August 6th is the day: the masts are coming down. The weekend before, we pulled out all the cables running through the mast, unscrewed the winches, and brought down the remaining halyards and lines.
Next up is the rigging. It feels terrifying and counterintuitive to loosen the turnbuckles one by one. It’s been 14 years since the masts were last removed, so the nuts, bolts, and cotter pins don’t give up easily.
In the end, each mast is held by only 3 stays instead of 10 when the crane operator decides to postpone the whole circus by a day (too hot, too late, too tired). To be safe, we screw the backstay of the mainmast back on and pray for a calm night.
When we arrive at the shipyard at 8:00 the next morning, the boom is already on the dock. After that, things move quickly, to everyone’s surprise. Both the mainmast and the schooner mast come free from the deck easily, without taking the teak with them or needing a chainsaw.
By coffee time, they’re already on the quay and we can start unscrewing the hardware. Meanwhile, the saw goes into the spreaders (the struts attached to the mast to bring the rigging to the deck at the right angle) to make it a compact unit.
The next step is the design work by Olivier van Meer. The plan is for the shipyard to recreate the masts in steel and put them back on in early 2019. As you can imagine, we’re really looking forward to that, because a sailing ship without masts is nothing at all.
