Friday was the big day, launch day in fact. How delightful to be in the water again! For the first time ever, I had decided to step the mast myself this year, with the little hand-crank crane they have. Obviously, for an operation like that, you need to gather a crowd of the right sort, so that other people do the the actual work whilst you supervise. By "supervise", of course, I mean "sit on your ass and drink beer". Fortunately, mast-raising is the kind of boat-related labour which your fellow sailors actually want to assist with- unlike, say, waxing the topsides or scraping crud off the hull- and I had no shortage of people who promised assistance. Indeed I could have rigged Noah's Ark itself had everybody showed up who said they would. Tim, Rich, Bob, Dave and RoseAnn, David, Steve all volunteered - unasked- for the privilege of providing unpaid labor.


In the event, the key volunteer was Don, a fellow I didn't even know beforehand, although I'm sure I'd seen him around. He was working on his mast in the yard, while I was working on mine side-by-side not fifteen feet away. We got to talking and the conversation (perhaps unsurprisingly) drifted over to the subject of masts. It turned that we were both of us stepping later that day! Naturally, I offered to be of whatever feeble assistance I could be, and Don very decently returned the offer. And it turned out that Don's end of the tacit bargain was far far more generous than my puny offer of assistance. For unlike myself, and unlike all my other hopeful rigger's apprentices, Don actually had practical experience in the stepping of masts, and further he had a variety of unforeseen-but-clearly-necessary devices to streamline the process. Everything from an ingenious mast-trolley to cart the mast from yard to crane to the machine-oil required for lubricating the ancient cranking machinery on the crane. A very valuable ally, is Don.

So I helped Don, his wife Rose, and his friend Bob step his mast- he has a Columbia 28, a beautiful little vessel. Steve- honest fellow!- showed up right about then to help, so Rose and Bob's wife Joan could go sit down and drink Mimosas while Don, Bob, Steve and I tackled my mast.

(Later, Steve, Rich, Rich's brother and myself stepped Rich's mast. I'm getting to be pretty accomplished in the esoteric arts of mast-steppery. And then I went sailing).