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May 15, 1998 Issue


June 1, 1998 Issue

May 15, 1998 Issue


Chart Update

I have just returned from the Annual Spring Chart Update Patrol. It was COLD! An Arctic Express sent temperatures plummeting to 25 degrees below normal and added northeast winds at about 17 mph. Auxiliarists are required to wear "Mustang" exposure suits when the water temperature is below 60 degrees, and today we were glad of them.

Each spring, all up and down both coasts, the Coast Guard Auxiliary conducts these patrols, checking to make sure that all aids to navigation are "on station and watching properly" after the winter storms. My boat was one of three from the Wilmington, North Carolina flotilla checking a 35-mile stretch of the Intra Coastal Waterway. Our findings were much as usual, two day boards damaged (we suspect from the booms of commercial fishing boats), one with numbers obscured by time and weather, one unreadable from a left-over bird's nest, and one buoy missing. The USCGC Blackberry will have them all re-paired or replaced before the start of the recreational boating season.

What lies ahead in aids-to-navigation work? When it is a little warmer, we will check the buoys and day marks in the north channel from the Intra Coastal to the Cape Fear River. One of our members says there are problems there. We will check (by GPS) the location of the North Carolina buoys marking the 11 artificial fishing reefs in our area of responsibility, and we will remind all coxswains of the regular safety patrols to check every navigation aid as they cruise the waterway.

It's not very glamorous work, but it is one more task that makes recreational boating (and especially cruising) just a little bit safer. I'm glad I was out there today. I just wish it had been a little bit warmer.


"The Old Ed Stories:" -- A Fishing Schooner

You hear an awful lot about "smart weapons," "artificial intelligence," and things of that sort nowadays, but years ago I knew of a smart schooner. Not only did I know of her, I was the man who had her papers.

You can't really say I owned her. No one did and no one could. She had a mind of her own. When I got her, I got her cheap. She had been built for the coasting trade, but she was so ornery that even though she could carry a large cargo and was very fast, no one would sail her two voyages in a row. She would take it into her to refuse to tack when the captain wanted to come into a harbor. Sometimes she made her compass lie so that she brought her crew into danger on a dark night. One time she even sailed half way to Ireland before her crew caught on.

By the time I came upon her, she was down on her luck. She couldn't get a crew and because she was unreliable, no one would hire her to carry cargo. Even though no one had been hurt or killed, she had a very bad reputation and she looked as bad as her reputation. Well, I surveyed her from keel to truck and found her sound. Under that peeling paint, she was in excellent condition.

I sat down next to her wheel box and thought about what I would do with her if I bought her. It was clear she was not meant to be a cargo boat, even though that was what she was built for. This was before the days of the "head boats," which carry people who pretend that they are horny-handed old sailors for so much a head. That left fishing. As I thought this, she gave a little wriggle, even though it was flat calm. It was then I knew what she was really for.

I had her towed to the Story yard and refitted for dory fishing.

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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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