Mast Partner And Mast Plan

I've been rolling over the mast installation in my head for some time. I've coalesced around the following. The mast will not rotate. The main reason is that if it rotates the halyard cleats and reefing cleats will need to be on the mast. Bear in mind that the mast is not really accessible from the cockpit. So to facilitate easy and safe reefing, the mast will stay put. This has other benefits since it makes the wishbone rig more straightforward and allows for a fully battened sail.  So with that decided the mast step will be a pinned joint with the pin running athwartships. This has a few functions. It will resist rotation, it will keep the mast and boat together in the event of capsize, and it will allow the mast to have its rake adjusted. When I say adjusted I don't mean on the fly, I mean that I plan to have the partner be a separate piece that is bolted on. So If I don't like the rake, I can re-make a new partner and re-install the mast. This also leaves open the someday possibility of making a rake adjustment that can be done on the fly, but that sort of fancy thing can wait for someday. One last thing to mention, as much as I like to take credit, the idea of an adjustable rake was not mine. It was mentioned to me by famous New Zealander Bryan Cox.

Today I started on the mast partner structure. This is just the beginning, I will re-force this area liberally, since the step and the partner is where the boat is getting all of its horsepower. Here is the picture of how its starting.

The cutouts are sized to fit pieces of 1X2 that will run parallel to the hull axis. The partner bolts will fit to these parallels, also a good amount of supporting structure (besides the deck) will also be fit to these pieces.  

Besides the above I put one piece of support for the forward deck hatch. I will keep moving things along as I can tomorrow. I can feel things beginning to get scattered again. So I will have to come up with a some way to stay focused. I may just concentrate on the bow of the boat and simply stay there until the deck is installed. Not sure if that is feasible since there are several items to order and figure out still. It turns out building a boat requires a lot of thinking, as well as doing.