We have many projects to write about. The majority from the fall of 2019 until now and I don’t know where to start with it all. Therefore I think I’ll start with the present work of painting Mahdee’s wooden masts. Both are the original masts she came with way back in 1931. The mainmast is fir and has an impressive bird’s mouth scarf that starts about 8 feet from the top which is likely related to the mast extension that was done when the second owner (1937-1943) removed her sliding gunter to leave her with a simple Marconi style mainsail. Her foremast is sturdy Sitka spruce. I painted the masts when they were conveniently horizontal on sawhorses at ground level when we were relaunching Mahdee in the spring of 2009.
I used Kush marine paint and we have generally been very happy with it. The mast hoops did eventually wear through the paint of the foremast a couple years ago and using the windlass I hoisted David up in the Bosun’s chair to cover the bare wood with varnish. David really didn’t want to pull the masts for my painting and kept procrastinating the job of actually pulling them so I could paint but yet he really didn’t want to paint them himself. I will only paint them safely on the ground. I thought we’d eventually find a nice time and a nice place to pull the masts so I could paint them while safely on the ground. Alas, that just was not to be. The DIY yards we have access to right now tend to not have a crane of the size needed nor the experience to pull such long masts for that matter. And thus it came to pass that I talked David into painting them from the Bosun’s chair. Way up there. In the air. He has no problems with the bosun’s chair at great heights, but David generally dislikes working with paint and varnish so it is quite commendable that he undertook this big job.
Even though the Kush marine paint (an oil-based coating) has worked well, we decided that we are going to go to Allback linseed oil paint for the masts. This is because we already use the Allback linseed oil wax in maintaining other painted surfaces on the boat and we like the idea of using linseed oil paint without solvents on the masts. It is likely that we will be both waxing and painting the foremast — because of hoop wear– more often but we hope it is worth it for us to use this linseed oil-based system.
This mast painting ultimately took more than 6 weekends — a couple hours each time up the mast. First was cleaning the spars as well as lightly sanding any edges of paint where it had worn away. The only real wear was on the front edges of the spreaders as well as on the front of the foremast in each area a mast hoop puts the shared load of the large foresail against the wood. Rub, rub, rub, it is surprising that there is any paint left in those bands on the mast.
On Mahdee’s masts, the spreaders and everything above the spreaders are painted white whereas the masts from the spreaders down to the gooseneck are painted a light golden brown. From the gooseneck to the mast boot we have white enamel again. I’ve been able to keep up with painting the lower white but everything else was in need of David’s focus. The mast hoops remain permanently on the foremast nested above the gooseneck so after David’s work aloft was complete, I secured the gaff boom above the hoop’s normal resting area and balanced the hoops on top of the gaff saddle to keep them out of my way while I did my own multi-day painting project.
After the clean and sand weekend, the next weekend David oiled the spars with a light coating of Boiled Linseed Oil (BLO). That needed a few days to dry and so working weekend to weekend seemed to be good timing as well. After the BLO came a coat of paint just on the bare spots and nowhere else. The following weekend gave the first of 3 coats of paint. Then weekend after weekend — in calm winds and in gusts 25-30 kts — David worked his magic from the seemingly uncomfortable perch aloft in the Bosun’s chair. A couple of weekends saw only one mast getting done because it was just too windy. But ultimately David worked his way through most of 3 liters of paint and tomorrow I put the last coat of paint on that lower section of the foremast so by this 4th of July holiday weekend our mast paint will be dry and complete. We will have to wait a few weeks or months for the paint to be sufficiently hard to apply the first of several coats of linseed oil wax — but that part should be easier to do from the Bosun’s chair for sure.
The first coat was just applied to the bare or worn spots on the forecast:
The old paint had oxidized to a slightly pink hue. The new paint is nice and golden:
