A sailing yacht refit in Turkey opens what the mast was covering

A sailing yacht owner comparing yards asks what a motor yacht owner asks: who holds the trades, which berth, how much covered space, what date. Underneath sits a question only he has, and it is not about the rig.

It is about the parts of the hull that cannot be looked at while the mast is in: the step, the partners, the compression post under a deck-stepped rig, and the landings the chainplates are bolted through. Those are hull scopes, and they open only while the spar is out.

Reviva states its scope as refit, rebuild and restoration for sailing and motor yachts, and the head yard is Tuzla. What follows is the part of a sailing yacht refit in Turkey a motor yacht programme has no equivalent of.

Mast step, partners and chainplates: what only opens when the mast is out

Which gate she sits behind is settled by her own numbers at survey, and that allocation has its own piece. What it does not say is that the lift opens a hull scope as well as a berth.

She keeps her worst work there, because those places are wet, loaded and covered. Fresh water stands at a step and does not drain. Bedding at the partners hardens and lets water into a deck core nobody has opened. A chainplate is bolted through a landing behind a liner that has not moved in a decade.

Chainplate renewal is a hull scope wearing a rigging name. The fastening is the small part. The landing under it is the job, and it is laminate, plate or floors, priced by the trade that owns that material, not by a rigger.

Where a rig finding lands in the hull programme

Deciding whether the mast should come out at all has its own piece here. What it does not cover is what happens to everything else once the answer is yes.

A crack at a chainplate landing found in week two is a laminate or steel scope with a drawing, a procedure and a place in the queue. Found in week nine, the same crack sits in a hall where the deck is caulked and the spar is dressed to go up. The repair has not changed. What comes off again to reach it has.

So the order runs the other way round from the one an owner expects. The rig scope is not waiting on the hull. The hull scope under the rig is waiting on the spar to come out of it, and the weeks between the lift and the re-step are its whole access.

Steel spar fabrication on this floor, rather than in somebody else's shop

The other question a sailing yacht refit in Turkey turns on is whether the spar is a package the yard makes or one it buys. A spar made on site sits inside the hull's own weekly report. A spar crated and freighted out is a second programme on a second calendar.

The yard behind this house has built sail. Mengi Yay launched Çağlar, thirty-six metres of sail, at Tuzla in 1992, and built Gweilo, the 47.4-metre two-masted wooden schooner drawn by Dykstra Naval Architects, in 2009.

In the mast shop at Tuzla since August 2026 is a complete set of steel sailing masts for the 1931 four-masted barque Sea Cloud, built in steel as the originals were: heavier sections, tighter distortion control and a more demanding approach to alignment than a modern spar would ask for. The sections are rolled, formed and welded from steel traceable to class; the welds are then examined to an agreed NDT plan, and the set trial-assembled, coated and sea-fastened before shipping to Malta, under DNV class.

Read that narrowly. What this floor makes is the spar and the structure under it — metalwork and naval architecture are on the payroll here, and who employs the trades is worth asking anywhere. The rig survey, the standing rigging and the tune belong to the rig designer and the rigger attending.

Two questions settle the rest:

• Where the section is formed, and under whose procedure — the yard's own metalwork shop, or a spar maker with his own queue.
• Where the spar lies while the rigging is off it — under cover on site, or at an address the hull programme cannot see.

What a rigging item in a quotation has to carry a date for

Age alone does not condemn standing rigging. An undocumented history does. A set with a written record — when it went on, what has been opened since, how the terminals looked when they were last off — can be argued about on evidence. A set with no record is renewed because nothing else can be said.

So the useful line in a quotation is not standing rigging replacement on its own. It is that line with a date attached and a survey behind the date. Inspection is what finds the cracked tang and the worn clevis, and turns renewal from an assumption into a decision.

A sailing deck carries rig loads

Winches, tracks, travellers, the furler drum, mainsheet and vang attachments are bolted through the deck. On a motor yacht the hardware through a deck is awning sockets and a passerelle. On a sailing yacht the deck is the working surface, and each fitting's load is carried by structure underneath.

The deck programme has its own piece. What it does not have to account for is that every hole through a sailing deck is a load path and a leak path at once, so the backing structure is inspected while the fitting is off.

Re-stepping, and the half of a trial a motor yacht never has

Re-stepping is the crane for the second time, and then the rig is tuned, which is less a task with a duration than a state arrived at over several sessions, some afloat. A fair line read down her topsides with the rig out is read again once she is stepped.

That is where a sailing trial stops resembling a motor yacht trial. Machinery under load, steering timing, vibration, noise: a sailing yacht proves all of it as well, and then a second half, sailed and loaded on both tacks, the leeward shrouds watched, the mast looked at in column.

One question arrives before any of that. Where a refit changes a mast section, a sail plan or the weight carried aloft, it becomes a naval architecture question, settled in the survey weeks rather than the spar weeks — a changed mast section is a design question before it is a fabrication one.

Written at the yard in Tuzla, where a set of steel masts is in build; intervals, sections, loads and clearances are the rig designer's and the attending surveyor's to set.