Well folks, the day finally came! For two years I've had my eye on a pair of 46' wood masts that have been lying on a beach on a small island, victims of a tropical storm that put the boat on the reef. The masts were in fairly good shape, but had splits up the glue lines. I would not deem them safe for their intended use, but they have a few hundred board feet of quarter-sawn old growth Douglas Fir well worth salvaging. After two years it is way more than fair salvage. Legally it could have been salvaged right away, but certainly after this long there is no way someone can say "Hey, I was coming back for those!" It had come to a point that if someone didn't do something with them they were just going to rot and get bug eaten.

With two sit-on-top Hobie double kayaks with the foot peddle system and my single strip-built 19' kayak and a proper Greenland paddle, we set off on mission impossible. I think it's a sin to peddle a kayak, but my friend rents them to tourists and they are great for people with handicaps that can't swing a paddle. I have to say, they gave me a run for my money with two strong guys versus one of me, but I won the race to the beach! The peddle systems gave us another advantage- more torque for towing- my friends could peddle and paddle at the same time.

Well it turned out they didn't need the paddles. In fact, we didn't need two SOT's. We lashed the masts together and hitched my kayak and a double SOT in a line with one guy actually riding on the back of the masts with a piece of wood for a rudder. That was too funny of a sight for words, and darn it I left the camera ashore! The other kayak just followed for added steerage if needed. We made amazing time pulling two masts that I estimate weighed 400 pounds each. Arriving ashore, my friends had to bail on me, but I was happy just to have them on land where I could get them home.

Getting them home required the unthinkable- cutting those two 46' masts in half!!! I brought an expert boatwright with me to give them one last inspection and say for sure that they could not be fixed before hacking them in two. He agreed with me that they were no longer safe for masts, but in amazingly good shape for salvage wood. With a sawzall and a portable circular saw we did the dastardly deed of sawing 20' off each end, then on one of them another 6' came off to end up with three 20', one 26', and one 6' section of mast. They were hollow rectangular with 2" thick fore and aft, and 1" thick up the sides. The sides are 9" wide and the fore and aft pieces 8". I was really wanting them to be spruce, but when we sawed into them we smelled that sweet piney smell and saw the reddish color and were quite sure it was fir. Later I would confirm it is for sure fir.

Getting them home atop an XTerra roof rack meant four trips, one mast at a time. I am quite certain these things were pushing 200 pounds per section. The roof rack being rated at 125, we placed some minicell under them to spread the load a little, and took it reaaaaal slow. The local fishermen that hang out on the porch of a local store seemed to enjoy watching us make trip after trip with these massive sections of mast on the truck!

So now I have a whoooooooole lot of old growth fir. The aft pieces are the tightest grain, and darn it they have screws every 3" all the way up holding the sail track on, so I have to split them down the middle. I am going to build a paddleboard, a skin on frame kayak, a few surfboards, and possibly another stripper out of this stuff. It is extremely light, much like spruce, and I think it's going to make some very light boats. All I have to do is remove about 200 screws and a few bolts and then I will sand them to see if any missed broken screws show up, run a stud finder over them, and then with fingers crossed run them through the planer.