Beginning the Transformation of Moonlight Sue

OK, it's me again, you know, the imaginarian, and I've had a lot of time to come up with all kinds of things to make over our boat into one that is as unique as can be.
 First was the color scheme. I had already had enough of white boats. I mean, inviting someone to come over and telling them to just "look for the white boat" didn't make much sense to me. And this is important, I don't conform well to everyone's standard protocol. "Normal" just isn't part of my lifestyle. So I settled on jet black as the base color scheme, and designed the rest of the colors around that. Black is not that hard to complement and Interlux Perfection Fighting Lady Yellow seemed to be just the right shade to do just that. More on all the flak I took for choosing black later, and on some things, well, I would agree.
     One morning, as I was looking over the general appearance of the boat, I was disgusted with the the lovely shade of "chipped white paint"on the mast. "This is where it starts " I thought and made an appointment with the boatyard to remove the mast. 

     The day came and the forklift moved into position to set the lift straps under the spreaders in preparation to lift it off the shoe ( the mast is deck stepped). As they began to lift, the whole deck lifted and I yelled for them to hold (yes, all the shrouds and rigging had been disconnected). The mast was not splitting away from the mast shoe so I had to resort to unbolting the whole shoe from the deck and that enabled the whole thing to lift up. After I cut the wire to the lights and the VHF radio, the mast was removed to the yard and laid across saw horses.
 Oh, by the way, did I mention that I had never done any thing like this before and was clueless about how to proceed from here? 
     Well, how hard can this be? It's just a big aluminum pole with some wire in it that should be replaced as the wire is all black inside the covering (badly corroded). All I have to do is to slide the luff tracks out and replace the wire, right ? Simple! I'll just take this big hammer and 2x4 and knock the shoe off the bottom of the mast and....... IT's NOT MOVING! After a few minutes of pounding, I feared I would break the casting and resorted to asking the yard manager what to do. He said that heating the mast might do it, but I knew that could soften the aluminum at the foot of the mast so I opted against that. After a couple days of brainstorming I knew I had but one option; cut the shoe off the mast. 
     I had to make this a straight cut, so I wrapped tape around the mast 1.5 inches above the shoe and began to saw. The shoe eventually fell to the ground and I picked it up to peel the mast end off the shoe. I was totally astonished at how much corrosion had accumulated there! There was NO WAY that shoe would have come off any other way. But now the mast is 1.5"shorter than it was. What can that hurt, right?
     I proceeded with the rewire, complete with new steaming/deck light, anchor light, VHF antennae, and new VHF cable. I did everything right and slid all the luff tracks back in. By the way, THEY all slid in and out quite easily.
     After three coats of flawlessly applied Jet Black Perfection, I was now faced with a dilemma; all my standing rigging was now too short. What to do?

      I used to be a profile mill machinist and when we saw we were taking too much off the part the common solution was to shim up the pattern with the appropriate amount of masking tape thus moving the tracing stylus out, adding material to the part. So I fashioned two blocks of 3/4" teak wood to the shape of the bottom of the mast shoe, and using longer bolts bolted the shoe to the deck, effectively raising the mast assembly 1.5". Now the standing rigging would work.
     After installing bullet connectors to the wiring (so I wouldn't have to cut them if I had to drop the mast again), the mast was re-stepped, wiring reconnected and rigging re-tightened. I turned on the VHF radio and it worked - as did all the lights.
      I was quite proud of my newly rebuilt shiny

 BLACK mast. But this would not be the last time this mast would come down.

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