Sqoop: a square-rigged sloop

  All the mast projects have been completed, and after one earlier abortive attempt (due to excessive swell), the day has arrived, the rain has departed and I had a small weather window of opportunity to get the mast back into an upright position.  This is how the day started: I had a wonderful cadre of patient, masked and willing volunteers assembled to assist, and after a quick safety briefing, the adventure began. Loren and I were able to get the mast up into the cradle, and then back into it’s retention baseplate.  After attaching the leverage pole and running the halyard over the pole and attaching it to the stemhead fitting, we were ready to actually raise the mast: We had Loren cranking on the winch, Dean stabilizing the leverage pole and Marco & Craig handling the jib halyard & topping lift to keep the mast centered over the boat on its way up.  We had just started cranking the mast up when the winch gave way and started coming apart.  Thankfully, we were able to safely

  With the mast down, now is the time to complete the project list I’ve been compiling ever since I got the boat; some things are repairs and others are modifications needed for the final square-rigged configuration. HALYARD SHEAVES I noticed the first time I raised the mainsail that the halyard had excessive resistance which seemed to originate at the masthead.  Once the mast was down, I fully expected to find one or more of the halyard sheaves broken apart or missing, and the halyard riding on the hinge pins. Instead, once I removed the sheave box from the masthead, I discovered four intact sheaves, but sheaves that were way undersized; properly sized sheaves for 3/8” line should be about 3” diameter, but the existing sheaves were only 1” diameter.  Due to dimensional limitations of the masthead sheave box, the largest replacement sheaves I could use were 2” diameter.  Here are the old sheaves and new sheaves for comparison purposes: Locating and drilling the holes for the sheave pin