How We Replaced Our Standing Rigging in Grenada (And What It Cost)

May 15, 2026

It started with a coffee stain. Not on the rig — on the survey report we'd paid a guy in St. Augustine to write two years earlier. "Shrouds show minor surface corrosion at lower swages. Recommend inspection annually." We'd inspected them. With binoculars. From the dinghy. They looked fine.

Then we sailed to Bequia. Beam reach, 18 knots true, boat speed 7.2, everything singing. And I heard it — a ping, like someone flicking a wine glass with a fingernail. Then another. I looked up and watched a hairline crack open in the starboard lower shroud's swage fitting. It was holding, but it was holding the way a tired man holds a rope. Not for long.

The Decision

We were three weeks from our Atlantic crossing window. The shroud was original — 1987. The boat was a Pearson 365, and she'd done one circumnavigation already. I knew the rigging was old. I didn't know it was dying in real time.

Options:

• Replace one shroud in Bequia and hope the rest weren't plotting against us.
• Sail to St. Maarten where there was a proper rigger with a bench and a hydraulic press.
• Sail to Grenada, where we'd heard there was a guy who'd worked on rigs for 20 years and charged Caribbean prices instead of European ones.

We chose Grenada. It was downwind. It had a boatyard. And frankly, after the shock of that crack, I wanted every piece of wire off the mast and either replaced or blessed by someone who knew what they were looking at.

Finding the Rigger

We asked around Prickly Bay. Three different cruisers mentioned the same name — a guy named Marcus who worked out of Clarke's Court Boatyard. One of them, a Dutch couple on a steel ketch, showed us their rig. "He did this in 2019. We sailed to New Zealand and back. No issues."

I called him on a Monday. He came to the boat Tuesday morning with a magnetic particle tester and a notebook. He didn't touch the rig for ten minutes. Just looked. Then he tapped each shroud with a screwdriver and listened to the ring.

"Your forestay is tired," he said. "Your port uppers have two broken strands I can see without the glass. Your backstay is fine, but it's lonely. Everything else is questionable. I'd replace the lot."

The Quote

He wrote it on a piece of paper from a spiral notebook:

• 9 x 1×19 stainless shrouds and stays, 5/16" diameter
• Norseman swageless terminals (he refused to use swaged fittings — said he'd seen too many fail)
• New toggles and clevis pins where needed
• Removal and re-stepping of mast (required for inspection)
• Re-tuning and rig tuning report

Total: $4,200 USD. Labor included. Turnaround: 7–10 days.

I laughed. Not because it was funny, but because the same job quoted in Fort Lauderdale had been $8,500. In Newport, $11,000. Here was a guy with 20 years of experience, a tester, and a reputation, quoting half what I'd pay in the US.

The Process

Day 1: Mast unstep. They used the crane at Clarke's Court — $350 for the lift, included in the quote. The mast came out at 0900. By noon, the old rigging was cut off and lying on the ground like a dead snake. Marcus showed me the forestay. The wire looked fine. The terminal was cracked inside, invisible until you bent it back and forth.

Day 2–3: He made the new rigging in his shop. I watched. He cut each wire to length, threaded the Norseman cones, and used a hydraulic swager on the upper terminals. The Norseman fittings are mechanical — you can inspect them, re-torque them, and replace them at sea if you have to. Try that with a swaged fitting.

Day 4: Mast inspection. He found a corroded mast step bolt and a sheave that was grooved too deep. We replaced both — another $180 in parts, two hours labor.

Day 5: Re-stepping and tuning. He used a Loos gauge and tuned the rig to Pearson's original spec, then added 10% because we were heading offshore. "You want a little more pre-tension in the uppers for the ocean," he said. "The mast will pump less."

Day 6: I went up the mast in the bosun's chair and checked every pin, every cotter ring, every turnbuckle. It was perfect. Not "good enough." Perfect.

What We Paid (Full Breakdown)

What We'd Do Differently

Three things:

1. Don't wait for the crack. We knew the rigging was 37 years old. We should have replaced it in Trinidad the year before, when we had time and weren't staring down a crossing window. Old rigging doesn't send a calendar invite before it fails.

2. Ask about the turnbuckles. Marcus replaced two that were pitted. The others looked fine, but two years later, one of the originals started weeping rust. Next time, I'll replace all the turnbuckles at once. It's $300 more. Cheap insurance.

3. Get it in writing. Marcus worked on a handshake. He's old school. For a $4,000 job, I should have asked for a simple written quote with specs. He delivered everything promised, but if he hadn't, I'd have had no recourse. In the islands, reputation is currency — but paper still helps.

The Verdict

We sailed to the Azores six weeks later. The rig didn't make a sound. Not a creak, not a groan, not a ping. In 2,800 miles of ocean, I looked up at those Norseman terminals a hundred times and smiled. $4,300 for peace of mind is the best money we've spent on the boat.

If you're in Grenada and your rig is older than your first mate, go see Marcus. Tell him the Pearson sent you.