What Goes Up
To say I am not a fan of heights would be a gross understatement. Most of my hobbies play nice with my phobia, but sailing is, on rare occasions, less cooperative. The mast is a very tall pole (51 1/2 feet). Things - often very important things - sit at the top of that pole as well as various points along the way down. When those things need service, or new things need to be added, you’ve got two options:
Bring the mast down
Get hoisted up
The problem with the first option is that it is expensive, time consuming, and complicated. Stepping a mast is not a trivial operation. The second option, hauling your ass up to the work, is fast and cheap (and also terrifying).
I am sure you get used to it. People tell me that after overcoming the initial fear, you grow to enjoy yourself up at the top (they say the view is amazing). In the back of my head is the nagging concern that going up may not always be about planned work or maintenance; if things go very wrong out on the water, a mast climb might be the difference between life and death. So I have been both reluctant to go up there, and equally reluctant to farm the work out, and as such the very last part of installing my new Mack Pack - the cheek blocks that need to go 26’ above the boom on the mast - had gone unfinished. No cheek blocks = no lazy jacks 😿 . I’ve been out with the new kit but sans lazy jacks; dropping the mast single-handed was doable (thanks to auto-helm!) but still quite an athletic event. However, getting that crispy new main sail bagged without the lazy jacks took much longer than I would be comfortable with in a heavy blow, or under shifting winds. Not just “man this is hard work,” but prime conditions for a lethal broach if the main gets away from me.
I decided about a week ago that I need to pick my battles. I will go up there, eventually. Maybe soon, I will get my own climbing gear and drag myself up single-handed - at least that way it will be behind me should the need arise. Or maybe another good reason to get my ass hoisted up there in the bosun’s chair will present itself. But right now Defiant has what sometimes seems to be an insurmountable todo list, and getting over my thing with heights takes a backseat to getting underway.
Finding someone to go up there has actually been much harder than you would think. At any marina there will always be a handful of people that are happy to go up; some for money, some are just crazy, some genuinely just like the opportunity to help. I called a couple of the first group without a whole lot of success. The weather has been too cold this spring for most of the dockside crazies to wander around aimlessly. Lucky for me there is that third group, and some friends decided to come to my rescue late today.
While Jake and I stayed on deck and hoisted him, James dangled by the staysail halyard to tap, drill, and mount my new hardware 3 stories closer to space. For all my fanfare, James was up and back down in less than an hour (and honestly, most of that time was me hoisting shit up that I forgot to put in the tool bucket in the first place).
Yeah, I will get up there eventually. But for now I have people helping me to get going ahead, and that’s much better than aloft in my opinion.
And now Defiant has lazy jacks!
