Sail away...

18 nautical miles

This was a quick morning sail that Tim took, with friends from South Africa, while Richard is in the UK. It would have been longer, but Tim's mum is seriously ill in hospital and so he needs to be with her.

Yes, Raymarine C70 the chart plotter is back in place. Damianou Marine Electronics Ltd, which are the Cyprus distributor for Raymarine are great. They checked it out, found it needed new motherboard and some other components, did the repair and returned it to us within a few days!

Plotter problems...

We replaced our chart plotter earlier this year from the Raymarine A70 to a C70.  progressively more it kept crashing. Last thing you want from a chart plotter. It kept saying 'Improper Cartridge Removal' even when we hadn't touched the cartridge. To start with we thought it was something we were doing wrong with the cartridge, and talked to our local Raymarine dealer from whom we bought it.

Eventually we came to the conclusion there was something wrong so removed it today and took it back to the dealer for him to look at it. I (Richard) am away for a month in the UK, since my son is getting married so it's a good time for this.

Sails?

13 nautical miles

Today was a sail with two purposes: Give some guests a taste of sailing and try out the new magicfurl on our asymmetric spinakker. Currently we have 5 sails in our wardrobe: main, mizzen, genoa, mizzen staysail and asymmetric spinakker. The asymmetric had a sock for dousing the sail, but because it was old and worn every time we used it it ripped the sail. 

Tim had seen magicfurl from Crusader Sails and thought this would be the answer. So we bought it... but... it needed a bowsprit and the cost of that was quite high so we decided to cut down our spinakker pole and make a bowsprit out of that.

We took a section out of the middle of it and then used a shackle to clamp it to the deck. The loop it goes through was constructed out of a piece of stainless steel we inherited with the boat. The bobstay is a 3:1 block and tackle which we also inherited with the boat, albeit with new rope. 

The magicfurl itself was fitted to the end of the spinakker pole with a couple of shackles.

We cut the spinakker pole carefully with an angle grinder and then remounted the joining piece that was formed from the two parts of the original pole. 

What we did though was to mount the two end pieces at 90 degrees to each other so that the end over the water was vertical to take the magicfurl and the end on the deck was horizontal to clip into a shackle attached to a loop on the deck holding it in place. We also added a cleat on the side for the bobstay line.

Basically at the start of the day you run out the bowsprit and hoist the asymmetric and then whenever you need it you unfurl and furl with the magicfurl... sitting comfortably on the liferaft on the foredeck.

It looked beautiful and added a knot of speed to our sailing.

The deeper red ring is from a patch to the sail put there by the previous owner. In fact it's a pain as it's double thickness and so tends to bunch up on the magicfurl.

Sailing with a bowsprit seems to give the boat class. One of the old masters and it keeps the asymmetric away from the furling genoa, which was the main purpose of the project. 

It was much easier running out the bowsprit and unfurling and furling the asymmetric that the previous method with the sock. 

We found you could just fly the asymmetric at 80 degrees apparent wind and really only filled well at 90 degrees apparent wind. We will be testing more in the future.

We did find that we had to be careful furling it - not put too much pressure on the sheet or it reverse furled. When this happened we had to clear the problem the following day.

The day sailing was very enjoyable.

Our guests brought food and drink - we provided the boat.

Hopefully more photos later from the day.

So what of future sails? 

A mule...  (proper name is 'main backstaysail') something like the the inverted triangular sail on Good Fortune. Some people suggest adding a half wishbone pole to it. Some people rave about it. Or we could go bigger with a Fisherman's staysail or a gollywobbler or gollyker. But Tim showed me something more interesting and we have lost the link: a pair of dihedral sails for downwind sailing. He also talked about a kite sail (and a kite cam, but that is very different). We might also need a riding sail... this hobby is interesting in the various options. I am very glad we have a ketch which gives us opportunities to play with the rig.

Marie joins us sailing

17 nautical miles

The spot positions didn't really do justice to where we sailed, so I photographed the screen of the chart plotter to show. I believe there is a way to screen capture from the chart plotter, but I have not found that yet, so the image sadly has the moire patterning of a photo of an LCD screen. 

A new crew member today - Jacob's older sister Marie. I had taught her to sail a couple of years ago and although she enjoys sailing, doesn't talk of it in quite the same way Jacob does, so I had forgotten to invite her. We rectified that today and she came out to see how a very much larger (than the 5 metre / 16 ft Wayfarer) boat sails.

We sailed out, did a couple of tacks for practice then off into the bay. We then thought about sailing back to the dinghy sailing club to see what they were doing, but it didn't look like there were any boats out. We hove too for lunch.

The wind came almost exactly as predicted, building during the morning then dying away by just after lunchtime so we didn't sail too far, not wanting to motor back. Jacob wanted to see if we could see the Xenobia wreck by sailing over it, but with the water the way it was (ie choppy) we would see almost nothing. You really need very still water to see the wreck. 

One thing we found is that the roller furling jams and is difficult to use at times. This is because the bearing at the bottom of the has broken losing all the ball bearings and the unit is no loner repaired to get a replacement. Last year it didn't jam as much so we shall try to find a solution.