A rig comes out of a hull in under an hour. Deciding whether it should is the part that takes months, and the part that sets the rest of the refit.
Unstepping a mast is the least interesting thing that happens on the day it comes out. The crane is booked, the rigging is eased, the heel comes clear of the step and the whole assembly is on trestles before lunch. Anyone can film it. Nobody learns anything from the film.
What matters is the two questions that put the crane there in the first place: does this rig need to come out, and if it does, what are we going to be able to see once it has? Neither question is answered by looking at a mast from the deck.
A rig hides its condition by design
A standing rig is a structure held in equilibrium by tension. That is a useful property at sea and an inconvenient one in survey, because tension masks a great deal. A fitting that is working loose is held still by the load on it. A crack that has started at the root of a spreader is closed by compression. Corrosion under a tang, between two dissimilar metals, is invisible from every angle you can reach with the rig standing and the boat afloat.
So the honest answer to “does the rig need to come out” is often: we do not yet know, and the only way to know is to take it out. That is an uncomfortable sentence to put in a quotation, which is why a lot of yards do not put it there. They price a rig inspection, carry it out from a bosun's chair, and report what can be seen. Everything they could not see becomes the owner's problem in a year or two, at sea, at a cost that has nothing to do with what the inspection saved.
Tension hides faults. That is what tension is for. It is also why a rig survey done under load tells you less than it appears to.
What gets recorded on the trestles
Once the spar is horizontal and supported at its designed points, the work becomes methodical rather than dramatic. The sequence we follow is the same on a modern sloop and on a square-rigged ship, because the failure modes are the same even when the scale is not.
- Fittings off, one at a time. Every tang, band, sheave box and halyard exit is removed and the seat underneath it inspected. Most of what is found is found here, in the few square centimetres a fitting has been covering.
- Dissimilar metals. Anywhere stainless meets aluminium, or bronze meets steel, the interface is opened, cleaned and photographed. Galvanic corrosion is slow, quiet and entirely predictable, which means it is entirely preventable if someone looks.
- Spreader and yard roots. The highest-load, lowest-visibility joints on the whole structure. These are inspected with the fittings off and, where the material and geometry allow, with dye penetrant or ultrasonic methods rather than with an opinion.
- Wall thickness where it matters. On a metal spar, section loss is not uniform. It concentrates where water has stood or where a coating has failed at an edge. Readings are taken on a grid and logged by station, so the result is a map rather than an impression.
- Standing and running rigging. Wire and rod are inspected end to end with the terminations opened. Age alone does not condemn rigging, but an undocumented history does.
Why a survey report is a commercial document
A rig survey is usually filed as a technical document, and that is a mistake. Its real function is commercial: it converts an unknown into a priced item. Before the survey, the owner is carrying an open-ended risk that no schedule can absorb. After it, they are carrying a number.
This is the whole argument for taking the rig out early rather than late. A finding in week two becomes a scope line, a lead time and a price, and the programme is planned around it. The same finding in week twenty becomes an emergency: the paint hall is committed, the yard is full, the parts are not made yet, and the delivery date that was agreed at contract signature quietly stops being real.
We write findings the day they are found, photograph them, and send them to the owner's representative rather than holding them for a monthly report. That is not a courtesy. It is the only way an owner can make a decision while a decision still costs less than it will next month.
Every finding is a priced item or it is a surprise. There is no third category.
When the scope grows, and when it should not
Scope growth has a bad reputation in refit, and most of the reputation is earned. Work that was always going to be necessary gets discovered late and presented as a new requirement, at a price nobody can benchmark, on a schedule that leaves no room to decline.
The defence against that is not a promise. It is a sequence: survey before specification, specification before contract, and every change after that priced and approved before it is worked. If a rig survey grows the scope, the growth should be visible in the first weeks, traceable to a photograph and a measurement, and accompanied by the option of not doing it.
Sometimes the right answer is to leave it. A rig with documented, in-tolerance section loss and sound terminations does not need to be renewed because it is old. What it needs is a record — so that in five years the next survey has something to compare against, and the conversation starts from data rather than from the beginning.
What the owner ends up with
At the end of a rig programme the deliverable is not only a mast that goes back in. It is a file: the readings, the photographs, the coat-by-coat record of any refinishing, the certificates for anything renewed, and the tension figures the rig was tuned to on the day it was handed back.
That file is what makes the next refit cheaper. It is also what a buyer's surveyor asks for first, and what an insurer is most reassured by. A rig that comes with a documented history is worth more than an identical rig that does not, and the difference is larger than the cost of keeping the record.
Written at the yard in Tuzla. Figures quoted are the ones we record on the job and hand over with the vessel.