Is Your goose about to fly south?

[Fortis]

A little cautionary tale of someone else's woe for you.

A man who is competent and capable both in the business world and in sailing, has owned his boat for more then 4 years...An engineer, for goodness sakes...

Well, he asked me to help him sail his boat from his mooring to a yard at which it could be hauled for bottom paint and some touch-ups to the topsides...

While things are quiet I take some time to look over the boat and do a subtle safety check as is my want. I catch a few minor things, see a bunch of stuff I think could be better, but that is all par for getting on someone else's boat...

It is only when we are actually out in the swells and I am at the mast to hoist the main that I happen to look down at the gooseneck.
There it is, a bit elderly, but very sturdily built. All cast bronze...Apart form the main horizontal pivot pin... Which is stainless...and not a pin...it is a bolt...it is a bolt with threads all the way down it...which was never the right size to fit the hole anyway...which has over however many years it has been there acted like a file and abraided and chewed its way through the bronze until there is only about 6mm of bronze left at the top of the ring and the entire hole is elongated so that the boom is sitting cockeyed and angled, meaning that it does not pivot cleanly along one axis.

I call the guy over and he admits this is looks bad, is surpirsed he never noticed it. He asks if I think we will make it where we are going with it as is (I hate questions like that...it is a lose/lose betting game...And your predictions always get doubted). I say that it is as likely to go twang is we jibe about in the rather tricky condition as if we keep going along the same tack for the next couple of hours...We have auxilery power, so why not keep going. I then take some nylon cord and do my best to add some lashing to the area so that having it go would not be too disasterous.

Boat gets delivered, dire warnings are made about not sailing the boat till the whole goosneck is replaced as it is not just about the bolt needing to be replaced with the right pin any more...
Promises are made etc....

Three weeks later he just posted on the club board about having the boom break and tearing the main (and possibly damaging his starboard lower shrouds) after having his gooseneck explode. Seems he "forgot" to get it replaced...He remembered to slice off the nylon cords a week or two earlier...but forgot to fix the problem.

So my advice is to spend ten quality minutes getting up close and personal with the boom gooseneck (and heck, if you have a rigid Vang, make it a threesome and get up close and personal with youre vang's gooseneck as well). Check the pins, check deformation of the holes, check for lube actually existing on the contact/wear surfaces and not just the outside edges (unless the pins are so worn that the holes are now big enough that spraying from the outside now Does lube the innards...and that is another problem)..Check it for cracks in the casting or welds, check that it is still firmly affixed to your mast and that the boom saddle is firmly anchored anchored and the boom is not cracked or damaged inside the saddle. It is the boats most stressed moving part...and most of us only know its there because we catch our clothing on the sail hook form time to time.

Go and LOOK and check it. Please.


Alex

[maxiSwede]

-Amen!

So true, and yet so easy to forget.  8)

[Captain Smollett]

My left knee agrees.  About a month ago, while raising my main off Charleston, my gooseneck failed and the boom hit my knee.  Was bruised and sore for nearly a week, but I was lucky it did not get broken.

The cause?  Cotter rings in the pin, and one came out.  They've been replaced.

[AdriftAtSea]

Thanks for the story Alex,

Amen.... so many things that you take for granted will work and continue to work on a sailboat.  I just checked mine, since I just took the boom off the boat to lower the mast.

:D

[CapnK]

Dontcha love owners who 'forget' to fix important (and often inconveniently expensive) boat parts?  ::)

I did some work for a guy whose early-70's Hobie had *serious* delamination on top of the stbd hull, forward of the tramp. I told him that sailing the boat without first fixing the hull was taking a big risk, an actual Inevitability, of Something Bad happening.

At the same time, I told him I charged ~$200 to fix that same problem (it is fairly common, and if the price sounds cheap it was because this took place a long time ago :) ). This was 'too much', I guess.

3 weeks later, he was 2 miles offshore, headed out, girlfriend on a trap line, when the hull folded in on them.

Luckily for them, his reaction put the boat into a crash jibe (he wasn't a good enough sailor to have planned that - pure luck), which transferred the sail power onto the port shrouds, keeping the mast up, allowing them to sail back in.

He then spent $600 on a new-used replacement hull, and I made my $200 replacing the hull and getting the boat in shape again. :D