Broken strop on my SEAL 28 - 1

The lifting keel on Analie, my Seal 28, had been showing an increasing tendency to encounter high spots in lifting and lowering. On one occasion it jammed in the down position. We decided to nudge it gently from the bottom on the slope of a concrete launching ramp. I misjudged the position of the ramp, and we ran into the end of it at around one-and-a-half knots. This rattled the crockery on board but did free the keel. Subsequently, it jammed completely in the ‘down’ position. The boat was lifted out, and I asked the yard to lower it slowly on to the keel allowing the weight of the boat to push the keel up somewhat, hoping that this would clear the jam. Instead, it simply wedged the keel more firmly, a little less than halfway up. Finally, allowing optimism to overcome common sense, I applied the winch with increasing force to try and move the keel, and succeeded only in fraying one of the strops.
 
Analie resides at Bradwell Marina on the River Blackwater Estuary in Essex. She rarely takes the ground and then only in the soft mud endemic on that coast, so the keel-jamming was unlikely to be due to trapped stones. The culprit was thought to be a build-up of rust blisters both on the lifting keel and the inside of the stub keel. After liftout, the boat was placed in a cradle on the hard with the keel clearing the ground by a few inches, just too little room to get a hydraulic jack underneath. I acquired some lengths of bandsaw blade cut to suitable lengths and attempted to ‘saw out’ the rust blisters by passing the blade between the stub keel and lifting keel—daylight was visible around about half of the keel on both sides. I had already flooded the area with phosphoric acid in the hope that it would transform the rust into something softer. It was hard work and little progress was apparent, so I motorized the process by attaching the bottom of the blade to a return spring fixed to a block of wood secured to the base of the keel with a clamp and attached the top to a reciprocating electric saw.
 
I still could not get the sawblade round much more than half of the keel periphery. A group of friends, Chris, Cliff, and Ewan, all owners of Parker yachts, took pity on me and organized a Friday afternoon working party. The application of a sledgehammer, and persistent sawing away with short lengths of the bandsaw blades at the bottom—together with an electric chisel—seemed to do the trick. We ‘borrowed’ a 2-inch square beam from one of the unused cradles in the boatyard, and using the edge of the steel cradle as a fulcrum, managed to lever the keel up and down by a few inches. The jam had been broken. Figure 1 shows the keel and beam; the keel and stub keel show some signs of the force applied to encourage movement.