Motoring to Marathon

Monday, 6 April; a typical Keys day.  Bright blue skies and puffy clouds.  But Saturday, the wind  picked up from the east and by Monday morning was blowing 10-15 knots and forecast to increase.  The easterly direction makes getting from Boca Chica to Marathon especially difficult since in addition to the wind being directly on the nose, there's a westerly current of about a knot.  East winds also mean a long fetch of water for the waves to build.
My dockmate, Jon Siewers, is a long-time sailor and retired Navy Captain who flew helicopters just about anywhere you can touch on a globe.  Since Micky has to drive to Marathon to get us back to Boca Chica, she can't come along.
The reason for the trip is to replace all the stainless (a laughable misnomer in the tropical saltwater world) steel wires that hold the mast up and transfer the considerable forces the wind puts on my 5-ton boat into its hull.  Most land folks never really feel the force of the wind.  Other than an occasional buffeting of their cars, the wind just blows a few leaves around.  Pulling a 10,000 pound sailboat through the water requires a 30 horsepower engine just to get to 5.5 knots and we regularly run over 6 knots under sail.  Yes, it is faster to sail!
So strength and light weight are needed to hold up the mast.  The mast itself is a strong aluminum extrusion and altogether weighs around 250 pounds.  Most of the rigging wires are the diameter of my little finger.
Saltwater corrodes everything and when it gets into the small cups that the wire is crimped into, it forms a very weak battery that over years transfers the protective nickel and chromium out of the wires and results in rust.  Rust weakens the metal not only on the surface, but "bone deep" also.
I had the experts from Keys Rigging inspect and they were alarmed enough at the condition of my 30 year-old rig to refuse to climb to the top and warn me to not sail the boat.  They also ran my jib halyard to the deck parallel to the starboard shroud lines and used the main halyard to take some strain off the backstay.
The trip east to Marathon was turning out to be much rougher than expected.  A sailboat without her sails up does not have the higher center of effort and "punch" into the waves, being driven by her propeller below the water.  TANGO had an uncomfortable motion that was working the rig harder than we wanted while crippled.
Thanks to current and wind we could only manage around 4 knots across the ground, and with the waves on the nose the boat would occasionally pound on hard and almost stop.   As a result, the 35 mile trip took 8 and a half hours instead of the 7 hours the boat was capable of.
Jon and I took turns watching out for crab pots and monitoring the autopilot as it did a sloppy job in the seas we had.  At the west end of the Seven Mile Bridge the current from the Florida Bay exits into the Atlantic resulting in a confused wave action at lowering tide due to shallow water.  We caught an odd wave and heard a noise like a slamming door that we both interpreted at coming from below.  I thought that the head door had slammed shut.  Then we found the windex lying on deck and looks up to see the starboard upper shroud had parted at the upper spreader and the mast was relying on the jib halyard to stay in column.
Keys Rigging and Curt Johnson were dead right about the rig!  We made it in to the calm waters of the lee side of Knight's Key and motored into the slip with my wife, Micky, handling the lines.
The next day, we couldn't get back up to the boat until after we had moved the motorhome into full hookups on the water in Sigsbee Park.  First-world problem!  By the time we arrived, the crane was there and the mast was rigged for pickup.
When the mast was laid across two saw horses, the extent of the shroud failure was shocking.  It looked like the wire barrel had exploded separating from the eye fitting.  The wire was still firmly crimped into the barrel, but the pressure of the rust and the crevice corrosion had blown a half-inch hole in the side.
The moral is that if your boat has been in saltwater over a year, you need to get your wires inspected. It cannot be done from the deck.  Only with a magnifying glass and close in will you see the true extent of the damage.