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June 15, 1998 Issue


June 1, 1998 Issue

June 15, 1998 Issue


A Princess Visits "Shack"

By Charles "Chick" Ludwig

It's a cool summer evening as I lay in the cockpit of my seventeen foot catboat, Princess, watching the masthead scribing fanciful figures across the evening sky. A flight of pelicans glides overhead like a squadron of WWII bombers setting off across the English Channel on a nighttime raid, while nearby a group of seagulls dog-fight over some shapeless morsel. A short time ago, a loggerhead turtle surfaced sev-eral times nearby, looking for all the world like some pre-historic creature from the deep. We are anchored for the night behind a wooded section of Shackleford Island, one of a chain of three islands on the North Car-olina coast set aside as a national park.

On shore is a panorama that must look much like it did before the white man came to inhabit these islands. Even today, with a crowded mainland so near, it is hard to understand why more sailors do not visit here. The only sailboat I have seen all day is a Sea Pearl 21 that was about a mile down the beach.

Not far down the island, a small herd of wild horses graze across the salt marsh, while shore birds wade through the shallows and flap lazily in salt-stunted trees. The horses probably came ashore from shipwrecks as early as the sixteenth century. They have been here so long that they have developed into their own sub-species. Their bodies have adapted to the salt water envi-ronment and they can no longer live without it.

Every now and then, the Park Service has a round-up to thin the herd so that the horses that are left have a better chance for survival. Those that are taken to the mainland are supposed to be offered for adoption, but somehow they usually wind up being euthanized. There is a great controversy about this between the Animal Rights Activists and the Park Service. I will not try to criticize the infinite wisdom of our government in this issue, but it does seem that there should be a better way. Perhaps a good start would be for the different sides to work together to find an answer, before the next round-up.

But, enough of this! Let us get back to the scenery around us. Far to the west, the sun is about to extinguish itself in the ocean behind Atlantic Beach. I once read that just as the red face of the sun disappears below the horizon, by some trick of nature, a green flash appears for a split second. I will watch carefully and see if it happens.

A lonely powerboat goes by on its way home from a day spent fishing and swimming further up the coast. My baby sways gently to the rhythm of the wake as it rolls under her belly.

It has been many years since I have spent an idyllic evening like this in paradise. Princess brought me back to the dream after the doldrums of ten years spent in the Carolina mountains. I admit that it is beautiful up there, but to an "Old Florida Boy" like me, with salt in his veins, nothing can com-pete with the ocean, or more accurately, the narrow strip separating land and sea.

The current prevails on Princess to turn so that Miss Wind can send her cooling breeze around to the back door and through the companionway into the cabin. It is going to be a comfortable night for sleeping.

Mr. Sun is about to do his disappearing act at the end of a sparkling runway stretch-ing all the way from his bedroom to mine. Going...going...gone! Beautiful, but no green flash. God's host of heavenly lights begin to come on in the sky. Twinkling points of light appear on the distant shore of Harker's Island. Funny thing, but the stars seem to be closer than the lights nearer by.

But now it is time for me and my girl to perform our nightly ablutions as the voice of Garrison Keillor drones softly out of the radio about a day in Lake Wobegone. What a fitting end to a day spent sailing the pristine waters of Core Sound. Princess gently reminds me that it is getting too dark to write any longer, so, goodnight for now. And may God bless.


Old Geezer Dreams

By Larry

The Old Geezers are going north again in August. I missed it last year but this year I already have a crew member signed on to drive up. He can only stay ten days. Once the boat is in big water I hope to stay longer

. I only sailed one day last season. Isn't that a bummer? The Compac 23 was grow-ing long green maidenhair streamers off the stern quarters at the end of the '96 season. A bottom coat seemed in order. Jacking up one end at a time cleared the trailer bunks enough to smear the paint. When it all got done along with making a bi-pod to raise and lower the mast solo, installing a boom ticker and vang, installing a CDI furler after having converted the jib, well, the summer sailing season was gone with the fall winds.

Two major projects await this season. Sew up a 140 genoa from a Sailrite kit and install a Yacht Saver inflation system. Three blow-up bags, at the yank of a lanyard arise from their slumber beneath the bunks, port, starboard and in the V berth footwell, turn-ing the interior of the boat into its own life-raft. Since Neptune has not [informed us of repealing Murphy's law, the many floating logs in the Ohio river make me nervous! At a little less cost than a true liferaft, this solu-tion is not cheap. But, less expensive than one hour's helicopter rescue time, and clearly cheaper than a three day stay in the hospital recovering from a few snoot's full of H20. We won't talk about a one way trip to Seabrook's Funeral parlor in our historic old river town of New Albany.

Spring looks like busy boating. Tom Grimes put together a West Wight Potter Messabout at the Muncie Reservoir for May 16th &17th. About a dozen Potter Dutters planned to pot about the 1 x 3 mile bathtub. Jim Michalak's Rend Lake Messabout is on the 13th & 14th of June. Five hours hard drive will deliver Chicken-black beans and brown rice for the Saturday night pitch-in dinner. Thanks to a dash of KC master bar-becue the dish was quite a success at the Lake Monroe Messabout. Its worth repeating at Rend Lake.

I'm hoping Paul Cormican, the oldest of the Geezers, can come down to help sew up the genoa. His help feeding the vast sheets of stiff sail panels through the throat of the sewing machine would be invaluable. His sensitive guidance straightened the stitch lines on a jib leach tape repair. Working solo, the seam lines wandered a bit on the Sail Rite full batten kit. But who can see stitch lines from hailing distance? After a couple of days of concentrated sail making, slipping over to Rend Lake for the Mess-about will be a nice change for both of us.

Of the four Old Geezers, one is spouse-less, the rest of us have wives who are Waterphobic. There seems to be no cure for"poor-crew-wife" syndrome. Universi-ties near blue water must have courses for this serious impairing malady but not around the rivers and lakes of the midwest.

To recount our rambling plans, Old Geezer dreams include: Island hopping the Florida Keys, a shakedown cruise to the Dry Tortugas, and a crossing to the Bahamas at the turn of the century. Land of the Lakes, Minnesota sounds like a mini Georgian Bay cruising ground, according to Frank Kibbe, the YatchSaver inventor. He discovered the area while installing his blow up inflation system in vans, yes vans, for a tourist lodge which caters to ice fisherman.

Can't you see it? As the ice cracks oc-cupants tumble into the freezing water, as the van sinks toward the depths, upon exit someone has yanked the rip cord, the van slowly rises in its jagged hole in the ice, floating serenely in a pool of dark water. Don't you think the Titanic could have used this system? The inflated bag idea must be to save the occupants but how could you ex-tract a floating van from the icy water? It can't exactly shinny onto the solid ice, splaying it's waterlogged wheels out flat to scootch on its belly.

Anyway, he said Land of the Lakes has wonderful islands and isolated anchorages. Since three of us old Geezers have boats in the 20' range, perhaps there is some serious trailer sailing beyond the yearly Old Geezers Go North trip.

With all these ramblings comes my hopes for a more literal boating season for all of us. Like the tucked away, in progress projects waiting patiently in the rambling buildings you have chronicled in you Com-mentary, I join you in a tongue in cheek struggle to keep the dream alive in spite of the less important details of life. Like the bumper sticker says "Stuff Happens," and Roar II hasn't gotten built. But, just wait un-til classes are over, grass is seeded, borders pasted on the bathroom walls, out back is cleaned up, the garage is cleaned out so we can get the car in, on and on...

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June 1, 1998 Issue


Commentary...

By Bob Hicks

Well, summer's about here. Anyone out there ready to do some reading? I mean while at some quiet anchorage of an evening, or when bad weather traps you on-board somewhere and you have to kill a day. Reading does seem to crop up in stories of cruising, even in small boats. I have some books for you if you are ready.

I always figure to get some reading done in winter, you know when the weather traps us indoors and short days and long nights encourage just sitting around waiting for spring. Sure. But it doesn't happen. I sit down about 8pm after the day's activities are done and by nine I fall asleep. So the pile of unread books grows. Mostly review copies of books the publishers think you might find of interest.

I do not solicit the majority of these books, they just turn up in the mail. A few I request the review copy offered in a mailing promotion as I really am interested in their subject matter. Seldom do I request a review copy on my own.

So now I have a fairly long list of books here that really ought to be read by someone who will then write up a brief (or lengthy if so moved) review for us to pub-lish. That someone is unlikely to be me now that I am getting really busy, so how about you? In the past I farmed out a number of books for review and the reviews, just like the articles you send us, turned out to be pretty perceptive and informative. The deal is you get to keep the book, I get to publish your review.

Here's the list on hand. If you see any you are really interested in give me a call at (978) 774-0906, (before 9pm please!), or write me a note. Limit yourself to one book first time around, or list your choices in or-der in case your top choice has already been taken. If any are left after a while we'll do another offering.

So there you are. I await your calls. And readers can anticipate learning some-thing about these books. If this approach works as it did before we'll do another round probably in the fall. By then a crop of new titles will have turned up here.


Boat Design

(Installment#) 4. Very Basic Naval Architecture
by John Thomson

What I want to do here is to give a minimal compilation of all you need to know about hull forms and rigs to design a basic boat, like 95% of those found in these pages (of MAIB). For a lot of you, this will border on the simplistic, but my aim is to encourage someone with limited experience to give a shot at turning nautical dreams into reality.

I'm an industrial designer, not a naval architect, but I've designed a lot of small boats, and I've built a half dozen or so of them, and compared them to a lot of other small boats, They have performed beautifully, so I can't be too far off. I'm also pretty sure that throughout history, most boat designers didn't know any more than is presented here. Often a lot less.

Often more. People have always learned the real gut level important facts from experience, sometimes scary, sometimes fatal! When green water comes over the gunnel, and when the gaff rig is gooswinged in a gale, you learn something fundamental that you can't learn from reading. ( you also gain vivid insight as to why sailors have, since pre-history, had such salty language. Why d'you suppose it's called salty? )

My interest has always been in comfort, stability, and practicality, rather than in the more conventional measures of performance like speed and pointing ability, but it's been my experience ( first hand ) that unless you're out to design a dedicated racing machine, you don't sacrifice noticeable performance to achieve these goals. If you want to design racers or larger cruisers, you do have to know more than the basics, and subtleties do noticeably effect performance. I don't pretend to tee an expert, so I hope that readers will send me additions and corrections so that I can do an improved version of this compendium, maybe in some future issue of Messing.

The Basics:

1. Water can drown you.

2. Water can drown you.

3. Water doesn't like to flow around corners so shapes should have as few bumps and corners as possible. ie, shapes should be fair.

4. Water doesn't like to drag along surfaces, so the less wet surface the better.

(Just a few of the design issues summarized in John Thomson's multi-part article in MAIB):

For hulls of the same size, the longer, narrower shape will be faster, and the wider will be more stable. But the stability of the wide hull will allow it to carry more sail, which can compensate for it's greater wetted surface and shorter water line.

The wide hull is stable because of it's shape, while a narrow hull will be more likely to need ballast or a heavy keel for stability.

For a sail to work well, it has to be set at the correct angle to the wind, but sails tend to twist so that only a small area can be at the correct angle. Some rigs employ vangs, power pulley systems which pull the boom down flattening the sail so that a greater proportion of the area is set at the correct angle to the wind.

With the sprit kg ( my favorite ) the sail area below the sprit doesn't allow the sprit to lift, keeping the sail flat.

The center of effort ( CE ) is the point at which the whole force generated by the sail can be considered to be concentrated. This is ( unless you're designing olympic sails ) the same as the center of area. Tall narrow sails are more efficient, but require longer, heavier spars, and have a higher center of effort. A high LE, all other things being equal, will heel the boat more. This, ( among other bad things like capsizing ), reduces the effective sail area.



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