The first thing that the Tag Instructor noticed the weekend before, were some missing cotter pins on the lifelines. Frankly, neither Rick nor I had spent much time looking at the lifelines. We didn’t really know what to look for, and we felt fairly confident they were in good shape because we thought they had been replaced by the previous owner. Checking out Cool Change’s rigging was the next on our agenda anyway, so I took off a day from work and met the rigger down at the boat so he could do a rigging analysis.
The rigger we hired was actually the same rigger who the previous owner had hired. I discovered that he did replace all the standing rigging, but he did NOT replace the lifelines; they were most likely, original. So, we hired him to replace the lifelines. He said the rig looked pretty well in tune, so that didn’t need to be changed. He made several suggestions for rigging changes, some of which we’ll do and some we won’t. We had him replace the main halyard, include a new shackle for the main, add additional purchase onto the boom vang, and replace the headsail halyard.