Gin Pole

I made one for ARC21 using an 8' length.

I personally prefer a Rum punch to a Gin pole. But seriously, do you have problem just hand raising it? There are many systems with a gin pole and a way to lead it to the trailer crank...Google and the search function will get more answers than you can shake a pole at....

here is the bottom. I used two heavy straight brackets bent in the vice to the shape of the mast.

Thanks! It looks like it's ready to pounce on the lawnmower.

31.5 feet is getting tough on my old back.

Yeah, I hear ya, just ruptured a disc and am awaiting surgery myself. Just remembered I have this in the garage if you want to buy a premade one, might cost too much to ship to make it worth it though...

Everybody knows that most men have back problems and that most of them won't admit it and have to try to be macho and raise the mast themselves. So they end up either rupturing a disk or getting a hernia. (And then they have an excuse for not helping their wives move furniture around. <img src=

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Anyway, for the Nacra 6.0, Rick and I were both getting a little old, and he was not able to raise the mast himself. He didn't have the time or patience to come up with a gin pole system, so he used me.

What we did was, we tied a looong length of line to the bottom end of the forestay, and I would go waaay out in front of our vehicle with the line. He would do the usual cling-and-jerk to get the mast started up, and then I would pull like mad on the line while he lifted. Seemed to work pretty well.

Lowering the mast was the same thing in reverse, except that I had to really dig my heels in to control the drop, and I always had this vision of him dropping the mast and me being dragged into and up over the top of our car. <img src=

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Uh-oh, sbflyer got his post in right before mine, and I had not even seen it when I said that about ruptured discs.

At least I can blame it on mountain bike crashes ( wrapped backwards around a tree one time) instead of mast raising! Did I ever tell about the guy I saw in a marina parking lot trying to raise the mast and hold it balanced while his girlfriend attached the shrouds and forestay?!

Thanks for the offer. Shipping anything to Hawaii is costly. Matson just bumped their fuel surcharge up to 35%. I can feel another walletectomy coming.

My wife saw a guy trying to step the mast with the boat in the water. They gave up after an hour.

Nice! The guy I saw had the mast pinned straight to the cup ( Hobie 16) which keeps it from going up far enough to pin the forestay of course, so from a distance I saw the stick go up...down Up....down about 12 times so walked over to see what was up, thats when the shroud problem got obvious. Boggles my mind that people are ready to go to a place you can die ( the ocean )with such gaps in just the basic ideas of what has to happen to even get going...Same thing with hang gliding, for awhile ball tips were a fad, there's a big delrin ball screwed to the cloth of the wing tip, fitting into a socket in the end of the leading edge tube so that the tip can float up and down easier. Anyhow this guy comes up to launch at a 1300 foot cliff launch, normally somebody holds the nose while the pilot lays down to check the harness straps, so while I do this for the guy, it was pretty obvious one wing was all crumpled and saggy, like a main hoisted 90% of the way up. I go check it out 'cause he's hooked in, and the ball is out of the socket with the tube ready to pop out of the cloth! I go tell him, and he just looks up and says

Yeah something seemed funny, but I couldn't figure it out , so I thought I'd check it out when I broke down in the landing field.

He would have launched and spun right back into the rock face, but a couple hundred feet lower from where he started, then tumbled down into some trees that would taken a trained high angle rescue team to get to...