Other People's Teals.....

So, today I went out to Frenchtown Pond with the Pica and met up with James with the Blue Flower.  You don't really see much mention of Teal's really showing up in groups, but sometimes they do.

This time around we were looking at a lot of wind, with gusts up to 19 knots.  Not much in the grander scheme of things, but for Missoula it is an exceptional amount of air on the move.  James was already in the water with his gaff rig with jib(somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 sq ft); myself, I tied my reef in on my balanced lug (45 sq ft).  If a good gust presented itself, I could boogey quite well.  I might have run up the whole sail (67 sq. ft.) but I wasn't feeling too ambitious--not to mention that I still need to deal with the fact that my mast is a "hair" to short for the sail I have (bought on closeout from Polysail) http://www.polysail.com/

An excellent comparison of sail plans of the Pica (left) and Blue Flower (former Annas Discors) on the right.  Don't let that gaff rig fool you.

So, my sailing was rather lackluster, but it was fun, and I may well dropped the reef and gone all out, but my tiller extension gave up the ghost (broken screw eye), leaving me to drop the rig and row to the dock.  Phooey!

James came in at this point and suggested lunch, which struck me as a good idea. At lunch he complained about a problem his rig has always given him in heavy winds.  To wit: the problem would be that the boom would furl up against the mast in heavy wind.  He had such an event before I arrived, and had the hole in his main sail to prove it.   He knew he wanted a downhaul but, rather like me, hadn't gotten around to mounting it yet.  Still, he has fun with his boats and you can read about that here:  http://inlandpacket.blogspot.com/

Well, that's what rope is for.  Happily there was an eyelet in one location and sufficient projections on the mast in the other.  Not much later a boom vang in born.  Now oddly enough, James was generous enough (?) to suggest that I take the boat out.   He said the Blue Flower is touchy and edgy with the wind--well he was right.

I guess the first harbinger that this would be interesting was after I had cast off the dock  "You know, I always put up the sail at the dock........"  In all honesty, I found that rather lame, I always thought a person should be able to raise and strike a rig on the water.  I did get the sail up, but a person does need two ropes (throat and peak halyards) and the parrel beads merrily hung up on the bolts on the tabernacle.  With sail up, twas time to sail.

Now, a balanced lugsail is simple:  one sheet, one halyard, one sheet line.  The Blue Flower is not:  Two halyards for the Gaff.  A line for the boomed gaff, a halyard for the gaff and a downhaul for the jib.  Yeah, five lines to sail a boat... egad.  Now in light airs this would be a non-issue, as very little of it would require fiddling, not so today.

Once I got away from the dock, which typically has weak winds, I was moving along nicely.  I did not raise the jib but the wind was moving the Blue Flower along nicely.  I decided to test out the boom vang by trying the one maneuver that gave James such trouble--a straight downwind run.  I was not able to get the boom to pop up, though I knew it was going to rise up some, simply because I had no way to really apply tension to the vang.  The gaff sail pulled well enough, and I soon had the boat up to hull speed and a wake that looked like I had a motor.

It took a while to master how to tack with the rig, and in the process of doing that I had to "go around" on a tack, which brought me too close to shore, in a tight turn and with the wind on my stern quarter, over she went and well, blub blub.  Happily I was close to shore and able to get the boat ashore.  Also the air boxes on the Blue Flower seem to work better than mine on the Pica, so the boat took on less water.  After much happy bailing (with James watching after dealing with the Pica as a rowboat) I set out again, this time with the jib up, but the gaff scandalized.

I would not scandalize the rig next time as it did not seem to provide a great advantage and it hampered performance later on.   I  spent about another half hour tooling around the lake, crashing through shoals (fallen trees) and pushing the heeling limits of the Blue Flower without actually sinking it again.  Finally I made it back to the dock and gleaned a few things:

A stiff rudder is kind of handy.  Since the Blue Flower has cockpit coaming, tacks are easy (1) put the tiller over the coaming and let the boat come around (2) when the boat is almost through the tack, shift yourself across the seat thwart (3) take in the sheet to keep loose lines from causing trouble (4) pick up the tiller and let out the sheet once on the new heading.  After practicing, it get a whole lot easier.

The Blue Flower is a very sensitive boat.  Part of this is because you are seated on a thwart that is 6 inches off the floor.  The coaming also makes it hard to get out on the rail.  being 240 pounds is a benefit for that, but not everybody comes with built in ballast.

A great example of the "barn door" rudder on the Pica.  Contrast this to the low aspect rudder on the Blue Flower below.

 The rudder on the Blue Flower is light years different from the catboat style barn door on the Pica.  It certainly helps the Blue Flower have a healthy weather helm, but gaining steerage way is a bit of a challenge and between that and the wind direction (no wind pennant) led to a number of gybing turns to make a tack.  I did get better at it and that gives me reason to think that I might be wise to try a different rudder blade setup on the Pica.

So, all in all, a very rewarding day on the water.

Boom and Bust

Had the Pica out on Frenchtown Pond a couple weeks ago (perhaps I should post more promptly?) and the wind was very good.  Sadly is was winging out of the northeast, which creates weird wind shadow problems.  It was also gusty and fickle, which amplify sail shape problems

Problems?  Well, actually, when all is working well, the balanced lug I have on my Bolger Teal works great.  However, due to some construction shortcuts (no....) I have been bothered by my sails sometimes, and the most recent sail pointed this out in spades.  The main point of the problem is the outhauls slipping and causing the lead edge of the sail to bag, which makes the sail much more difficult to control when trying to point into the wind.

Just a note to indicate that outhauls provide tension to the top and bottom edges of a sail, and downhauls provide vertical tension against the halyard (in very general terms).   A great discussion of rigging a balanced lug, especially for performance, can be found in this article by Mik Storer at:  http://www.storerboatplans.com/GIS/GISRigging.html

Why would the outhauls slip?  Possibly because they are wrapped and tied around the end of the boom and yard with no cleats or eyelets or anything to hold them in a particular position, save friction.  If the knots remain undisturbed, things are great, but if something gets loose....look out!  Obviously if I had built the Pica to the stock plan, the leg of mutton sail detailed by Phil Bolger would have no outhauls and darned little fiddly rigging to hassle with.

Of course the Leg of Mutton (Spritsail) cannot be reefed either, and that seems like a bad idea if weather conditions can vary as much as they can locally. 

So, maybe it's time to deal with those slipping outhauls and wandering rigging by putting some cleats on the upper boom.  The lower boom gets by with a couple screw eyes to restrain the lines, though that should be upgraded somewhere down the road.   So the simple solution is to run down to the nearest chandler (brick and mortar or online) and pick up the required cleats.  Being a more frugal (cheap) sort, I elected to make them out of wood.  I've have other wooden cleats on the boat, so why not more?

At this point I can't point out photos of these beautiful little gems.  Okay, that might be pushing it, but I did make a pair of regular cleats for the outhauls on the upper boom, and a thumb cleat to limit the movement of the halyard.  Subsequent sailing has shown the problem to be remedied.  I'm posting this blog without pictures because I have another post to put up (and don't want to get all out of order).  However I will put up pictures shortly.

A Turning Point, the evolving rudder...

Who would have thought that sinking my boat would take the wind out of my blogging sails?  Egads.  The story is not over (not by a long shot.  I won't steer you wrong--in fact lets talk about steering!

When this boat was abuilding I don't really recall what Payson mentioned about rudder hardware. One thing though, there's darned little out there designed for a double ended (and pointy ended at that) sailboat.  It gets a little better when you have a real stem and stern (as exposed timbers--but those timbers are buried under plywood, so some sort of canoe rudder hardware is required.

Being cheap and not really seeing anything cheap and easy to procure, the first thought was:  why not make them out of wood.  Yes!  Wood gudgeons and wood pintles!  It is a wood boat after all, no?

Somewhere around this time, I had come across the Wooden Boat Forum, and in there, lots and lots and lots of photos of James McMullen's Rowan, an Ian Oughtred design called the Sooty Tern.  It certainly wasn't the boat I was going to build (being 19'--certainly not), but there were plenty of photos of construction details, including the rudder.  Well, the Rowan had nice cast bronze hardware, which I wasn't thinking I could replicate.  Still, good design is always an inspiration, and the idea of having flowing carved gudgeons in dark wood as brightwork against a white hull still strikes me as something really cool to attempt--with a proper bandsaw and sanders........  Lacking that certainly changed the outcome.



Wait though.  Wasn't the  Annas Discorse equipped with a rudder?  Of course, but the Annas Discorse also has a transom, a narrow one, but a transom just the same, and so was able to use much more common gudgeons for a flat surface.  A picture here will explain neatly:

From the Annas Discorse--note the transom end of the boat--not pointy.

 So, what resulted is sort of brute force gudgeons.  The pintles would probably qualify as brute force trauma--and the two were connected by dowels made from cut down broom handles.  Did it work?  Well... sort of ....   note the sort here.  A picture might be more interesting....

Even at this early point, this I think is the second time out, the wooden pintles were regarded as failures and replaced with "Payson Eyes" (large screw eyes).  The pins are dowels, with copper wire keepers.    

 

 

The wooden pintles just didn't work, the non-square pivoting of a sharpie end caused them to bind and frankly, they were really bulky and ugly--that blunt force trauma thing.  They were replaced with "Payson eyes", (ie, screw eyes).  They performed better, so long as the pins didn't get lost.  The gudgeons actually functioned quite well, for being sort of whacked out of tight grained 2 x 4 stock.  They stayed with the boat even after it was painted.  The misshapen rudder stock was ok, but rudder failures kept cropping up, and that takes all the fun out of going out on the water.  Time for a new plan....

Wooden Boat Magazine has a wonderful forum that is full of all sorts of interesting stuff. Even though the bulk of it is aimed toward traditional construction methods and larger boats, good design ideas and sound construction techniques are everywhere.   One of the threads I was reading involved rudders, and one photo (getting permission for it) posted by "Thorne" gave me a straightforward solution to making a decent pop up rudder.  Rather than having the blade of the rudder fit within the rudder stock "cheeks" why not have smaller cheeks that pivot with the rudder blade?  A picture of what I built:

 

 

Simpler, easier and, as a bonus, more effective!

Showing the rudder head, and the tiller extension.  Of course later it was suggested to have the tiller on the other side, which is where it still resides, though changing it (or breaking it down for storage, is simply a matter of pulling the pin and switching it.

The new design required changing to a push pull tiller, but that was ok, as I was tired of having the tiller handle sticking me in the back, and having to reach around to work it while sitting in the middle of the boat.  The rudder blade was recycled, but rather than use a rope tie down to keep it down, I decided to weight it with lead--handy when one has a hot metal pot built into an Intertype machine.....

So... what did I do about the pintles and gudgeons?  Will, I got lucky to find a set of stainless canoe gudgeons on Ebay, and later wound up buying pintles from Duckworks.  Of course the two didn't mate, as the gudgeon pins were too big, but I had access to a lathe and did machine them down, yielding a much handier setup.  It certainly took time to get used to the new tiller setup, and some really exciting gybes were the result, but I consider the new rudder a success, and it will likely remain with the boat for as long as it sails. 

Next time around, perhaps a look at the sails is in order, or the mast, it'll be one or the other.