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More Boat Work

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Near the Top of the Mast!

Trying to get some last minute outfitting and boat work done before we head out and down toward the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). One BIG item was to measure our mast height. Why? We need to go under some fixed bridges on the ICW. The “control height” is 64 feet, meaning if your mast is higher, you can’t go. The spec mast height of our boat is 62 feet and that’s way to close to not know exactly. The reason is that there are a lot of instruments on the top of the mast, see pic below. If they add significantly to the mast height, they’ll strike those bridges.

To measure the height, I had to go get lifted to the top of the mast to make the measurement. I took the photo above looking down at Shelly belaying me (notice my work boots). “Precise” measurement places our mast height from waterline at 61 feet, give or take probably a half foot. That’s good but doesn’t take into account the instruments at the top, the highest one being our VHF antenna.

Shelly winched me up the mainsail halyard and so I couldn’t get right to the top to measure the antenna height, but I estimated it to be about two feet. That makes our total height 63 feet, which gets us under the lowest fixed bridges with an entire 12 inches to spare!

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Masthead of theĀ Good Karma


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