Here's another look at the old mast step. I had sawed the tongue off the bottom of the mast so I paired it with the angle bars I had ripped out, to show how it would have been on the boat:
The wood core goes up the mast about 9" from the heel of the mast, and the cleats for the halyard and the downhaul are screwed into it. I cut just at the end of the hollow fibreglass mast, so the fibreglass doesn't show here.
Trying to align the holes from outside and above, with no room for a head to get down beside it, was a major drag. The mast would be waving around as I was trying blindly to get the bolt to go through three holes.
New Dolly
To keep Golightly in the CBSA compound I needed wheels that would go across sand and not get stuck, and a platform wide enough that I could mount the amas on the akas and not have the whole thing tip over, which happened once at Cattle Point with the strap-on wheels I've been using. The boat would be living outside on this dolly.
I bought two pieces of 1" x 4" cedar to make the dolly with. One was rough and cheap, and that one I used for the cradle frame part, and other pieces. The other was a long smooth board of quality cedar that had a long curve in it, which I thought would match some of the curve of the bottom of the boat, which it does. I used that one for the tongue.
The tongue & gusset part and the cradle with the wheels on it are two separate units that are screwed together so they can come apart if necessary for easier transport. I got the wheels from John, and he made some hard plastic bushings to replace the metal ones that the wheels came with, which would seize up with rust in no time from the salt water. The axle is a piece of the same aluminum tubing as the akas are made of. The axle is fibreglassed to the underside of the cross-board and I put a foam core in the ends so the seawater won't get inside and corrode the aluminum.
As you can see, I discovered that I could store the amas upside-down on separate mini-akas, since I need to minimize space taken up in the compound.
Above is the way I imagined storing the boat in the compound, with mast in and rudder and board attached. This is all stuff I have to bring down to the water and assemble when I go sailing now, so having it all together in the compound is hopefully going to mean I get out sailing more often.
The aluminum tube handle visible in the above and next photos slides up and down inside a fibreglass tube that's attached to the forward end of the tongue. The tube is pinned in position: up for pushing or pulling the boat around; or down to keep the bow up somewhat if the boat happened to be bow-heavy in the yard. As it is, it's stern-heavy, so it rests on the aluminum shoe on the end of the skeg.
The handle works great because the wheels are so short that the forward end of the dolly needs to be kept low, especially in low spots of ground where the skeg gets caught on the rise if the bow is not low down. I can stay upright while pushing or pulling the cart in its optimum trim.
Here's a view from behind, showing how the sail and akas would be stored, more or less. In wet weather I'll put my car tarp over the cockpit. I'll have to make an opening in the tarp with a collar for the mast, though.
I loosened the new rudder line and it flows great now. I had a bit of trouble steering last time, as the rudder line was so tight it was grabbing instead of slipping. I had to replace the rudder line because I couldn't find the first one I made. It had some nice stainless snap-hooks on it, which I've replaced with some tiny little S-shaped snap-hooks that I found at MEC. There's so little tension on that line that the fasteners don't need to be heavy.
The red lines are a continuous line that loops around the forward end of the cockpit through a tube. Steering is done by pulling on the line on one side or the other. The black line is the rudder down-haul line, which goes to a quick-release jam cleat, which lets go with enough pressure, so if the rudder blade hits bottom the down-haul line will be released. The white line leading from the top of the rudder is the up-haul line, which goes to a jam cleat and is what's keeping the blade up off the pavement in this photo.
All of the lines and the halyard are more things that I won't need to be fiddling with each time I go out, once the boat is on the dolly in the compound.
