Jaded62, I don't think you want to be sharpening those masts anyway. Sharpening essentially increases contrast at the borders of objects and as a result always creates artifacts. Now with a large object (such as a boat), that tends to go unnoticed, but with a long, narrow object only a few pixels thick (like a mast) enough sharpening to make them stand out is probably going to be enough to show up as artifacts. Besides, as you know, it's almost impossible to select them.

So what else can you do? Easy! Dodge and burn is your friend. A good dodge and burn utility (the one in Photoshop is excellent) selectively darkens dark-ish pixels without touching lighter ones (that's burning) and/or lightens light spots without touching dark ones (dodging). Simply select "burn", set the tool to "shadow", set the opacity to a very small number (4% is often good) and wave the burn brush over the area you are interested in. You don't have to be precise, and you can go over it two or three times to get just as much as you want.

As a rule, a little subtle dodge and burn is more visually effective than a lot of mucking about with fancy sharpening, and really easy to do.

This is the one and only thing I actually miss since I got rid of Photoshop: the dodge and burn module. DxO Photo Lab (my preferred raw converter and editor) has many advantages over the Adobe products but it doesn't have dodge and burn at all. (It has other things you can use instead, in many cases much more sophisticated ones, but I often just want good old dodge and burn.) For that reason I bought Affinity Photo which was a mistake. For some inexplicable reason, Affinity's D&B module doesn't work properly, it burns everything, not just the dark bits you want it to do, and apparently they don't intend to ever fix it as they like it the way it is. More wasted money.

One more thing: those particular images have oodles of contrast, colour, and visual interest. If anything, they are already a fraction overcooked. Don't get carried away with boring post-processing tricks, let the natural beauty of the scene and your obvious skill with a camera do all the heavy lifting.