My O’Day 22 Sailboat Blog

Since the mainsail on the boat is pretty shot, I went ahead and ordered one from D & R awhile back. Rudy told me it was backordered til the middle of May so I went hunting around else where. Porpoise Sailing in Florida came through and is able to deliver one to me in about a month. That's good enough for me. Hopefully it works since my order with Rudy was cancelled. If I wanted it back, Rudy said it will be another 8 weeks. Toes and fingers are crossed. This does mean that I'm saving a little on the order. Porpoise is selling me this sail for $385 instead of Rudy's $510. I did however opt for a Coastal Cruiser Reinforcement for 10% more. That brings it up to $423.5. Shipping being about the same from either place and I won't know until they place it on the truck, I'm going to assume its about 15 bucks. That means my ongoing tally is going down a tad. Take $510 off of the current total gives me $5180.97 add on $423.5 for the new sail brings it up to $5604.47. Plus another $15 in shipping, my new tally is $5619.47. What this sail will be missing is the O'Day 22 Insignia. I guess I won't miss it that badly.

Today I test fitted the standing rigging on the boat and it went fairly well. It is right now a 2-person job to rigg the boat until I come up with a better method. One of the things that came up is the headstay and/or backstay. It does not get tight enough to take all the slack out of the stays. i wonder if D&R Marine just cut them too long while making them or if they actually intended on them to be loose. It is functional as it but I would worry about it if I took it out and hoisted sails on it. I don't have that many experiences with rigging a boat so I posted on some messageboards including mine although only 1 other use is on it. Here are the 2 posts if you have anything to contribute:

O'Day Owners Forum Post

My Message Board Post

This may be a smaller issue once the boom, sails and mainsheet are on since the mainsheet will put some tension of the backstay and the jib sail will tension the headstay. If you look at the photo below, you will notice a slight bend to the mast. Thats from the mast being rested horizontally on the cabin top for too long and its own weight has made a temporary bend to be noticeable without the tensions of the stays.

The other problem which I don't know if there is an inexpensive solution to is my mast is in 2 sections joint together using a wooden insert and bolts. Maybe this is the same issue as the rigging. Maybe one of the previous onwners had to cut the mast and rejoint it. That could explain the rigging being too long for its current length. It is not significant but is noticeable. The wooden insert in the mast makes running lines and wires internally impossible. That is a problem I will need to deal with later…

For $48, I am upgrading the currently-broken trailer lights on the trailer to submersible LED lights…

New total: $5690.97

After my shopping binge on and offline, I decided to drag the boat to the house to work on it this weekend. The lot does not have a water hose or an AC outlet. Both of which I will need for many of the projects. I risked getting pulled over by trailering the boat home from the lot about 1 mile away using my Toyota Tacoma. It does not have trailer wiring harness installed yet and it is under powered to do any serious trailering. I did make it home however without any incidents. i will post a more indepth story on what I did while it was at home but for now, here is a photo of her next to the sidewalk:

(Notice the upright mast? That's right. I rigged it for a test fit. Worked decent. fore and back stay seems a bit lose and I don't really know if its suppose to be tighter…)

So after I brought home my new battery and electrical system parts, I was eager to test and see what works and what doesn't. I didn't even really know how the Perko battery switch wires up since I bought it used from eBay sans instructions. I am only using one battery so that simplfy things a bit. When I am ready to upgrade, I need to make sure I know how to hook the batteries up so they are parallel when the Perko switch in on both of them. That's a future post. Back to this story. So I used some existing wires I stripped out of the boat to test the circuit. I hooked up the battery to the swithc and panel and connected the 22 year old dome light to one of the switches on the panel. It looked something like this:

I timidly switch the perko on battery one and after flipping the toggle on the panel, I saw this:

Halleluja! It worked. And on first try at that. I don't pretend to be an expert on electrical systems and flares and sparks are a common sight when I'm near a project. This however fell into place perfected. I just used a little common sense in figuring out where the wires need to go and without much effort, I have a circuit lighting a 12-volt light bolt. I know this is a simple test but it means I saved about $30 in not having to buy a new panel. I proceeded to test each connection using the light and all seems to be working perfectly. The next job will be to install the system into the boat. Stay tuned.