Up the mast (again)
When I’m happy with this system I’ll post details (photos/instructions) on how to rig it and what you need… until then I’m keeping it vague. This is really dangerous. If you haven’t done a fair bit of climbing I’d advise against rigging systems like this. They’re really easy to screw up - and there are no second chances once your 30+ feet off the ground.
I bought three Petzl pulleys and a bozun chair to try to get up the mast a bit easier.
The bozun chair (which you wear in conjunction with a climbing harness) was a huge improvement… it was actually comfortable.
The 3:1 pulley system I rigged made it fairly easy to haul my self up. I put two pulleys up top (attached to the main sail halyard and the topping life [redundancy is the climbers best friend]) and one pulley and an ascender attached to my harness/chair. You need at least 3 times your mast height in rope (used climbing rope and, if you’re buying new, get static line or no stretch climbing rope [sometimes called big wall rope or rappelling rope or canyoneering rope - like this stuff]). A 3:1 pulley system makes it so you only need to lift 1/3 of your weight (for me that’s about 83 lbs… which is very do-able - it was actually kind of easy.
But, I ran into the following problems. One - getting off a loaded ascender and onto a belay device so you can rappel down is kind of tricky. I order a rescucender which will hopefully fix this but, it’s not to bad with a plain old ascender - you just need to hook up and clip in to your figure 8 (belay device) below the ascender, unweight the ascender by pulling on the rope above it, and release the lock… watch your fingers doing this and, for the love of god, make sure you’re clipped in.
The other (bigger problem) is that, once up there, I was too low to work on the top of the mast. I ordered an etrier (basically a series of foot loops) to try to get around this… but, it’s going to be pretty far from optimal.
Anyway - short of putting in mast steps this is the best, solo system I’ve found for going up the stick. It worked well, had redundancy, was moderately comfortable and pretty straight forward to rig. Given all the old climbing gear I had it wasn’t even that expensive.

I’m pretty sure Jason is just convinced I’m out of my fucking mind at this point. But, he’s the one going to Idaho this weekend.

You know you’re living small when your kayak is nearly as long as your boat.

Strange - that blue hat - it’s green… I guess that’s a fisheye thing.

























