After all this time, the reassembly is starting. The rain is not helping. Huge shout out to people who’ve helped (that means YOU Gerry for helping to run a tricky cable through the mast, and Daniel for help on the solar wire (although that’s not done yet). Another challenging cable went through for the deck light, and there’s one more for the steaming light (more about that in another post).

For the record, here’s the main reason the mast removal had to happen:

This is the tang on the mast that holds up the diamond shrouds. You can see significant corrosion under it; it almost looks like it’s about to come completely off at the bottom part. As a side note, that small hook and wire coming off near the bottom happens to be an anti-bird wire.
And once that thing was removed, it looked like this:

As you can see, the corrosion was so bad that the aluminium was starting to bend inward. The mast probably would have snapped at this point under heavy load, or this whole section would have collapsed.
The fix looks like this:

That looks a lot better. After blasting the area even further, this plate was attached to the remaining aluminum using marine-tek epoxy. If the mast breaks now, it won’t be here.

And, for completeness, after painting here’s what it looks like:

That should work for a while!