DICK DURHAM

Retrieving halyards

What comes down must go up, and when it’s the wrong end of a halyard you have a dilemma. I lost the peak halyard of my 25ft gaffer, Betty II, up the mast last season, by yanking the wrong end of it carelessly after bringing up in a lonely creek for a swim. It was the intense heat and the blazing disc of sun which made me tug without looking up and, with sinking heart, feeling the haul and not the fall dropping into my hands. The bitter end, fortunately, was a stop knot, with a protruding tongue of rope, and it sat looking at us from the peak block at the masthead.

What were we to do? I considered rattling down the shrouds on one side, thereby giving myself a rope ladder to climb up to the crosstrees, but that would not have been high enough, even armed with the boathook, and in any case would have drawn the shroud wires together under my weight, thereby collapsing the ratlines.

We considered motoring to some overhead wharf or crane, but none were to hand that we could think of, then I thought about using the flag halyard as a messenger. Down came the burgee and instead we knotted on a pair of pliers with handles opened and sent them aloft to try and hook the knotted end.

With eyes watering against the sunlight we fished and fished, but we could not get the pliers close enough to hook the knot. Down they came and up instead went a mini hacksaw: this time we hoped to hook the knot with the bow end. Again we failed.

Various implements went up the mast in the same manner: filter grips, a can-opener, even some adhesive tape sticky-side upward, but all failed.

Then my crew, Glum, so named because he isn’t, patented a bowline-on-the-bight loop from sail twine tied to the flag halyard and kept open with a tiny piece of gaffer tape. With the fall of the twine dropped to the deck we hoisted the loop skywards and tried to engage it with the male end of the halyard. After three attempts I was about to give up, but Glum insisted we keep trying. I salute his persistence, born of years of fitting modern kitchens to old houses, because we snared it. I held it in place while Glum tightened the bowline, and bingo, we nipped it and hauled the blessed halyard back on deck. When you lose a halyard aloft aboard a gaff-rigged boat the only thing you’ve got going for you is that it’s not as far aloft as aboard a Bermudian-rigged craft.

A few seasons back I read somewhere how the luff of the genoa could be prevented from being over-stretched by slackening the halyard when leaving the boat. It seemed to make sense and I did so.

Next time aboard I hauled out the genoa and it dropped down the luff slide to the deck: the halyard end was at the top of Minstrel Boy, my Contessa 32’s mast. Foolishly I’d used a snap shackle to bend the halyard onto the sail and because I’d eased it, it had obviously unclipped itself as it flapped for the time I’d left the boat in a marina. I asked the marina manager if he had a mast ladder he could lend me, but was told it was more than his job was worth in insurance terms: ‘We don’t know when you last changed your running rigging…we do have a floating crane we can send to your berth,’ he said helpfully.

Instead, I mustered the crew of a neighbouring yacht to haul me aloft in the bosun’s chair. I told the marina manager a floating crane was more than my job was worth.

With eyes watering against the sunlight we fished and fished, but we could not get it