The Coolest Halyard on the Planet

The other day a club member proudly showed me a very clever modification he has made to his boat, and it's worth passing on. He calls it his "geezer halyard." This sailor is in his early 70's, not ready to give up sailing, but ready for some of the harder physical tasks to be a little easier.

Meanwhile I had heard from an old friend -- my long-lost first husband, actually, the man who introduced me to sailing and got me so hooked on it that I spent nearly 40 years daydreaming about returning to the sport some day. While he is generally in good health, he had to have rotater cuff surgery not that long ago, and was looking for easier ways to handle his boat. However, this adaptation isn't just for "senior citizens." I have a thirty-year-old daughter who has also had rotater cuff surgery. The truth is that any of us can have some sort of injury at any time that could make sailing harder for us.

If you look at the picture below, you'll actually see a couple of things this clever inventor has done to make his boat easier to manage. If you see the triangular thing sticking off the mast, that's one of a series of mast steps. With those mast steps, he can still climb his own mast.

Which he did. At the top, he used a pop rivet gun to attach a piece of hardware at the *very top* of the side of the mast. He attached an extra long halyard to that hardware. before leading that halyard through its sheave at the top of the mast, he first dropped it to near the bottom, and fed it through a block attached to a snapshackle. Then he took the halyard back to the top of the mast, through the sheave, back down the mast and through turn blocks to run it back to the cabin top and cockpit. (You don't have to run your halyards back to the cockpit, but it will make the boat much easier and safer to sail single-handed.)

In the picture below, the snapshackle for his halyard is run back to a loop on the top of his StackPack. If you're going to attach your halyard to a lifeline, that will require a little more length as well, so measure appropriately.

The "Geezer Halyard." You can see the extended halyard dropping

from the top of the mast, through a block, and back up again.

When he's ready to sail, he moves the snapshackle from his StackPack to the head of his sail. Because of the block attached to the snapshackle, he now has 2:1 purchase on his halyard. I tried it. His halyard is remarkably easy to raise. It certainly would make the task easier not only for those with shoulder injuries, but those with bad backs or arthritis in their hands.

This sailor put his block and snapshackle together from hardware he already had, but he's going to make a few changes.

First of all, the snapshackle he used is the type that swivels. This allows the two lengths of halyard going up to the sheave to twist, so it has introduced one more thing that can go wrong while raising the sail. Below are pictures of hardware I found at West Marine, a single block, and a non-swiveling snapshackle to attach to the becket.

Hardware used to connect your 2:1 halyard to the head of your sail

 It's still possible to get the two lengths of halyard twisted, but it's a good practice to eyeball the entire length of your halyard to look for things it might be hung up on anyway. The block costs about $36 at West Marine, and the snapshackle about $22. It's crucial that you use stainless steel hardware. You do not want your hardware to break at the top of the mast.

Besides the extra (but avoidable) chance of a fouled halyard, there are two other downsides to this adaptation. First, you'll have a lot of extra line in the cockpit after the sail is raised. Once your halyard is raised, you're going to have extra halyard in the cockpit. One option is to take a moment and hank the dangling halyard. If your halyard has a dedicated winch, you can put a loop over the winch, and the halyard will be stowed neatly. You can also find "line bags" on line you can hang near the bottom of your mast or in your cockpit to catch that line.

Second, you will have increased the number of turns your halyard has to make as you drop it. You may find that you have to go to the mast and help encourage the sail to drop when you're ready to take the sails down.

There's one more thing you might want to note about the hardware shown above: the sheave in the block I photographed is black. It seems counter-intuitive, but black plastic is more resistant to damage from UV rays than white. A block with a black sheave in it will last longer than one with a white sheave.

Finally, make sure your halyard size runs freely through the block, and that the snapshackle is large enough to attach easily to the head of your sail. If you choose a piece of hardware with a pin in it, make sure it's of a type where the pin can't be completely removed. The halyard hardware on my first boat used a pin that could fall out, and it did within five days. Then, of course, it bounced on the cabin top and into the marina. If a crucial piece of hardware can free itself it will, laughing all the way to the bottom.

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