In-Depth, A Refit Tale, Part I
Index
Part I
Introduction
A Top Ten List
The New Mast,
Why?
The New Mast, The Benefits of Carbon
The New Mast,
Amateur Boat Design
The New Mast, The Bottom Line
The New Mast, Lightning: Myths, Assurances & Risks
Introduction
Those of you who have followed this site for a while know that we recently completed a four winter long refit of Morgan’s Cloud. While we have worked hard at maintaining and upgrading our boat over the years we have owned and sailed her (since 1991), 130,000 miles (many of them rough) do take their toll.
First we removed every deck fitting on the boat, then Doug and his crew of master painters at Billings Diesel and Marine painted her. We then put down Treadmaster deck covering and put all the deck fittings back but with many improvements. We had the hatches anodized, together with a lot of other metal stuff that used to be painted, and re-bedded the lenses. Wooden hand rails are a pain to paint or varnish, so ours headed for the scrap heap, together with the wood trim round the cabin top, and we replaced them with stainless steel.
We then moved to the rig where we replaced the mast (the old one was cracking) and most of the rigging, both standing and running. To make it easier for one person to deploy, we bought a new carbon spinnaker pole and changed its stowage position from the deck to the front of the mast.
Below, we spruced her up with paint. We rebuilt the sea berth, to make it more comfortable and increase storage, and added a computer work station for Phyllis (I use the chart table). We had wood bezels fabricated with plexiglas covers to stop condensation forming on the ports in cold weather and added a book shelf. The galley got a new stove and we checked over the refrigeration system and replaced the compressor.
We completely rebuilt the forepeak to incorporate a redesigned chain locker that holds 330-feet of 7/16 chain without any need to hand flake it.
We improved the head holding tank system and rebuilt the shower so that it will be easier to keep clean and drain better.
The aluminum hull seems to be in good shape, even after 20 years, but we had Dave, the brilliant machinist at Billings Diesel and Marine, install and accurately align a new rudder bearing so the steering is now smoother than it has ever been. While Dave was at it, he checked the prop shaft and trued it up slightly. We replaced the cutlass bearings and generally went over the running gear.
The engine and generator got a thorough going over from Danny, master mechanic at Billings, including new injectors and rebuilt injection pumps. (Normally we do our own engine maintenance, but there is no substitute for having an experienced professional go over engines every couple of thousand hours.) While we were thinking about fuel, I cleaned the fuel tanks and rebuilt the fuel system complete with new tank lids and pickups engineered by David and welder Chris. Not to be outdone, Phyllis cleaned the water tanks and we installed a triple filtration system to keep wee beasties at bay, since we eschew the complications of a water maker and rely on shore water, sometimes from questionable sources.
Back on deck we added a new dodger and reinforced the bimini top too so we can stand on it.
We finally bit the bullet and installed an electronic navigation system including a dedicated computer and on-deck screen with waterproof mouse and keyboard. While doing computers, our change from film to all digital photography demanded that we install a powerful computer with a big screen for photo storage and editing and a network to tie all three of our computers together complete with a Wi-Fi client hub and external hi-gain antenna.
All this, and about a gazillion little jobs, have made Morgan’s Cloud better than she has ever been. In the process we learned a lot, made some mistakes (including a real doozy) and frequently got to the point where only whisky therapy dulled the pain of a refit that cost twice what we budgeted and took two times longer than we expected.
So this series will be about what
we did, the mistakes we made, what we like (most things, I’m glad to say)
and what we don’t.
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A Top Ten List
Here is a top ten list of what we did during the refit that we really like:
1. Our new Hall Spars carbon mast. The boat is stiffer, pitches less, and we have every confidence in the engineering and execution of this great spar from a great company.
Technicians fitting the spreaders to our new mast during a test rigging at Hall Spars. The clamp is used to apply pressure to slightly compress the mast so that the spreaders can be pinned to a bar that passes through the mast with absolutely no play; which gives you an idea of the precise tolerances this spar is built to.
2. The Treadmaster deck covering we installed. It was a huge amount of work, but we are truly nailed to the boat now and feel far safer than we did on the old non-skid painted deck or even on the teak we had before that.
3. The new rudder bearings perfectly installed and aligned by David, machinist at Billings Diesel and Marine. The steering is smoother and easier than it has ever been.
Talking of precise tolerances, if you want something machined to fit absolutely perfectly, the first time, every time, this is the man to talk to: David, machinist at Billings Diesel & Marine.
4. New running rigging and running back stays of rope. Much nicer to handle than our old rigging of wire, particularly since, being lighter and therefore having less momentum, loose halyards and runners don’t whip around in a seaway when we are changing sails. By using exotics specified, supplied and spliced by Jay Maloney, we got greater strength than wire with almost no stretch.
5. We completely rebuilt the forepeak to accommodate a newly designed chain locker so that all 330’ of our 7/16” chain will self-stow without any need for someone below to flake it down—not just a convenience, but safer too since both of us can now be on deck when hauling the anchor.
6. Our new electronic navigation system comprising a Dell laptop—out of harm’s way below—running Nobeltec software with C-Map MaxPro vector charts driving a waterproof screen, keyboard and mouse at the cockpit chart table; a powerful and flexible system that will be easily upgradable to take advantage of future advances in software and cartography.
7. The small changes we made to the deck running rigging and fittings including more clutches and improved leads—small stuff but a big improvement in sailing efficiency.
8. Ergonomic and technical improvements that we have made to my (John’s) office (the old chart table) and Phyllis’ work station (the salon table), that make them more comfortable and efficient for working on writing and photography.
9. Our Syrens WiFi hub and external hi-gain antenna that has provided high-speed (depending on the hot spot) internet to our three networked computers in almost every port and anchorage we have been in over the last six months.
10. The
wood bezels we had built, fitted with removable Lexan covers that double
glaze our ports so that they no longer drip condensation on us when it
is cold.
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The New Mast, Why?
Without doubt the biggest, most expensive and most stressful part of our recent refit to Morgan’s Cloud was the replacement of her mast.
First off, why were we replacing the mast at all? Simply put, to buy peace of mind. We had seen several signs that all was not well aloft including, most ominously, cracks in the tube at the deck and just above the staysail stay tang. We had caught and fixed each problem during our frequent mast inspections, but clearly the mast was coming to the end of its life. Not that surprising considering that since we bought Morgan’s Cloud, our 56-foot aluminum custom cutter and home, in 1991, we had put 90,000 miles on her, many of them hard sailing in the high latitudes. Add to that the 30,000 miles that the previous owners racked up, including a Cape Horn rounding, and we were talking some serious wear and tear. Would the old mast, repaired as it was, have continued to stay up? Who knows, but the real issue was that we had lost faith in it and were not willing to continue to look up with FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) every time it blew hard.
Our first plan was to simply buy a new aluminum mast and reuse the fairly new standing rigging from the old spar. But then I talked to our long time sailmaker and friend, Richard Hallett, who counseled me in his usual gentle fashion, “John, don’t be an idiot and buy another aluminum mast. One day you will want to sell your boat and that will be a lot easier with a carbon mast. In the meantime you guys will have a better boat that is more fun to sail.” Up to that moment I had frankly thought that carbon fiber masts were for obscenely rich people who can’t find enough to spend their money on. But Richard is very experienced and no fool, so Phyllis and I agreed to at least consider carbon. Although, since we would be spending money from the sale of our house, capital that took much of a working lifetime to accumulate, and every dollar we spent on the boat would come out of our future cruising kitty, never mind our old age, carbon would have to walk on water to get the nod.
Since the major selling point of carbon is that it is lighter than aluminum, as we started evaluating the choice between aluminum and carbon, our first question was “how heavy is the old mast, really?” Quickly followed by “how the heck do we weigh a 74-foot mast that it takes a boom truck to lift?” Our answer to the second question was to rent an industrial floor scale, normally used to weigh blueberries during harvest, and then precariously balance the spar on the scale using a fork lift—a method that also determined the center of gravity. The answer to our first question was 1320 pounds, stripped of all standing and running rigging. Now we had a real baseline to work from.
Tim and Charlie, of Billings Diesel and Marine, look perplexed
at the latest insanity dreamed up by one of their more eccentric customers.
A new spar in carbon was projected to be about 500 pounds
lighter than our old mast, but what would that mean in real world benefits?
An engineer worked out that it is equivalent to 1800 pounds on the rail.
Now we were getting somewhere. I have raced enough to appreciate the incredible
difference in performance that moving nine 200 pound deck apes onto the
rail makes whenever the wind is forward of the beam. Better still, by fitting
a carbon mast we would get this stability benefit while actually making
the boat lighter, not heavier; never mind not having to provision with
a ton of bananas and beer to feed such a crew. And, even though our boat’s
primary mission is cruising not racing, both Phyllis and I dislike going
to windward enough that we are all for any improvement in performance that
will reduce the time doing it and also make it less uncomfortable by reducing
the heel angle and pitching. So, the first big plus for carbon.
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The New Mast, The Benefits of Carbon
Pictures of Americas Cup-class boat hulls breaking in half and their masts, supported by a plethora of rigging and spreaders, collapsing in relatively benign conditions, have given structures built of carbon fiber an undeserved reputation for fragility. But it should be remembered that Americas Cup boats are designed on the ragged edge of structural engineering where the motto is “if it does not break occasionally, we built it too heavy”.
Tuning the new rig.
The facts are that a cruising mast properly engineered and built in carbon is stronger, stiffer and less susceptible to fatigue than a mast built in aluminum could ever be. And all this at about half the tube weight of an aluminum mast. Far from requiring more rigging to support it, a carbon mast can be engineered to require less. For example, on Morgan’s Cloud, except in very heavy seas, we now only use the running backstays (that bane of the cutter rig) as a tuning device to control mast bend rather than to keep the rig up, as we used to with the old aluminum mast.
So let’s see, a carbon mast makes a boat faster, more comfortable, more stable, easier to sail, and all for a price differential that is generally less, at least on boats over 45 feet, than the increase in value of the boat so fitted.
Does this mean that carbon fiber is a perfect material when compared to aluminum? Well no; for one, as I understand it, carbon structures have less impact resistance than aluminum ones. This is because aluminum is extremely ductile; when hit it tends to bend or dent thereby absorbing much of the force of the blow without failure. But is this an issue when choosing materials for masts, which are not generally at risk for impact loads the way hulls are? And even if it were, here again, carbon fiber’s fragility has been much exaggerated: When we were evaluating mast materials a manufacturer allowed me to take a heavy hammer to an off-cut carbon mast section less than ¼” thick. Yes, with substantial effort I was able to crack it, but the damage was limited to a small area around the point of impact. Our Hall Spars mast is over double that thickness and includes many more off-axis fibers. I doubt the hammer would bother it at all…no, I’m not going to try it.
So, to me, the ultimate offshore voyaging boat
has an aluminum hull for resistance to collision, longevity and a good
strength to weight and cost trade-off, and a carbon fiber mast for speed,
stability and rig strength—biased, who me?
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The New Mast, Amateur Boat Design
We had an interesting to-and-fro with a reader who thinks that the benefits of carbon fiber for cruising yacht masts are trivial and that the same benefits could be realized in easier and cheaper ways. To understand why this is not so, and why carbon fiber as a mast material delivers such astounding increases in performance and comfort, we need to delve into a little simple—it better be simple since I’m really reaching here—engineering and yacht design.
When designing a voyaging boat the naval architect must balance, among many other factors, the following needs:
- Resistance to capsize, to be safe offshore, as well as quick and sure righting after a knock-down or inversion. (Counter-intuitively, these two needs have somewhat different and conflicting solutions.)
- Enough sail area in relation to the boat’s displacement, preferably without the use of overlapping headsails, to perform well in light air—that is, if the owner wants to sail and is not really looking for, as many are, a disguised motorboat.
- Reasonable draft for the cruising area envisioned. Over the years we have found that the sweet spot, at least for us, is 6 to 6-1/2 feet (1.8 to 2 meters).
- Sufficient stability to stand up to the necessary sail area required to go up-wind or close-reach well into waves offshore.
Leaving out the stability provided by hull shape, to satisfy the above needs the designer is faced with balancing the force of the wind on the sails together with every ounce of weight above the center of gravity (hull, decks, fluid in tanks, mast, rigging, and on it goes) against the weight and depth of the ballast in the keel and any structure or fluids below the vertical center of gravity. Wait, it gets worse: as the designer adds more sail to get good performance he or she must make the keel heavier (we are assuming a fixed draft), and that then makes the keel bigger and drives the boat down in the water, increasing the drag from wetted surface, which in turn requires a bigger rig, which requires more ballast, which requires…you get the idea, a vicious circle.
However, going to carbon fiber for the mast is a virtuous circle since the boat gets both more stable, without adding ballast, and lighter, by the weight saving in the mast. The benefits are dramatic, and more than one might expect, because the effect of weight on stability is multiplied by its distance from the boat’s vertical center of gravity. For example, Morgan’s Cloud’s new carbon mast, with its weight saving of about 600 pounds (270 kilograms) over the old aluminum mast and its lower center of gravity, is like adding about one and a half tons to the keel, but without the above-detailed diminishing returns.
Or, to look at it another way, to make the reader’s suggestion of saving weight by buying a water maker and carrying less water equal to the effect of the new mast, it would require (assuming the water was stowed under the cabin settees) getting rid of an amazing seven tons or 1400 gallons (5300 liters), nearly six times more than we carry! (In fact Morgan’s Cloud’s water supply is in tanks in the keel stub below the boat’s vertical center of gravity and so having them full actually has a positive effect on her upwind speed and stability.)
Photographs of carbon fiber masts being built
are courtesy of Hall
Spars, and no, we have not sold
our souls.
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The New Mast, The Bottom Line
All the above is great, but this post gets to the real meat: How much did carbon fiber cost? And what did we get for that money?
The new mast, excluding some new rigging, cost about US$55,000, as against an aluminum replacement mast, which would have cost about $30,000; a lot of money to us, particularly since it was capital we were spending that came from the sale of our house.
Fast is fun: Our friend Flax who, with many miles as the owner/skipper of a Swan 41, knows what fast sailing feels like, is in the zone while steering Morgan’s Cloud.
What we got for our US$25,000:
- The new mast is substantially up-strengthened from standard practice and even from Hall Spars’ standard cruising mast safety margin of 100%. This thing is a bruiser. Just two examples: the boom and vang goose necks, beautifully molded of carbon fiber, are engineered to withstand a full mainsail crash jibe in 30 knot winds. The tube itself is so strong and stiff that running back stays are simply not required for safety, except in very heavy weather, although we do use them to tune sail shape. It would simply not be practical to build a mast this strong in aluminum.
- The boat will now stand up to her full jib-topsail and staysail with a single reef in the main (to reduce helm more than heeling) in 22 knots of true wind; that's nearly 30 knots across the deck—impressive for a comparatively narrow boat with a big rig that only draws six and a half feet. With the old aluminum spar we would have had two reefs and at least 30 percent of the jib-topsail rolled up in those conditions. More sail set combined with the reduced pitching moment of the rig drives her through a good sized sea at a steady seven to eight knots instead of being knocked back every so often to below six knots by larger waves, as she would have been with the old mast. Her leeway is also reduced a good two to three degrees.
- If we are sailing for comfort and not speed, we can carry the same amount of sail that we used to, but heel and pitch less, and still go faster with less leeway. Morgan’s Cloud was always an easily driven boat with a soft and comfortable motion (important for a short-handed crew) and now she is even more so.
- We can keep sailing substantially longer in light air and waves before needing to start the engine, because she does not roll as far, which means the sails stay full, which means she goes faster, which means that she pitches and rolls less…yes, another one of those virtuous circles.
- We no longer need to use the running back stays to keep the mast up. I can’t tell you how great this is after years of tending to that bane of the cutter rig. We sail a lot more in confined waters than we used to because of this one benefit.
- With the environmental issues surrounding anodizing of large structures, most larger aluminum masts are now painted and we all know how hard it is to keep paint on aluminum. My guess is the paint will last twice as long on our carbon mast; not a trivial benefit when you consider that painting our aluminum mast would have cost in the region of US$10,000. Not only that, repainting a carbon mast will be substantially cheaper than doing the same to one of aluminum due to the much smaller amount of preparation required.
- The replacement of the aluminum mast with carbon has substantially raised the boat’s limit of positive stability and lowered her inverted stability. In other words, it would take a lot more to knock her down or roll her and a lot less to right her from an inverted position. (Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that, see this post.)
The only drawback with our new carbon fiber mast is that when offshore and lack of wind finally does force us to motor, the boat’s motion is noticeably faster and jerkier, to the point that I have felt seasick in conditions that would not have bothered me with the slower and deeper roll of the old mast—in boats, like in life, there is always a trade off.
Our friend Erik, whose sailing experience covers everything from a Dana 24 to big schooners, is impressed as Morgan’s Cloud effortlessly accelerates to the high eights in a puff.
So if we had to do it again, would we choose carbon over aluminum? You bet, as long as we had to replace the existing mast anyway. Would we replace a perfectly good aluminum mast with carbon? No, but we certainly wouldn’t scorn someone with deeper pockets than us who did.
If you are considering replacing your boat to get better performance,
turbo charging her with a carbon stick instead may be a bargain, but
only if the boat in question is a good sailor—no amount of carbon will
make a real woofer fly. Morgan’s Cloud was already a fast boat with the
old mast and as such she has benefited hugely from her new carbon mast.
Enough that I’m tempted to try out her new turn of speed on the race
course. But, as I tell Phyllis, I’m all done with that racing foolishness—well,
maybe just once more….
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The New Mast, Lightning: Myths, Assurances & Risks
Let’s start with the myths:
- If a carbon fiber mast gets struck by lightning it is toast, end of story.
- If a carbon fiber mast gets struck by lightning, there is no way to tell if it has been damaged or not, so it must be junked.
These two statements are right up there with “drop a penny in the bilge of an aluminum boat and it will burn through in a week”; in other words, rubbish. I can say this because I have personally seen a carbon fiber mast that was struck by lightning and then pronounced undamaged by a large and reputable mast manufacturer using ultra-sound. And before anyone says that the manufacturer can’t be trusted, do you think that any manufacturer in their right mind would pronounce a mast safe, with the attendant liability, if they were not sure of their methodology?
On to assurances. I quote Ben Hall of Hall Spars:
The question is: “How well do carbon masts hold up to a lightning strike?” The answer is simple: just as well as an aluminum mast. Lightning is an unpredictable force. A severe hit will damage any rig, regardless of material.
So far, the record of carbon masts holding up to lightning strikes is at least as good as aluminum masts. Due to the fact that the rigging does the ”heavy lifting” in absorbing the energy of a strike and transferring it to the grounding system in the boat, the mast (either aluminum or carbon) usually sustains little or no damage.
The record shows that carbon masts have survived hundreds of lightning strikes. The greatest damage in a lightning strike (for both aluminum and carbon masts) usually befalls the electronics. We had a carbon cruising mast hit in Massachusetts, and they lost the microwave, television, GPS, radar, and all the instruments. The electronics were completely fried but the mast was fine.
The bottom line is: Anything sticking up like a mast, regardless of material, is susceptible. Carbon does not cry out “come hit me” any more than an aluminum mast. You can protect your rig with a lightning rod and a static dissipater—we recommend using both—but there’s no guarantee they will head off a major strike. Considering that carbon is easier to repair, we think it’s a better choice.
If your carbon mast [is] hit by lightning, you can and should definitely check it or have it checked. There is the visual inspection and tap check (when you tap a carbon mast, a damaged area has a different sound) or our service technicians can ultrasound the mast to check for internal damage.
The above begs the question: Can you trust a manufacturer’s assurances? Having done business with Ben (no, we did not get a discount or any preferred treatment), I think you can. Aside from anything else, Ben and Eric Hall are way too smart to make claims they can’t back up.
Be that as it may, what we are really talking about here is the weighing of risk, and when you are evaluating risk you need to talk to the professional risk takers, marine insurance underwriters: The men and women who sit in the back office of insurance companies looking at loss history, setting premium levels, and answering to the boss when expensive things happen without adequate premium to cover them.
For many years Morgan’s Cloud has been insured in the European market through Pantaenius. Their underwriters made no change to our policy when we changed to a carbon fiber mast. Pantaenius insures over 60,000 yachts worldwide and specializes in the high end of the market where carbon fiber masts are common. I can assure you that if they were paying a lot of claims on these masts due to lightning, or any other cause, we would have experienced a big jump in premium or even a refusal of cover.
So, adding all that together,
Phyllis and I feel confident that going with carbon fiber for our new mast
has given us a stronger mast than could be built in aluminum, as well as
a faster, more stable and safer boat. And all without any appreciable increase
in lightning strike risk, particularly since we have installed a substantial
lightning conductor.
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