Sailing Lake Norman

Nothing too exciting, but I finally got the boat out for some sailing again, been quite a while! I've been doing a lot of mountain bike racing as well as playing on the powerboat. It's too bad because we have had good winds down here lately.

Going out was a straight shot downwind, then a couple lazy reaches across the bigger part of the bay. Coming in was a fair bit of tacking and I wasn't in a hurry but not super impressed with my tacking angles but really not too bad. All in all a nice relaxing day, except for a stowaway that decided to scamper across my foot partway out. A nice size wolf spider has been living down by the keel apparently. Hopefully he has moved on, really do not want to meet him again.

Lake Murray, SC

A couple weeks back I headed out for another weekend of sailing and camping. I had originally planned to head back to Lake Marion again, but got a late start so halfway there I decided to try Lake Murray, which is just west of Columbia, SC. Lake Murray turned out to be a great lake for sailing, The weather was pretty heavy that first day with avg 15 knot winds with only a few gusts coming in but those that did were pretty heavy.

A fair bit of heeling even with just the main up

The whole day ended up being a close reach which I actually enjoyed quite a bit. Beam reaches are just too easy! I had the rail close to the water most of the day since my main sail is very full which works well in light air, but ends up causing a lot of heel. I started to put in reef points but haven't set the grommets yet. At one point after I had rolled out the genoa (I'm not much for caution), a good gust caught me which put the coaming all the way in the water and made me take on about ten gallons of water! Which pointed out the need to enlarge the cockpit drains. And got my feet wet. Fortunately my beer didn't spill so disaster averted. I also wanted to practice heaving to and learned that my boat will heave to quite nicely in strong winds which was good to know. I spent a fair bit of time looking for a good place to camp and finally found a quiet cove that already had a fire pit and settled in for the night.

The following morning was quite pretty and after a couple cups of coffee and some oatmeal I was ready to go. Unfortunately, the wind was not ready to cooperate.

What took about 3 1/2 hours to get out to, ended up taking the better part of almost 12 hours to get back. The wind had died overnight for the most part and shifted so I was back on a close reach which is no fun in light shifting winds. Only had a small trolling motor but worse I hadn't put back in the larger batteries so I was stuck trying to gather what wind I could and paddling to get somewhere. Ugh. You can see in the track below the straight line out and the much less fun track back. And the glassy conditions at times on the lake in the picture above. Ah well, it was still nice to get out and learned a few more tricks and made it back so all in all a good weekend.

Companionway Updates

I got some new bits on the boat today. The hatch on the Newport 16 is basically just a cover that sits on top, nothing to hold it down. So I got a couple of Sea Dog hatch hinges that have a removable pin in case I do want or need to take it off. I also got a twist type hatch adjuster to hold it open which will make it a lot easier to grab things from down below without climbing all the way in. At 6'3" the cabin is awfully tight so I like to just lean in. But then I don't quite clear the hatch with my back if I put a knee on the companionway sill, I had to move very slow and it was quite a pain.

You can also just see the new drop board bits I built which I'll get pics of later.

Sailing on Lake Marion - Day 2

Day two started with a beautiful sunrise. I made some coffee with the JetBoil french press and got going. Still no rudder but the wind had shifted a little and lightened up some so it wasn't hard to get out and get going. Mainly steering by my position on the boat occasionally hanging over the side to get it to turn windward. Without a rudder I had a lot of lee helm which was a hassle. After a nice long close hauled reach trying to steer through the stumps to the deeper water on the other side I got into a weird situation where I could not get the boat pointed. I finally rolled up the genoa and that helped balance things out although I did lose some speed. After a couple wasted tacks going nowhere, I got it settled into a nice groove and managed to get a couple good long tacks and then got a nice wind shift headed back to get up to the bridge.

The one long tack from Vance back across the lake looked like this and was the best part of the day. Note the lack of a tiller. I just sat with my back on the cabin occasionally leaning a little left or right to adjust my heading. The engine there became just for show since it wouldn't run after a bit, just started leaking gas. I was guessing that the float in the carb got stuck or some such. I am definitely going back to the trolling motor because it has been nothing but trouble.

I was ghosting my way under the bridge close hauled and just about through the second span when a gust of wind came up and grabbed the front of the boat, smashing the bow. Yay. Got a pretty good bit of damage to a spot that had already been repaired once prior to me, so now I get to repair it again for real. Slightly ironic in that I have a rub rail I am working on that will look nice ad would have been great protection for that but oh well. On the other side of the bridge the winds got flukey which are a real pain to deal with when you are steering by jumping around the boat. I did get a good wind for a while but I started figuring that it was going to be tight making it to the landing by dark and if the wind died I wasn;t going to make it. So I bailed out at a boat ramp with a nice beach next to it. Tied the boat off and got to enjoy a nice 8 mile run back to my car. Well I probably ran about 6 of it and walked 2, took me about an hour and 15 minutes or so. Well I did want to get some exercise this weekend.

All in all, it was quite an adventure. What is it they say, "It's not an adventure until something goes wrong." I was happy that despite all the setbacks the boat did get me back home in one piece and I learned quite a bit about the boat and how to sail it. I'd actually sail Lake Marion again. It was a nice wide lake, the camping was beautiful and there were plenty of spots to camp. The cypress trees are vary nice. I'd launch closer to 95 to avoid the hairy sections and try to generally stick to the south side where the main channel is (the blue line in the google earth pic above) to avoid the hazards.

The rest of my pictures are up on picasaweb at https://picasaweb.google.com/110586701752725030552/LakeMarion

Sailing on Lake Marion - Day 1

So I decided I would head down to Lake Marion in SC this weekend just to sail somewhere different. My local lake, Lake Norman is relatively narrow so the winds can be flukey. Plus I figured I would make a weekend of it and camp out on an island somewhere. Turned into quite the adventure, but I learned a lot about my boat and gained a few new skills. Plus any trip where you wake up to this view can't be all bad, right?

So here is a view of the google earth track. Navionics is a great little application (Lakes East is what I have), but I have heard the new version is not as good.

   There was a lot of wind, white caps on the lake, but overall not too bad. Probably should not have chosen to launch on the lee shore at a place called Stump Hole Landing though! It lived up to its name with a lot of stumps and in fact the whole lake has good stretches of stumps as well as cypress trees popping up. There was one lonely little tree right out in the middle of the lake. Considered changing my plans to come from the north side of the lake which would have made more sense. But I got out, had a great downwind run making over 4 knots with just the genoa out (the roller furler worked well although I need a longer reefing line!).
  I made it under 95 and got greedy and tried to hoist the mainsail. Well the new tiller tamer had been working great except that my tiller moves up and down so when I am not holding it it basically falls down and locks the tiller. So when I moved forward and was pulling the main up a good gust of wind came up, pushed the boat out of the wind and caught the sail. When the boat heeled over, I heard the crack of the rudder. The wind was pushing me hard into the shore for a while until I got things situated.
  So I got to to learn how to sail for the next 7 miles by playing with sail trim. I was losing light since I got a late start playing with things around the house, so I decided to hit a nice harbor I saw on the charts and just managed to glide up to a great little island and get everything on the shore and my tent set up in the last bit of light. I had a nice little spot and the Newport floated out in about 8 inches of water. Great sandy spot for my tent, sheltered from the wind and I slept like a baby, except at one point when my forearms got tight (from holding the sheets for two hours steering along) and I woke up with my hand asleep.

But again, got a perfect spot to camp and had a great night.

New Gear Winch, Mainsheet Routing, Tiller Tamer and the death of a Rudder

So I installed a new gear winch for the swing keel, which works well. The only drawback at this point is that it takes too many turns to lift. I will end up wrapping 'something' around the cable drum to increase the diameter which will reduce the number of turns. I may also get real crazy and install some type of electric motor to drive it which would be a nice bonus. Getting rid of the thwart really opens up the cockpit. And it also works well as a drink holder!

Here you can see where I ran the mainsheet and now run it to the end of the boom. Not entirely happy with it but I wanted to go out this weekend and wanted to get it working. Basically cleat it under the tiller. Please disregard how dirty the cockpit is, still need to clean and paint it.

I also managed to put together a tiller tamer out of part of an old broken desk chair that I saved the wheel adjuster for. I tend to look at something like that and say 'that could be good for something' and in this case it paid off.

However, stay tuned for the next bit where the tiller tamer combined with some good wind gusts and a little bit of stupidity led to this, the remains of my rudder:

I wanted to post some pics of a new DIY roller furling setup. I got a lot of ideas from a post on the web that I can't seem to locate now. It's built out of mostly 1/2 inch sch 40 electrical conduit. I used conduit since it is made to be UV resistant as opposed to white PVC pipe. The T had to be gotten from the plumbing section as well as the two parts of the drum. About 25 bucks for the whole thing.

Here is the drum. This is the only part I glued together and even that doesn't absolutely need it. From the bottom it consists of a 1/2 inch cap, small bit of 1/2 pipe to connect, 1/2 male threaded piece, PVC box cap (from electrical dept.) 1/2 inch thread to 1 1/4 adapter, small bit of 1 1/4 to connect it to the next adapter, plate and male adapter, then the 1/2 inch pipe starts.



You can see where the 1/2 pipe starts I actually drilled and chamfered a small stainless (#6 x 1/2) screw rather than gluing. I had done this same design but glued all the pieces together but ended up breaking bits on it while moving the mast around and such. Using a screw does two things; allows me to take it apart and replace bits if needed and makes it slightly more flexible which will hopefully put a little less stress on things and I won't break it! We'll see how it holds up. If it all goes to heck, I can still take the jib off and hank it back on but it has held up rolling things up in about 25mph winds.

Here is the next bit. Basically cut pieces of PVC long enough to go in between the hanks, then cut out a bit of the coupling and pipe about halfway around to give room to get the hank on the fore stay. Then I put a screw in the backside of the coupling (could also be glued). Do this for each hank of course.



And here is the top bit, pretty self explanatory. Using eyebolts with washers, then zip tying the jib top and bottom. The whole thing just spins on the caps on either end, tension on the sail is preset by the zip ties and the pvc pipe between the hanks so you want to get it fairly tight. I also sized it so the caps roll on the swaged ends and not on the stay itself, it will roll smoother and less chance of damaging the stay that way.



Final step, go sailing!

The boat is in the water and sailing just fine. Still work to be done, but most of that will be waiting until wintertime.

Alright, so here is the cockpit sole getting ready to go back on. You can see I left spaces between some of the plywood cores. My theory being if one of them gets wet and starts to rot at least it won't be all of them.

I dropped it down and used 3M 5200 to seal it back together. Used about 125 3/16" Aluminum rivets and backing washers. Came out pretty well, not pretty to look at but solid.

And here it is looking like an actual boat again! I rigged up a mast taberknackle out of 3/4 plywood and some fiberglass, temporary until I break down and order the right parts from Dwyer Mast. That will push my costs up a good bit. I will put up a post with my cost breakdown soon, but suffice it to say I wasted some money on buying smaller quantities of things like epoxy and fiberglass resin by not breaking down and buying the right amount to begin with. Kind of a learning experience there, I was trying to save money but in the end there were some places I could have saved by spending more up front on supplies.

I did order a main sail from Bacon Sails which I haven't hoisted yet but looks pretty nice in the bag. A lot cleaner than the genoa that I have. At some point I will order a jib from them since that one is pretty rough.

If all goes well I will get it in the water this weekend for a test run. Need to finish hacking together the ruddder I am working on, hack up a boom and sheets, place cleats for said sheets, finish the transom, and get that keel bolted back in there. And don't worry, I will have an outboard for when all of that breaks and the mast falls off.

Obviously more to go before I will be content, mainly paint, rub rail, windows, a real rudder and boom. But making progress.