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M

ost masts come to Oriental in the full, upright position on their boats. A few, though, arrive on the horizontal.

That was the case Saturday when Ross Otterbacher took delivery of two masts for the Formosa 41 ketch he’s been working on.

With a little help from his friends, Ross Otterbacher (3rd from right) brings a mast to his workshop, a move that involved crossing Broad Street..

Getting the masts — a main and a mizzen — to Oriental from Florida was a task for Triton’s. The next trick was to get the heavy cargo off of the Triton’s truck and in to Ross’s workshop on Broad Street.

Enter: a dozen friends.

They gathered Saturday afternoon to bring the masts in to the waiting sawhorses. It was no easy task. Ross estimates that the main mast, with its rigging weighed in at 1,600 pounds, while the mizzen was approximately 800.

Two masts were delivered.. but first, two that had been in the workshop, had to be removed..

By the time Triton’s Ralf Heit drove up with the two masts, the mast-moving crew was rather practiced, having earlier moved a main mast and a mizzen from the workshop to make way for the new ones. (Ross was replacing the older masts because a lawnmower hit them, sending one crashing to the concrete ground; the resulting fracture — seemingly small — was not something he wanted to think about in a gale, so he searched for and then found the masts which arrived Saturday.)

Ross Otterbacher and the masts that came with the boat…before a dozen folks moved them out of the workshop to make room for the new ones.

More photos follow:

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Posted Tuesday August 18, 2009 by Melinda Penkava

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