Drilling out the screw must have been challenging! I tried and finally gave up. I glued the pin base to a 1/4” piece of
aluminum on top of the gooseneck. It’s held up well for more than a year.
My thought on why it happened was the reef line was pulled down too hard. The holding screw may have been loosened by the sail drop banging you noted, and the pin slid back off the gooseneck. But, the extreme downward force was caused by setting the reef improperly. It even bent back the top of the gooseneck pin itself!
When we reef now, we set the tack of the sail close to the desired position with our main
halyard so the reef line pulls down against the luff, not down onto the sail cars. Then, continue to tighten the reef line to set the clew, the tack does not get pulled down against the sail cars. Once the reef line is secure, we’ll pull on the main
halyard again to tighten the luff.
The cause is just a guess since it was in a damaged state when we purchased our 450S. Our
sails don’t seem to come down that hard. Maybe I need to lubricate the track! Just my observations and conclusions. Thanks for sharing!