Hello and welcome to Yachting Monthly's How To series brought to you in association withGJW
Direct. I'm Matthew Sheahan and over the course of 13 episodes we're going to be dealing with some of
the key issues when it comes to maintenance and talking to some of the experts to get their tips.
Hi I'm Rachael from Rubicon 3 Adventure Sailing
and today we're going to look at how we remove a halyard and replace it with another line. This
is just in case we need to do some maintenance on our halyards or we're taking the mast out.
This is not what we would do if we had broken a halyard and lost a halyard at sea.
So our halyards are all running up to the top of the mast and then
back down inside the mast. Sometimes they go down through some kind of channel,
usually they're kind of loose inside the mast and there's other things inside the mast like
cables from the VHF, a SeaMe if you've got an active radar reflector, your navigation lights.
So what's important is that the halyards and the wires never twist around themselves,
so if we are to remove a halyard from the mast we need to make sure that we pull a sacrificial
line – an extra line – down through the mast to take its place whilst the halyard is out for
servicing or replacement and that's called the mousing line. So a mousing line is just a very
thin, usually fairly cheap, bit of rope which is long enough to go all the way up to the top
of your mast back down again and potentially all the way to the cockpit if you need it to
so it needs to be at least twice the height of your mast or twice the length of your mast
and it needs to be long enough to come back to the cockpit if that's what you want it to do.
So before we do anything to our halyard we're going to make sure
that we have securely attached the mousing line to it.
If you've got really heavy halyards and very narrow sheaves at the top of your mast to pull
through the best way to attach these is actually to sew them end to end together.
Today what we're going to do is just do a rolling hitch and use some duct tape.
Because these are very lightweight halyards this should be okay.
I've got a hitch there and i'm going to duct tape over it to make sure it's really nice and smooth
and then it will go down through the top of the mast safely
We want to make sure that there's no kind of
random snaggy edges that could get caught on the way down.
It also needs to be really strong. What we don't want to do is lose the halyard or the mousing line
inside the mast by them falling apart and make sure it's really secure i'm going to give that
a really good pull and check they don't come apart which they don't and then what i've done is just
flake the line out in the cockpit so that it's all ready to run when i want to pull it through.
Okay so this is our main halyard and we're going to take this one out for servicing.
We firmly attach the mousing line to the other end of the main halyard and now we can actually just
pull it all through making sure that the other end of the mousing line is still attached somewhere.
At no point should you need to pull it hard.
If you need to pull it hard, stop what you're doing and try and work out what's snagging
because the risk is if you pull it too hard that the lines will come apart.
If it does get a little stuck you can just pull it back and forwards a little bit
give it a gentle [pull].
It just feels a little tight there so i'm just going see if i can free it up. There we go, that
was the knot coming over the sheave at the top of the mast there so it just was a little stiff.
So that's our main halyard fully out. We can now take the
mousing line and the duct tape off or unstitch it if we've sewn the two ends together
and then we can just make this secure at the base of the mast
and tie both the ends together really nice and tight, and that can stay there all winter long
without any problems ready to mouse the halyard back through at the other end of the winter.
The other thing we need to remember to do is to label each mousing line. They're really
obvious when they're this colour but if you've got three or four lines that are that colour
then you'll probably forget which one was which by the time you get to March next year.
Okay so we have re-stepped our mast and we're ready to put our halyards back in. It's time to
go sailing again so we're going to prepare the main halyard on the deck. We flaked it all out
nicely so it's going to run properly. We're going to attach it to the mousing line just like before
give it a really good test – you don't want to be testing that when it's inside the mast
and make sure that you've attached the right end to the mousing line. If you put the shackle end up
and try and pull the shackle through the mast it'll get stuck at the top of the mast you won't
get very far. So once we're all attached, we're nice and secure there, we can do the reverse of
the process of when we pulled it out and we can find our mousing line. Pull it all back through,
making sure nothing gets snagged on the way up,
just being careful at the top. It's quite a
narrow sheave at the top there, so just being careful to make sure
we don't yank it too hard and separate the mousing line and the halyard.
Just checking for any resistance as you're bringing it back down through the mast
you want to make sure that it's not getting snagged around anything internally.
It should be fairly smooth when it comes to bringing the knot out through the sheave,
and maybe a little bit of resistance. You might have to just help it out as it feeds down,
and again when we get to the blocks at the bottom of the mast.
Cool, so we've got both ends safely back on deck and ready to go sailing.
Well thanks for watching. I hope that was a help. Make sure that you like
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