now I'm waiting for some parts to finish the job. Still have another length of wire to pull but I feel confident that there's plenty of room and it will go easily. I'd like to thank the good Lord for granting me the gifts of patience and persistance.

I replaced the braided line that IP included from the factory.  It was just about 10' longer than the mast and gave enough line to pull a cable through but then you had the full length at one end of the mast or the other.  I installed a 140' length of 1/8" braided polyester cord that's tied to the mast at both top and bottom.  There's enough line to pull a cable all the way through and still keep the line attached at both ends.  It's then a simple matter to pull it back down and attach another cable.  Using this line to pull cables is way easier than using fish tape and having it attached in this manner makes it very useable.

To finish off the wiring installation I ran the cable coming off the antenna in a modified "S" before it enters the mast.  This will limit the amount of rain water going down inside the mast which eventually finds it's way into the bilge and has to be pumped out.  This is a normal thing on a sailboat but it's always a good idea to reduce the amount of water inside the boat as much as possible.  Duh.

Replacing the wire for the wind speed transducer was easier than I had thought. John Hellwege of Gratitude Yachts gave me a replacement wire, about 100' long, that included a new mount for the transducer. I had to drill and tap two new holes at the top of the mast and then pull the new wire through the conduit. Not a problem.  Now when the mast is stepped (put back in place) this wire will be connected to a terminal strip under the cabin sole for easy removal in the future instead of having to cut it.  Why wasn't this done in the first place?  What were they thinking?

The final project was to polish all the stainless steel fittings on the mast.  I used Flitz polish which is pure magic.  It's safe to use on the standing rigging because it has no acids and is so easy to use, wipe on/ wipe off.  I'm told the best stuff is in the tube but I could only get a liquid form.  It still kicked butt.  This stuff is expensive, $20/small bottle, but seems to go a long way.  Definitely the very best metal polish I've ever used.  There is something like 749 stainless steel fittings on my mast and they all needed polishing.  99% of it is only surface rust so it goes pretty quickly.  The standing rigging is also covered with surface rust.  Looks really nasty once you get everything else polished up.  I'm told by the "Pros" that this isn't a concern, doesn't degrade the rigging, and it's OK to clean it up.  I started to take this on but there's approximately 17 miles of standing rigging on my boat and after a few hours I decided that tarnished look really gives the boat character.  Job done.