There is a good reason to remove stanchions, IMHO. You can prevent damage due to water/snow buildup on your tarp during winter storage by removing the stanchions before draping the tarp . I broke 2 SS screws trying to back them out with a power screwdriver before I got wise. I hit the remaining screws with a fine-tipped propane torch , then gingerly backed them out. Some of them required a little back-and-forth, but they all came out without incident. I reinserted them after liberally coating with anti-siezing compund.
Micheal Pegasus ('81 C&C25)

A few of you may have followed the toe-rail discussion and may have seen the pictures of the procedure that are on Stu's Photo-Album, sent in by Richard (aka Melissa).Since that's my boat, I thought you might be interested in the time frame to perform this task. The pictures make it look easy, and for the most part it is providing you have good access to the nuts underneath. My son and I spent most of one day just removing bolts, actually 4/5ths of them, leaving every fifth bolt in to keep the deck and hull attached. Second day we removed one of the four sections (the one in the picture).That took 1/2 hour to remove and 2 to 3 hours to clean both the toe-rail and the deck. I found scraping the old butyl tape off with a knife followed by liberal use of varsol remove all the tape from the rail. The varsol was then washed off with warm soapy water and rinsed. The deck was another story. Here we carefully scraped off what we could and then using a damp rag (with varsol on it) rubbed the remaining tape off the deck. We could not use a 'soaked' rag for fear of getting varsol down the holes. There is also butyl tape between the deck and hull flange which the varsol would affect. Putting the new tape on the rail was easy enough, but what the pictures didn't show, was using an awl to open each hole and insert a bolt into it before putting the rail back on. Give about an hour for that. Finally, the rail is reattached and bolted down. All the bolts must be tightened from the inside by the nut. The bolt should not be spun. As we are using either a wrench or socket (where space permits) this was a very slow process, roughly 3 hours to tighten all 50 bolts. Each bolt was tightened until the butyl tape started to squease out. Then each was tightened some more, approx 3 turns of the nut. After the boats been in the water and used a bit, I'll retighten then all yet again. That works out to roughly 6 - 8 hours per section of toe-rail. C&C had used 1" butyl tape when they built the boat. This had mostly squease down off the ledge between deck and hull leaving very little on the inside of the rail. The underside of the rail is 1 3/4", I used 2" butyl tape and rolled over the extra along the outside edge. This has given me a very good bond with butyl tape squeasing out on both sides of the rail but mostly on thin side. The next day I trimmed off the excess tape and tightend each bolt(yet again) a turn so that the tape just started to squease out giving a nice rounded bead. At this rate it will take a total of five days to complete. As long a the weather permits I plan on having another two sections done this weekend and the last and final section done the following saturday.
Ivan Shelton C&C 32Lady of Shalott