Folding Rigging

Last year, about this time, we pulled our boat out of the water and brought it to our house to work on it. Everything went fine and we started hauling it back into town (6 miles away) to put the boat back in the water. The weather was significantly warmer, though, and we think the power or telephone lines stretched because our boat hit the lines, killed the power, and bent our aluminum rigging backwards. Nothing else happened to the boat and we got it back into the water.

We have a great welder and mechanic who looks at our boat when we are lucky enough to get into his busy schedule. I mentioned the idea of not just repairing our bent rigging but cutting it so that we could fold it down in the future to prevent this from happening again.

The welder did just that - he put a hinge in our rigging and it turned out beautifully. This picture shows the hinged rigging as we just pulled the boat out two days ago.