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SS Gin Pole sketch The Gin Pole. I keep it down below in my quarter birth compartment. It's there whenever I need it.
IMG 0027 With a rear mast crutch mounted on the stern rail you can mount your rudder on the transom before you back down the ramp. All you need to do is center the tiller and tie it off to keep the rudder blade straight. It also helps if you have a rudder blade hold-up pendant line.
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.
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