When something breaks in your Rigging, the repair is called a Jury Rig. On passage from Gibraltar to Madeira, a 700 mile voyage on the same tack, our windward chainplates broke to the cap shroud and aft lower. Not a good situation when you’re 300+ miles from land!
While this picture shows the jury rig on the leeward side, it was actually the windward side for the majority of the voyage!
To support the loads of the cap shroud and aft lower, I lashed them to the neighboring deadeyes at a 45* angle. This angle helps keep the loads lower so that the remaining chainplates don’t become overwhelmed and break as well.
This spread out the load to the remaining two chainplates (forward lower and check stay) while keeping the mast up.
The other very important thing we did as soon as we found the problem was change the sailplan to a setup that would put the least strain on the weakened rigging.
Being a cutter, we have redundancy in our rigging. The masthead setup is again repeated at the height of our staysail.
The Cap Shroud is stressed by loads on the headstay which pull on the mast head. This meant no jib or full main while we had the broken chainplate. The aft lower is in charge of holding the middle of the mast in place when the spar is loaded, but this task is also provided by the forward lower which also is in charge of giving the mast a forward bend. Being how we were not racing, absolute trueness of the spar was not that critical so the aft lower was of little priority at the moment.
The sailplan was staysail and trysail, with the trysail set at the spreaders. The staysail was supported by the inner forestay and the check stays which also acted like lower cap shrouds for it. Running backstays would not provide this same lateral support as they run too far aft and only function as a backstay.
The trysail was set at the spreaders to keep the forces low and light. Less force aloft meant less strain on the broken rigging.
Being keel stepped with a thick and heavy mast meant that the spar itself was intrinsically stiff. The broken rigging was a unwelcome but not catastrophic.
Figure this, we were sailing along when I discovered the broken chainplates. This means that they were not supporting the mast and the mast was still able to remain unbroken while sailing in 20 knots of breeze. I jury rigged the stays to once again give support to the spar, but the spar was able to support the load on its own without those stays (for the short amount of time, I wouldn’t have wanted to sail 3 days on it without the support!)
When we arrived to our tiny island, I found a mechanic who machined new chainplates for us to replace the broken ones. With the new chainplates installed and the rig set back up to normal, we can now safely sail away to continue crossing the Atlantic.
