Not all of the boat build takes place in the shop. This Sunday’s project involved an overnight flight to Chicago and early morning to Toronto, plus 40 miles of rental car in the snow to track down the 50′ carbon fiber mast acquired (but not delivered) 15 months ago.

Down a long driveway outside of Caledon, Ontario is a boat wright’s workshop that is temporarily storing our mast. This was the first time seeing it, and it’s way better than the pictures! U-Spar’s craftsmanship looks fantastic.

It’s a full pre-preg carbon build, with proper resin slow-heat-rise baking and well executed reinforcements. I like that they did not do material tapering on the ends to try and shave weight. It’s a uniform layup, stronger than the F39 minimum design specs, and totals about 160lbs including the double diamond stays.

Perhaps the best part for me is how complete it is, down to the windex and antenna fittings, rotation control arm, spreaders, Tides Marine track, etc.

The mast crane is a separate carbon composite built to slide in to the mast. It’s set up for two main halyards, including one doubler, and two mast-head spinnakers. Mike L will happily note one of those is perfect for the big SoCal reacher, and I’ve added a set of upper cap shrouds to compensate for that extra load. We have one regular jib halyard, and a storm jib halyard exit is being added at the main’s third reef. I decided to skip a cutter stay and will sew a wire luff in to the storm sail – it’ll be it’s own stay between the deck and the halyard.

Here are a few more shots of details. We didn’t want to unwrap the plastic any further.

The spreaders are fixed onto the mast. It makes transport more difficult but once stepped, that’s another simplicity element (no connectors to catch, erode, etc) I think we’ll appreciate.

Because it’s a rotating mast, the bottom is open and the halyards will simply exit and be routed to the turning blocks in the stainless steel base. I took the base, the rotator control arm, and the shroud-to-mast shackles home as luggage. The TSA wasn’t too happy with me.

The eyeglasses are there for scale of just how big the primary shackle is, taking the combined pull from forestay and windward cap shroud under load.

We’ll see more photos when the mast comes west. For now, send good thoughts for the fine furniture trucker who is supposed to carry our mast inside his 52′ trailer atop a load headed this direction. We’re not out of the woods yet…