[hdra]

Hi all,
My girlfriend and I are considering making an offer on a boat for some fairly aggressive offshore sailing and the one thing that makes me uneasy is that the mast attachments for the shrouds are stem balls into those bulgy stainless pieces that stick out of the mast, like on a beneteau. The mast is a spar craft section and it + standing rigging were new as of 2011. All of the boats that I have either owned or worked on in the past have had traditional tangs through-bolted with compression tubes, and it seems as if there are some downsides with the stem balls, particularly in ease of replacing a broken shroud, especially at sea, and I worry a bit about how much articulation they allow. Is this a legitimate concern, and are there any other things I should be wary of? My girlfriend thinks that it's not an insurmountable problem, given what we like about the rest of the boat, particularly as it's metal so that there shouldn't be the same flex issues in the deck and hull (and hence shock-loading and motion on the shrouds) as we would have on a fiberglass boat. Any advice?