I'm a bit late to the commenting party here, but as many have said: good job dealing with the emergency, Greg! I also appreciate it when people risk drawing negative comments by posting about a problem, for the benefit of helping out their fellow sailors.
You may recall that I had my standing rigging and all electrical wiring/fixtures replaced this spring by a professional rigger in Annapolis. I chose not to attempt it myself mainly because my mast has never been down before (22 years), our yard crew (while great guys) don't seem competent to do this, and I've never seen it done in person so I wouldn't know how to direct them. In the mid-Atlantic where I am, few people drop the mast and almost no one does it every winter, unlike in some yards up North.
I liked the riggers I used, but I have to admit that I didn't explicitly ask them to check the stem fitting or chainplates. Maybe they did and maybe they didn't. I'll have a close look at the stem fitting, but I'm going to guess that it might be hard to see a fine crack in the SS when hunched over the bow: a 43 year-old engineering degree hardly makes me an expert in metallurgy. (On the other hand, I've probably bent hundreds of metal things back and forth until they broke, so maybe I _am_ an expert! At breaking things...) My chainplates are 90% external, so that's a good thing.
A comment on the VHF cable soldering: I had my cable and antenna replaced by the riggers, and this was the only thing about the re-rig that didn't go smoothly. When they were done re-stepping the mast and tuning the rig, and were packing up, it occurred to me to test the VHF radio. No signal whatsoever. I told them about it, and the lead guy was a little grumpy about it at first. But I told him it had worked perfectly last fall before unstepping the mast, so it needed to work now. They said they'd check that there was continuity between the cable end fitting at the base of the mast, and the antenna at the top, but the parts inside the boat were up to me. No complaints after that, but it took them like an extra hour and a half to figure out the problem. It really gave them fits. The owner of the rigging company ended up calling an electrician friend for advice. They sent a guy up the mast, and he sat up there for more than an hour as they did test after test, and re-soldered the connections. Finally, it tested good and the radio worked perfectly. I believe the problem was the solder joint up at the masthead, so my take on this is that these guys do this all the time, and it seems like it's not necessarily all that easy. I'm good at soldering circuit boards (built a Heathkit TV, oscilloscope, and multimeter back in the 70's), but I've never done coax, so I have no insight into how it's done and what can go wrong. The riggers used a butane torch up on the mast to do it.
