De-masting - Dulcinea

We awoke to a warm boat after leaving the fan heater on all night (all good when
you dont have to pickup the power bill!),after a bit of a sleep in this morning and a good feed of bacon and eggs on english muffins we had a bit of a tidy up and got to work marking the shroud turnbuckle lengths and undoing them ready for the mast to come out. Before we knew it Lloyd from Sounds Shipwright was there and going through what we needed to get done. We decided to motor over to the commercial dock where the hiab is and finish everything off there. Before long we had shrouds disconnected, backstay off, roller furler/forestay off. Boom was fully disconnected and removed from the boat and I was being hoisted up the mast to the first spreader to wrap the strop around and connect it to the hook. With precision Lloyd lifted the mast the first 50mm and the rest is history really, she came out with relative ease and before long 75ft of aluminium mast was swinging in the breeze. Dulcinea looks very strange with no stick in place but made for very easy berthing with plenty of visibility. We carried the mast with the front end loader to the workshop and placed it on large trolleys ready for any work that's needed and also safe keeping and before long we were safely tied up in our slip again. As we were not set on the colour and what detailing to put on the new paint job we went for a walk through all the docks and decided to go full plain white hull and spice it up with decals if needed later on. Not a lot else happened really, we had a good chat to the marina manager trying to score ourselves a nice concrete berth for the same price as what we are paying but he didn't really want a bar of my cheeky offer but said he would try to get our berth dredged over the next couple of weeks while they are doing other areas so hopefully we can stop sitting on the bottom soon. The rest of the night was just spent having dinner at the Slip Inn and relaxing in the boat re watching House MD. Tomorrow will be the interesting day with Lloyd coming back to talk and bring the marine mechanic down to look at the engine, which way will this go?