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DSC01268 This is another method of attaching the baby stays to your mast. I tried it for one season and abandoned it for the mast yoke. Some dude wrote and article in Small Craft Advisor on mast raising and this is one of his "brain children." In essence what you see here is a S.S. ring attached to a sail slide in the mast track. The baby stays are tied to the ring and then snapped into the rings of the pivot bridles on both sides of the boat. The Main Halyard is attached to the ring and pulled up, cleated off at the bottom of the mast to tension the baby stays. I really found that setting this up was a big PITA. No hard feelings to the writer of the article but I'll stick with my mast yoke. Don't get me wrong. These are all good ideas. Try them out and if you like them, adopt them. There's always something better and easier though. You just have to come up with the idea.
DSC01265 Years ago, I didn't have a mast yoke to connect my baby stays to. All I did was tie a "Lineman's Rolling Hitch" to each of my lower stays and it worked OK. That's one hitch that won't slip, not even around an 1/8" stay wire.
DSC00447 This gadget is indispensable on my boat. It's called a Johnson Handy-Lock. It's like a backstay adjuster. I don't use it for that. I only use it to throw slack into my fore stay to remove my furler when I want to lower my mast. One of the reasons why I had this installed was to rid my boat of the end of boom to the backstay sheeting by mounting a traveler in front of my companionway. It's important to leave the open turnbuckle on the backstay just above the HL so that the backstay can be removed from the mast head. The turn buckle also provides some extra adjustment if needed. These Handy-Locks are pricey but you may be able to buy a used one like I did, or buy a newer different adjustable lever type back stay adjuster similar to what is used on the Mac boats. This particular HR has a lever that you need to turn. They make one that works a little different than this one for cheaper money. I think that this HL would work on an O'Day 22 but I'm not sure. I never need to mess with my side stay turnbuckles when I want to loosen my forestay to drop my mast and this is the beauty of this gadget. It does it all.
DSC00445 Here's a good shot of my Port pivot bridle. You can't see it in the picture but the rope on the left is shorter than the the rope of the right. I had to keep remembering that the short rope on each bridle faces toward the bow. Once you install the pad eyes on the deck, there is no way to get your bridles even so that the rings come right with the pivot point of the mast. You really need to get your bridles made up first and get them even with the rings centered and at the right height, then you can mount the pad eyes. In theory, if you were to stand perpendicular to the mast with a plumb bob and try to mark the deck with the line going through the pivot point of the tabernacle, whatever measure you come up with from the shackle on the chainplate toggle should be the same measurement from that point on the deck to the pad eye. The centerline on my deck is 6" and my pad eye is mounted approximately 12" from my chainplate.
DSC00454 I needed to be able to stow my Gin Pole on board my boat so I got fancy and built it so it can come apart in two equal sections. Back in 2005 they were digging up my street and installing city sewage. You can see a construction device in the background which is used to keep a hole from caving in on the workers. There's my old GMC pickup. I got over 200,000 miles on it before I decided to trade it in for a newer one.
DSC00434 Here's a pic of my old Gin Pole. Anyone can make one of these. It doesn't have to come apart and you don't need to use stainless steel hardware. The Gin pole provides the angle needed to raise your mast by using the Jib halyard and a boom vang or mainsheet blocks. You could also mount a small boat winch on the Gin pole and use that to pull your mast up. I have the yoke tied to the mast near the goose neck fitting and the end of my Gin Pole is about 1" to 2" from my forestay when the mast is up. If the Gin Pole is too short, the boom vang will have a tendency to pull the yoke out of the mast once the mast is up. If you set the Gin Pole too low on the mast, the Gin Pole will be too long and you'll have trouble reaching the end of the pole to snap your bridles in when the mast is laying horizontal and ready to be raised. For this reason I chose to set my Gin Pole so that the yoke is near the goose neck fitting. Note how close the blocks of the boom vang are in this picture. Before I inverted the line locking cam on the pulling block, I used to extend the boom with a wire tail piece that cam off my back stay that was connected to that triangular plate. By inverting the cam on the block, I was able to do away with the tail piece and be able to connect the block to a shackle on my bow stem chainplate. This gave me more space for my blocks. The is another reason why the Gin Pole needs to be set near the goose neck fitting. If you decide to use a boat winch to pull your mast up, you could mount the Gin Pole lower but the lower the Gin Pole on the mast, the longer it has to be.
DSC01153 This pic shows the collar and the end of the Gin pole where the bridle connections are made. In case you're wondering, that triangular plate used to be attached to my backstay and I finally found a better use for it. I use the top hole to snap on my Jib halyard, and the middle shackle on the bottom is used for my boom vang attachment. The pulling block of the boom vang of course is connected to the aft hole of my bow stem chainplate. I unbolted the cam on the pulling block and inverted it so that I could snub the line off by pulling up on the line instead of pulling down on it.
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