25 and 26 owners- what modes have you made to your boats to make them better?
Pictures?
John
John,
I think that one of the first mods that I would do on the O'Day 25 or 26 is to build a temporary mast attachment or yoke for attaching temporary stabilizer stays for mast raising/lowering. Normally, some of the O'Day 25s and 26s came with stainless steel triangular plates built into the stays on each side of the boat to be used in conjunction with a set of bridles that attach to the back of the boom. The boom is used as a Gin Pole and the bridles keep the boom centered. Another set of bridles(baby stays) can be made up of ordinary braid line with snap hooks to connect to these plates and the mast yoke. This would provide more lateral stability for the mast in the raising/lowering process.
The yoke can be made of any type of strong wood. I chose white oak for mine. My friend Wayne came up with this idea and he built his yoke to fit the mast very snug with a bolt and special nut to tighten it and keep it from slipping down the mast. Mine has a hinge with an adjuster bolt and wing nut. Both mast yokes have eye bolts for attaching the baby stays. If your O'Day 25 does not have these triangular plates and a lot of them don't, you can make up a set of pivot bridles and connect them to a small shackle between the turnbuckle toggles on each side of the boat. You would also need to install a small pad eye on each side of the deck to connect the other end of each pivot bridle.
It seems like a lot of work to go through but it's well worth it if you have a roller furler connected to your mast which not only adds more weight to it, but can cause the mast to go over the side if it's not handled carefully in the mast raising/lowering process. Here's some pics of both mast yokes, bridles, and baby stays. The first pic shows two of Wayne's mast yokes. The one on the left is for the baby stays, and the one on the right is for his Gin Pole attachment near the bottom of the mast. The last three pics is of my set up. So far, I've tried three different ways to attach my baby stays to my mast and I've found the wooden mast yoke to be the fastest and easiest of all three. If you have questions just fire away.
Joe