Blind Squirrels...or

"The most fun an adult can have wearing a hermetically sealed rubber suit."

The first day of Laser frostbiting was today. It was 50 degrees and sunny, with winds at 5-10 knots. Beautiful conditions.

As mentioned in my last entry I expected to go out on my first real day of Laser racing and get, well, humiliated. Shockingly it didn't happen. In fact I am somewhat at a loss to explain how I actually managed to put up what would be a reasonably good day for an experienced Laser sailor. For me it was nothing short of miraculous.

What a blast it was though. I've not taken the helm in a race since 2005 and back then I had a small army of people on the boat with me. Including people to help me with basic things like setting up a start so the boat ends up in an advantageous position at the beginning of a race instead of buried under everyone's foul air with nowhere to go and timing the tacks to the wind shifts so we'd sail the shortest way to the marks. Today...no Tactician calling the start or the tacks...just me looking around and saying "huh...looks like time to tack".

The cool thing was I didn't suck as fiercely as I thought I would. In fact I did pretty well for a rank newbie and even led the fleet for a little bit. And I don't think it ever felt any better when I had ten other people on board helping to make it happen on the big keel boat.

I'm certainly not claiming any Mad Sailing Skilz or much of anything but blind luck on a light air day. The race I was first to the mark, well, that was because I screwed up the start so badly I could only sail the other direction away from everyone else because I put myself in such a deep hole. Away from the fleet...and right into an awesome wind shift that lifted me in front of everyone else until I got greedy and pinched my way into a mark. Cost me two boats but I didn't care at that point I was so happy not to be last. So a lot of beginners luck and not having to pay too badly for my sloppy tacks and poor boat handling made for a fun day on the water.

Only six more days until the next race!

Humility Lessons

So we added a few more boats to the family fleet.

It started so innocuously - my son outgrew his Opti. The decision was that he would start sailing Lasers next year and an opportunity to pick up a very lightly used boat from the Laser Worlds presented itself.

Well, I took a look at that boat and thought "gee, I've lost enough weight so I bet I could sail it too." Of course that wouldn't be as much fun as sailing a Laser with him. So after some discussion my wife relented and agreed that I too could pick up a Laser (albeit a much older and more used one) so I could learn to sail it and also do some Frostbite sailing this winter.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of "Frostbiting", well it may be as dumb an idea as it sounds. Basically you get a small boat and race it. In the winter, when it is cold, snowing, icy, etc. This is New England, not the Bahamas...it gets cold here in the winter and we are sailing in December and January. So you get a dry suit (shown above), wear a lot of long underwear and layers and try not to fall off the boat too often.

Now, unlike my son who has been sailing small boats since he was eight or so and is now a perfectly competent dinghy skipper I never sailed as a kid. I used to race, but competitive sailing is not something I took up until well into my thirties. And I've never raced Dinghies.


A Laser is a small boat, about 14' long and weighing around 125 pounds. I used to say that I didn't "sail any boat that weighs less than me", however I've changed my tune since losing enough weight to get onto one of these little things. This is a boat designed for "an athletic 175 pound man" which I was at one point in my life. I'm close enough now that I can get on it and sail it without falling off all that often.

It is a very different experience than sailing a keel boat. Keel boats like like the old Weeble toys - they wobble, but they don't fall down. So we can bury the rail in the water on the big boat and nothing happens - you just can't flip the thing, it always comes back up. On the Laser, well it flips over if you do that too much. It flips over if you do any number of things wrong. I am fairly certain I will discover every one of them this fall.

In some ways it is like learning to sail all over again. This little boat is so much more sensitive and responsive than anything I've ever sailed that it takes relearning some of my worst habits. So far I've only dumped myself in the water once - and it wasn't that bad. I got the boat right back up and got right back in it and kept going. Not even an ego bruise really; I expected to capsize more often than I have been so far and I expected to have a lot more trouble getting back in the boat. Last time I sailed a boat this size I turtled it (turned it completely upside down) a mile off shore in the water in front of my house and couldn't get back on. It must of looked like the poor boat was being assaulted by some stricken pinniped as I kept trying to lunge back on board like an exhausted seal trying to beach itself on the rocks to no avail. With the Laser, well it came right back upright and I climbed right in it and sailed off.

This coming Saturday is the first day of racing, the day the reality check happens. I can tack the boat, I can jibe the boat and I can sail around a mark without hitting it. Of course I tend to get my feet tangled in the sheet and hit myself in the head a lot and my tacks and jibes are not what anyone would describe as "graceful" or "fast". What remains to be seen is how well I can put my minimal boat handling skills together with all that I've forgotten about racing over the last few years and not completely humiliate myself this week.

OK, Now What?

Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been more than two months since my last blog entry confession.

For your penance you have to figure out how to store all the crap in that picture for the winter while stripping the old electronics gear off the boat. Then figure out how to put all that stuff back in.

Can't you just give me 30 Hail Mary's and a couple of Rosaries?

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It's been a busy end of summer with a lot to write about. Coming up we will see....

• The Great Electronics Upgrade Project of 2010
• Vacation and trip reports, or "Sandwiching fun between Hurricanes and Tropical Storms"
• Additions to the Fleet
  
• Seals
• Teak Updates (I know you all have been dying without those...we are doing bungs!)
• More additions to the Fleet, and the stupid things your humble blog author is planning to do with it. It involves long underwear and a dry suit.
• The Neverending Project List Update
• Wailing, kvetching and gnashing of teeth about hauling the boat and Winterization.
  

And of course a lot of other stuff I will remember now that it is getting colder and I am looking for things to help me procrastinate with my decommissioning tasks.

Time & Sobriety

Both of which were apparently in short supply the Provincetown vacation...so I'm way behind on updates.

What a nice vacation - great fun traveling with friends. Cuttyhunk was a pleasant stay for us, we got to walk around a bit and have a relaxing visit. Provincetown is, well altogether different. The weather was a bit dodgy and prevented any serious sun related activities, and a whale watch was not in the cards this time. Highlights included:

• Cuttyhunk Raw Bar!
• Mudslide night. Well, mudslide day really, since we started blending them up in the afternoon. One member of the party lost her shoes, and some of us managed to not get beat up in town in spite of our less than excellent condition. We still managed to cook dinner on the boat without blowing it up and dropping only one tank of propane in the water. New boat record set for pitchers mixed in one sitting (eight).
• Kid's freedom...with four kids on the trip and staying at a dock we felt OK handing them money for dinner and telling them to meet us at the boat later. They had a blast walking around on their own, and the adults had some nice dinners out.
• Baked Stuffed Lobster at the Lobster Pot. Do not miss this.
• Drag Karaoke night at the Governor Bradford pub. Followed by a few other places...
• Being nice and dry in the Buzzards Bay chop on the way home
• I have to put the rubber band guns the kids found in an eclectic store on the "highlight" list since they loved them so much. I remain puzzled on how rubber bands have ended up in some of the places I have found them...apparently there was quite a battle on board while we were at dinner one night.
  

Of course, it would not be a trip on Evenstar without something causing me trouble. A self inflicted Alternator injury plagued part of it - being a good do-bee and tightening my belts did not pay off this time when the socket wrench slipped and something made a really bright spark. We had a new alternator and some fuses shipped to P-Town, but that didn't work out so well. Wrong sized mount and disk on the alternator meant we couldn't put it on. I thought I'd trashed the old alternator, but it turns out it was just the snubber that was burned out. This is a little diode used to protect the big expensive diodes on the alternator in the event of an unexpected event, like someone turning off the batteries or some idiot dropping a wrench across the terminals. I always wanted a backup alternator anyway.

More alarmingly the instruments just sort of...stopped...on Cuttyhunk before we left. I was able to partially restore them, but they were not liable and the autopilots were no longer working. Initially I suspected the Fluxgate Compass, but it turned out to be a loose connection to one of the autopilot controls that knocked out the primary and backup pilots.

The trip home was foggy and long with a lot of roll and chop. Makes me love the hard dodger more, but also raised my frustration level with the instruments and radar to a new high.

Vacation!

It's that time again! Tomorrow morning we head off for a week of relaxation and adventure. The spinnaker is repaired and on board, and we are almost ready to go. Hopefully we will be underway tomorrow morning barring any disasters or misfires.

The itinerary is pretty simple, we are meeting up with some friends and heading, eventually, to Provincetown. We can get out before they can so we are heading to Cuttyhunk tomorrow for a day or so before we rendezvous with two other boats. On Wednesday we leave for Provincetown for three nights, wending our way back home starting Saturday morning.

Due to the social nature of the trip - traveling with two other boats - we are actually going to *gasp* pay for at least one night in a slip. Three if they can fit us. Weird for us to be sure, but much easier to be sociable.

Our last trip to P-Town was a lot of fun, this time we're traveling with some other families with kids that are friends with our kids. And of course adults that are friends of ours.

Updates to follow as time & sobriety permit...

Teak Update...

While I know that all of you have been on the edges of your seats for months awaiting an update to the Great Teak Debacle of 2009 there's not been a lot to update. Since the last update Chris has been working on the detail sanding while I deal with more prosaic tasks like replacing a head, repairing a burned out 50 Amp shore power connector and cord, and other maintenance tasks his teak work has freed me up for.

Funny, but he didn't want to switch jobs with me yesterday when I was replacing another one of these stupid Jabsco toilets (more on that crappy job in another post...the job was OK but the head is annoying!); I would have been more than happy to offer him my rubber gloves and do some sanding.

"Detail Sanding" mostly means going around either by hand with a piece of sandpaper or with a small power tool and finding all the extra caulk we've not sanded off and getting rid of it. There was actually a lot - all the places the big power tools couldn't get to; edges around things, the edge of the teak areas, and other tight places.

The detail sanding is basically done (though I anticipate finding "misses" regularly for the next year). We have two final steps before the project is essentially complete. I say essentially because we left a few lazarettes (hatch covers) completely undone because they have a lot of detail work, and they can be taken off the boat for the winter and done on my work bench at home.

The first big task is the teak bungs. These are the little round wooden plugs that fit into the screw holes in the deck where the screws that hold the deck on are. For our first attempt, I measured some of the open bung holes with a micrometer and they seemed to be about 3/8" inches, which is a standard size you can buy at most local marine retailers in the United States. Easy to find and convenient. Hah! I estimate we have a little more than 100 bungs to replace.

About is the key word in that last paragraph, after Chris put a few in we noticed that while they were snug going in they were not snug enough and there were still hair line gaps around them. That they went in by hand and without a mallet should have been a tip off: clearly 3/8" is too small. Given the European construction of Evenstar my thought was they were either metric, or some odd custom size. To be safe and not waste a lot of time with bung making tools or hunting down metric bungs I ordered a set of bungs from Hallberg-Rassy; these should fit. We don't lose any time because I'm taking the boat on vacation next week anyway. 200 of the bungs and screws that Hallberg-Rassy uses to build their boats will hopefully be sitting on my porch when I get back.

The process is straightforward, if time consuming (isn't this whole project?). For holes where the head of the screw is deep enough a quick cleaning out of the hole for dust and crud, a dab of varnish in the hole to hold the bung plug, tap in the plug and let it dry. Then you put a chisel on the edge of the bung and give it a little tap to pop the part that is sticking above the deck off, and you sand it a little.

Unfortunately more than a few of the holes are not deep enough to hold the bung. For those we have to back the screw out and take a rotary tool to the hole to countersink it a bit more. Dig it out if you will so it is deep enough to shove the bung into it and hold it there. Then a screw is reinserted with some sort of sealant (to be determined) on it, and the process continues as above.

The final task which will put an end to the job is fixing all the skips, misses and screwups. Cut out the new, badly installed caulk then re-prep the grooves. Mask it all carefuly and refill the gaps and sand it down.

The end is in sight though, and the decks are looking really, really nice even now.

Boringest Post Ever

This weekend we went to Block Island.

Nothing Broke.

Nothing was destroyed.

Nothing caught on fire.

There was no fog.

An excellent and relaxing time was had by all.

We did have some minor drama when anchored next to Mr. "Chapman's says I should have 7 to 1 scope dammit and I'm taking it" in an anchorage where you consider yourself fortunate to get 5 to 1 out because it is normally so crowded. But we didn't hit him (even though he swung into the guy next to us the night before), and we didn't drag in the 30+ knot thunderstorm that blew through Saturday night. The conversation went something like this, when he decided to clue me in about 8 hours after we'd anchored that he had so much scope out:

Mr. Chapman's Says: We have 210 feet of scope out.
Me: I have 165
Mr. Chapman's Says: We're in 30 feet of water.
Me: I know. I have all chain.
Mr. Chapman's Says: It's supposed to blow 30 knots tonight.
Me: I know.
Mr. Chapman's Says: It's supposed to swing West.
Me: I know.
Mr. Chapman's Says: I have 210 feet of scope out.
Me: I know.
Mr. Chapman's Says: I am worried that you won't swing enough, last night we woke up against that boat over there (points to rather beat up looking ketch NO ONE wants to end up against). When we swing we will be on you.
Me: OK. I will let more out so you don't hit me. But we will get closer together now.
Mr. Chapman's Says: That's OK. We're going in town to the movies now.

An excellent and relaxing time really was had by all...except for a brief moment with one skipper wearing boxer shorts and foulies in the cockpit during a torrential fusillade of rain while glaring daggers at the boat next to us from 2-3 AM on Saturday...but I got over it.

In all due seriousness...yes, 7:1 scope is ideal and preferred. I've gotten that at Block Island. In early May, and in October. Other than that it is too crowded and no one can let out that much lest they be a menace to everyone around them.