Sooo… After a lot of time spent doing other stuff that fun (=boat) stuff, I am starting to get to the bottom of the piles of cruft that have gathered since I left for Estonia.
Today I did the casting of the mast collar. The old method of inserting rubber wedges between the mast and the deck ring has apparently fallen out of fashion. Of course a cast plastic collar is much better. It is watertight and provides much better load distribution around the perimeter of the mast than a few rubber wedges would: