Surveyors Roundtable: Why Masts Fail

Steve Knox covered this topic several years ago at IBEX, and we think it's a good one for our roundtable members to discuss. According to Pat Kearns, "It’s quite remarkable that more sailing rigs don’t fail given the ignorance of those who confidently sail 30-year-old boats still equipped with the original rigging. This luck is probably the rule because (1) most of those boats are never pushed to their performance edge but it takes only one 'push' to bring the whole thing down and (2) because, somewhere along the way, an insurance company required a survey or in the due process of a sale/purchase, a marine surveyor looked at the boat, including the rigging, and the underwriter dictated rigging renewals."

Check out the blog page for this show for more detail.