The Survey and Maintenance of a Vessel’s Standing Rigging

Veteran rigger, boatbuilder, and sailor Hans Vierthaler has spent over 40 years sailing the coast of Maine in a variety of wooden boats. In addition to his time under sail, he has also worked as a rigger at Brooklin Boat Yard and Belmont Boat Works enabling him to acquire a wide array of specialized skills and become quite proficient when working with modern and traditional rigging.

We will focus on standing rigging in this episode. That comprises all rigging and associated hardware that supports the mast, keeps it straight, or provides means to attach sails, and is permanently installed. Hans will explain how a survey of your boat’s standing rigging presents an opportunity to spot and correct flaws before they’re serious. It’s also an opportunity to minimize expense and labor by assessing lubrication, adjustments, improvements, and other maintenance needs. Rust stains, cracked fittings, and wire with kinks or broken strands or a slight unlaying due to heavy strain are all things that are possible to spot if you habitually look for them but easy to miss ifs you don’t. Cotter pins, shackle musings, swages, and seizings don’t require much effort on your part to examine. If one of these is not healthy and you spot it soon enough, it’s easy to fix or replace but if six month’s time elapses between looks, serious trouble can develop. We’ll look at a number of examples of fatigue, chafe, snags, unfastening, and corrosion and discuss how it occurred and how to prevent such problems in the future.

As the late master rigger Brion Toss used to say, “surveying is really just a formal exercise in noticing things.” The Mastering Skills team feel sure this episode should be a valuable aid to anyone who wishes to develop an “eye” for working on and better understanding their rigging.