I went up the Express 27 mast not long ago and had a somewhat scary experience.

I weigh 160, and at the time there was a 200 lbs guy on deck with the boat tied to the dock. I was at the top of the mast doing some work and the guy on deck stepped to the rail to do something. The boat started heeling pretty extremely and truly felt like it was going to to roll all the way over until guy on deck jumped to the other rail to stabilize the boat.

Would the boat really roll over like it felt it might? Any experience with sending people up the mast on this boat and how much weight is too much?

We plan to go up the mast fairly frequently with the new offshore rules for mounting and removing the masthead VHF when doing offshore races, not to mention if we ever had a problem and needed to ascend the mast while on the water.

I'm wondering what is safe?

-dan