Rock On Doink

He's Dreamin'

Definitely living the dream, though.

Spring Theory

Recently finished some rudder tooling so I should be on the water again soon. Have also been spending some time with CAD looking at foil shapes, which one might convincingly argue is a waste of time, especially as things drawn on backs of napkins seem to have less drag than their full-on professionally designed CFD counterparts.

Latest numbers from the tank suggest the foil I put together with Greg in 2007 is still some distance ahead of anything else upwind; hard to know about the top end performance but if I had to choose a high camber section vs. a reflexed flap, well, I guess the answer to that question is pretty obvious by now.

Rudder tooling being done I'm on to a new mainfoil, for which purpose I put together a parametric Rhino file to define the lifting surface so I can tweak it until the last possible moment. Perhaps by then Nick Flutter will have the poor man's CFD figured out enough to give it a whirl, but frankly if the accepted math is at all representative of the real world it should be a big leap forward from what I'm sailing (or not sailing) at the moment.

This all leaves much to be desired on the boathandling front, and sailing is certainly enjoyable. I look forward to getting back on the water soon, but in the interim I have to say designing and building my own stuff is a fascinating counterpart, and one of the greatest things about Mothing.

Boom of Doom

Some wind today in Long Beach made for interesting test piloting on the new incidence control program:


San Pedro Bay is a decent place to sail in these conditions as there are a couple of long breakwaters. But the end of the channel is somewhat unprotected, has a fair bit of tide sweeping past it, and can be a real handful if everything isn't going according to program.

My plan was pretty straightforward. First, get thrown out of the protected harbor by the cops for speeding. Take a deep breath, sail outside to end of channel where I know it is blowing reasonably hard, find some protected water to play around in, and hope the boat behaves itself. Richard said be careful if you go outside, showing me his 27.9 kt GPS max, so I didn't take it lightly. Would have much preferred to bomb around inside frankly, as per my normal sort-the-crazy-ass-new-foilsystem routine. But I digress.

Thankfully the boat decided to behave, mostly. The new gizmos have pretty much taken care of the wand loading issue, and it is cool to zip along with less load out there. Need to trim the ski way down, and add a bit more gain, but no matter. May still be hanging up a bit on starboard tack, but nothing the air grinder and a bit of carbon won't take care of.

Capsized next to the Lifeguard boat in the lee of the oil island to adjust the wand linkage. They came over to check, and asked the fateful question: "So you're not going to need any assistance at all then?" I wanted to give my pat answer, which is that none of us has a crystal ball, thereby warding off evil spirits with circumspection. Clearly this would have been a better answer than "No", in retrospect!

Headed in as it was getting late. Foiling low to avoid surprises in the substantial lumpiness between the oil island and the end of the channel jetty, my practically new, sailed three times, heavy-duty-so-you-won't-have-to-worry-about-it boom decided to fold in half at the vang. Death roll, fiddle around with alternate sheeting systems off the back rack, get cold and a bit seasick from all the lumpiness. Finally realizing there was no way to sheet effectively and get upwind to the beach, or downwind through the worse water between me and where I needed to go, or in fact anywhere at all except drift up on the jetty itself, I waved the Big Red Boat over.

The BRB is not a RIB, but a 35ft twin diesel screw fire boat that will fit a capsized moth quite comfortably on the aft deck, provided the rig is removed. Which mine wasn't. Bringing me to the day's main lesson: if it is pseudo-nuking and you are sailing in lumpy water when you lose the boom, take the mast down right away and get the sail off, because you aren't sailing home and it isn't going to be any easier to do it with a huge red fire boat standing by after you have developed a case of mild hypothermia.

I'm probably tempting fate by saying it, but the things I expect to break, like all the dodgy parts and contraptions I make in the garage, don't seem to break. Similarly, the original Prowler stuff doesn't seem to break, unless it gets broken onshore or trailering. But anything I pay retail money for in the name of "improvement", like new masts and booms, is doomed!

Not sure I like the filament wound spars at all; I think the next boom will be a nice rolled bit of autoclaved prepreg - like the first boom that lasted me four years and has yet to cash it in. I have enough on without fretting over the possibility of random spar failures.

The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness

Why do so many multiple World Champions seem to get grumpy and leave Mothing? Boredom perhaps. Or maybe it's that they hate losing so much they can't stomach the fact that someone may come up with something on the design side that no amount of good sailing can overcome.

The pop psychologist in me attibutes this phenomenon to the fact that it must take a hell of a lot of effort to win a Worlds, and even more to win multiple times. So the thought of losing on the design side, rather than the sailing side, starts to seem like an unreasonable chance to take, and even more so if you are involved with building or selling a particular design.

It brings me back to the Fall of 2001, when I had some cash and looked at buying a Hungry Tiger from Mark Thorpe. We chatted back and forth a bit, but then 9/11 happened and it got put on the back burner. I do however recall it seemed obvious to both of us that two foils on the midline was the most likely way forward. He clearly saw the light at the end of the tunnel...and decided it was a freight train.

I wasn't privy to much of the discussion surrounding the adoption of hydrofoils, but there was a lot of discussion back and forth about whether to allow them - for the usual reasons: expense, practicality, decimating the fleet by putting it out of reach of mere mortals, etc. We all know where that led: foilers everywhere, but no more Hungry Tigers (apart from Scott's). The dominant class boatbuilder and three time World Champ, who even beat a foiling Rohan with a lowrider Hungry Tiger in Les Sable d'Olonne, decided he wasn't playing the foiling game. I have to give him credit for going out on a high note.

Rohan then went on to win in 2005 and 2007, affiliated with Bladerider in the latter event. Again not privy to any details, but the end of that story was basically that Bladerider was outclassed on the design side, and is no more. You'd think someone like Rohan would just move on to a Mach 2 and keep sailing, right? But after all that went on, and being so immersed in Mothing for so long, one can hardly blame him for wanting to do something else. Another boat and another multiple World champ sidelined by better hardware.

Fast forward to 2010 and history seems to be repeating itself: a multiple World champ is marketing the dominant boat, and yet another round of technical development threatens to knock it, and the Champ, off their perch. Having witnessed the rise and fall of Rohan on mainly technical grounds, and Thorpe before him, the best stragegery (to quote our 42nd President) for a sitting Champ and manufacturer rep is apparently to make it as hard for anything faster to get to the starting line as possible. Which is relatively easy to do when you sit on the Class Executive Committee.

Thusfar, we've seen the class Constitution invoked against the class rule, basically arguing that the first rule defining the class violates its own Constitution. This seems like kind of a scorched earth approach to winning, but whatever. Not entirely convincing in any event. This argument having failed, the discussion has shifted to Rule 4.2, and the responsibility of the measurer to report  "anything which he may consider to be unusual or to depart from the intended nature of the boat, or to be against the general interest of the class." The Rule states further that "a certificate may be refused, even if the specific requirements of the class are satisfied." Unfortunately, the decision regarding whether to refuse a Certificate to a wing hinges upon a tricky, somewhat subjective judgment by the Exec: Are wings against the general interest of the class?

Suffice it to say the positions of interested parties are predictable on this point: boat manufacturers feel that wings are against the general interest of the class, pretty much, and the people building wings obviously feel that they are squarely within the general Class interest. Both factions have vested interests in the outcome. Which is, well, interesting, as the very next Rule, 4.3, quite presciently states the following:


A measurer shall not measure a boat, spars or equipment owned, designed or built by themselves, or in which they are an interested party or have a vested interest.

So, if I follow the news properly, measurers are banned from measuring equipment they have an interest in, but Exec members are allowed to rule on how the measurement rules should apply to equipment that THEY have a vested interest in suppressing or promoting? Perhaps the Class should pass a rule mandating Exec members recuse themselves from debates in which they have a vested interest.

Impressively, the Exec is off to a good start: Bora has been booted from the Exec on grounds of vested interest. But now that the precedent has been set, it hardly seems reasonable to allow manufacturer representatives with equally vested, but opposite interests to remain. Let the standard be applied uniformly.

Drag Queen

Up in West Hollywood where I work, there is no shortage of queens, but I thought it was high time to broaden the definition, Moth-style, in celebration of the prodigal mainfoil's return from the tank:

For reference, I post the Prowler numbers from Bill's earlier work with John Zseleczky, which was the most efficient foil in that paper (vs a Bladerider mainfoil) for 20fps and 18" immersion, 180lb load:

The two foils are the same area and span. Different 2D foil sections on lifting surfaces; struts should be the same shape but ended up different due to (my) operator error in building the thing. An old photo:



I feel good about these results; they confirm a lot of what I thought in the design stage and what I have sensed on the water, but could not state conclusively until now. I think it is good news for the class in general, because it shows if nothing else that there may be a way to get quite a bit more efficiency out of the boat.

I hope these data will serve as an impetus to anyone who might have been thinking about going completely flapless to get busy on a prototype, as the control system design isn't a particularly easy nut to crack! Sounds like J. Bethwaite et al may have something up their sleeves in this regard; should be interesting to see how our next iteration compares to their design. I have a date with the Shop Bot next weekend and hope to get a new system mocked up before July.

Major thanks to Bill Beaver for once again helping to shed some light on the behavior of these cool little boats.

Speed at Any Cost

In a recent interview with Tom Brokaw, Bode Miller said:

"Every competitor has a choice. He can walk up to the starting gate, take a look, and walk away. It would be unprecedented, but he could do it." He went on to say that skiing with joy, fully committed in heart, is more important to him than winning races, ultimately.

So when people choose to ignore their blogs for extended periods, or their boats, or their sailing, I always take it as a reminder that all this might not actually matter all that much in the broader context of a life. Maybe they are so far down a rabbit hole in some other area of existence that this seems trivial by comparison. Maybe someone got sick or died, or got married, or got a new job. Had a kid, bought a house. Discovered nuclear fusion, started a company. Found something cooler to do with their spare time, or figure out.

When I finally build my latest scheme and make it work, I doubt it will count for much - even if it is fast. But that doesn't make it any less fun. And that is where Mr. Miller's comment rings true for me: things done with heart somehow count for more than things done simply because someone else thinks you should care about doing them well. And that philosophy, more than anything else, is what will probably continue to differentiate development class sailors from everyone else in the sailing world - no matter what aspect of the design, build and sail endeavor they choose to tackle.

I've never seen anyone sail a whole race, come down to the finish in first, then not cross the line. But I would applaud the sentiment.

When the Spirit Says Stop

Back in college (uni?) we used to branch out on Sundays, looking for transcendence, or maybe we were just religious voyeurs. One Sunday found us at a Baptist church where we were the only white people in the congregation. The preacher said "I'm a-gonna preach until the Spirit says Stop". Apparently the Spirit was otherwise occupied, because the guy preached for two hours straight. Christ that was a long sermon.

On November 1, when Mothing killed what was left of my L4-L5 disk (admittedly not much), things were going alarmingly well before the crash tack that ended in grief. But the boat flies so high it runs out of rudder, even upwind. So I made a mental note to fix that.

Johnny Z's Eppler hydrofoil tool was only about 50 inches long, which should be fine, but it isn't for a rudder, since the lower end of the gantry is well above the waterline. I went ahead and lengthened the foil. Then I flipped the boat, shot the laser level at the hull waterline, blocked the racks until it was level fore and aft, then mounted the mainfoil and jury rigged the new rudder in a plausible position. Turns out I added about 3.5 inches too much strut, assuming one wants the rudder and mainfoil to fly at the same depth. But I wanted more bow down anyway when flying, and the lifting foil is mounted rather aggressively positive, so I think it will fly up above the mainfoil even if the strut is a bit longer. I did a little math and figured I could scrub a couple of degrees on the bottle screw without looking too weird. Not enough.

I don't mind looking a bit like a truffle hunting pig when I hydrofoil, but an extra 4" of height at the gantry lowers my bow 3" and sailing with the bow seven inches lower than the gantry seemed extreme. So I cut some vertical off the rudder again. It is now 12:30am and the heat gun is blowing on the gudgeon reinforcements; I was tempted to try the whole setup with plexus only but that seemed foolhardy. So a little midnight madness, and some time for blogging while I play fire marshal. I twittered it up. Looks a bit long, frankly.

Tomorrow is the acid test. Zack should be there with the Mach2, Nat and Bobby on CCZs, me on the Prowla, Richard on a Bladerider and a newbie on Zack's old BR for six, which is quite a fleet for this neck of the woods.

And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

Whatever that was.

I felt a lot like my boat lately when they opened me up and took various bits out of my back, then sewed me up again, all in the name of better performance. On the whole I am improved, but hoping not to repeat the experience any time soon. The boat won't escape a second trip to the operating room, I'm afraid. But that's progress.

The local fleet is going strong, thanks to strong commitment and efforts on the Chinchillazilla and Black Pearl sides of the fleet. They were in Dago over the weekend so one hopes we will see some photos of the action. It rained cats and dogs in LA on Saturday but apparently things were not as hopeless further south.

Lately mothing has been confined to messing with spreadsheets, which are lots of fun actually. I have been trying to figure out how much vertical immersion one typically sails with upwind and down; from Bora's vids on U-tube it looks like 10-12 upwind and I would expect less offwind in flatter conditions - perhaps eight inches?

I plug these various scenarios into the spreadsheet and convert them into torque, in hopes of me, the boat and the planet all staying attached to one another no matter the sea state. I imagine it is sort of like designing a building to cope with wavelike fluctuations in the strength and direction of gravity, only in this case the building has to jump up and down in time to a conductor's wand.

When I was a kid in South Dakota, Ronald Regan funded these ridiculously cool supersonic nuclear-capable bombers called B-1s. Their main mission was to sneak in below Russian radar and annihilate everyone with cruise missiles loaded onto a carousel rather like a thermonuclear gatling gun in the bomb bay. In order to do this the plane was given seriously capable radar-controlled autopilots, allowing it to fly near supersonic at altitudes of about 300 feet. One of the best places to test this capability is over Eastern Montana, which is fairly close to my home town of Rapid City, SD. But then everything is pretty close when you are flying an air-refueling-capable supersonic bomber, and in fact pilots would not infrequently tell tales of flying to England for lunch and being home for dinner. But I digress.

The radar seemed to work well enough, but as in foiling, the margin for error is pretty slim when flying near an interface with another form of matter: birds, the airborne equivalent of the plastic bag, occasionally blasted through the wing leading edges and severed all hydraulic lines, and crews occasionally appeared to stuff the avionic equivalent of the foiling gybe, crashing into the ground out in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. But then typically none of them ever survived to tell their sides of the story.

I don't know what all this proves except to say that Moths are hardly the first craft to have problems flying at extremely low altitudes. The prototype B-1A had so much airframe flex from the rapid pitch adjustments during low level flight that they had to add little canards to the front of the aircraft to avoid making the pilots throw up. The canards are actuated by little accelerometers that kick in to limit the vibration of the airframe whenever it jiggles too much. This is of course the origin of the term "getting jiggy with it".

On a personal note, I like the B-1 for its all-moving tailplanes, which remind me of my mainfoil, except that the two sides can move independently of one another to induce roll (!). Pretty sure I am not ready for that feature.

Critical Mass

Well, not quite yet, but closer with each boat on the line! We had four yesterday: Nat, Richard and Paul from San Francisco. It was fun. Wind increased gradually from not foilable during the first two races to quite foilable for the last two.

The tilt-a-foil was fairly painful in ultra-marginal foiling, and only slightly painful the remainder of the time. It went pretty well uphill and offwind was decent when the too-short original rudder didn't ventilate. Gybes remain tricky with my short tiller/extension but are coming along; remarkable how easy they were with the old foil but old dogs, new tricks, etc.

Rather disappointed to not give Richard more of a run for his money, but well done on his part after not much time in the boat. PS - Richard I have your coffee mug! Nat had a moment of glory being first to the windward mark at one point, only to have his vang implode again on the downwind. Otherwise the CCZ had remarkably few issues for a homebuild. Paul's Mach 2 looks like it has been set up for a pro: nice and high almost immediately and good height control on all points of sail with good speed to go with it.

In terms of lessons learned, it will be difficult to get the current version competitive in the light, but there is another version coming down the pike. I am encouraged enough to stick with the program; this game is sort of like learning to foil all over again and often enough a good gybe or nice downhill run is as satisfying as a whole string of gybes in the old boat.

I particularly like this shot for showing how close the rudder foil is running to the surface; small wonder I have ventilation woes! Goodbye old, hello new:

New Kid In Town

Sort of anticlimactic that BobbyK is taking all the footage with him to South Africa, but the CCZ hit the water today in true homebuild fashion, foiling around in spotty breeze until one of the sketchy micropress fittings gave up. Solid performance for a boat whose only dolly is a car! Maybe BKNA will take pity and send a photo! Rumors of a CCZ blog abound, but talk is cheap! So maybe I will get some stuff to post. But don't count on it.

In any event a huge day for the San Pedro Bay Moth Fleet as there are now three functional Moths at ABYC; we would call ourselves the Alamitos Bay Moth Fleet but the cops won't let us sail in Alamitos Bay, which is fine as long as they keep coming outside to get us when our masts break! SBMF. Why don't we get together and call ourselves an institute? San Pedro Institute of Neophytes Sailing Tiny Esoteric Runabouts, or SPINSTER.

Anyway, that's it. Congratulations Nat, well done.

The Monstersphere

When it's a slow news day and the anchors have to talk about inane freeway chases and make them sound interesting I always joke that the 24 hour news channels are a monster that needs to be fed, whether there is any news or not. I am beginning to think the same thing about the Mothosphere. I have nothing to report. Really. Stop reading now.

Movies are apparently fair game for filler; saw District 9 tonight and enjoyed it though the s/o said it was too much like work! I guess babies are sort of like little aliens, now that you mention it...but it wasn't that only the general adrenalin level. When you give at the office you want something more sedate at the theater.

I have been planning a new rudder for so long I am sick of talking about it. Shut up and stick the thing together already, chump! I pity the fool! Nat even has a tiller for me. All I need is an angel of attack [sic].

No sailing to report as I am working all weekend. Holiday Monday to boot.

Watched a vid tonight about aeronautical oddities. I always wonder when I see these things what happened to the planes. Are they in museums somewhere? Some truly original thinkers, those early aviators, with the courage of their convictions. Anyone can fly they say but it takes a pilot to get back down! At some point there will be a museum with early hydrofoil Moths in it and we will look as antiquated as those old planes. No, son, I was cool. This stuff was all the rage. Really. I have vids on YouTube. What? You mean they shut YouTube down? Always thought we should archive that stuff somewhere on a class website...

None of this makes me go any faster but there is something about Mothies that makes them want to write about sailing when they are not able to do it. Since most people find themselves unable to sail the majority of the time, the Mothosphere makes Mothing tons more interesting between regattas than sailing other boats, and foils make it more interesting the rest of the time. Like Mr. Buchan said in that interview from Worlds: there is something about sailing a boat you can build and redesign that keeps a class healthy and draws interesting people into it. Old School, man. What goes around comes around.

Damn the Torpedoes

Though I should be out in the garage figuring out how to beat Dave Lister on the water, the urge to take up arms in defense of Blogdom is simply too enticing to resist. I feel like Obi-Wan by the Tractor Beam: "You can't win, Dave. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

And so, proceding with reckless abandon, we put to the fullest test the canard that the pen is mightier than the foil. I am reminded of Rear Admiral David Farragut, who, if Wikipedia is to be believed, ran full throttle through a minefield with an entire fleet of warships to take victory in the battle of Mobile Bay. When one of the ships hit a mine (known as a "torpedo" at the time) and sank, causing the other ships to falter, Farragut yelled down from the rigging of his own ship "Damn the Torpedoes...four bells Captain - full speed ahead!"

This brings to mind my most recent lake foiling experience, during which I managed to foil through the lee of Greg's catamaran, only to discover that a) Carolyn, not Greg was driving the cat and b) she was headed straight into shallow water with billions of small dead trees sticking up from the surface. What to do - tack and risk coming off foils, or Damn the Torpedoes? I think you know the answer.

In trademark style, Tom Petty used Farragut's quote as the title of his groundbreaking 1979 album, Damn the Torpedoes. Living in Southern California always lends a bit of extra relevance to Mr. Petty's lyrics, given the freeway running through my yard...

And so my fellow bloggers, take heart. Lister may be fast, but he probably doesn't sail in your neighborhood, so you won't have to find out precisely how much faster he is than you for a good long time. In the interim, take up your pens, and answer the call. Losers may blog, and bloggers may lose, but no less an authority than Petty would be quick to point out that in Mothing, as in the rest of life, even the losers get lucky sometimes.

Cold Infusion

Yes I registered for Worlds; no I am not there. Sorry if you were expecting to see me; with any luck we will catch each other in Dubai.

Sailed on a lake Sunday. Extremely puffy, 0 knots ambient, with foilable puffs. Sort of frustrating Mothing, but good practice. New spring held up well after a little maintenance.

Managed a gybe or two - nothing spectacular. Boat is much more stable after putting some more black stuff on the mainfoil at the hull exit - it used to wobble around alarmingly during gybes, then the uni started to break and flake off - always a sign that some beefing up is in order!

Ski is going OK once on foils and is awesome offwind. Transition to foiling is another story.

Somebody was giving me a hard time about the bowsprit crossing centerline. I always figured the wand tip was the thing to put on the centerline! Looks pretty close here:



No smarty pants comments about the line dangling from the leeward wing please - in common parlance that would be the adjustable ride height, but I don't use it much.

One day I'll get around to shortening the bowsprit. One day.

I am so sick of the twist grip tiller and short rudder! Making new rudder. Wetting out 9oz uni is always a drag, so I decided to trade one kind of pain for another and infuse the thing. Time will tell whether I got it hot enough; multiple layers of uni are always a bit tricky!

Masochismo

Sort of like machismo, but more pain and no bad cologne. Wind from Sunday:



18-20+ mph from due West, regular as Clockwork this time of year, but not always that strong.

Some really good foiling with Richard out on his Bladerider doing some work to windward and sticking a few downwind runs in for good measure. He seems to be making great progress on the boathandling front and will no doubt soon be even more difficult to keep up with. Our fleet being quite small and me sailing Inspector-Gadget-prototype mode has heretofore kept me from comparing speeds against other Moths, but suffice it to say that the boat seems to have decent pace. Richard sent me a file (see below) of his fastest runs with several over 20 knots and I seemed to be going as fast as he was occasionally without pushing super hard, so the boat should do 25 without much fuss, and I still have yet to install the new rudder. Rohan seems to be going these speeds uphill lately so I clearly have a long way to go, but I am pretty happy whenever I can go out and sail these speeds with any semblance of control:



Overall I'm starting to feel like I can trust the boat offwind, which is a huge step forward. But there is still a lot of tuning to do.

It all started to go wrong very subtly when one of my control set points shifted, changing its effective range and launching me into the sky. The effect was almost imperceptible at first and I was tempted to put it down to poor sailing, but no, the boat was actually was trying to kill me! The mainsheet has been sticking lately also, just to make life more exciting, and the rudder flap had started to lose its flap down also, though I didn't realize this until much later.

At one point I pitchpoled in a new fashion. It involved bearing off, accelerating to warp speed, then capsizing slowly to leeward. I was looking a long way down at the shroud thinking "that could hurt" when of course I was thrown off the wingbar down on top of the wire. In the end it didn't hurt, but I did manage a complete cartwheel around the shroud before hitting the water off the bow. First time for everything I guess.

I was pretty much as tired as I have ever been when I got back and was very happy to have Richard and Nat come down and help me onto the dock.

At this point, after at least a year of weekends building and messing about with the tilting foil system, all I can say is that a Moth is about the worst platform for foil system development ever conceived. My hat is off to anyone who does something fundamentally new on this boat and makes it work, because the boat and the speeds it achieves will absolutely kick your ass if the control systems are not functioning perfectly - and they never are in the beginning.

What Comes Around

More foil porn.

Airchair

Despite the fact that it is late July in southern California, I am chilling out on the couch with some virus which I have decided is either Swine Flu or possibly one of those Coxsackie viruses that makes you sick for a week and then completely destroys your heart over the course of a few days. I would not normally invoke either one, but both happen to be running around my neighborhood at the moment. Rather than continue this morose line of thought I decided to watch a little comfort Tube.

Powerboating is pretty boring in the final analysis but people occasionally think of some pretty cool things to do with all those horses. I thought everyone who cared had seen this before but I realized recently I was wrong:



So if you hadn't seen it before, now you have. They put the same foil setup on kiteboards to make them more usable in light air, and on surfboards to tow in on the big/fast waves. Somebody glommed one onto a windsurfer at some point but wasn't fast, so I guess that's on hold for the moment. There is a great paper out there about another foiling windsurfer from San Fran several years back, which apparently WAS faster than a normal board, but it never seemed to catch on, and who knows how it would stack up against today's technology. Anyway that deserves its own post.

Guest Stars

Nat and Bobby K were nice enough to take a break from sanding Duratek to show me the rudders they stuck together out of the tooling we made together. Vertical is John Z's Eppler tool and horizontal is from a couple of windsurfer fins I used as a plug for a female tool. Nice to see a finished product come out of all that.

Not long before it's out with the old, in with the new for my boat, minus flaps and such. Looking forward to a bit of added vertical in the bargain as well:



Not much else to report. Tried my new damper today but for technical reasons that only about four people on the planet would understand without me typing for half an hour the mounting bracket for the damper interfered with part of the foil tilt mechanism, preventing me from doing enough foiling to form an opinion. I was a bit frustrated as I had anticipated the problem but had not been aggressive about fixing it before going sailing, but at least now I'm sure it needs to be modified!

I do not think the world is quite ready for photos yet - everything is sort of Terminator-esqe in a Rise of the Machines way, you know, the first one where all Arnold's skin is gone and he is just a skeleton of metal with a glowing red eye lurching toward Linda Hamilton before she drops the 100 ton press on him. Who knows, perhaps the damper will disappear after sea trials like a bad dream. Or will it return as T2, liquid metal? I suppose the fishnet tramps will only add to the confusion when they are installed, which will be soon as the dacron is looking really sketchy these days.

New North sail is looking very full in the top which was nice for today's light breeze, but making me think about growing new muscles to pull on the vang when it gets windy! At any rate the sail is so light the boat won't stay capsized on shore anymore, which is sort of interesting! Exchanged greetings with Richard as he returned to shore looking very stylish on his Bladerider.

Someone in a kayak asked me if my boat was a Laser (!). Of course she asked while I was trying to tack into the basin against a two knot tide in no wind, but I did pause long enough to say "No". Then she said "It's beautiful". Must be the bowsprit. Or maybe the ski, which I almost had to pry some F18 dude away from before launching as he oohhed and ahhhed and poked and prodded to test its little recoil spring. People do so love gadgets!

Enough fun for one day.

Better

Riddle: What's the enemy of "good"?

Had the boat working reasonably well today in the fading breeze between five and eight pm. California was doing one of it's epically beautiful Sunday evening things with a nearly full moon high in the east as the sun disappeared below the horizon. The breeze held until just before sunset, allowing me to do more troubleshooting than I had any right to expect getting on the water at 5.

I transmorgrified my wand "paddle" into a larger footprint and found it vastly improved performance; a bit draggy at the top end but nothing a step or two won't fix. The foil return action was giving me fits until I realized a line had slipped so I wasn't getting the proper throw on it. After retying it things were better and I had some nice sailing, even getting foiling pretty quickly after the tacks and lifting off in not too much breeze without having to fiddle very much.

Reaching back and forth to my launching point on the beach I was having so much fun I just had to give it one last run before heading in. Of course once I was out past the oil island I got hit by a puff while trying to gybe, at which point my sail was interrupted by a rather loud crack and some crunching carbon as I stuffed it hard. I thought I might have broken a foil, but it was only the magic box glued to the deck letting go, pulling a bunch of paint off the deck in the process, ricocheting off the back of the trunk breaking a little nomex gusset and putting the foil into full negative. While righting I noticed the police boat watching me carefully from a short distance away; whether out of pity, alarm, disbelief or all three I have no idea. Anyway I sailed back with the foil full negative but it was a great day with perfect conditions for fiddling - plenty of breeze to foil but not nuclear and some chop but not too much.

I have decided my new rudder strut will be fashionably longer than the current one. It should be interesting picking an angle of attack for the new section but I'll aim a bit more positive than the difference between the zero lift angles of attack and see what happens...I'll miss having the twist grip tiller extension but that setting should really be on a line anyway so Lister Lever here I come, or what I am forced to assume is a Lister Lever given the prevailing radio silence from that particular part of the Mothosphere!

Independence Day

Whoever said that the first rule of writing is having something to say clearly never had a bloog! People keep reminding me I have one and neglecting it is giving me pangs of guilt!

First, a thought on masts: Why does everyone keep making them lighter? Wouldn't a heavy mast give you more righting moment upwind? I thought the whole point of lighter masts was to increase righting moment on keel boats that heel to leeward, which Moths don't do very much, and to reduce pitching moment, which last time I checked moths don't do much. So skinny and heavy would seem to be the way to go!

Next, a thought on Moth Sailors. I could cook up a bunch of arbitrary but colorful categories, but they would only be a distraction from the truth everyone, on some level, knows: There are only two kinds of moth sailors, professionals and amateurs. Not that anyone is really making a living from the sailing itself, but there are a whole lot of people in the class who sail for a living, or did at one point. If you do not, you are pretty much kidding yourself if you think you are keeping up with them. And if you are keeping up with them, you are kidding yourself about not being a professional. I so love circular logic! If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns! The next rung down are people who sail a lot and are involved with some aspect of the industry with Moth ties - masts/sails/foils/hardware/boats. They are pros but of a less deadly variety. Then there are amateurs, some serious, some not so serious, some more technically inclined than others. But who really cares? Let's go sailing!

Speaking of which, I haven't been doing a whole lot lately, but new rudder foil is coming together gradually, new mast is working OK, new sail arrived yesterday to replace the MSL 12, which never fails to elicit cries of alarm from youth sailors when I hoist it these days. What?? You've never seen battens stitched in with whipping twine instead of batten pockets? Having battens tack independently of the sail is fast! Funny it has never actually come completely apart though I do seem to find new ways to jam the mast through the luff pocket each time I rig it...speed holes.

Congrats to Eelco for 3rd at Euros and a nice blog. Impressive accomplishment and impressive humility about it all. Kind of puts the lie to my professional/amateur theory, but whatever.

I heard recently how towns all across America are suffering because their fireworks displays have been cancelled for economic reasons, and they cannot afford the traditional 90 minute, $45,000 displays which have become customary. Sometime in the 90s fireworks became ubiquitous in the US; not the kind you can buy but the serious electronically programmed and choreographed variety formerly reserved for the President and major metropolises. What? The football team won? Fireworks! Basball game is over? More Fireworks! Big shopping day? How about some Fireworks! Half the time I don't even know what they're for anymore. Guess they'll have to go back to being special, at least for awhile.

My Boat is Bigger Than Your Boat

Went out sailing today with a raft of enhancements and was actually coming to grips with them little by little with a fickle breeze providing foiling where one could find it. On the way out the channel, against what must have been a four knot current, several leadmines asked if I was OK. Apparently here in California, the only reason a boater gets into the water is if their boat is sinking. Yes yes I'm fine never mind just making an adjustment. Carry on, as you were.

In keeping with the irony theme it would be perfect if, having waved off all those offers, one were to then encounter a problem requiring assistance. As I foiled merrily across the swell out to the nearest oil platform, tacked, and foiled up nearly to the starting line for the cruising boats I could almost feel myself being smug - that's how well all the new stuff was working. Little self-recoiling ski feeler? Check - bouncing along without a hint of the old geyser effect - seemingly much more efficient, and never tripped tip down once though it spent a fair bit of time underwater. Adjustable linkage length? Performing flawlessly, though it does need a port tack counterpart. Stiffer wand doing its thing - the bowsprit is now the bendiest part of the setup. Aft mainsheet keeping itself out of trouble, except when I forget and try to pass the tiller around the end of the boom!

I sailed into a hole near oil island #1, floundered a bit and while righting the boat suddenly a popping sound and slack shrouds. But everything still seemed attached...with a sinking feeling I followed the shrouds up to the hounds and noticed a new kink in the mast of all things! Random failure. I thought sure it was abrasion from the batten cams but later inspection would disprove the theory. Full on failure about a foot above the join, standard C-tech spar, two years old.

So now I am bobbing merrily about, collecting various bits in anticipation of assistance at some point. Disconnect the shrouds and prodder from the mast and coil them on deck. Untie the clew/outhaul/cunningham. Pull the lower mast section out of the sail and secure it to a compression strut with the sheet. Pull the short broken bit of the upper mast out of the sock and shove it into life jacket. Pull the upper mast out of the sock and tie it to the deck with the tail of the mainsheet. Roll the sail up and jam it onto the deck, and tie it on somehow...at roughly this point a beautiful 25' white power cat pulls up and asks if I am OK. "I'm fine" I respond, "but my mast is broken so I will require some assistance". "Oh" says the driver, "well, the Coast Guard will be here in a few minutes" and he zooms off. Not quite what I had in mind, but there's not much I can do about it! I bob around some more, wondering if turtled is the most stable mode, or if I should right the boat, when I note an absolutely HUGE black vessel bearing straight at me from 500 yards off. Before I have time to contemplate the amount of confetti a moth can generate getting sucked through twin screws on a boat like that, he has backed down, pointed his stern to windward and is parked twenty feet from me. The boat has something like 30 old airliner tires tied on the side for fenders. After exchanging pleasantries with the deck hands and explaining about my mast, it occurs to me that I have never seen any boat this big go into the channel near my club, let alone been assisted by anything like it. I mean, it has a few 20' shipping containers positioned athwartships on the aft deck, and I can barely see the tops. We chat about the water temperature, which is 65 and would have been a problem had I not been wearing, as I always do, a 3mm farmer john under my shorts and spray top. Apparently they are a tender for the local oil platforms and responded to the distress call put out by the catamaran driver.

Meanwhile, something like 30 cruising boats just to weather of me continue racing, assuming I suppose that it is normal for 150' oil platform tenders to stop and shoot the breeze with turtled, rigless moths for 15 minutes. Nice.

Now it is the fire department's turn. They have extremely nice big (maybe 30') red boats with twin diesels and usually when one is motoring toward me it is inside Alamitos Bay to threaten me with a ticket for speeding. But today they are all business responding to my distress call. Except I didn't call, and would have preferred not to bother them, but no matter they are here, and none of my erstwhile clubmates seems to be lifting a finger, so what the hell. I tell them it's probably best to just haul my boat up over the stern and that it probably only weighs 50 pounds, and they are OK with that. They pirhouette and come at me with a swim platform, hook the bowsprit with a boathook and before I know it the moth is on the aft deck and I am wandering around an expansive immaculately white griptex dance floor. We could have fit another moth up there with no trouble at all. Another identical red power boat shows up from downtown Long Beach to supervise. Turns out these boats have another engine just for the pumps and a huge chrome bow nozzle for fighting fires. All in all an impressive day for working boat exposure.

Normally this mast thing is an overnight repair and back on the water tomorrow but I lack an appropriately sized inner sleeve at the moment, so I am down to rigging the new mast. Sounds like it's time for a replacement anyway.