I had a couple nice overnight trips out of the area this summer on our Montgomery 15. The first was with my son from Santa Barbara to Santa Cruz Island for a couple of nights and the second was in the California Delta and the San Francisco Bay. I have posted short videos of both trips to the Facebook Montgomery page. I had the same lesson taught to me on each of these trips - one that I admit I first learned from this group. I leave the shrouds always connected on the boat so that to put up the mast you just have to push it up and connect the fore stay. For most of the five years I have had the boat I have connected the fore stay with a simple push pin. What I mean by a push pin is a pin with a button at one end that, when pushed, allows a little ball to retract into the pin so it can be inserted or removed. The pin makes it really easy to connect the fore stay which I have liked because my method involves me just holding the mast up with tension on the fore stay while I connect the fore stay to the thingy on the bow. The process of getting up the mast goes very quickly this way. I think it was Dave Scobie responding to another member of the group that said a push pin was not a secure way to connect the fore stay on a Montgomery 15, but maybe he was talking about all of our boats. I often have thought about Dave's advice but have always found the push pin has worked great so, although appreciated the advice (the lesson), never changed to a different method of attaching the fore stay. Until recently. After our first night on Santa Cruz island we motored up the coast to Painted Cave, looked around there, started back, and stopped to snorkel for a while. After the stop, the wind picked up so we had a nice sail back down the coast with the west wind mostly behind us as we moved east. After an hour or so the wind picked up nicely into the mid or higher teens of miles per hour. With the wind behind the boat, the fore stay was essentially unloaded most of the time and a little slack. With the wind picking up the jib would flap from time to time and the waves also got bigger. The combination of the flapping jib and the waves would shake the rig around a bit from time to time. At one point I was sorry to see the bottom of the fore stay had disconnected from the bow. I had a bit of a tense time replacing the push pin with a spare. The two legs of the thingy at the bottom of fore stay that the pin goes through had been spread a tiny bit so I squeezed them back together and put the spare pin in without having the rig come down. The next day I found the old pin laying against the toe rail. I remembered the "lesson" from this group about the push pin for the fore stay, but figured from the way the legs of the thingy at the bottom of the fore stay were spread, that the problem was probably that I hadn't put the pin all the way through when I had assembled the boat the day before. I decided to think about it some more, but the push pin still seemed like it should work fine. As could be expected, our first day on the San Francisco Bay had good wind, in the afternoon as we headed east in Racoon Straight and started to enter Ayala Cove for the night, the wind, that was mostly behind us, got switchy and gusty as we got in the wind shadow of Angel Island. The fore stay was slack, there were waves, and the rig was gotten shook (shaken?) around. Guess what happened? Sure enough, the fore stay disconnected from the thingy on the bow again. The rig was nice enough not come down this time too and I replaced the now-missing push pin with a regular pin with a safety clip. They say fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me but it has taken me three times to learn that a push pin is not a good way to connect the fore stay to the bow on a Montgomery 15! David Grah Bishop California Montgomery 15 - Sky