PARTING SHOT

Only when you’ve learned the dark art of rigging do you truly know your yacht, recounts Jess Lloyd-Mostyn

You don’t truly know your boat until you’ve re-rigged her. In our 12 years of full time sailing we’ve completely replaced all our standing rigging wires twice and a few shrouds are now on their third round. rough these changes we’ve learnt an awful lot about what I’ve come to think of as the ‘dark art of rigging’.

Yes, there is meant to be a golden unspoken rule of marine insurance companies that 7-10 years on rigging is the maximum life but it’s rarely enforced in reality. We’ve also encountered many sailors 20 or 30 years in with certain wires. For us, a rigging change is mostly about the amount of action a rig has seen and this happily coincided with a 10 year mark and around 30,000 miles, including two ocean crossings. e problem was that this combination of timing also occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, when shut borders made getting to either a boatyard or a reputable rigger far more of a challenge than normal.

When we rst bought our boat, rather neglected and on the hardstand, her rigging was over 10 years old and a new rig was recommended by our surveyor. is makes a lot of sense, fresh start, new rig. Trouble was we were very new to boating and needed someone’s guidance. More by luck than savviness we were helped by a local rigger who was so fastidious with his measurements and record keeping that he is still helping and advising us today – despite not having seen us or our boat since September 2011.

Like much of sailing, yacht rigging has its own strange language: swages and tangs, turnbuckles and toggles, studs and eyes, pins and jaws. With the pandemic’s restrictions leaving us with few options, we were in the bizarrely international situation of being stuck in Singapore, ordering a new rig from Australia and consulting with both our rst rigger in the UK and our most recent one in New Zealand, with a view to nally installing it in Peninsular Malaysia – a

tting position for a South African boat, with a British crew who have had children on three di erent continents.

We entered a long period of head scratching with measurements, several long trips up the mast in the bosun’s chair armed with a long measuring tape and lots of recalling A-level trigonometry in order to fashion our new set of wires –13 di erent wires, many di erent sizes, myriad

ttings at both mast top and deck level. Each tting seemed to be from a di erent time and country and, most critically, from a di erent method of rigging. Which, although it ba ed me initially, was gently explained to me by our rigger back in the UK.

ere is no straightforward right or wrong way to set up a rig. So long as the mast is properly supported and set up to reinforce the boom against the force of the wind there are many di erent ways of going about it. You can use

Dyneema or carbon bre rather than metal now. It’s quite freeing and eye-opening to think about these set-length, strong steel wires, as having an innate exibility within both their design and their performance. By thinking of each eye jaw, or tang set as being part of an ‘à la carte’ menu of rigging design we quickly learned more about the pros and cons of each individual element and what they were actually adding to the construction of the rig. Our mast is deck-stepped, supported on a tabernacle, which means that to li it out is, at least in theory, fairly straightforward. In practice it’s a nail-biting process, akin to having a very large tooth removed as the mast gets tied to a crane and then all her rig is loosened piece by piece. I prefer the reverse of this business much more as it feels like everything going back to rights when the mast is back on. Removing both the mast and boom is such a rare occurrence for us that we take advantage of this moment and repaint. ose miles under our keel have meant a lot of times when things bang or scrape, hitting both mast and boom. None serious or major but both were scattered with scu s and scratches of her 33 year history, so it was de nitely due. Plus, with the rig o , it’s an ideal time to check and re-bed the chainplates if needed, another good maintenance job ticked o . And now, with her new rig nally installed and tuned, she was ready to cross oceans again and all those strange terms and tting names will fade – until the next time.

‘In practice it’s a nail-biting process, akin to having a very

large tooth removed’