I've wanted to start a thread like this for awhile. In reading a few books there are many situations posed in which we sailors are faced with equipment failures, or emergency situations. When out on the water, there is rarely help nearby and one's ability to handle a situation on his/her own is crucial. The Sensible Cruising book I read outlines the importance of knowing how to handle the failure of anything on your boat. How would you handle some of these?


It's blowing 25 - 30 knots, sailing a close reach and your windward shroud snaps -- What do you do?


Your sailing along on a beautiful May day on Lake Michigan. You tack and hear some strange noises coming from below. You look and there's water sloshing in the bottom of the cabin. The electric bilge is is not pumping out water.


It's blowing 25 - 30 knots and rapidly picking up in sight of a nasty looking front, you are hove-to in big swell and your main will not budge to reef. The halyard won't give and the sail will not come down. You've no mast ladder.

Don't take me as one who claims to know the answers, or has even been through these dilemmas, I'm just interested in the dialog. There are a lot of websites and books devoted to such topics, but I'm interested to know the opinions out there. Please feel free to add your own encounters or situations for discussion.

It's blowing 25 - 30 knots, sailing a close reach and your windward shroud snaps -- What do you do?


Been there. We pulled in the sails, rigging and mast, all of which went overboard. Fired up the motor and dropped out of the race.

Let's say you were too far out to motor home... How do you think you'd jury-rig the shroud back in place such that it could support the mast under load?

Once the mast breaks, which it very likely to do when a weather shroud goes you'll have to motor or do some real jury rigging. I suppose you could rig the boom as a mast, hoist a headsail as a loose footed main, maybe with the foot as the luff and head home.

Old boats, real old ones, with low aspect rigs, masts that step on top of the keel, etc. could survive a parted shroud w/o breaking the mast. With them you could rig any suitable line to take the load.

BTW, it happened to us on an Endeavor. I actually credit the soundness of the boat that there was not more damage.

Good point... If you're under enough pressure to snap a shroud, chances are the mast isn't going to hold up under that amount of pressure.

I like the boom idea. You've got a track for the sail.. foot becomes luff and you're off and running... with a lot of creative engineering in between..

Good stuff..I like hearing these ideas.

Yeah, Chris, that's one of the critical things to understand about modern rigs. The mast is totally supported by the standing rigging, except in a very few cases. Once one element of that rigging goes, one element under tension, you are very likely to lose the whole rig.

In the case of the mis-adventure I was involved in it turned out to be single fitting that attached the spreader to mast (if my memory serves me).