Episode 17 Foam, holes and reefs

One of the joys, if you can call it that, of owning an old boat is that after a while, you really get to know it intimately. I began wondering why the feminine pronoun is used on boats, and whether it was because you spend a lot of time trying to wriggle into “her” nether regions, and had to stop because it was getting all too Freudian.

The objects of my latest investigations into the boats innards were two curiosities; one seen and the other unseen. Both of them equally difficult to get to.

The visible curiosity was a brass tap, mounted on the starboard side of the keel box with no obvious connection to anything. I decided to remove it, firstly because by doing so I might discover its otherwise arcane function, and secondly, because I wanted the space for a battery shelf. It took a couple of turns with an oversized adjustable wrench to get it loose, whereupon I found that it was sealed in place by bathroom silicon (the snot of the Devil, according to Chris, an experienced old boat bloke at the marina). Upon removal, it left a hole, and my first thought was that its only purpose was to plug the hole. I then realised, quite rapidly thereafter, that the hole would let water in, if left unplugged. So, I went home, got an offcut of the stainless steel sheet that I had bought for similar hole-covering on the rear transom, and fixed it in place with some stainless steel screws, some Fix190 WT and some swearing when I realised I had made the half hour trip to the boat without my power drill. The Fix190 WT was a recommendation from the boat shop as a replacement for SikaFlex, because my tube of the latter had set solid, and the former would keep better until applied. It still made a black gooey mess.

Having sealed the hole formerly filled by the brass tap, I returned to musing why it was there in the first place. I think it was some kind of sea cock, possibly an outlet to a bilge pump or a galley sink, but the connecting hose had long since disappeared. The boat has another bilge pump under the cockpit, which has the outlet connected to the cockpit drain on the starboard side. Thanks to what I can only speculate is poor design or build, the inlet hose to the bilge pump terminates behind an enclosed compartment under the companionway, so that it does not reach to the lowest point on the inside of the boat, also known as the bilge. I had a not-quite-bilge pump, which would be not-quite-useful at extracting water, if called upon to fulfil its function. To reach the bilge, I would have to make a hole in the enclosed compartment, and pull the inlet hose through and then pass it under the cabin floorboards.

Which brings me to the invisible curiosity. What was there, inside the enclosed compartment? My current guess is that it is either air, or buoyancy foam. Hopefully the latter and, hopefully, not degraded or waterlogged. The reason is that the sales brochures of the time speak of foam buoyancy to make the boat unsinkable. Tentatively, I drilled a small hole in the bulkhead (with my new Makita 18V battery drill), and was relieved to find that no water came out. If there had been water in there, it might have been fermenting there for the past 30 years. So, the compartment has either air or foam. I then filled the small exploratory hole with black goo to keep the air in, in case I would need it in the event of filling the rest of the boat with water.

I think I will need to dig a hole through the foam, if it exists, to connect the inlet hose to the bilge pump to the bilge and so make it not-quite-useless. To compensate, I am considering filling the remainder of the airspace below the cockpit with plastic ball-pit play balls ($8 per 100), kept secure in a ball-net. Expanded polystyrene, or builder’s foam seems too fixed and messy, and will not allow the kind of air circulation needed to allow the boats innards to dry out.

Having taken out the brass sea-cock, I made up a shelf for the battery, so that it is nicely tucked up, out of the way, and the connecting wires no longer dangle through the water in the bilge.

Finally, I took her/it out for a sail on Sunday afternoon for a race, sailed poorly and recorded a DNF. I think it was because I put up too much sail, and by the time I had figured it out, all the other boats had got past me. So, I retired and shortened the course.

There is a life-lesson in greed here - try to grab too much, and it will actually slow you down. The aerodynamics are interesting, and I’m still trying to understand out how they work. It’s counterintuitive; you’d think that more sail equals more force, and hence more speed, but it works the other way around. I think you need to think of it in three dimensions - an overpowered sail will heel the boat, so that the resultant force vector is pointing down into the sea, rather than forward. It also pushes the boat to leeward more, so you can’t point (sail towards the wind) at such an acute angle. In any case, once I had reefed the foresail (reduced the sail area), my speed through the water increased from about 4.5 knots to 6.0, I was able to point the boat further into wind, and the boat became much easier to handle. The difference was remarkable. I am now converted to reefing, and will probably overdo it until I work out what the best settings are for different conditions.

The good news was that my new foresail furler worked well and, on returning to shore, I found almost no water in the bilges, meaning that my contraptions for stopping leaks around the keel pin were working well. Also, no water was coming through the hole where the brass sea-cock had been. Small successes, indeed.

The electrics inherited from the previous owner. Although they looked messy, they actually worked. No trunking, and wire  glued to the cabin walls with white bog. The old stop cock is hiding behind the big, black lead-acid battery on the cabin floor.

Old battery removed, old stop cock on side of keelbox under companionway. Cables replaced in trunking, except for cables under floor to new battery in new location, with red and black insulation tape at joins.

Stop cock hole sealed over with stainless steel plate.

New battery shelf. Cables now routed through trunking. Battery replaced with small, sealed red and white unit.

Episode 16 Success and other dangers

We don’t do enough to promote the fear of success.

Probably, its because we’ve decided that the only fear worth fostering is the fear of failure. Even that is misleading because it is really a fear of looking a goose in front of persons more competent, and more superior, than oneself. Technically, it relates to peer pressure, which is a lamentably underrated virtue. For instance, my fear of looking a goose in front of other drivers (peer pressure) keeps me alert to driving on the right (left) side of the road, which, in turn, has probably saved many lives. I have decided there is nothing inherently wrong with trying to blend in, though one should be discerning about what one should blend in with.

The fear of the fear of failure is one of those things that I’d like to feed into my politically incorrect two-stoke tree mulcher, together with other post-modern sacred cows, like the Disneyesque notion of following your heart. 

There is another danger out there that awaits the unwary failure-averse among us - Success. Particularly in a competitive environment such as a boat race.

What could possibly be wrong with winning, I hear you say. I’m glad you ask the question, so let me explain.

[At this point, Martin puts on his most sincere voice, knowing that if he can fake sincerity, he can fake anything. He’s been watching the politicians on TV, and reckons that if they can do it, so can he.]

The problem is that when you succeed, you’ll want to go back and succeed again. Call it confirmation bias, if you like, or even the Gambler’s Fallacy.

I got a whiff of this, when I finally got the boat out with its new rigging and sails for a Sunday Afternoon Race Around Green Island. I had cajoled a mate, Maurice, to crew for me, and together we set off into the unknown, not knowing how the new old tub would react.

I am happy to report that the boat did, indeed, sail better. Noticeably. Which is reassuring after my recent investment in her. She took on a solid heel of about 10 to 15 degrees, occasionally bowing over to 30 degrees in the gusts, but never panicking. Two hundred and twenty kilograms of cast steel slung below the boat in the keel made sure of that. And she slid along nicely at about 4.5 to 6.0 knots, which is about half a knot or so faster than before. Importantly, she pointed quite nicely with an angle of about 50 to 60 degrees off the wind, up from about 70 to 80 with the old, blown out jib. What these numbers mean, is that we managed to work our way upwind and almost made the first mark off Green Island before being overtaken by the first of the boats in the pursuit race behind us.

The experience of getting overtaken was to be repeated many times before reaching the finishing line, but not comprehensively so. We started at the front (being the slowest boat in the race) and finished about twelfth from first and fifth from last. Which means there were still some boats behind us, allowing us some gloating rights. That’s not bad.

We also saw a Green Turtle and scared an Osprey, with its fishy lunch, off a navigation post, as we brushed past. I had instructed Maurice, on the helm, to get as close as he could to the markers without entangling the rigging in them, and he did a remarkably good job of it.

Puffed up with this modest success, my mind then started to calculate how to get the boat even faster. I’d need a new Mainsail ($900), a better bracket to pull the outboard right out of the water ($150 to $300), a bespoke mechanism to fill the keel slot when the keel was down ($500 ?), shiny go-faster paint ($5000), carbon sails ($ eeek!), a new boat, with foils, and so on. When you add up the dollars, you wonder if you’d be better off with a less expensive addiction, say illegal drugs or funding a private war in central Africa. All this because I had almost succeeded at something, and needed to clamber towards turning the "almost" into an "actual".

And so, we need to fear success, or at least hold a healthy respect for it, in the same way that we should fear failure. You never know what it will drive you to.

No that I’ve got that off my chest, I need to plot a way to get past that 11th-placed boat. And after him …

New Furler and Foresail, but getting overhauled in the last leg

Course recording from iSailor

Episode 15 Curses and other discretions

Today, the planets aligned, or so I thought. My boat was finally ready for a sail - the new standing rigging was on, the new foresail was wrapped neatly around the furler, and I’d even checked for leaks the previous weekend to find none.

 But, the winds were a little too fresh. A sustained gust at the hardstand, just as I was about to hook up the trailer in the morning, persuaded me to go home and wait another week.

My current sweet spot for windspeed is about 5 to 15 knots. I’d go out in less than 5 knots, but I’ll be prepared for lots of idling around with the possibility of pushing against the tide with the motor. I’d also go out in winds a little fresher than 15 knots, but not without some assistance from a deck-hand, and not with the new, but untried, wardrobe that now dresses the big pole in the middle.

Being short-handed (a sailing term meaning that you haven’t organised a mate to help out), I regarded the forecast of 15 knots, strengthening too 25 in the afternoon, as borderline and, possibly, delusional. I would either launch the boat and curse myself when things got exciting, or go home and curse the weather. I opted for the latter, which was galling, because high tide was in the middle of the day and the recent rain had subsided to possible showers. The former was nice for launching and retrieving, and the latter, tolerable with a chance to dry off.

It has been while since my previous posts, and the reason is that the boat has been laid up since the end of October. 3 months! Since hypothesising that the boat’s wire luff on the foresail made it sail like a garden tub tied to a plastic bag flapping about in the wind, I elected to change the standing rigging. The turnbuckles on the old wire rigging had no adjustment left in them, so all the tensions and angles on the mast were wrong, like a badly tuned guitar with a warped neck. Following a recommendation from Ullman Sails, I got Rope Solutions to replace the rigging. Replacing the rigging also required replacing the foresail. The new rigging, with fully adjustable turnbuckles cost about $3,100 including GST, a Furlex 50s Furler, and labour to tune it all.

A couple of things to note here;

1. Don’t try to get things done before Christmas. If you’ve ever followed the program “Grand Designs”, you’ll know that aiming to get things done before Christmas is a guaranteed way of getting things done before the follow Easter. Fortunately, my delay was only a few weeks, rather than the nine months and several hundreds of thousands of pounds that follows most “Before Christmas” projects on Grand Designs as surely as night follows day 
2. Your rigger will demur on lowering and raising the mast, possibly, because he knows how easy it is to damage stuff, and legitimately, because he can save you labour costs. This means you’d need a mate to help out, unless you’ve become adept at doing it yourself. I’m not adept, which incurred further delays as I hunted around for an available mate who didn’t mind loosing a couple of hours over the weekend. So, thank you Ryan (down) and Pete (up). I also managed to bend one of the turnbuckle screws (add $20), which shows how easy it is for inexperts like myself to damage stuff, even with willing, but inexperienced help. 

Then, the new foresail. The old ones would no longer work, and they were blown out anyway. The sail-maker needed the final dimensions on the rigging after the mast was up again, which is fair enough, but added another couple of weeks to the project. The foresail measures about 12.6 m2 (a tad larger than the old Genoa, at 12.4m2) and cost about $1100, with a UV strip. Because of the Furlex Furler, I am advised that I only need one foresail, and can furl it in or out, depending on conditions, so I don’t need a separate, smaller jib.

Foresails, incidentally, have their own language. A jib is a foresail that does not extend to the mast, but a Genoa does. Storm Jibs are even smaller and are usually used for stability rather than forward motion in a storm (hence the name). To clarify, or perhaps to obfuscate in a profusion of words, these are often referred to as Number 1, Number 2, Number 3. A Number 1 typically has a 150% overlap, which I find misleading because only 33% of it actually extends past the mast and overlaps the main. A Number 2 has 130% to 140% overlap and a Number 3 has a 98% overlap, meaning none, and is, actually, a Jib. To simplify, Number 1 equals big (or Genoa), Number 2 equals middle, and Number 3 equals small (or Jib), followed by Numbers 4 and 5 (or Storm Jibs). These terms are important for racers, but now that I’ve only got the one sail, I’m likely to allow them to fall into disrepair in my lexicon and never refer to them again. From now on, its just “The Foresail”, but I may lapse into “Jib”, or “Genoa”, or even “Jenny”, or “that big white flappy thing at the front”.

So, I would like to report that 3 months and $4,200 have yielded a boat that sails nicely, and that I can sing the praises of Ullman Sails and Rope Solutions. But, alas! And by no fault of either of these fine establishments.

Still, part of the art is knowing your limitations, and today’s winds were just beyond mine.

On the plus side, I got to see my daughter as she, literally, flew through between her friend’s wedding in Adelaide and a job placement in Noosa. She felt a little fragile after being subject to a torrent of free Champagne and Red Wine the previous night, and I, in response, did my best to kerb the boisterous teasing that such a state prompts in older Dads. As Mr Bennett muses in Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”. My cynicism has not yet plumbed the depths of Mr Bennet’s, in part, because I am cynical of it, and partly because it doesn’t actually yield anything good. It frustrates the simple enjoyment of the good in life, even sailing (gasp!). Cynicism, I have decided, is not the answer, and is its own dour dogma that is as truculent as any religion. Not sailing on this Sunday morning also afforded me the opportunity to meet the new Priest-in-Charge at our church, who seems a good bloke, and I genuinely enjoy going to our church anyway. I’m not afraid of dogma, but I think you have to choose the right one.

 That cursed wind had its compensations, but I’m hoping for better weather next weekend.

Checking for leaks the previous weekend - none found