I started sailing as a boy on my father’s heavy, wooden ketch, the Windjob, on Puget Sound. Then as a young man, I began to learn about real seamanship as crew on Jack Carstarphen’s 74-foot, gaff-headed ketch Maverick in the Caribbean. Both ships had plenty of control lines, especially Maverick, and both had pin rails at the base of the mainmast and shroud-mounted pin rails at the mizzen shrouds. There were always plenty of belaying pins on which to tie the sail control lines, and it was easy to attach each line onto the proper pin at the mast because the lines fell easily into place.
Few modern boats use belaying pins for mast-based control lines, with the designs of Lyle Hess being perhaps the primary exception. Sailors now typically rely on cleats or clutches mounted on the mast or the deck around the mast. As the number of lines grows, so does the crowding and confusion on the sides of the mast or on deck around the mast.
When I acquired Adavida, my Brewer-designed Morgan 382, over two decades ago, I knew I wanted to rig her for offshore work. We move her nearly every spring from Portland, Ore. to British Columbia, up the Washington State coast. That coast is known as the Graveyard of the Pacific and I have regularly encountered rough weather in our transits. I also had voyaging plans for my retirement. I knew the number of lines I wanted to rig would never all fit on cleats or clutches on the mast itself.
Of course, the halyards coming down the inside the mast would have to be tied to the mast. That included two main halyards and two genoa halyards. I could continue to use cleats or clutches for those. But where could I belay and store the many other lines for offshore work, all of which would be run outside the mast? To begin, the external portion of Adavida’s extra main halyard is always rigged to a three-to-one tackle system kept in reserve to lift aboard any crew member who falls overboard. Even retrieving a person who is hanging over the side attached to a jackline may require a lifting tackle. While LifeSling instructions suggest using a main halyard and a winch for this purpose, I knew I wanted to have an effective lifting tackle that one person could manage always ready in an emergency.
Next, Adavida uses an external halyard for the Solent jib, a line that also can raise the storm jib if needed. Then come two spinnaker halyards hanging from the cranes at the masthead. In order to run downwind using two jibs on two poles, I also have rigged two topping lifts with four-to-one tackles so a short-handed crew can raise and lower the poles with ease. Finally, we need flag halyards on each spreader so we can fly our club burgee, along with quarantine and courtesy national flags.
How could we manage all these lines? Belaying pins made sense, even on our relatively modern sloop. To keep the mess of lines away from the mast, however, I decided against a pin rail surrounding the mast. Instead, I mounted my pin rails on the main shrouds. On Adavida, the cap shrouds ran down from the spreaders outboard of the two lower shrouds. The two lowers were a little less than three feet apart at five feet above the deck. That meant a pin rail holding three belaying pins would fit neatly between the two lowers on each side of the boat. For the external jib halyard, of course, we would still use a mast-mounted winch to achieve a good, tight luff, but the line and its bulky coil then could be moved to the pin rail, out of the way. We set our cruising chute using a sock and typically need no winch to raise it. So for the spinnaker halyards, emergency lifting tackle, pole lifts and flag halyards, the pin rails also would suffice both for making fast and storing the coiled lines.
Ted Brewer gave the Morgan 382 a fairly narrow shroud base, so the two lowers come down close to the cabin sides. That meant crew working at the mast easily would be able to reach all the lines on the pin rails while staying close to the mast. We carry dedicated tethers at the mast base. When attached to one of those tethers, a crew at the mast can work safely in the relatively narrow space between the mast and the shrouds. In fact, after installing the pin rails, we have come to realize the mast, shrouds and pin rails create a kind of protective cage in which to work.
There is one other advantage to our set-up. Shroud-mounted pin rails store our extra lines away from the mast. That means those lines less frequently create the typical racket set up when lines slap against a mast in strong winds.
Once I knew what I wanted, final design and fabrication became the next step. While I do a lot of boat maintenance myself, I decided building really good pin rails probably exceeded both my carpentry skills and my available tools. Most critically, each pin rail would consist of two mating parts that would clamp around the forward and aft lower main shrouds. Those shrouds come down to the deck at an angle; the forward shroud slants backwards from the deck, and the aft shroud slants forward. The easiest way to drill angled holes through the wood would be to use an adjustable drill press, which I did not have. But I knew someone who did.
My old friend Jim Leslie, who sadly has passed away, over the years made lots of stainless and bronze fittings for my boats and the boats of many other Portland sailors. After retiring from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, he set up a fabulous machine shop in his basement. Not only was he talented and friendly, but he charged only $12 per hour. With some good-natured grumbling, he agreed to work on wood, just for me and just this once.
I handed Jim four pieces of half-inch teak, cut to the length and width I wanted, 3 x 36 inches. On those pieces, I had marked the locations where the shrouds would pass through the wood and the angles at which the holes needed to be drilled. Jim and I decided each wood “sandwich” needed six through-bolts holding it together. There would be two closely together on each side of the supporting shrouds and two more along the length of the rail. Those bolts would hold the rail around each shroud and hold the two pieces of the wood sandwiched together without distortion. We also decided to put two stainless eyebolts through each pin rail where halyards could be attached for storage.
I acquired six beautiful ½ inch x 10 ½ inch bronze belaying pins from Hamilton Marine in Maine, and Jim drilled holes through the rails to space the pins evenly along their length. (Note: Hamilton Marine no longer sells pins of this dimension. Its ½ inch pins are now 9 ½ inches long, which is still sufficient for the job.) Each hole was drilled out to a diameter of just slightly over half an inch. When I bought them, the pins were beautiful, bright bronze, but I have not kept them polished. I do not mind the green corrosion that appears on sea-going bronze and frankly have no interest in the daily effort to maintain polished metal around saltwater.
It was easy work for Jim to create each pin rail, drilling the shroud holes to the proper angles and drilling straight down the rails for the pins. He also drilled and countersunk the six holes on each rail to hold the two sides around the shrouds and the smaller holes for the eyebolts. We used six 3/8-inch stainless bolts, washers and nuts to hold the rails together. When Jim finished, I rounded all the sharp edges with sandpaper for appearance’s sake, applied several coats of Cetol finish and installed the pin rails on Adavida’s shrouds. That final job was simple because Jim’s handiwork made sure they fit perfectly.
Making pin rails like mine is actually simpler than I had first thought; you do not need a master craftsman like my friend Jim to create them. Anyone minimally adept at woodworking can create shroud pin rails. Each consists simply of two pieces of wood, cut to span across two shrouds, mated together with through bolts. The holes for the connecting bolts and the pins are drilled straight through the wood, so the use of any drill press (or very accurate hand drilling) will suffice for that work. The only tricky part is drilling angled holes down through the rails to encapsulate the shrouds. For Jim, with an adjustable drill press, that was simplicity itself. But anyone with a standard drill press, an inexpensive “angle locator” and a drill press vice can do it.
One also can drill angled holes using a common electric hand drill and a portable angle drill guide (I suggest using a metal guide, not one made of plastic). In 1998, when I asked a master machinist to create my pin rails, YouTube and its thousands of “how-to” videos were just a gleam in some tech bro’s eye. Now, with a quick computer search, you can find dozens of video guides on how to drill accurate, angled holes.
After a summer of cruising with the new pin rails in place, I realized my design had one serious flaw. The pin rails projected forward of each shroud by about two inches.
I quickly discovered they were perfectly (mis)designed to grab genoa sheets and disrupt a tack. A more skilled rigger would have seen the flaw in the design without having to wait to watch the genoa sheets regularly wrap themselves around the pin rails. In any case, after that summer, Jim and I designed, and Jim created, a protective stainless bow about five feet in length to fit on each pin rail. The middle of the bow is screwed into the forward end of each rail, and the bow’s upper and lower ends are attached by small stainless hose clamps to the shroud (Each clamp, of course, is well protected with self-amalgamating tape). In profile, the protective bow looks sort of like Robin Hood’s long bow. That solved the genoa sheet problem.
For several years, I used Cetol to finish the rails, matching Adavida’s teak cap rails. But after spending 2017 cruising in the Pacific Ocean tropics with my son, Emerson, I decided to end the nearly constant maintenance required to keep up on pin-rail bright work. Because water can get between the two halves of each rail and because the rails are constantly exposed to the daily sun, Cetol lasted a relatively short time. Moreover, proper refinishing requires removing the rails for a few days and finding temporary locations for eight lines. I needed a better finish.
When Emerson and I returned from the tropics, we had Adavida painted with AwlCraft 2000. Her thinning gelcoat is now covered with shiny white paint, accented with grey decks and cabin top. While that project was underway at the yard, I removed what little remained of the old Cetol from the pin rails and painted them with Interlux’s two-part Perfection paint. I chose a grey color that matches the deck. The Perfection has lasted very well for several years now, with only occasional touch-ups where chaff from a couple of the lines has rubbed through the paint. I like Perfection’s ease of use, appearance and durability.
Not everyone has as many control lines on their masts as we do. Some may consider the old-fashioned look of pin rails incompatible with the lines of modern fiberglass boats. But the pin rails on Adavida have served us very well; I would not be without them. And nearly every time I tie a line around a hefty, bronze belaying pin, I am reminded of the beautiful utility of the wooden boats on which I learned to sail and the two men who taught me to love sailing. n