Our Broken Toggle

Or... let's all sing the same old song "Working on boats in exotic places..."



In an inspection of our rigging yesterday, Dave found a key component of the rigging broken. It is called a 'toggle', and it connects the backstay to the mast. It is a machined stainless steel part that is very important to keeping the mast up. It would have been a disaster for this to break at sea. And we can't even move out of the harbor here without locating a replacement part. For now, we have a couple of extra halyards helping to hold the rig up.

Needless to say, there is no West Marine in Isla Isabela. And even West Marine wouldn't have this part in stock. So we've been brainstorming several ideas to try to get a replacement. Here are some of the options we've thought thru

1. Have it made locally in Isabela or Santa Cruz. Problem: Need the correct stainless steel bar stock, not likely to be off-the-shelf here

2. Have a friend in Panama, headed this way soon, try to get it made in Panama. Problem: timing issues

3. Gram from Visions of Johanna, anchored next to us, is flying to England to get a new Autoprop (theirs has a manufacturing defect and they need an immediate replacement--due to logistics of shipping stuff into Ecuador, they have opted to go get the replacement vs trying to have it shipped here). Problem: he will only be on the ground in England for a couple of days, probably not enough time to get his own stuff done, much less get parts for us fabricated.

4. Get someone in England to get it fabbed and get it to Gram before he leaves. We have contacted another CSY owner in England, and he said he'd check with his rigger.

5. Have a guy we met in Quito get it fabricated there, with Gram dropping off the old part and bringing back the new part. We met a really nice guy who lives and works in Quito. He is checking with a couple of machine shops to see if they have the right stock and if they can get it done in time. This is our current most likely prospect.

Dave thought he had spares, but it turns out the spares he had don't fit the two big toggles holding the headstay and the backstay. So whatever we'll do, we'll try to get 2 made, and use the unbroken one currently on our headstay as a spare.