Escape Adventure—Repairing the Mast 18-25 August 2014
In the last blog, I wrote about bringing Escape from Baja to Oxnard, CA and I reported that we had broken a mast in very rough weather about 120 nm south of Ensenada.  The trials and tribulations associated with that broken mast were covered in the last blog so I won't reiterate them here.  With the remaining mast, the mizzen sail, and our two engines we were able to get to Ensenada, then San Diego, and then to Oxnard.  We arrived in Oxnard on 26 May 2014 and a few days later Chris White, the designer of Escape came out from the East Coast to help us thoroughly assess the damage so Escape could be restored to "like new" condition.  We had done a preliminary inspection in Ensenada while we were tied up to the dock there to assess whether there was any damage to the mizzen mast.  Here are a few pictures from that initial inspection so you can get a feel for the condition of the remaining mast and for what it feels like to be at the top of the mast dangling from a single rope.
For perspective, you can see my two sons, Chris and Jay standing on the starboard bow and the trampoline.  In the picture below right, I could see some chafe on the back stays but the lights, below left and masthead seemed to be in good condition.  The flap on the back of the mast foil, however, was damaged.  The top half of the flap was completely missing and the slot where the top half of the flap was mated to the bottom half is torn open (see below left).  I couldn't really see the top of the mast inside the mast foil because it was covered by the masthead, but given the chaffing on the backstays and the condition of

the flap, I decided to only use the mizzen mast and sail in light winds and relatively calm seas.  You will see later that that was a very wise decision.  Anyway, as I said earlier, Chris White flew out a few days after we arrived in Oxnard to help me assess the full extent of the damage and to help coordinate the repairs  with the Ventura Harbor
Boatyard.
Here are a few of the damaged parts so you can get an idea of the magnitude of the task ahead of us.  At right is the  foresail furler showing where I
hacksawed off the furler tube and the steel forestay cable inside it.  To the left is the outhaul line that pulled the clew of the foresail out to the end of the boom.  This is the first line I cut on the night that the mast failed and started the process of getting the mast and sail over the side of the boat.  Below left is what's left of the mast step.  The steel plate that bolts the mast to the step is still in place and you can see the pulley that feeds the spinnaker halyard out from the bottom of the mast to the winch.  I just untied the stopper knot in that halyard so it could pull through and let the mast go.  To the the right is the main winch for the foresail lines.  You can see that the bottom of the mast got hooked under the lip of the winch and lifted up on it like a beer bottle opener.  The
small Anderson winch that is used to rotate the mast foil and to lock it in place was also damaged.  At left is a picture of how it looked before the accident, and below right you can see that the top of the Anderson winch was completely ripped off along with the line that went around the winch and the bottom of the mast foil to turn it.  All of the bearings for the Anderson winch were scattered all over the floor of the forward cockpit, but they didn't go down any of the drains so I was able to recover the top
 of the winch and all but one of the bearings.  The rest of the damage was more superficial.  Below you can see the lifelines were broken where the mast fell over the side and smashed them.  Two of the lifeline stanchions were bent, but one was broken off (below right).  That one required us to drill out the old fiberglass dowel and glue in a new one.  The mast also rubbed off the paint along the top of the bow when it was being pushed up and down by the 12 foot waves that night.  These places required lots of sanding and repainting.  We first cleaned up those areas
filled them with
fiberglass resin thickened with small microscopic plastic beads.  Then sanded and painted them.  I found that painting with AlexSeal is not easy.  I've painted two cars with a spray gun and I tried,
brushes, rollers, and spray guns on this job and never really achieved a nice shiny hard finish like the original paint.  We did all these repairs while we were waiting on the arrival of the new mast, mast foil, and sail.  Fortunately for me, Alex at Alwoplast had a new mast and mast foil almost ready to go.  It was originally intended to go on boat #5, but it was now being diverted to me.  The catch was that the design had changed a little since my boat, which was #1 off the assembly line, and the new masts were thicker, but also about three feet shorter so that the back stays had a better angle on the masts and did a better job of holding the masts in place with less
movement.  I could have waited for a longer mast to be built, but that would have taken another couple of months and I liked the idea of incorporating as many of the enhancements from the new boats as I could.  I didn't really lose that much sail area but it caused me to have to cut down my spinnaker to fit the new shorter mast.  To their credit, Alwoplast covered the cost of cutting down the spinnaker as well as all of the other costs including the sail and instruments that were lost when the mast broke.  All-in-all, making the repairs to put Escape back into "like new" condition probably cost me only a couple hundred dollars.  Not only did Alwoplast stand by their warrantee, they sent Sven, who is the production manager's son up here to help with the repairs.  Sven is the same guy who made the maiden voyage with us from Valdivia, Chile to the Galapagos Islands—i.e., the first 15 days at sea.
Although the new mast and mast foil were almost ready by the time we got Escape to Oxnard, CA, there were a lot of issues Alwoplast had to address before it could be shipped.  Just arranging for shipping it and getting it through Chilean and US Customs was a monumental job that took a lot of hours from both Alwoplast and me.  Finally, the mast and mast foil as
well as the other materials we needed arrived in Oakland, CA and we thought it would be delivered around the 18th of August.  Consequently, I arranged with the Ventura Harbor Boatyard to bring Escape over there on the 19th so we could get the mizzen mast off, inspect and repair it, and get the new mast assembled and installed.    Since there was no need to pull Escape out of the water for this work and there were no empty slips at the boatyard, I arranged with my marina at Anacapa Isle to get me a reciprocal slip at their marina in Ventura Harbor.  Sven arrived from Chile on 16 August and stayed at my house as a guest.  We moved

the boat up to Ventura on the 18th of August so all we had to do was motor about three hundred yards to get to the Ventura Harbor Boatyard on the 19th.  It was tricky backing in to
the slip where they had a hoist set up because there wasn't much maneuver room there.  Within half an hour of getting tied up to the dock, we had Sven up on the cherry picker tying onto the mizzen mast and preparing it for removal.  The three pictures above show how Escape was positioned and how we got the mast off and on the ground so we
could inspect it.  As soon as we pulled the mast head off (above left) we
could see cracks in the top of the mast (above right) and some delaminating and cracks on the inside (also above right).  The first step was to sand the paint off and then laminate around the cracked areas with epoxy and carbon fiber sheets.  The cracks are more visible just
above with the paint sanded off.  In the small pictures at right you can see the first layer of carbon fiber material being epoxied on and then covered with a polyester cloth which is then pulled tight.  The polyester cloth squeezes the excess epoxy out and compresses the carbon fiber material so the surface is nice and smooth.  Miraculously the polyester doesn't stick to the epoxy so the next day when it's all dry, you just unwrap the polyester and the epoxied carbon fiber surface is nice and dry and smooth.  Once the outside of the mast head had been repaired, the next step was to thicken the
walls and reinforce the top of the mast so it was stronger.  To do that we first had to chip away the tube that was epoxied to the inside of the mast that carried all the wires running to the top of the
mast for lights and instruments (see before and after pics at left).  The first step is to sand and clean the inside of the mast so the epoxy has a nice clean surface to cling to.  The next step is to saturate multiple layers of carbon fiber with epoxy (see pic at right).  The blanket of carbon fiber that Sven is preparing in that

picture is about 12 layers thick consisting of different length sheets and sheets with carbon fibers going at different angles.  You lay the sheets on one at a time and work the resin in with a spatula as you see in the picture.  Once that's done you fold up the whole blanket and put it inside the mast as shown in this YouTube video:  http://youtu.be/Ui28bQViYKY.  When it was all done and dried, it looked like this (see right).  We then sanded the ragged ends of the carbon fibers off to make it nice and smooth as in the picture below right.  When you compare this picture to the ones above you can see that the reinforced mast wall is about twice as thick as the original.  Once the mizzen mast was repaired and reinforced we restrung the wires through it and replaced the mast head on top of it.  For those of you who are not sailors, it's important to have that small tube epoxied to the inside of the mast to carry the wires so you don't have constant clanging of the wires back and forth as you rock through the waves.  I've been in a couple boats that didn't have the small tubes to hold the wires still and it's really annoying.  The
next step was to attach the new back stays to the mast head so when we restep the mast the back stays are attached to it.  These new back stays are considerably larger than the old ones (16mm vs 13mm) but are made of the same synthetic Dux material.  They are light weight and stronger than steel.  Each of these back stays is rated at 90,000 lbs.  Also since we saw some chafe on the old back stays I had

Colligo put the anti-chaffing covers on the loops where they go around the mast heads (see pic at left).  Of course, since the new back stays are bigger than the old ones, the fiberglass cover that holds them in place, would not fit.  Consequently, we had to mold a new one using epoxy and fiberglass sheets (see two pics at right).     Amazing what you can build with fiberglass.  We also used a small piece of carbon fiber to repair and reinforce the broken flap on the back of
the mizzen mast foil (see left).  We finished these repairs on 21 August 2014 and early in the morning of 22 August, the new
foremast arrived.  That was good timing because now we were prepared to devote our full attention to assembling the foremast and getting it ready to raise on Escape.  Here are the two mast sections and the two pieces of the mast foil as we unloaded them from the shipping container.  It took three or four men to manhandle these masts.  Below left is a close-up
of one of the bushings along the mast that the mast foil
rotates on.  It's made of a very slippery and tough material like teflon.  The new mast head is identical to the old one, but I wanted to show you this closeup so you can see the horn-like guide that Alwoplast made to lead the spinnaker halyard from the front pulley to the spinnaker top.  This guide is very important because we didn't have that on the original design and the spinnaker exerts considerable force to the side.  As a result, our original spinnaker halyard chaffed through on our maiden voyage from Valdivia, Chile to the Galapagos Islands.  Alwoplast made this horn modification and had the parts waiting for me in the Galapagos when I arrived.  We haven't had any chaffing problems since we installed that horn shaped guide.  The first
order of business was to slide the two sections of the mast together and epoxy them together.  The picture on the left is where we slid the two sections together making sure they were lined up just as they were in the factory.  Just as important as aligning them was to make sure the mast was straight before the epoxy dried.  To do
this, we bought a long section of clear plastic tubing and filled it with colored water (colored by breaking open a marker pen and dumping the wick in a bucket of water).  On the right above is Chris White (the designer of Escape) holding one end of the clear plastic tube on the center line of the top of the mast while Sven holds the other end at the center of the mast where the two sections join.  When the fluid in the tube is even with the centerline marks, the mast is level.  Along the other axis, we simply sighted along
marks on both ends and the center.  Once that dried and we were sure the mast was epoxied together and straight, we reinforced the joint with carbon fiber sheets.  First you coat the mast with epoxy, then you lay a sheet of carbon fiber on it and saturate it with epoxy.  Then you put a longer piece of carbon fiber over the first so it overlaps, then add other sheets at different angles, etc.  Once that was done, we slid the new mast foils over the
mast as shown on the right.  Finally, we mounted
the Airmar weather station to the top of the mast as shown on the left.  The Airmar weather station has a GPS in it, a compass accurate to within one degree, and it senses wind speed and direction.  We have an identical weather station on
the antenna farm on the back of the boat.  This gives us some redundancy in case one of them fails or gets hit by lightening—or you lose a mast.  When that was done we simply pulled Escape into the slip (at right with no masts), rolled the new masts up beside it (see below),  pulled the crane up in front of Escape, and hoisted the mast into place.  It took only about two and a half hours to step both masts and get them tied into place with the back stays and forestays good enough that we could motor away from the boatyard and back to our dock where we could retention the stays.  The "after" shot is two pictures below showing Escape with her two
masts back on (one new and one refurbished and reinforced).
Sven was so relieved once we got the two masts stepped that he took Jay's paddle
board and went for a spin around the harbor.  Here's a movie of Sven on his "victory lap" on the paddle board:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d6Zdodjqws
Well that's it for the repairs to Escape after having broken a mast in heavy weather on our journey from Baja to California.  We've already begun exploring again and have visited a couple of the local Channel Islands.  I'll be writing blogs about them as we explore them so that you can share in those adventures.  Again I want to express my thanks to Alwoplast and Chris White for their dedication in helping me get Escape back up and running again.