Gypsy had her original standing rigging when we bought her this past summer. It was high quality, solid rod, shroud & stays, all in great shape but at 21 years old must be considered suspect, so we’re replacing it all. We decided to go with type 316 stainless steal wire rigging primarily because it’s simpler to repair in remote locations. Rod rigging requires special and costly tooling, which isn’t available inmost of the places that we’ll be visiting.
We’re also adding a removable inner forestay and running backstays that will allow us to fly our storm jib inboard of the headstay to better balance the rig in heavy weather. An additional benefit will be that we won’t have to strip our genoa whenever we need to fly the storm jib, we can just roll it up on it’s fuller.
We’re working with Mystic Stainless fabricate the deck and mast fittings. Jeff Morgan will do all the rigging work.
Susan and I recently traced the shape of the mast onto 11 blocks of wood. I then cut out the mast shape, screwed & glued them all together to make a pattern to assist in making the mast fitting.We’ll have Ace Sailmakers convert our storm jib from a luff tape to hanked-on to fly on the new inner forstay.
