Apparent Wind

Washing my Teacup

2012-01-10T16:45:00.000-05:00

I went to a friend’s house for dinner and was asked “What have you been doing this winter?” “Not much, but I’m going sailing in Cabarete in about a week.” The subject changed. I was grateful for no further embarrassing exploration of my doing nothing.

Later I wondered if “not much” was really true. On the face of it, it is, but I have managed to keep comfortably busy. Yesterday, it became a little clearer as I was working on yet another basement project – the third of the nothing period. The first was a rehab and rebuild of the high school sailing team equipment – 2 damaged hulls, 6 centerboards and 12 rudders. Grind, apply cloth & epoxy, sand, gel coat, polish; repeat as necessary. The next project was the refinishing of all the mahogany on the yacht club’s 13’ Boston Whaler – sand and varnish, sand and varnish, sand and varnish…. Now, I’m down to an even less significant nothing. I’m refinishing the handles of all the garden tools. My wife laughs – “Who does that? What’s wrong with them?” “They’re rough. They need refinishing.”

Is that it? Has the winter really been that boring and mundane? Well, there has also been the excitement of dealing with lawyers and financial people in the settlement of my little brother’s estate. This included the selling of his good-neighborhood house which received no maintenance for two decades. The “vulture” buying it cheap – no stealing it – has been the most likable, most efficient, most honest person in the whole process. In addition, there has been the out-of-the-blue final settlement of a 12 year old law suit from my last century business. The lawyer’s fee is more than the cost of the settlement, which is not money, but just some more legal work. And finally, there has been my work on something truly worthwhile – compiling all my high school sailing educational material to put it on our web site for reference. In doing so, I discovered more stuff to be written and illustrated – about 150 diagrams worth. PowerPoint is wonderful, but my back is killing me from sitting at the computer for a few weeks.

So yesterday, as I was sanding and varnishing shovel and rake handles (why do I have so many shovels and rakes?) , I was thinking that this was the best nothing I’ve done all winter. I was listening to my music (as if we own it now-a-days), mostly from the 70’s and no longer cool, and marveling at the degree of unimportance I had sunk to. Who does this? Who cares about shovel handles? Who tries to perfect varnishing techniques on shovel handles? Who even uses shovels in the age of hired landscapers and processed food? I won’t even use most of these tools….. Yet, I love knowing that those handles will be good for another 10 years – and then they can be refinished again.

I’m doing my own humble, unenlightened version of the Zen monk washing his teacup. I am remembering the wisdom of the Tao – by doing nothing, all things are done. I’m glad the shovel handles will be shinny and smooth and that no one cares.

But now I’ve gone and written this, and suddenly it all feels like it’s more something and less nothing. Will I ever get to the least little bit of enlightenment?!

21st Century Chalk Talks in High School Sailing

2011-09-21T11:38:00.001-04:00

When there is no longer enough time in the sailing day to teach sailing in the preferred format, what is the best alternative? Can you take a little time from each part of the universally accepted “best practices” structure – direct instruction (chalk talks), rigging, sailing, de-rigging, and debriefing – and make it work? Call me skeptical, but after years of trying, I don’t think I can make kids rig or de-rig noticeably faster. I also don’t think I can take much time from my 5 – 10 minute debrief. If I could explain any of the things I cover in chalk talks any quicker, I would have done it by now. That leaves shortening the sailing time…. Really? To shorten the sailing time significantly seems tantamount to giving up on the idea of a quality program.

How did I get into this mess? A little background……..

I have been coaching high school sailing for a number of years now and have always enjoyed the freedom to structure our schedule of practices and events in whatever way seems to work best. There has always been a need to strike a balance between how much time (and fun) we are allowed to have sailing and the academic and other demands of students’ schedules. Until now, the coaches, students and parents have been able to work out a schedule that works well for the overwhelming majority of those involved. No more.

Now, the principal has imposed limits on the amount of time devoted to sports. Two years ago, he and a certain faction of the school community succeeded in changing the schedule of the school day, pushing the start and finish times almost an hour later. The idea is that the late schedule may be more in sync with natural teenage circadian rhythms (sleep cycles), thus getting them more sleep. Dinner time has not changed in most households, so after school time has been the part of the day that has been truncated. While those involved in sports could see the writing on the wall and voiced their concerns, the late start faction promised cooperation in making things work. Turns out, year one worked well enough for sports programs shortened by 0 - 20 minutes but other after school/before sports activities were hit harder. In year two, the pendulum (axe) is swinging the other way and time for sports is getting cut even more, with the same mandatory time constraints being imposed across the board for all sports. Doesn’t matter what happens to the sports programs. Doesn’t matter how the kids feel about it.

Why does modern life so often come down to choices between the lesser of evils?

After thinking carefully about the specifics of our program and our collection of kids, my approach is to eliminate the standard chalk talk from our standard sailing day. That should allow the other parts of the day to remain intact. But I can’t really live without the content covered in the talks, so I have to provide it in a variety of other ways.

The first thing I have done is explain the schedule restrictions, and my adjustments to them, to the team, and ask for their cooperation in reducing the usual chaos that comes from dealing with a group of 30 teenagers. In lieu of daily verbal explanations to the group, boat assignments and the day’s activities are posted before practice begins. Three minutes after report time, boat and crew assignments are adjusted for any unexpected absentees. There is no more waiting for late comers, and those who are tardy may lose their boat or crew or both.

Sailors are expected to handle rigging and getting out on the water on their own. Boats are assigned to the same skipper every day and hardware issues are dealt with after the previous day’s practice, not during rigging time. Freeing myself from the boat mechanic role allows me to communicate with individual sailors about the drills or other special concerns. We do this as we rig.

We are lucky that we have a good balance between skippers who were on the team last year and new freshman (most with some sailing experience) who can crew for them. Experienced skippers give me confidence that each boat can be handled with enough skill to ensure safety in all but the most severe conditions. The experienced skippers can also serve as teachers and mentors for their freshmen crews. Another advantage of veteran skippers is that they have done most of our drills before and therefore require little or no explanation.

For teaching new skills, I have two options. On days with no wind or too much wind and there is little or no sailing time, I will do a long chalk talk. Hopefully kids can connect that talk to the sailing despite the separation in time and space. The other option is to communicate electronically with whatever material I can produce or find. So far I have used Youtube videos, US Sailing videos, documents scanned from books and other paper handouts, sailing websites, original text, original Powerpoints, and photos. I would love to use some of the CD ROM and DVD material I personally use in a classroom setting, but I think there are copyright laws to discourage this. I also haven’t quite mastered the technology required to do it. I feel like I’m teaching at Phoenix University.

I have several first impressions of this methodology. I am very impressed that the kids have embraced the demand for more personal responsibility. Tardiness has all but vanished and they have been very good at advance notification of absences. (It seems that telling them they absolutely cannot practice before a certain time causes them to show up early and start rigging.) Kids are doing a better job of taking care of their boats and fixing things before they break. I have relinquished the job of crowd controller and cat herder and focus far more on giving individual attention to those who follow all the instructions and work at developing the skills. The vast majority of the kids are taking advantage of this.

On the other hand, I still worry that the freshmen are not getting enough basic instruction. This methodology would never work with a preponderance of new sailors. I worry that many people do not absorb the material as well when presented this way. I worry that questions aren’t being asked. I worry that some may simply ignore the electronic presentations and therefore, that I have little sense of what they know and don’t know. And lastly, I worry that the “go go, hurry up” version of sailing reduces the social connections between sailors.

Much of the time we used to “waste” was spent making friends, and that, after all, is what keeps most of us sailing.

yarg

Sailing as a Spectator Sport

2011-07-01T14:55:00.006-04:00

Like many avid sailors, I would love to see sailing become a more popular (probably too strong a word) spectator sport.

As a high school coach, I get to watch a lot of races from the water, but that is an opportunity limited to a few, and very limited by your position near or on the course and freedom to move around. I was on a spectator boat at the America’s Cup (back in the 80’s when it was in Newport, RI) and saw very little of the race. I was on a mark boat at the Laser Olympic trials and saw lots of windward mark roundings and nothing else. In coaching team racing, I am usually on the start boat or the finish boat, and from either perspective, I miss some of the action. It seems that short of having access to a helicopter, competitive sailing is usually just too hard to see to get a real sense of the overall sport.

Non-sailors compare watching sailing to watching paint dry…

(This is actually gel coat, which might be more interesting than standard paint. Is it going to cover? Will the sprayer spit all over the work or coat it evenly? Did I put in enough catalyst to make it dry or will it stay sticky forever? Fascinating, once you get into it! Sort of like sailing?)

The Extreme 40 racing series is trying to change all that. They have come to Boston this the Fourth of July weekend for Act IV of their series, and in my view, they are making it work. How?

Fast boats – 40 foot catamarans that can really fly – at least one pontoon at a time.
Large boats – visible from a considerable distance away.
Differentiation between boats – unique and colorful graphics on the sails.
Possibility of crashes – who doesn’t like a good NASCAR wreck?
Expert sailors – much scrambling around and perfect spinnaker sets every time.
Short races and many of them – about 20 minutes apiece – 43 races in five days at their last stop.
Knowledgable and entertaining play by play commentary over a loudspeaker – identifying the players, explaining the courses and sailing tactics, and generating crowd enthusiasm.
And the really critical factor, stadium viewing – the race is as close to shore as possible and bleacher seating is available. You can finally see the whole race, not just a couple of boats for a small part of the course!

Yesterday at Fan Pier, the wind was up and down and very shifty. (Being close to shore probably ensures this some degree even if the wind isn’t shifty in general.) For catamarans that can go from zero to full speed in about five boat lengths but can find themselves practically in irons during an almost perfect tack, being in the wind is everything. Consequently, the racing is very exciting with surprising and dramatic changes in position. Even with world class sailors in shifty conditions, it is nearly impossible to be consistently in the front. In consecutive races, there was a lot of movement from first to nearly last and vice versa.

I’ve seen a couple other instances and venues where it all works as a spectator sport. The world team race championship held on the shores of Newport a few years ago was similarly great viewing and exciting racing. Events held at MIT are close to shore on the Charles River and the roof deck of the boat house provides just enough height to see the entire race. Although I’ve never been there, the Hinman team race event in England reportedly provides stadium sailing better than anywhere else and draws crowds that pack the grandstands year in and year out.

Newport Team Racing Championship

Charles River Regatta

For me, all of these examples make sailing more viewer friendly than the highly touted America’s Cup which is progressively becoming more about politics, technical feats, and money than sailing. Maybe the new graphics with NFL style yellow lines on the field will help next time around. Like most other sailors, I will be watching the televised drama, but in comparison to attending the Extreme 40 racing, the viewing portion of the spectacle will be like watching gel coat dry.

yarg

Race Courses - Thinking Outside the Box

2011-06-23T16:01:00.000-04:00

Last January, I took over as Chairman of the Race Committee at my local club. I had been vigorously proposing changes in racing (or supporting those proposed by others) for the last four years and had encountered considerable friction among club racers along the way. A few changes were made, but the process felt like dragging blocks of stone up the Pharaoh’s ramps. Imagine my surprise this year when not only was my offer to become chairman accepted, but others greased the wheels for moving new ideas along.

I was told that I was a good candidate to help reinvigorate our increasingly anemic local racing (a problem shared by many, many local clubs these days). I was told I was able “to think outside the box.”

A short digression:

I have always found the overused phrase “thinking outside the box” irritating. Usually is it used to talk about thinking which moves from a small box to another box only slightly larger. Most people seldom go further than that.

Really creative people say, “What box?” For them, thinking and boxes have nothing to do with each other. I wish I were more like them. When it comes to sailboat racing courses however, the best I can do is to take some things from different boxes and put them together in a larger box. Sounds like a job in the shipping department to me. It may seem pretty pedestrian, but where would the world be if we couldn’t move boxes around?

One of our RC tasks was to find a way to make two divergent groups of racers happy when all fleets sail together on Sundays. The sloop rigged boats like our tried and true, traditional format of two 40 minute races in an afternoon. The Laser sailors come from backgrounds of high school / college racing and frostbiting where the pace is quicker, courses are shorter, and five or more races are run in a day. Sunfish sailors also prefer shorter courses and more races.

At our lake, we don’t have a large enough sailing area or enough manpower and power boats to run separate courses simultaneously, but a major goal was to get away from the “separate, but equal” feeling that the fleets were developing. Our challenge was how to run two completely different kinds of racing using the same marks and the same committee boat.

I offered two solutions that passed for “thinking outside the box.” The first was a trapezoid course which I lifted from a box labeled “standard practices for Laser regattas.” My original contribution was merely to suggest a more rectangular trapezoid and a finish line using the same RC boat used for the start line.

The standard trapezoid course works best for two fleets of similar speed having races of more or less equal duration. The first fleet sails the outer loop while the second fleet sails a windward-leeward-windward on the right side (inner loop) before reaching to the marks on the left and then sailing a leeward and reach to the finish. But with a little creative misunderstanding of the standard course, I looked at the diagram and saw a long course by sailing the traditional outer loop and a shorter windward-leeward course using only the marks on the right side of the course. This seems to solve our long course-short course issue, and separates the fleets for much of the time. We have not tried this yet, but I have high hopes.

The second solution was to take the trapezoid and just make it into a box. By putting the marks on the corners and a start-finish line in the middle of the right side, the windward-leeward course on the right could have a more desirable upwind finish. A little more fleet interference was possible, but both fleets get the upwind finish that they seem to prefer. Placing the start and finish lines on opposite sides of the committee boat reduces the interference significantly. (This idea came directly from a couple of other boxes I’ve seen along the way.)

We used this box course a couple of weekends ago, and it was a big hit. The sloop rigged boats were as satisfied as usual with their course, and the separation between fleets was so successful that we Laser sailors felt like we were the only fleet sailing. And, unlike Sundays in previous years, we got in many more than the two standard races.

So, what is working so far is not so much thinking OUTSIDE the box, but thinking OF the box. For multi-fleet racing, placing one windward-leeward box next to another windward-leeward box opens up many possibilities. Similarly, an additional re-labeled starting line box adjacent to and mirror imaged from the first (using the same committee boat) can separate traffic and allow starting fleets with less waiting time. Just rearranging familiar boxes presents many different opportunities. It’s not terribly creative, but sailing isn’t rocket science. It turns out that boxes are very useful in the shipping department!

yarg

Book Review – Into My Father’s Wake by Eric Best

2011-04-23T09:33:00.000-04:00

I somehow appear on an email list of book reviewers and was asked to review this book. For those of you who prefer brevity: “Great Book!”

For those of you with a little more time for detail, here goes:

Into My Father’s Wake, by Eric Best, is the story of a 5000 mile solo journey from San Francisco to Hawaii, round trip, aboard a 47’ ketch. But it is no simple sailing adventure. If it were, the reader might agree with Best’s father’s devastating response to the idea of writing it, “Why would anyone want to read a book about sailing alone to Hawaii and back. Lots of people sail to Hawaii.” Instead, Best follows the advice from an ironically non-literary and non-sailing source, a Hawaiian business man: “Give a chronological story of your fears. Ask yourself the most personal questions and try to answer them. People will listen to that.”

So Into My Father’s Wake is also a personal story. It is about the anxieties of an insufficiently experienced sailor who struggles with a lonely and sometimes overwhelming sea voyage. As the title suggests, it is also about the author’s hate/love relationship with his abusive father. It depicts a loving relationship with a young daughter, and it describes Best’s attempts to understand himself through psychotherapy. It bemoans writing aspirations that have been undermined by Best’s father. It touches on failed marriages. It reviews the effects of alcoholism on human behavior. It deals with solitude. And in the end, it reveals how coming to terms with the vast, indifferent, and all powerful ocean helps Best begin to come to terms with his father and most everything else.

Although it is a rich and complex book, the basic organization is quite straightforward. The chronological story of the sailing trip is the backbone that supports everything else. Episodes from his personal life are revealed in non-linear bits and pieces as they are remembered, pondered, and re-experienced by a solo sailor. The reader puts together enough details to understand the plot of the personal stories while more importantly sharing the author’s emotional experience of them. The approach is at times confusing or challenging to the reader, but upon reflection, it is a remarkably insightful and truthful depiction of how events are processed and reprocessed, particularly when we have a good amount of time to be alone with our thoughts.

The sound narrative structure that successfully integrates the broad range of subject matter in this book is evidence of a sophisticated and skilled writer. My false first impression from the title (and the fact that I was asked to review this book on a sailing blog) was that it would be a mixture of adventure and pop psychology told by a non-professional author wannabe. Boy, was that wrong! Only a few pages in, I was blown away by a literary and linguistic sophistication that I don’t seem to find lately. (Turns out Best went to Stanford Writer’s school and was a career journalist.) I don’t know if the rich, descriptive, and often poetic language in this book works for all readers nowadays, but it certainly works for me. A sample:

Nothing had ever seemed more vast and irrevocable to me than to be in the ocean at night, alone with her sounds and concealed intentions. Some ancient balance of flesh and water and electricity, deep legacies of evolution, would absorb signals unknown to science. To sail across vast ocean reaches would be to rearrange myself from the inside and realign to the universe.

Another of the book’s outstanding qualities aside from the richness of language, is the way it depicts a relentless undercurrent of uncertainty. I think this feeling is more universal than we care to admit and represents a part of us that is not comfortable to examine. Though he is ultimately a successful solo sailor, Best honestly and eloquently reveals his fear of massive freighters in the night, potentially unmanageable weather, irreparable boat breakdowns, and inadequate navigational skills that leave him frequently not knowing where he is. Similarly, he grapples with perceived personal inadequacies, his search for understanding through psychotherapy, the lasting impact of his father on his character, and most importantly, his own contradictory feelings toward his father.

As a story of the effects of an abusive parent, this is a powerful one. The gradual resurfacing of fragmented remembrances is a model for the way the dysfunctional relationship infuses the personality of Best and weaves its way into many aspects of his life. Despite a long pattern of evening alcoholic rages and regular beatings with a rubber hose, Best maintains an unbreakable bond with the man who taught him to sail and love sailing. But it is a severely damaged relationship with conflicts that seemingly cannot be resolved. Without time alone in the ocean, Best says he could not have come to this realization:

A child cannot reconcile violence at the hands of one who is supposed to love him, and whom he loves without condition….It cannot make sense to the child unless he is deserving of the violence and the pain an the anger behind it. How could that be?

Understanding the contradictions does not resolve them. Only a process of forgiveness and a Zen-like acceptance of things as they are, begun in the middle of the Pacific, help Best acknowledge his father as a flawed man driven by his own demons to commit despicable acts.

One of the best things that can be said about a book is that the reader finds meaningful personal connections or insights in it. In that respect, this book is completely successful with this reader. Many of us carry baggage and insecurities similar to Best’s in some way, and his struggles mirror some of our own. Best’s candidness and his insight challenge us to be as honest with our own issues. Many of us also identify with his search for the path that leads to letting go. At the mercy of an endless, almighty ocean, Eric Best begins to find his way.

Nothing 1000 Tacks Can’t Fix

2011-03-28T07:59:00.000-04:00

I recently returned from a terrific four day Laser sailing clinic at Sailfit in Clearwater, Florida. I went with four of my regular sailing buddies, and all of us agree that we had a great time and learned a ton about laser sailing. It’s hard to say what the best parts of it were, but here is a list of choices:
• Small class of 6 people
• Entire group at more or less the same skill level
• How-to instruction from a bone fide expert and great teacher, Kurt Taulbee
• Individual, on the water coaching, one skill at a time
• Coaching to match our skill level and needs
• Video tape review of our sailing showing what we do well and what we do poorly
• Instruction on fitness and nutrition from another bona fide expert, Meka Taulbee
• Expert answers to every question we could think of
• Camaraderie with sailing buddies
• Warm water
• Escape from New England weather

Like many adult sailors and racers, I have attended my share of sailing seminars, heard one to two hour talks on the nuances of sailing a specific type of boat, and purchased a bookshelf of books and videos from experts and champions. Also like most adult racers, I have raced regularly, but practiced infrequently. I have sailed in some big regattas, trying to pick up tips and tricks from the experts, but I have not had any real coaching since the first “how to sail” lessons.

It’s amazing how much different getting some real coaching, especially from an expert, is from trying to improve sailing skills in the other ways. It is one thing to watch the champion on a video tape, but quite another to do what he does. Monkey see, monkey do has its limits. How do you know if you are doing what the champion did? Most of us can be pretty sure we’re not doing all of it, but what parts are we doing right and what parts are we doing wrong? What do we have to change? Kurt at Sailfit was great at sorting that out, and he has saved me years in trying to figure those things out myself.

I think he did the same things for all the other members of the group as well. His individualized feedback identified different strengths and weakness for each of us as we went through various skills. We each surprised ourselves a little in some of the things we did well. One of us could stand on the side deck and sail the Laser like an experienced surfer. The rest of us - not so good at that. Two others loved blind tacking. The rest - not so good at that. One could comfortably sail down wind, healed 45 degrees to windward right at the point of capsize. The rest looked more like old geezers. The process also revealed for each of us tendencies toward our own particular set of bad habits. We came away with individual lists of things to work on and Kurt’s voice in our heads telling us what we need to do to complete each skill better.

The last thing I came away with is Kurt’s response to fixing a bad habit or developing a new technique – “It’s nothing 1000 tacks can’t fix.” I don’t know if this line sticks with me because it appeals to a Midwestern hard work ethic or because it appeals to a high school coach who blows whistles through seemingly endless tacking drills. Whatever the reason, I know he’s right. But it begs the question “Are we willing to do the 1000 tacks?” Most sailors never really do them. We tend to read books and watch videos and “understand” it in our heads, but never really train our bodies to automatically execute the skills. We are also smart enough to realize that after the 1000 tacks, there are 1000 gybes, 1000 mark roundings (I suppose that’s really 1000 upwind and 1000 downwind), and 1000 starts (2000 in my case). Who’s got the time? It’s enough to make me really tired. Maybe 500 tacks are enough. Maybe 250. Oh god, I need a beer!

As soon as the weather is warmer and the wind is right and I have the time and……….., I’m going out and start those 1000 tacks. No, really. I’m going to try.

Spring Time in New England

2011-03-22T09:30:00.000-04:00

After waiting a week for the ice to thaw, this was the first day on the water for our high school sailing team. It's been a long snowy winter, but Spring is finally here!

Scooped!

2011-03-13T11:39:00.000-04:00

I know I have been very, very remiss in writing for this blog, but finally when there is something good to write about, I am scooped by Tillerman! It’s not so much that he said what I have to say, but that he used the photo at the center of my story. The photo is from last week’s Sailfit seminar which I attended. It was posted on the Sailfit facebook page, but incorrectly attributed to Jody …… There is no need to name the actual sailor, but he is one of the group of five friends from New England who attended the seminar.

Aside from the obvious entertainment value, the whole episode has an important lesson to teach about sailing.

The question is how to sail a laser without actually being in it. One possibility is to just fall off and let the boat sail itself. I’m sure that it takes remarkable skill to trim the sails and adjust the steering just right to keep the boat sailing after abandoning ship, but the better it is done, the longer the swim to ever get back together with the boat again.

A second possibility as one departs the boat is holding onto the mainsheet. The primary virtue of this approach is to stay in touch with the boat until it capsizes. (But, maybe there is another possibility. I wonder if it is possible to adjust the amount of body drag to achieve correct sail trim and keep the boat upright and going. Any volunteers to try this out?) Anyway…… this seems to be the preferred method so long as one holds on with the hands and does not wrap the line around arms, legs, or torso, which could cause some serious problems.

The third, but not very desirable method is holding onto the tiller extension. This seems to have been tried many times, and is apparently the best way to break a high performance carbon fiber tiller. Aluminum tillers don’t fare much better, except that they allow the sailor to stay connected to his boat. Holding onto the tiller extension was the method employed in the photo. It had two immediate results. The boat capsized (eventually) and the aluminum tiller looked like this:

This Old Hull – Laser Deck Repair with Air Pressure

2011-02-04T04:01:00.001-05:00

Somewhat housebound after yet another New England snowstorm this winter, I’ve had the chance to work on my 23 year-old Laser hull with decks adjacent to the cockpit so soft and sagging that they seemed to be structurally unsound. My good friend and fellow Laser enthusiast, Yarg, told me that the problem might be delamination of the fiberglass-foam sandwich deck structure. Pictured below is a piece of the 1/2” thick deck material which I had cut out for an access port some years ago in order to repair a cracked mast step tube.

Inspecting the underside of the deck, using a mirror, and an existing access port next to the centerboard revealed what appeared to be perfectly intact fiberglass. However, pushing on the deck seemed to suggest an airspace as the upper deck surface made a crunching sound when it touched the rough foam surface below. My findings probing through a 1/16th inch test hole were consistent with the delamination theory as well. Perhaps the deck might be repaired by injecting epoxy into the space between the layers, but without easy access to the inside of the hull, clamping the two sides together would be problematic. Pushing from the top only would leave a seriously sagging deck. The answer appeared to be pressurizing the hull with an electric air mattress pump.

I began the repair by cautiously connecting an electric air mattress pump to the stern drain hole applying just enough pressure to cause the sagging deck to rise. Too much pressure, causing the hull to explode, would be counterproductive. Drilling holes in the tubing reduced the air pressure as necessary. After covering the deck with masking tape, I drilled an array of 1/16th inch holes into the soft areas of the deck using a hexagonal pattern, 2 inch hole to hole spacing, and 3/8th inch depth. The hand drill had a stop using a piece of dowel to prevent drilling too deep. Five 1x2s clamped across the deck prevented the deck from rising above its normal flat position when the air pressure was applied.

West Marine extra slow curing epoxy allowed enough time for me to inject all the holes before it thickened. I injected the epoxy using a West Marine syringe with a tapered nozzle that fit snugly into the 1/16th inch holes. I loaded the syringe by removing the plunger and pouring in the epoxy. It takes way too long to try to suck it into the syringe. I injected one syringe-full (about ½ ounce or 15 ml) into only 1/3 of the holes which worked out to holes with a 4 inch spacing pattern. The other 2/3 of the holes allowed for excess epoxy and air to escape. The average epoxy thickness was about 2.2 mm or 3/32th inch. It was comforting to see the excess epoxy and air bubbles flow out of almost every hole when the air pressure was turned on indicating that the epoxy had spread out well. I injected some extra epoxy into any hole that was not oozing.

After leaving the air pressure on for 24 hours (praying the pump wouldn’t conk out before the epoxy hardened) the deck appeared to be quite solid. A few of the holes were leaking air, so the pressure was turned off, and the leaking holes were sealed by injecting a little more epoxy. By the way, pressurizing the hull is a good way to find other leaks as well. Running my hand under the joint between the deck and the hull revealed a previously unknown large leak near the bow with air blowing out. I’ll do a search for smaller leaks at some point. The final step for the deck project was to apply some Gel Coat repair material to the 1/16th inch holes.

The soft, sagging deck is now flat and solid, but will it be good for another 23 years (or even 23 minutes of sailing in rough conditions)? Time will tell.

Eric

It’s Time to Ban Single Use Plastic Water Bottles

2011-01-24T11:45:00.000-05:00

College sailing has banned single use water bottles from its events. Real rules against it! Sailors must drink from re-useable bottles and hosts must provide a source of water to refill those bottles.

The New England Scholastic Sailing Association (high school sailing) has approved the same policy on a voluntary basis.

Host schools and coaches are tired of finding bottles in their sailing waters, tired of picking up the empties after an event, and tired of disposing of the mountain of trash. The bottles are frequently discarded without recycling the plastic.

My first reaction to this information was totally selfish. How will addressing this inconvenience me? I take along bottled water when I sail and buy cases of it for high school regattas. My sailing facility does not have a readily available source of clean drinking water to provide to regatta participants. Is it really a big enough problem to warrant new efforts from me?

Upon looking into it, it IS a big enough problem. In fact, it’s big enough that I’m ashamed I haven’t changed my ways before now.

Some bottled water facts:

• 60,000,000 plastic water bottles are discarded EVERY DAY in America.

• Only 23% (highest estimate I’ve found) of plastic water bottles are recycled. The rest end up in landfills or worse, where they can leach chemicals into the ground water.

• It takes ½ cup of oil to manufacture and transport each bottle.

• It requires 3 times as much water to make the bottle as it does to fill it.

• In producing each bottle, the CO2 released into the atmosphere would fill 12 balloons.

• Bottled water costs between 200 to 10,000 times as much as tap water.

• Virtually every independent study on bottled water shows some contamination from bacteria and/or synthetic chemicals.

• Many of the leading brands are not mountain spring water, but merely tap water that has been run through filters.

A simple alternative is tap water in reusable plastic, aluminum, or stainless steel bottles. Reusable metal bottles can be bought for as little as $4 each when purchased in bulk. Plastic bottles are even cheaper.

If water quality is the issue, it should be comforting to know that the safety of tap water is more regulated than the safety of bottled water. Other quality issues depend on a comparison of specific bottled products to specific tap water sources. When necessary, filters are available to upgrade the chemical and mineral purity, odor, and taste of tap water. We can almost always find a suitable tap water source.

When you think about it, you have to admit that re-usable bottles and tap water, especially when filtered, would work in almost every situation where we commonly drink bottled water. It’s hard to rationalize the need for wasteful production and distribution processes and the harmful environmental consequences of single use water bottles.

We have two fundamental choices. As the saying goes, we become part of the solution or we are part of the problem.

Every time we refill a bottle, we reduce the number of new bottles by one, and we take a step in the right direction. 59,999,999 bottles on the heap. Our reuse might encourage a friend to do the same. 59,999,998 bottles on the heap. College sailors are doing their part, and now, so are many high school sailors. 59, 998,000 bottles on the heap.

Here’s a visual representation of the rate at which plastic bottles are discarded.

The internet offers lots of information of the subject. Here are some sites and videos that make the point in 13 minutes or less.

Back2tap.com website with a 9 minute video reviewing the problems with bottled water - http://www.youtube.com/v/FjyLABrtmqA&hl=en&fs=1&autoplay=1

http://Storyofstuff.org/bottled water/ - offers an entertaining 10 minute video explaining the life cycle of single use bottles with an anti-bottled water industry tone.

Penn and Teller have a 13 minute entertaining video debunking the perceived quality of bottled water - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfPAjUvvnIc

A short tap water vs. bottled water discussion - http://www.wimp.com/bottledwater/

The Path to FAIRNESS

2011-01-17T15:31:00.001-05:00

The recent talk on Tillerman’s blog and discussion on the Laser Forum mark another milestone down a new road for laser sailing and perhaps a new understanding of the term “one design.” The old laser map to FAIRNESS directed us down one of two over priced toll roads (New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway), but the sailors’ free market, global positioning systems have recalculated and shown us another road. The new road is getting a lot of traffic, perhaps most of it, but there seems to be a question about whether both the old and the new are headed to the same FAIRNESS. One FAIRNESS is in the state of supplier to customer relationships, and the other is in the state of competitor to competitor relationships. I believe that they are sister cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Boston and Cambridge.
I contend that both roads will lead you to fairness among competitors. Despite the highway confusion, I think laser sailing is as fair and equal as any sailing, except for the influence of those damn #@*&^% mommy boats. I also think that the free market is more effective than the class rules in keeping it that way.

I don’t mean to promote a free market like some damn #@*&^% Republican politician with tunnel vision. Instead, I mean to encourage equity in the context of a little guy vs. big guy, David vs. Goliath story.

When it comes to sails, Big Laser has used its monopolistic position to exploit its customers for a long time now. They sell a lousy product (mediocre, at best) for a ridiculously high price, a combination of planned obsolescence and authoritarian pricing that would make any damn #@*&^% super-capitalist proud. To the customers, it seems like extortion. To Big Laser, it may just be making a living and keeping the wheels of business turning. After all, they are sailors and boat builders, not damn #@*&^% Wall Street bankers. I like to think that they did not anticipate that the requirement to use overly-expensive sails would come to undermine the universally acclaimed goal of fairness. BUT IT HAS. Many sailors can not or will not spend what it takes to keep up with those who have unlimited budgets. Do the class rules help even the playing field? Not so far.

Thankfully, the free market has allowed a young upstart like Jim Meyers at Intensity sails to jump in, make a living for himself, and fulfill a need in the marketplace. (Cue America the Beautiful in a medley with the Chinese national anthem – that’s where the sails are actually made.) From my talks with Jim, I understand his business to be mostly a response to overpriced products he finds in the market, most notably the class legal Laser sail. By giving us more bang for our buck, he is leading us to FAIRNESS in the state of supplier to customer relationships. He is giving us the same product for one third the price, complete with prompt and friendly service.

But is it really the same product? It sure seems to be. Jim says it is as close to the North sail as possible. (The North cloth is proprietary, so he uses the closest product he can find, which seems to be slightly more durable.) Sailors don’t seem to be finding any competitive differences. Although Intensity makes no claims about this, it seems to me that with its sails, we maintain FAIRNESS in the state of competitor to competitor relationships.

For several years now, more and more Intensity sails have been used for local club racing - to the chagrin of Big Laser (as I discussed last year). Tillerman reports that Cedar Point has altered their sailing instructions to include them. I did the same for our local regatta three years ago. In the two places I sail most frequently, there are far more Intensity sails on the water than North sails. I suspect that in the fleet as a whole in our local club there are at least five Intensity sails for each North sail. I wonder what percentage of North sail owners also have an Intensity sail or two.

The market is shouting its approval of equal or better products at lower prices. And the shout is increasing in intensity. (Pun intended.) Intensity sails will be seen more and more at bigger regattas. Is anyone going to complain that those of us in the middle (I wish) to the back of the pack are using them? Will we be asked to leave? (So far, I have been non-confrontational and have used my North sail at Regattas, even though I might do better with a newer Intensity.) Does anyone really think that the $180 sail has an advantage over the $563 sail? I think the only advantage is a new sail versus an old sail. If we could buy sails for $180, everyone would be more likely to have a new sail, and therefore a more level playing field. The rules say buying a $180 sail instead of a $563 sail is cheating, but common sense and the marketplace know that FAIRNESS is not the operative concept here.

The consternation over all this will continue to go on for a number of years, but the market forces will eventually win out in some way. The Intensity Laser class will thrive at the local and regional level, and we’ll all have fun and FAIR sailing. Big Laser will have to decide if it wants a separate class for world class and Olympic sailors or whether it should make some compromises to keep it all together. Assuming that those who make the rules and set the prices want to keep it all together, why are taking so long to do something about it?

Cooler Than Ollie

2010-11-09T13:12:00.003-05:00

It is common knowledge that the Ollie box has been one of the great innovations in small boat sailing. It is a waterproof automatic timing and horn system for starting races. It can be programmed with up to three different sequences, selectable from inside the box. It has made life easier for many, many race committees and kept timing precise for the racers. It is unquestionably a great invention!

But as clever and useful as the Ollie box is, my good friend and fellow laser sailor, Eric, wondered if there might be a way to have an automated system that we could use in our informal racing where no race committee boat or race committee person is present. Could there be an alternative to rabbit starts that would help us all hone our time and distance judgment in starting? Could we just float an Ollie box and have one of the racers initiate the sequence?

Ollie boxes are expensive and fairly heavy, and one would sink like a stone if given the chance. It didn’t take much thought to realize that any flotation scheme risked losing the Ollie if something went wrong. It was particularly worrisome that it would not be our Ollie box at the bottom of the lake, it would be our Yacht club’s. Eric decided to start from scratch and develop another floating automated starting system that could be operated by a passing racer. Here is his description of his ingenious and low cost solution.

The device is built into a medium-sized picnic cooler which is about 10 inches wide so that it can be transported in a Laser cockpit. A 5 lb. barbell is used as an anchor attached with a 50 ft. line to a cleat on the forward end of the cooler. Excess line is wrapped around the cooler handle so the scope can be adjusted according to the water depth. The cover is secured and sealed by good old duct tape.

There are just two control switches, “Start” and “Abort,” which are doorbell buttons mounted on the aft end of the cooler. There is no separate power switch. The unit turns on when the start button is pressed, and automatically powers down at the end of the start sequence or when “Abort” is pressed.

A standard 3-minute dinghy starting sequence is used beginning with 5 short warning beeps and ending with a 5-second countdown to the long start blast. The short tones are ¼ second long with ¼ second spacing. Long tones are 1 second with ½ second spacing. The final start blast is 2 seconds long.

The sound source is a waterproof piezoelectric marine horn which has been likened to the sound of a dying duck. It is not terribly loud, but on the other hand, it does not destroy the eardrums of the sailor starting at the “boat” end of the line.

The electronics are housed in a small waterproof plastic box (in case the outer duct tape seal fails). The power is supplied by 8 D-cell batteries mounted to the floor of the cooler so they also serve as ballast along with two 4 lb barbells. The calculated battery capacity is about 2,400 starts, so battery life is really just limited by shelf life. Three empty 2 liter soft drink bottles are included in the enclosure for emergency flotation.

The electronics consist of a small microprocessor board (ARMite single board controller, Coridium Network Control Systems) with a few extra solid state components added to interface with the buttons and horn, along with some circuitry for the auto power-down. The software is just a small (about 170 line) program written in BASIC.

Overall, the system works pretty well, although I am sure there are improvements that could be made. Naturally, we have to use the honor system when it comes to being over early at the start. Maybe someone can come up with a paintball system to mark a boat that is OCS.

Yarg

Gumption

2010-10-27T18:51:00.001-04:00

Last Saturday was the final day on the fall sailing season for the high school team I coach. Actually Thursday was the last official day, but four of them wanted to drive two hours to get in one last day and one last regatta. You gotta love those people who can’t get enough of the things they are passionate about, and respond to each last time or last day with a plea for “just one more.”

Maybe a coach shouldn’t be happy after his team finishes seventh in an eight boat regatta, but after silencing the Vince Lombari voice in my head, it occurred to me I was proud of my very young freshman and sophomore sailors who thought nothing of going head to head with the best varsity junior and seniors from other schools. It took me a while to really pinpoint why I was so proud of them, but out of the blue, despite years since I have heard, read, or spoken the word, the perfect word came to me – gumption. Gumption is a word that seems to be out of fashion, but it sounds great and is enthusiastically positive without being syrupy or trite.

Dictionaries offer many definitions for gumption – initiative, resourcefulness, courage, spunk, guts, common sense – but the definition I like best comes from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

“A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption.”

It took gumption just to get to this regatta. When the event was first discussed, it was explained that it was two hours away, that the school would not provide transportation, that the school prohibited the coach from driving students in his own car, and that kids therefore had to provide their own transportation. None of the varsity skippers was prepared to hurdle those obstacles, but the future star freshman, and head gumption-eer immediately responded with “I’ll go. My mom will drive.”
“Has she agreed to that?”
“Not yet, but she will.”
The very talented out of town sophomore who sails with us, but is usually prohibited from competing in official school competitions, said he “would clear his schedule” for some outside competition. The freshman’s regular crew, our team captain, responded with her usual “I have no life outside sailing; I’m available.” And a few days later the volunteer for everything sophomore who always wants to go “even if I’m not sailing” offered to crew. The plan was hatched. We committed to the regatta.

It took a little more gumption to stick to that commitment after a series of setbacks. Future star freshman sprained her ankle the weekend before the regatta. She couldn’t sail all week, but swore she would heal enough and tape up the ankle sufficiently to sail on Saturday. On Wednesday the very talented (best kid on our team) out of town kid thanked me for a great season and said he now had a family obligation on regatta day. A call for a volunteer replacement elicited only one sophomore who was a crew and not a skipper. The only solution was to elevate the volunteer for everything sophomore from crew to skipper, and although he just started to drive the boat this year, and is about ninth on our depth chart, he was our man. None of the kids thought of any of this as an obstacle; it was just an adjustment in the plan.

When it came to the racing, there were six races in the A fleet for future star freshman and her crew, and six races in B fleet for volunteer for everything sophomore and his crew. In the first five races, future star freshman was averaging sixth place out of eight and volunteer for everything sophomore was averaging seventh. But in the final race for each, things started to fall into place. Future star freshman advanced from sixth at the windward mark to first on the last leg and then lost one boat to finish second. Volunteer for everything sophomore put together a good first leg to be fourth at the windward mark and gained one boat to finish third.

In our own gumption based scoring system, we threw out the first five races, counted only the last race in each fleet, and won the regatta by one point.

My sailors impressed themselves with what they accomplished in those final races, but they really impressed me with the gumption that it took to get them that opportunity for success.

As I think about it, maybe one of the things I like most about sailing is the gumption of the sailors. High schoolers are frequently willing to risk repeated capsizing and challenge themselves to sail in strong wind that the coaches know they can’t handle. Blue water sailors, long distance ocean racers, and solo single handed round the world racers all possess incredible knowledge and skill, but they are all the more admirable because of the gumption they demonstrate in pursuing their challenges.

And a final shout out goes to a couple of my friends who had the gumption to fly to England, compete with world class sailors, push the limits of their aging (and in one case, sick) bodies, and test the limits of their small boat sailing abilities in overpowering wind and massive waves. You have my admiration.

Autobailers- Part Two

2010-10-23T15:05:00.010-04:00

Removal and replacement with a watertight plate

For a very long time, leaking autobailers had been my nemesis as I battled to keep all 12 of our high school sailing team’s well used 420’s fully functional. This year, it was time to abandon our duct tape solution (actually better tape than duct tape, but just tape nonetheless) and move on to a real solution. Several ideas occurred to us, but each seemed both expensive and flawed in one way or another.

Replacing the autobailers would be expensive ($62 each x 12), and they would quickly fail again with the boats exposed to our very sandy environment and the care left in the hands of multiple, careless, high school students.
Fiberglass work to plug the holes after removing the autobailers would be tricky and time consuming, especially given the very thin hulls on 420’s. A quality fiberglass repair of a 3” by 5” hole also takes expertise I don’t have.
A friend offered to weld the old autobailers shut, but after discovering the gaskets inside, he determined they would melt into a gooey mess that was not compatible with welding.
A stainless steel plate bolted to the hull with the same bolts used by the removed autobailer would seem to work nicely. I couldn’t find anything like this sold commercially, and I worried that having them made would get almost as expensive as buying new autobailers. When I examined an old bailer I had removed, discovering that the bottom of the bailer was not flat, but a pan shape, I became totally discouraged about the cost of having such a piece custom made.

What we (mostly a former sailing team member, now a college graduate) finally came up with was a way to reuse pieces of the old autobailer to make a waterproof plate. The 420 autobailers are constructed from three separate pieces of stainless steel and a couple of gaskets. The chute that drops to let out water is sandwiched between two frames. Our solution was to replace the chute and its gaskets with a solid piece of hardened West System epoxy resin that would span the hole and bond to both frames of stainless steel with a water-tight seal. We tried it out on our boats during the summer, and we have been sailing for six weeks this fall with no leaks.

Here is what the process looks like:

First, we remove the autobailers and separate the three pieces, the two frames and the chute. They are fastened together with six copper rivets that need to be drilled out.

Drilling Out the Autobailer Rivits

Autobailer with Rivits and Lever Removed

After the pieces are separated, the chute and its gaskets are discarded.

Next, the top and bottom frames are tightly bolted together. Then, they are temporarily bolted to a piece of wood that will serve as the bottom form when we pour in the resin later. Wax paper must be inserted between the wood and the frames to prevent adhesion of resin to the wood.

Frames Ready to Receive Fluid Resin

The resin is two part West System epoxy with High Density 404 Adhesive Filler mixed to a thick, but pour-able, consistency. It is just poured into the frames, making sure all the corners are filled. (We waited 24 hours before removing the assembly, but the resin sets up in about an hour.)

Pouring Resin into Metal Frames

The final step is removing the new pieces from the temporary molding board and inserting them into the boats to plug the holes where the autobailers were removed.

Finished Autobailer Replacement Plate

All the old silicone or 5200 needs to be removed from the fiberglass on the boat before installing the new piece, and this is the most time consuming and tedious part of the process. When installing the new piece, all the old nuts and bolts are used. Working simultaneously from both the top and the bottom of the boat takes two people and is a little awkward. Careful attention needs to be paid to craftsmanship when the new sealant is installed. (We screwed this up on a couple of boats and had to reseal them.) We used marine silicone sealant which lasts for a long time, but had we been 100% sure this whole approach was going to work, we might have used 5200 for a permanent bond.

View of 420 Hull with Autobailer Plug Installed

Has anyone else come up with another way to eliminate autobailers that they would like to share? Other comments on autobailers?

Yarg

Autobailers- Part One

2010-10-22T09:34:00.003-04:00

Keeping it simple?

Autobailer side view - open

Some time ago, Paul Elevstrom came up with a simple solution for removing the water that accumulates in the cockpit when sailing small boats in big wind and waves. He used the fundamental Bernoulli principle (low pressure created by moving fluids – you remember) to invent the autobailer. In Lasers, 420’s, and other small boats I have seen, the autobailers all have the same basic design. A chute that can open and close is mounted at the lowest point of the hull and depends on suction caused when the boat is moving rapidly forward to remove water from the boat. It has “a wedge shaped venturi that closes automatically if the boat grounds or hits an obstruction, and a flap that acts as a non return valve to minimise water coming in if the boat is stationary or moving too slowly for the device to work.” (Description from Wikipedia, with British spelling of minimize.) Mr. Elevstrom’s autobailers have been bailing small racing boats for a long time now.

But wait! Autobailers have also been letting significant amounts of water leak into small boats for a long time now. Maybe cutting a hole in the bottom of a boat to let the water out is not such a simple solution. Isn’t that how boats sink?

I think many of us have had love/hate relationships with autobailers over the years. Sometimes they seem to work, and sometimes they cause annoying leaks. My experience is that they work well when they are installed, maintained, and used properly, but when those things are done poorly, the system breaks down quickly and the water flows the wrong way, sometimes in copious amounts. I suspect Paul Evelstrom was very good at care and maintenance. I certainly try to be good about those things with my Laser, but don’t always live up to his or my own standard. However, many small boat owners don’t believe in maintenance. They hate autobailers.

Among those who abhor maintenance are all of the sailors on the high school sailing team I coach. They not only abhor maintenance, they are inclined to practice abject neglect or worse on all of their equipment. Fighting these instincts in upper-middle class American teenagers is a tilting at windmills kind of exercise. Apparently, it is one of my callings.

We have a fleet of twelve old 420’s, no maintenance person or budget, and our boats, which are shared with the town recreation department, are heavily used. Despite ever improving preventative maintenance (done mostly by me), things still break – frequently. Although problems run the gamut in older boats, the overwhelmingly most frequent failure is leaking, nay, hemorrhaging autobailers. These devices depend on two different gaskets and a silicone or 3M5200 seal - three opportunities for water infiltration. For two years now, our favorite solution has been to tape over bailers with a 4” wide, waterproof tape which obviously also eliminates any possible benefit from autobailers. For several reasons, this approach has had various degrees of success, but it seems the “coach, my boat leaks” complaints never stop.

In fairness to the kids, some of the boats had seriously flawed autobailers by the time we got them. On top of that, we launch from a beach. Raising the main and putting on the rudders while standing in the shallow water stirs up the bottom enough to create an insidious slurry cloud that exposes all underwater parts to as much sand as water. Sand on the sailors’ boots also gets deposited inside the boat when they hop in. Rubber gasketed autobailers are just no match for sand that can penetrate the smallest of crevices. I can’t imagine the perfection in care and maintenance required to keep a bailer opening freely and closing tightly in these conditions.

With all due respect and deference to Paul Elevstrom, autobailers demand a high level of care and maintenance that is just not possible for us (and many others I suspect). A device that uses simple mechanics and physics turns out to be not so simple when operated by teenagers in a sandy environment. For us, a hole in the bottom of the boat is just a leak.

We won’t miss having working autobailers. They really don’t work well in the 420 anyway until the boat is going fast. Our courses are always short and don’t offer long fast straight-aways where the self-bailers work best.

The solution for us is a bleach bottle bailer and no hole in the bottom of the boat. Since all our boats came with an autobailer, the problem became how to remove them and plug the holes (twelve times) with a minimum of cost and effort. Necessity being the mother of invention, we came up with a way.

I haven’t heard a leaking boat complaint in six weeks, so I’m cautiously optimistic we may have found a relatively simple and definitely cheap solution for the hole in our boats.

Part Two will attempt to explain and illustrate our approach.

Yarg

10 Suggestions For Managing Multi-fleet Regattas

2010-07-26T20:37:00.002-04:00

The last three regattas I have attended have had two, three, and four different fleets starting on the same starting line. Sometimes the fleets have different numbers of races, different lengths of courses, and sometimes even different course configurations. It can be quite a juggling act for the Race Committee. Although nobody has asked me, I want to offer my two cents about techniques that can be used to make race management more efficient in these highly challenging conditions. I’m not an expert, but I have been to enough races to see a lot of good ideas and endorse them as if they were my own. The terrific regatta I wrote about a month ago used several, but not all of these suggestions. I think each item makes an incremental improvement, but each also requires some resources, so there is always a trade-off between the two. I’m sure my list is not comprehensive, so please feel free to add your thoughts.

The overriding principle here is to maximize the PRO’s options. In a multi-fleet regatta, the PRO is constantly making judgments about minimizing inter-fleet interference and getting the next fleet started. He needs all the tools he can get to be flexible and agile, and he can’t have his hands tied by unnecessary constraints in the Sailing Instructions. He needs the best committee members or crew that he can find, he needs plenty of mark and rescue boats, he needs to be able to move marks quickly and easily, he needs the capacity to change courses, shorten courses, and have a separate finish boat when required.

1. Get a skilled PRO and a crew who enjoy doing all this. Some people actually have fun meeting the challenges managing this kind of regatta brings. Some also enjoy sailing as a spectator sport. And who doesn’t like riding around in power boats talking on the radio?

2. Keep the start and finish lines outside the course. This keeps all those not starting or finishing away from these areas. Lines in the middle of the course or even at marks are subject to traffic from any of the fleets.

3. Use separate start and finish lines. Having to delay the start of a whole fleet for a couple of stragglers at the end of another fleet wastes a lot of time. A separate finish line solves this problem. One line on each side of the committee boat is the easiest way to do this. A finish line completely separate from the starting area goes even further by allowing simultaneously starts and finishes by different fleets. But it also takes a boat and a skilled crew to set a good finish line and record finishes.

4. Use a short starting sequence. It is always tricky to determine if there is enough time to get off a start without running the starting fleet into a fleet already racing. The shorter the starting sequence the easier it is to make that judgment. The three minute dinghy start works well.

5. Get enough marks. Having different marks for different fleets is the ultimate in flexibility. They do need to be very clearly different, like yellow and orange. They can be tied together whenever the same location can be used for multiple fleets. A change of course mark is also good to have so that the new mark can be placed immediately, and the mark boat has more time to remove the old mark.

6. Make the marks easy to handle. I like marks with a handle on top and a lightweight anchor (a short chain or a sash weight work great where I sail). As I was told in a US Sailing seminar, “You are only anchoring a bag of air.” If marks can be dragable – even better. Placing and moving marks can be relatively difficult or easy and relatively time consuming or quick.

7. Equip all mark boats with change of course and shorten course flags. All boats also need to be able to anchor and record finishes if called upon. The crews need to clearly understand the procedures for all this. A rule book provides a handy reference for double checking the correct procedures. This gives the PRO tremendous flexibility to deal with radical changes in sailing conditions or weather.

8. Communicate well with the competitors. The competitors need to understand the actions and intentions of the Race Committee, so the Sailing Instructions need to be very clear about how competitors will be notified of their starts, what marks are to be used for their fleets, and the schedule of races. If the Race Committee makes adjustments on the water, there needs to be a clear procedure (specified in the Sailing Instructions) for notifying the competitors of the changes.

9. Communicate well with all members of the Race Committee team. This begins before the regatta with the PRO clarifying his expectations and defining roles and duties for all the members of the team. All variables should be anticipated and discussed in advance. Procedures should be reviewed. The language for discussing things should be clarified. Are wind direction and mark locations defined by compass direction, compass bearing, or simple right and left? Are right and left as viewed by the PRO or by who ever is speaking? Radios should be checked both on shore and on the water, and even then, back up radios or cell phones should be in each boat.

10. Practice, practice, practice. It is great if the entire Race Committee team can work together at least once before the regatta, but any experience with any of the above techniques develops expertise, and every little bit helps.

Communication with the Race Committee

2010-07-15T14:03:00.002-04:00

Last weekend I was at a regatta, and before the first race, I asked the Race Committee to confirm my understanding of the course. Their response was to point to a placard and say “course 6.” Well, that was helpful. If I had known what course 6 was, I wouldn’t have been asking the question. I realize I was a dolt for not having committed the 7 different courses in the sailing instructions to memory. I was even more foolish for deciding that there‘s no good way to carry reading material on a laser. And I was an irresponsible competitor to have tried to depend on the kindness of strangers to explain what had already been explained clearly enough in those sailing instructions next to the regatta tee shirt in my car. Clearly I deserved to be punished.

Needless to say, I was. The convergence of my reckless negligence with the unlikely good fortune to be leading the first race led to the inevitable tragedy of my snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. To finish the course, I managed to sail upwind back to the start line, while the competitors way behind me sailed to the real finish line which it turns out was not nearly so far upwind. While sailing to the “correct” side of the course, I succeeded in sailing around the real finish by so far that I didn’t even see it. Subsequently returning to the real finish, I recorded a 5 and was grateful for the small laser turnout for the regatta.

I get it - understanding all the sailing instructions is part of racing. But really! Is it too much to ask the race committee to explain their unique course designations to a visitor?

This all leads to the general question of how much the Race Committee should communicate with the sailors. At pre-race skippers’ meetings, it has been standard practice for years for the PRO to answer questions with the magic, unhelpful phrase “refer to the sailing instructions.” This has always impressed me as being unfriendly, if not arrogant. It suggests a tone of seriousness or gravity that is contrary to the expectations of most of the sailors I know. For most of us, this is supposed to be fun.
“Refer to the sailing instructions” sounds like homework, when we are looking for recess.

I realize that the thinking is that the PRO or Race Committee should be careful not say anything to contradict the carefully written sailing instructions. While there is some merit to this reasoning, it seems to me that it goes way overboard for any but the most serious high stakes regattas. The risk of offering explanations and clarifications to the instructions is that one could actually increase confusion or introduce contradictions that then could result in some disastrous consequence that in turn could cause a protest or even skew the results of the event. Does that seem likely? Are the explanations really likely to be so bad that they would do more harm than good? In a time when there is a need to attract more people to sailing, what is more important – covering for the remote possibility of an imperfect explanation by the Race Committee or establishing a friendly atmosphere where everyone enjoys the sailing experience?

One of the high school coaches I work with always tells the sailors “if you have any questions, ask; if you are confused about the course, ask the race committee – it’s not supposed to be a mystery.” I know that I would be happier if events were run with this philosophy. I admit that I was the stupid one last weekend, but who wants to win or lose because one of the sailors misunderstood the course?

Multi-Class Regatta with No Waiting Time

2010-07-02T17:26:00.005-04:00

I have been to many multi-class regattas where three or more classes share the same starting line and the same course. The one common characteristic for almost all of them is that they have lots of waiting time - long, wasteful, and seemingly unnecessary waiting time. Last weekend I finally went to one that broke the mold. With four classes on the same course, the races for each class were started as promptly as if there was no one else on the course. Major kudos to Duxbury Yacht Club.

I have to admit that in the last few years I have become very impatient on this subject. Aside from personal psychological deficiencies, the blame goes to coaching high school sailing and laser sailing, especially frostbiting. High school sailing is always short course racing, and a good sailing day is filled with many races. (College sailing is similar in this respect.) The fleet race regatta we host typically has 12 races with sailors returning to shore to swap boats every two races. If the course to shore distance were less, we would do 16 races. I run an intramural regatta twice a year where there are 7 – 9 races in a two hour time frame. Laser frostbiting works the same way. Our high school head to head team race events have five races in the same two hour window.

The reasons for these efficiencies are fairly obvious. Frostbiters get far colder when waiting than racing, so nearly constant racing is the prescription for greater comfort. (I acknowledge that for most of the world frostbiting and comfort are antithetical.) Many places follow more or less the same format in summer racing because it is simply more fun to race than to wait – especially in a laser. In high school racing, the minimization of down time is related to the short, little attention spans of students culturally trained to have ADHD. If they aren’t focused on the coach-guided activity, they drift into never-never land, and they are hard to recapture.

Having experienced a piece of the sailing world with faster paced racing, I have very little interest in going back to the slower pace of larger boats. The fun of racing just seems to overshadow the relaxation (boredom) of milling around and waiting. It is even more interesting and challenging to be the race committee in these situations.

Despite my impatience, I can recognize that my enlightened opinion might not be the enlightened opinion of others. The majority of the sailing world seems to have little interest in the seeming hyperactivity of nearly hypothermic sailors and inattentive high school students. Last summer I wrote about A Three Race Regatta?! where the Flying Scot racers were satisfied while I was mystified – 3 races in 2 days? At the far end of that spectrum is the America’s Cup where one race a day after hours, maybe days of anticipation, is all the excitement anyone can handle

It’s certainly a good thing that sailing contains a multitude of options allowing people to enjoy the sport in very different ways. But occasionally there is a clash of the different worlds within the sport. In those instances, it is surprising how little we seem to understand each other. Last spring our team sailed in a regional regatta where teams qualified for nationals. It was hosted by a major yacht club that was unreasonably generous at making their very upscale facility available to questionably responsible high schoolers. However, when it came to the racing, their course was a mile from the club, sailors in the second fleet were stationed on a large float to wait in the wind and the rain, and the first attempt at a course set-up had a one-mile long windward leg that looked like it would yield 45 minute races. Can’t do many of them in one day! How could they fail to understand the courses used in high school sailing when they were the perfect host in every other way? How could the high school organizers fail to make their expectations clear? Different worlds.

Multi-class regattas where lasers are invited present a similar opportunity for a clash of different sailing worlds. Usually the world I live in is the loser in such a clash. But Duxbury was different. The differences in the class of boats were striking – quick little Lasers, comfortable but lumbering Flying Scots, Marshall 15 cat boats that are fiberglass re-makes of New England boats of the 19th century, and Pintail 25s that look a bit like a plasticized Herreshoff design. Yet with right length courses and the proper spacing between fleets, there was virtually non-stop racing and no interference between boats of different fleets. For the lasers, a few more races than five might have been desirable, but overall it was a great day of racing. Sailors from the other classes seemed to be similarly satisfied. If there were compromises, they were the right ones as the race committee expertly bridged the gaps among very different classes. Kudos again to Duxbury Yacht Club.

Walmart Lasers

2010-06-16T17:42:00.002-04:00

Last week I picked up a paper copy of the APS (Annapolis Performance Sailing) catalogue, and in the Laser section, I found a “practice” Laser sail priced just under the price of the infamous “practice” Laser sail from Intensity. Undercutting Intensity by a dollar or two is not exciting, but to think that a Laser Performance dealer has joined in the game of low-priced non-legal Laser parts gives one a moment of pause. Although APS has always carried a practice sail, it never has had one priced at less than $200, so this is something new.

We have been all through the argument of using non-class legal sails before. Hard core one-design believers think the purity of the brand should always be preserved, and some rebels and cheapskates think that $550 is just too much to pay for something that can be had for less than $200. But since almost all rebels and cheapskates have been willing to compromise and use the legal sail at serious regattas, there really hasn’t been much of a ruckus.

It would seem that the undercutting Laser Performance / North Sails game is working so well for others that APS, and maybe some other dealers, are starting to want a piece of the action too. And the action does not stop at sails. The business of making and selling low-priced, non-legal Laser parts is growing faster than weeds in my garden. Just at APS, you can buy a “practice” daggerboard, rudder head, rudder blade, outhaul and Cunningham cleats, boom, lower mast (full, radial, or 4.7), and upper mast. Intensity sells all of that, in some different non-class legal non-one-design variations, and they also sell a “practice” auto-bailer and a “practice” mounting plate for the hiking strap.

I’m still looking for non-legal gudgeons, grab rails, and bow eyes so that I can strip a laser and build a “Walmart” Practice Laser with absolutely no genuine manufacturer approved parts except the hull! Nothing builds a champion so much as practicing in a boat with sails, blades, and spars different than the ones that must be used in real competition.

For those of us who just want to manage the annual operating cost of Laser sailing, it all just looks like the world has gone a little crazy. Sails are one thing. The sail is the most interchangeable part on the boat, the most expensive part on the boat, and the part that wears out the quickest. If, in a five year period, I buy five class legal sails, I spend about $2750. If, instead, I buy four practice sails and one class legal sail, I spend about $1350 while using a legal sail in every important regatta I attend.

How much would I save if I used a “practice” daggerboard? Stupid question because nobody uses a practice daggerboard. But just to play along, if I were an elite racer for whom the wear of the trunk on the daggerboard over, say a five year period caused me to replace it with a new one, I could save a whopping $50 by buying a practice one. If damage were the issue, assuming I managed to damage one daggerboard beyond repair every five years and thus needed two of them in a five year period, I could again save that $50, but if, and only if, I had the good sense to damage the practice one and not the competition one. I seldom exercise this kind of clever planning. The same logic applies to rudders and spars.

These parts are not “practice” parts, they are simply cheaper, non-legal, knock-off parts

Attached hardware gets even worse. Even self deception can’t go far enough to disguise the fact that the boat is illegal all the time! That’s a big compromise! And then there is the issue of quality. We all find the cost of marine hardware downright painful, but reliability and durability are paramount. High price and quality wins every time over low price, low performance and breakdowns. With hardware, less is almost always less..

So the non-class legal Laser part industry can offer us some minor savings in exchange for less reliability, less (or unknown) quality, and a thorough trashing of the one-design concept. No self-respecting Laser racer should want to convert his boat into a Walmart Laser. Even recreational users and underfunded community sailing programs might not be served if quality and reliability are compromised.

There has to be some common sense and some middle ground when it comes to this kind of thing. When is the world going to finally start behaving like I think it should? Outrageous!

Flip-flop Laser Centerboard Handle?

2010-05-16T08:05:00.003-04:00

There are many ways to rig a Laser, but here is something that I don’t recall seeing before. I’ve been trying a “flip-flop” centerboard handle to help with access and organization of the three Laser sail shape control lines (vang, cunningham, and outhaul). The main idea is to keep the lines close to the gunnel for easy access while hiking. If it happens to be flipped to the wrong (leeward) side, it’s pretty easy to very briefly lean in to flip it to windward.

The flip-flop handle is easily made by folding over some 7 mm line twice so that the shaft is composed of three lines with a triangular cross section. Wrapping with several layers of plastic tape results in an appropriate degree of stiffness. One end of the handle is attached to the centerboard using a hole near the top aft corner. The three control lines are tied to the free end of the handle. It’s about 24 inches long. I believe it should be class-legal.

So far I’ve used it on a couple of race days at a great local club in Duxbury, Massachusetts. It seems to be working out pretty well. Besides the easy access while hiking, it tends to keep the excess line away from the main sheet block which otherwise can be easily jammed. If the control lines become tangled on the deck, a quick whip motion of the handle helps to free them up. When you are positioned aft while sailing downwind, access for the adjustments just before rounding the leeward mark is also improved by angling the handle a bit aft.

If you think it might be helpful, give it a try.

Eric

Appreciating the Zen of Boat Maintenance

2010-03-23T10:02:00.000-04:00

Everyone accepts that maintenance is a part of boat ownership, a necessary evil for most of us. The questions for a boat owner are what kind of maintenance is required and how much time, blood, and money it will demand.

The character of boat maintenance spans a very wide spectrum. For newer boats, maintenance is mostly about shininess with fiberglass polish, varnish, and wax. For old beaters, maintenance is disaster mitigation and control, an exercise in emergency medicine and triage. The right tools are often unavailable and correct parts unobtainable. MacGyver-like solutions allow the sailors and boats to survive an “incident”, but leave the boat needing at least as much corrective repair as before.

I have been at both ends of the spectrum and found little satisfaction at either one. Even with my new laser, I’m falling short. There is a kid at the club who keeps his 8 year old boat shinier than mine. He wet sands and polishes seemingly every time he uncovers the boat, and somehow the sand that finds its way into every little corner of my boat is magically repelled from his.

Most of my high school coaching tenure has been spent at the other end of the spectrum. Our program began by using four very old (30 years, give or take a decade), battered, leaky Tech Dinghies borrowed from a local college with an on again, but mostly off again, sailing program. They were held together by a mishmash of hardware, duct tape, and habit, and the repeated breakdowns were repaired with whatever parts were on hand at the local hardware store. The boats were an embarrassment and a source of endless frustration.

Boat maintenance can seem to be a losing battle against entropy, the physics word for the tendency for the universe to move toward disorder and degradation. No matter what you do, the boats are going to steadily become at least a little worse than they used to be.

At some point, however, there is an opportunity to overcome entropy and actually make the boat better. After the gloss is off the fiberglass, the rigging is well used, the lines are sun faded and worn, and the blades or keels are nicked, there lies an opportunity for redemption. Big boaters who spend more time at the dock messing with their boats than sailing them understand this. It involves a certain intimacy with the boat and a reverence for the function and value of each part. It requires an understanding that each part contributes to the whole and the whole depends on each part. And an important part of that whole is the guy who labors to keep it all working and in balance. The person who does the maintenance can be at one with the boat, and a little piece of Zen-like happiness is possible.

For me, this started to happen after our sailing team acquired a second batch of boats to grow the program to 12 one-design boats. I started noticing the different style vangs and the many subtle variations in the way the boats were rigged and, in some cases, the way they were built. The anal instincts in me craved some consistency, and my competitive side demanded equal boats. We found enough money to buy necessary hardware and new lines. We installed interchangeable parts where the exiting ones were no longer quite interchangeable. We repaired fiberglass scars and defects, especially the broken rear corners that are an inevitable part of a 420 used in competition by junior sailors. We made the boats better, and those of us involved, made ourselves better.

Now that we are again replacing one of our sets of six boats with newer used boats, we are going through another round of upgrades. This time, all boats are getting revarnished tillers, matching tiller extensions, refurbished pivot bolts and bushings, fiberglass damage on the blades repaired, and new downhaul and tie down lines. All control lines will be brand new and identically colored-coded. It is really satisfying to breathe new life into older boats. Life is good.

Aside: Every year, there are one or two kids who spend a lot of time doing this. For some, this is the best part of their sailing experience. Seems like a very good thing when kids in this throw away culture learn to take care of something.

In the first few years as I was losing the battle with entropy, my goal was just to spend less time on boat maintenance. I am finally realizing that the goal should be to spend the allotted time dedicated to preventative and restorative maintenance. Kaizen. Old boats are not my enemy; they are my opportunity to make improvements. Old boats have always created opportunities for kids (and adults) to learn to love sailing and for their keepers to discover the rewards of maintenance. Always will, I suspect.

Help a Grassroots Sailing Organization

2010-03-10T17:46:00.003-05:00

Not knowing how well publicized the fire at the University of New Hampshire boathouse has been, I want to publish this this letter from the team captain. All boats, equipment, and the boat house are a total loss.

This is exactly the kind of grassroots sailing organization that has been praised in this blog and several others. They support sailing every which way in their array of programs. If you can help them, please do. They are very worthy of our support.

From Chris Edwards of UNH's sailing program:

As some of you may not know, on March 3, 2010 the UNH Sailing Team's boathouse was set fire to, and all the equipment inside had been destroyed. The structure at the pond sheltered over 55 sailboats (Opti's, Lasers, Sunfish, Club 420's, FJ's), outboard engines, trailers, coach boats, tools, and other gear, all of which were lost in the fire. Estimates have been upward of $600,000. State Fire Marshall's Office has ruled the fire was incendiary, or intentionally set. The police are still investigating who started the fire.

We are still unaware of what type of insurance will be awarded as well.

As a co-ed student-run team, we work to promote an interest in sailing, in both recreation and competitive inter-collegiate racing. The team is open to any students who want to join, regardless of their experience. In the past fall season, we had over 50 active members on our roster. The majority of these students, many for whom sailing was a new activity, took the opportunity to participate in competitive racing in New England last season. In the spring, the UNH Sailing Team also coaches a combined regional Junior and Senior High School sailing team at our sailing center for their spring racing season which includes hosting the NH State High School Championship. Their season at the moment remains in limbo.

This fire has also affected the UNH Community Sailing Program, a summer sailing program open to local youths ages 6-18. The loss of their own resources including Opti's, Lasers, and those other boats they share with the collegiate team has jeopardized this organization and the summer activity of over 200 youth sailors.

The team is a club team and as such raises almost every penny for boats, equipment, regatta travel, coach's salaries and so forth. The sailors maintain all the boats, build the docks and essentially develop an ongoing deep sense of pride, commitment and leadership by being members of the UNH Sailing Team. We are extremely saddened by our loss but are grateful for the many emails, phone calls and offers of support.

This team will not be shut down. We will rebuild the centre, acquire boats and become stronger through adversity. Hopefully, through the support of the greater community of sailing, that process will happen sooner than later. Despite the extent of our losses, current team members, alumni, coaches, and our University advisors are optimistic and are moving toward the rebuilding process. We have suffered a terrible blow but are confident that our team bond and love of sailing will help us bounce back from this tragedy. We are currently working on some short term goals (allowing us and the Junior/Senior combined high school team to practice), mid-term goals (getting boats for the summer program and starting to create a structure for our sailing center), and long term goals (acquiring new or refurbished boats and replacing the equipment that was lost). We will rebuild, and we will continue to sail our spring season.

If you would like to donate to the team, whether it is tools, boats, electronics, parts, or even cash donations, we would be very appreciative. Any type of donation is valued. Any contacts or connections to boat or construction businesses are very helpful. Several corporate sponsors have reached out to assist us in this transitional time. On our website, we have a donations page with more information. http://www.unh.edu/sailing-club/

Thank you for your time, and we are grateful for your support.

Sincerely,

Chris Edwards Brittany Healy
Captain Commodore

Accidental Manly Men

2010-03-08T12:43:00.002-05:00

O Docker’s comment to my last post, Why Manly Men Never Use a Radial Sail, wisely pointed out that Manly Men characteristics aren’t limited to sailors of smaller, more athletic boats. The tendency to use brute force and a sense of bravado instead of intelligence and good judgment is evident in manly sailors of all boats. Perhaps there is a macho gene that takes hold of us and overrides all other brain functions when certain opportunities present themselves.

As I suggested in the last post, one of the compensations for our manly acts of foolishness is the opportunity for a good story. Here is my personal big boat tale of stupidity and inexperience triggering my Man-Up instinct.
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At one point some years ago, I was a little bored with racing dinghies and thought I should expand my horizons to include comfy, cruising keelboats. I took a rather big first step and bought a used Pearson 36, a beautiful, comfortable, well made boat from a quality company… not counting some of the shitty lasers they made in an apparent sideline business. (Alas, they were driven out of business in 1991 by the recession and the introduction of a luxury tax on big boats.)

Admitting that a five day US Sailing course in bareboat cruising might not have taught me all I needed to know, when I picked up the boat I brought along an experienced friend who I will call Ralph Snodsmith. (No offense to any real Ralph Snodsmiths out there.) Because the new home of the boat was a full day’s sail from its current location, our trip began with some two hour jockeying of dry land transportation so that we would have a car waiting at journey’s end. The water part of the trip got underway in unusually calm Sippican Harbor in Marion, MA. As we motored out, it only seemed logical to raise the sails to be ready for Buzzard’s bay, known for its frequent 15 – 25 knot winds and 4 foot waves. As Ralph raised the main, it caught on a mysterious line, halting the process. The line appeared to go from a grommet on the luff forward along the boom. Not understanding the function of this line, we untied and removed it. Minutes later, another similar line became another obstruction and was handled in the same way. Finally, the main was up. Unfurling the 135% genoa followed efficiently. Geared up for the tumultuous Buzzard’s Bay, we found a sheet of glass. Humph. This never happens. Thank God for diesels.

The next segment of this under-powered power boat trip was through Cod Canal, passable only with a favorable current. Competent mariners for sure, we had timed this correctly. With apparent wind only generated by our movement, we kept the main up and furled the genoa. My first trip through the canal was smooth as silk.

To those of you anxiously awaiting the manly men part, thank you for your patience. It’s coming shortly.

On the Massachusetts Bay side, we finally found the wind we came for, a comfortable 8 – 10 knot off shore breeze. Finally the rumble of the diesel could be silenced and the peaceful beauty of travelling under sail power could be savored. Moving north at 5 knots on a close reach with flat water, life was very good. Man, was I smart to buy this boat!

Getting up to Plymouth Harbor, the wind had picked up to about 12, and boat speed went to 6 knots. It was really cool to have instruments that actually measured these things. In dinghies, we just make up these numbers by the seat of our pants based on our self proclaimed expertise and narrative needs.

Proceeding northward past Marshfield beach, the wind had built to a solid 15. The boat was heeled 18 degrees. (Measurement based on a crude tilt-o-meter and a poor memory… in other words, made up.) Half an hour later, the wind was up to 20 and the boat over to 25 degrees. (Same measuring system, but you get the trend.) Boat speed was about 7 – 8 knots. Boy, this was fun!

My experienced friend, Ralph, cautioned, “If this wind keeps building, we should think about reefing the sails.” Instead, we skipped any thinking and just enjoyed the ride for the next half hour as the wind built to 25 and the boat was over to 30 something degrees. Fifteen minutes later, we finally got serious and decided it was time to shorten sail. Ralph confidently wrapped the genoa furling line around the winch and began pulling. Nothing happened. Pulled harder, the line did not move. “The furling line must have jumped the spool. I’ll go forward and put it back on,” Ralph said calmly. I was in good hands.

As the wind had increased, it had moved forward. We adjusted to a close hauled course, and even with a short fetch from land, waves were starting to build. I was happy it was Ralph bouncing up there on the bow. It seemed he was up there for quite a while, and as he crawled back to the cockpit, I was hopeful that we were going to get this boat back to a more comfortable heeling angle.

“I couldn’t get it. The line looped over itself under the spool and I just can’t get it undone. We’ll be fine like this.”

“Maybe if we reef the main, it will help,” I said tentatively, trying to be helpful.

“Why not,” responded Ralph. “We’ll give it a try.”

We surveyed the situation. There were two grommets at the luff of the sail. All we had to do was to find some line to make an outhaul and lower the main

“Maybe we can use one of those lines we took off getting the main up,” I suggested.

“You know,” Ralph said thoughtfully, “those lines were tied to those grommets before I removed them. Maybe they were reefing lines.” (Doh!) “I’ll just retie them.”

Turns out that those reef points are pretty high off the cockpit seats when the main is up. Judging from the considerable reach of the 6’2” Ralph, the lower one must have been about 7 and a half feet up, just a little too high for him to get. (Aside: The nifty jiffy reefing system on the boat worked really well once I learned how to rig it properly.)

“We’ll be fine,” we told ourselves. “We can handle a little wind and the boat heeling over.” We were tough guys, manly men of the sea. Heeling over was not really a problem, only an inconvenience. The formidable weather helm just required a little muscle to keep the boat on course.

That eastern shore from the Cape Cod Canal up to Hingham where the boat was to be docked is a lot longer by sea than it is by car or appears on a map. Passing five towns may seem quite do-able, but these towns stretched for miles and miles. By 4 o’clock in the afternoon, we were just beginning to see parts of the third town, Scituate.

Now the wind was consistently in the high 20’s. We watched the anemometer readout, taking pride in our manhood with every gust. The highest was 33. We were pretty impressed with ourselves to be under full sail in this wind. At this point, the boat with a five foot freeboard had its rail buried in the water. No problemo. We could handle it.

As we approached Scituate harbor about 5:30, we noticed a lot of boats out. They had reefed sails. “Must be the Wednesday night race,” my knowledgeable companion observed. We were going to go right by them, affording a good view of the race. As we approached the fleet, we noticed a boat on the left reaching toward the other boats. From a distance, it was clear she was going to cross us with no problem. As we got closer, it wasn’t quite so clear that she was going to cross. Still nearer, it looked like it was going to be very close.

“Just to be safe, bear off and give him plenty of room,” Ralph suggested. With more speed we’ll cross him and give him plenty of room to go behind if he has to. Or we’ll just go parallel until it gets sorted out.”

With considerable effort, I turned the wheel to head down. When the boat didn’t respond, I turned harder.

“Let’s go! Turn down!” Ralph shouted with more intensity than usual. “It’s getting too close!”

“I’m trying! It’s not going!” (Funny how large boats behave like dinghies in this respect. Full sails in big wind completely overcome the rudder in steering the boat.)

By this time, all aboard the other boat were hollering at me too. They were in complete disbelief that some asshole just out cruising might actually hit them during a race. Sweating, I began imagining the shattering of fiberglass that would occur when a 15,000 pound boat going 7 knots broadsided another boat. As the boats came within a few boat lengths of each other, Ralph simultaneously yelled “tack!” and dumped the main. The dumping of the main allowed the ruder to take over just enough to turn the boat and avoid the stern of the other boat by five feet. The two of us finally exhaled, but the screaming from the other boat continued. We hung our heads in shame for causing the close encounter, but we also secretly prided ourselves on our quick reactions and heroic disaster avoidance skills.

Having a modicum of sense, we admitted to each other as we sailed on that our unfamiliarity with a new boat had caused considerable anxiety to everyone on both boats. But what could we have done? Under full sail in that wind, a big boat is really hard to handle. In the end, no one was harmed, no property damaged. No big deal.

Checking the time, we realized that there was no way we were going to reach our destination before dark. Our vast experience told us that navigating an unfamiliar harbor at night was a potentially bad idea. Besides, we were tired and really needed some beers.

Being the veteran sailors we knew ourselves to be, we radioed the harbor master and requested a mooring for the night. He gave us a mooring right on the channel, not allowing us to demonstrate our boat handling skills in tight spaces. Maybe he had already heard about us. After finally fixing the genoa spool, we stowed the sails and closed up the boat for the night.

As we rode the launch in, who did we pass but the sailors on the boat we narrowly missed. Fortunately, they did not recognize us as we turned our faces away in casual manly avoidance. However, halfway through our first beer, our would-be victims strode into the bar. We were going to have to meet this head on as real men do. After a friendly greeting, we apologized, offered to buy them a couple of beers, and laughed at our close call. We earned forgiveness, at least in our minds, at the very reasonable cost of two beers each.

We were, however, still 10 miles from the car we planed to drive home. Being single at the time, I had no one to call, and it would have been an admission of failure to ask Ralph’s wife to make a rescue trip. No biggie. Ralph said he would use his manly charm to find a ride back to the car. So effective was Ralph’s “charm” that it was actually one of our victims who located someone going our way – an absolutely shitfaced drunk. Not to worry. It was late, few cars still out, secondary roads.

It was, in fact, no problem. Our new friend was one of those highly cautious drunk drivers, never breaking 20 MPH all the way back to our car.

Getting into the car, we breathed a long, deep salt air sigh of relief and satisfaction. We had conquered a 33 knot wind without conceding an inch of sail area, we had avoided, nay prevented, a disaster, we had made new friends, and we had a good story to tell and perhaps embellish. A good day for two manly men of the sea.

Why Manly Men Never Use a Radial Sail

2010-03-06T10:42:00.011-05:00

A few weeks ago, as I sat eating my quiche and reading about Tillerman’s adventures in frostbiting in 18 - 30 MPH winds, I though about how courageous he was in conditions where I might have wimped out and used a radial.

For anyone who doesn’t sail a laser, I should first explain what a radial is. Lasers can accommodate three sizes of sail – full rig, radial, and 4.7 – each one getting successively smaller. The idea is that smaller and lighter people can step down the sail area and still sail with the same hull. It is also a way for sailors to deal with increasing wind by reducing sail area, just like every big boat in the world does. It would seem there is ample precedent for the wisdom of this concept.

Nevertheless, manly men never reduce sail on a laser no matter what the wind, their physical limitations, or their sailing deficiencies. (A few shorter, lighter, perhaps smarter men are notable exceptions to this rule, but they have Laser Radial World Championships to prove their prowess.) Below is a list of 6 excellent reasons why manly men continue to defy conventional big boat sailing wisdom and never cop out with a radial.

Radials are for girls. It’s simple in the Olympics – men sail full rigs, women sail radials. Period. End of story. It doesn’t matter how big or strong the women are or how small the men are. It’s a gender issue, and only girls sail radials. Gender identification can be a slippery slope, and no manly man wants to take even a first step down that slope.

Radial sailing girlie girl

Radials are for weaklings. Radials suggest a smaller stature, and we all know it is the strong, tall, manly men who control the world, run the corporations and get elected to political office. (i.e. Scott Brown and Mitt Romney – we are so shallow in Massachusetts.) Never mind that when the wind approaches 20, radials are just as fast upwind, even with the best sailors sailing full rigs against radials. When everyone is overpowered, the big guys lose their edge, and it becomes a contest of boat handling and wave management, but that’s no reason to make those things easier by using a smaller sail. Manly men are tough enough to struggle with the bigger sail in the toughest of conditions.

Radials are too slow. Manly men always go for maximum speed. Being in control doesn’t matter. Even though the two sails become about equal upwind, downwind the big sail always goes faster if it stays upright. The more Adeline the better. Damn the consequences, full speed ahead!

Manly men aren’t chicken. Regardless of the amount of wind and the size of the waves, a smaller sail is an admission of fear. Fear is not acceptable in the code of the manly man. Even if every sailor on the beach understands that radial sails are just a common sense reaction to the conditions, no manly man wants to be the first to suggest it. He is understood by the others to have conceded that his thingie is smaller than the other guys’ thingie.

Fearless manly man

Manly men like to overcome disasters. The bigger the disaster, the more spectacular the crash, the tougher the man who accepted the pain. Actual sailing injuries provide fodder for great stories of heroic recoveries. Manly men welcome the potential dangers of a bigger sail and want to be filmed having spectacular death rolls that would scare women and children off the water forever. Taking risks is for the manly. Being smart is for the nerd.

Heroic manly man

Manly men will always prevail. If they can’t stay upright, they can still demonstrate their prowess with powerful swimming and skilled boat righting techniques. Rather than meekly accepting the limitations of their skills and using their judgment, they can claim to be heroic, life saving first responders… albeit of themselves. A declaration of victory is what it is all about.

The marks of a manly man are strength, courage, desire for adventure, and the ability to prevail over whatever comes. God bless you, manly men!

Finding Yourself

2010-02-25T08:47:00.014-05:00

Yesterday's post was about the well known Myers Briggs personality typing system. Although it is THE system of choice in the corporate world and elsewhere, there are some other ways to categorize personalities. If it is helpful to define yourself in such a system, here are a few more ways to look at it. Find yourself in each one. All serious discussion has been omitted here as I let the visuals speak for themselves.

The Ennegram defines personalities in nine basic types, and within the types, you have a "wing" that leans to one of the types next door.

Never having been a corporate type, this is more my impression of how personality typing really goes in the business world.

Asians have a whole different terminology if not a completely different way of understanding things. I'd need a little help placing myself in this system.

Back to Western thinking, this one has some fancy terms that look very serious. I would need to read the instruction manual to figure this one out. Myers Briggs calls me a thinker and blue is the color of my eyes, so there must be somethhing to this one.

Apparently the technological world has a different way of defining us.

When we transcend our own machines and venture out into the Internet, it gets more complicated. I'm stuck in the two squares in the bottom left corner. I suspect many of you are more daring.

This last one says it all. I have people in my family within each of the four types.

Since each system has its limitations, looking at a multitude of schemes may give us a more complete understanding of who we are. It that really helpful?

I have no graphic that analizes each of us by the type of boat we sail, so there is still some room for academics to write new books.