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Today it looked like we would have 7 boats trying to finish out the seaon with a bank. Forecast was looking decent for wind. As Sunday came around the forecast had some chances of storms and only 4 showed up. During race one someone noticed a nasty line of storms heading across the region and it was decided to just have one more race for the day. Everyone made it home without any incident even though the weather, yet again cut the day short.
My “main” 2023 winter project was to order a mainsail kit from Sailrite and build my 1980 O’Day 23-2 a new mainsail. I believe the one that came with it was the original and its quite baggy!
last year I purchased a Sailrite LSZ-1, have done a few projects but was ready to tackle the mainsail kit. The kit comes mostly complete minus a few pretty specific tools required to complete it. I purchased those also. All the Dacron is precut with printed lines showing all the seams. They send along a detailed set of instructions (printed out) and there is some fantastic YouTube videos to watch/re-watch, and re-watch to help insure everything is going as planned.
The hardest sewing part was once the sail started getting larger, getting the reef patches sewn since the LSZ-1 is definitely not a sail loft sized machine, rolling/stuffing all the sail through, and around to get the patches on was quite a feet. But overall the actual main sewing went quite smooth
Finishing work once all the panels are together includes installing the leech line, the bolt rope on the luff and foot of the sail, creating the holes for the tack/clew, reef points, the header board. And of course the, I believe 12 , holes and grommets for the sail slugs that slide into the mast track. All this work was not specifically difficult but it was quite time consuming. I did have sore fingers after wrapping the tack,clew, and reef SS rings that are the grommets with waxed twin before inserting the brass sleeve.
One remaining thing I would like to do, is get the O’Day emblem (big O) for the sail cut out of some adhesive Dacron that I also ordered. I’m not yet sure to get these cut out smoothly so that is TBD.
Below is a link to a great article explaining mainsail trim
