posted September 02, 2002 04:16 PM            

the problem is that while tacking there is very little head room due to the fact that I cant get the main all the way up the mast, it gets progressivly harder to raise the farther up the mast it goes.
can I put some wax on the mast or is there some way to make this easier to lift?
thanks Chris.

I have two suggestions for you. The first would be to check the "exit block" where your main halyard comes out of the mast. Is the sheave flattened on one side. Be sure to do a full visual inspection here. The sheave works great so long as it is rotating properly. Once it stops rotating it can be a real muscle job to hoist the rest of the main. As the main gets higher in the mast slot the friction becomes greater.

My other suggestion is to put a silicone spray on the bolt rope. BUT rather than spraying the entire bolt rope, simply spray the bolt rope about every 5 feet. This should be enough to properly lubricate the mast slot. If it is lubricated too much it will attract every speck of dust in your general vicinity.

posted September 03, 2002 04:50 PM            

Welcome to a great new boat. I think you're going to like it a lot once you get this problem resolved.

Robert's suggestions are worth looking into, and easy enough to check out. The other thing I'd be looking at (because it's a potential problem on mine) is the size of the eye splice joining the rope and wire halyards. When I replaced my own wire section of the halyard I used a too-large thimble the first time and had a bad interference between that thimble and eye splice coming down inside the track and interfering near the lower part of the mast. And it occured when the sail was almost-but-not-quite raised. I had to redo the splice with a smaller thimble and work that down to a manageable interference.

You can check this out with the mast laying down, just see how much space is available inside the track as the sail would be raised. (As I think of it now--far from the boat--I'm not sure what the interference is with, but it occurs just at the point when the sail is ready to top out. So maybe it's an interference as the splice tries to pass the inside point of the boom gooseneck?)