I read Jim Bailey’s article on a mast pivot. Like Jim I own a Mirror 16 and sometimes need to drop the mast when on the water. I once sailed down the Thames from Abingdon to Putney and had to drop the mast 40 times and my back ached with the strain of it.

No longer. I devised my system ten years ago in preparation for the Three Rivers Race on the Broads. I simply tie the foot of the mast to the deck just aft of the mast step. There is an eye against the coaming either side of the mast step and an eye either side of the mast about an inch from the heel. The line goes from one deck eye to the other via the front of the mast and held guided by the two mast eyes. The forestay is attached via a pulley arrangement except that to allow the jib to be as low as possible there is no pulley on the deck, just a short length of stainless tube to act as a sheave. After all there is no load on the stay when I am raising or lowering the mast. The system works so well that I only lower the main till the boom is in the boat and drop all standing. It can be well under two minutes from sails drawing to sails drawing! The reason I stopped lowering the sail was because one time the halyard caught round the top of the mast while trailing in the water and the mainsail would not go right up. This was in the middle of the night and I couldn’t see what was wrong till dawn.

Other tricks are to have a length of strong bungee across the transom which is pulled forward to a cleat on the tiller when required so that the boat can steer itself while I am dropping the mast, fixing the spinnaker pole, paddling or any other duty. A simple X crutch keeps the tip of the mast above the water and makes the use of the tiller a lot easier. I also take the jib roller reefing line back along one side then across the thwart so that I can furl or reef from either gunwale.