Not all thing lost go to Davy Jones.

Not all things lost go to Davy Jones Locker.  This week I lost a halyard up the mast while I was taking some measurements. This thought occurred to me. What do you call a halyard stuck up at the top of your mast swinging around?  Perhaps a Jack Sparrow?  That guy is always swinging around from something in the movies. 

There are several different ways to retrieve a lost halyard everything from fishing lines to running some sort of device to snag the line up another halyard. Most of these methods look to require quite a good bit of patience and time. The most straight forward way is to break out the bosun's chair and go up and get it. 

 Seems it is the spinnaker halyard and it is above and outside all the other halyards I decided to just go with the bosun's chair. It has been a while since I've been up a mast. This time I decided to make things a bit easier on myself and my wife down below by building an easy climber. Besides making the mast easier to climb I felt the easy climber also added a second level of safety for my climb. The Mirage has wire to rope halyards and by using the easy climber on one halyard and tieing the bosun chair into the other halyard I was able to reduce the amount of strain on the lines as I went up and down the mast. 

Here is a video about the official easy climber. 

It is a bit more sophisticated than mine but hey use what you have. I didn't have any pieces of starboard material just laying around so mine is just made of wood and a few eyebolts I picked up at the hardware store. The cam cleat has been laying around my parts box for a while.

Halfway up easy as pie.  It is just a matter of sitting and standing.  The person below is no longer cranking you up they are basically taking the slack up as you go and holding while you re-position the climber around the various mast obstacles like the steaming light and spreaders.

Once at the top, it was easy to drop the halyard down and time to take a few photos. 

While setting up the climber and giving it a little test I gave myself a good rope burn coming back down. #always climb with gloves. 

With all the halyards back down we headed out for a nice sail on the lake. On the way back in we saw this guy driving his car up the river. What a perfect car.