Early DS2 Roots Discovered!

[brucybaby]

The new site improvements have already been of great help. It's much easier to peruse posts and pics in my op. I had some doubt about the hull number on my early '71 DS2. According to my MI boat registration it's #25873. The sequence just didn't make any kind of sense to me. Since there was no trace of the ID plate, it was all I had to go on. After a scouring the gallery for just a short bit, I noticed a partial hull registration doc in 'hightides' gallery (last post 9/24/2010) referencing a '71 DS2 owned by 'captaindad' (last post on 6/27/2006). Captaindad has(had?) a '71 DS2 with a hull ID of #25881 with gallery pics showing the ID plate AND that it was an exact sister ship of my boat, badged simply as O'Day Daysailer (no DS1 or DS2 designation whatsoever). Even had the single vertical rudder gudgeon! Not knowing my boats 'roots' really bugged me, but now I'm confident it was built just eight units before captaindad's in 1971 and feel quite good about placing that number on my new sail.

ps: Sorry for the long winded way of saying Thanks Again!

[Bob Hunkins]

Hold on there.... That number can't be the proper sail number. There are only about 10,000 of these boat in existance. No way that a number in the 25000 range is correct. Is there a second number on the plate - called class number?
If so, that's your sail number. If not, then you could go ahead and use the hull number. But at least contact the class Association secretary and let her know.

[brucybaby]

Thanks for the heads up Bob. I love a good mystery and my pride in being a sleuth got ahead of me. I should have dug a little deeper before coming to a conclusion and got the hull# and class# mixed up as far as the relationship to the proper sail#. Since captaindad’s hull# was 25881 and his class# is 4685, I deduce my class# would be somewhere between 4678 and 4684, depending on what other hulls were produced by O’Day during that time period as I understand it now. At any rate, I’d like to get it right and will join DSA and clear it with the secretary before saying/doing any more with it. Great stuff this!

[Bob Hunkins]

A number in th 4000's sounds more like it... I wonder what records O'Day kept and what happened to them.

[GreenLake]

The membership application form http://daysailer.org/pdf/dsaapp.pdf has the contact info for the DSA secretary. In my case, the state registration # was believable for the range of sail numbers based on the age of the boat (as determined by minor design features, not state records) and so I "claimed" it as a sail # after contacting the DSA.

BTW, it is a known fact that sometimes sail numbers were not given out in any relation to the hull numbers. Two effects combine. One, the hull numbers apparently covered the full range of hulls created at a given facility, not just a single type of boats. Second, in the early days, sail numbers were apparently based on which set of sails shipped with the boat (picture a process where sailbags sit on a big shelf, and, as final step in production, someone grabs a bag, reads the number, punches it on the hull placard).

This changed with the introduction of the HIN (which your boat just missed by a few years).