Costs for 2019 and a Review of the Year.

Here's the yearly roundup of costs, which this time are pretty meagre:

As usual first are the basic expenses.

£142      Mooring Fee

£170      Insurance.

The only new stuff this year was the fuse box and rewiring.

£9.39   Fuse box (eBay).

£13.99 Battery Switch (Amazon).

£7.45   10m 11A red/black twin wire.

£5        Terminal Blocks.

£14      LED Stern light (I bought the Nav lights a few years ago).

The only additions apart from the electrical stuff were:

£18.41 Water Pump Impeller for Outboard.

£20      Laminate dinghy mainsail.

Total for the Year: £401-ish.

Sailing in 2019 was again thwarted by something cropping up instead of actual sailing. In this case it was the electrics not being fit and requiring a new fuse box, which took a few visits to make and finally install. 

It seems I've fallen out of the habit of going down to the boat on a regular basis, especially after the conveyor belt of storms over the winter. I need to change that hopefully when the restrictions are lifted.

2019 was marked by the loss of not one but three mooring buoys. The second one was padlocked and chained to the mooring chain and the third was definitely securely shackled with seizing wire, but still went missing.

I'm not sure what security measures I can put in place for the next one. Short of using a longer bolt and bending it or welding the thing closed, it looks like someone wants my mooring buoys.

In 2019 I also tried to improve the sail, but the cheap laminate dinghy sail was actually too big! 
It's now sat in the shed while I think about what to do with it. I'm still on the lookout for a flatter mainsail.

The highlight of 2019 was the floating picnic. Daughter and Granddaughter enjoyed the day even though we didn't sail.

That's about all for 2019. Not as bad as some years. If 2020 allows, hopefully I can get an oak sleeper and fashion it into a mast beam. Then next on the list will be the window rubbers. 
Both of those have been on the to-do list for a number of years now. They need sorting. 

It seems there's always something else the boat requires before I can get to the big jobs. Or is it my own procrastination?

COVID-19 Look at that weather!

It seems like while we're all banged up on what feels like house arrest, the big fella upstairs has decided to pull another funny one and decided the weather should be gorgeous fettling/sailing weather.

All us sailors can only gaze up at the cloudless skies and feel the mild breeze and wonder if our wives and partners would have given us the time to go fettling or sailing. ;-)

I must get round to sorting last year's expenses. The first of this year's has already popped up: £143 for mooring fees. No dispensation for COVID-19 when it comes to fees then...

Went delivering food into Pompey on Saturday and as I was there took a wide route home and drove by the boat (no stopping, no contact with anyone else). All is good at the moment.

Maybe single-handed sailing comes under exercise? I can do an hour up and down Langstone harbour. And dragging the dinghy up the beach is more exercise.

But instead of boaty stuff I'm relegated to garden duty and car washing.

Sitting and Waiting...

That's all I can do at the moment. It seems we've had storm after storm, all of which seems to know when it's the weekend. Only 1 casualty this winter: one of the guys on the Solent Sailors Facebook group has reported a little fishing boat has turned turtle.

So far Sprite has been ok. I went out before Ciara hit and took the boom and mainsail down and put them in the cabin to reduce windage.

Other than that, that's all I've done. I've lost yet another mooring buoy despite all the shackles being wired up, so I'm looking into something I can keep on the boat and inflate and attach to the mooring chain when I leave the mooring. Maybe one of those big exercise balls in a net bag.

I've not got around to 2019's expenses yet, but they are pretty much the same as 2018 apart from the fuse box bits which I've already documented and that cheap laminate sail.

It seems that a few salvage yards have started getting supplies of French hardwood sleepers, which may do for a mast beam. At £19 I'm tempted to make the journey (collection only) to Sussex or Devon to get one. Certainly worth checking out as a source of cheap oak. If they do turn out to be oak that is.

I have a new cockpit cover I got for £20, but I've resisted fitting it until after storm season. I want to use some old tent poles to hold the cover up so I can have decent working room in the cockpit but still be enclosed. Something for the spring.

The wife has booked us on a cruise on the Ventura in June, so that's another expense for this year and two weeks out of my summer season. Lets see if the lure of the sea is the same when someone else is driving!

Hopefully I can make some progress by being a bit canny with money again. My money-saving mojo has begun this year with finding the existence and source of those sleepers. There's enough wood in one sleeper to make two mast beams. The plan is to make one up and test it to see if it is load bearing.

Fingers crossed the mast beam will be sorted this year at the very least. Then the only other major jobs will be the window seals and antifouling.

Hopefully The weather this year will be conducive to getting some work and some sailing done. It looks like the last spell of good weather was back in 2017, so we're due a nice long sunny spell surely.

It's Been a While...

Wow, September since I posted something.

Lest assured I have been on the boat, it's just that life is getting in the way. The cover is on for winter, although I have a bigger cover in the boot of the car ready to fit at some point. But it's a really boring post if all I say is that I've put the cover on for winter. The bigger cover is a cheap eBay one that may last the winter and afford me a covered cockpit with more than kneeling space.

A little windfall I had this month will hopefully allow me to buy a chunk of hardwood that I can use for the mast beam. Also money for the window rubbers, if I can find someone to tell me what size rubber I need. Fingers crossed.

When I'll get round to doing it is anyone's guess. I have work stacked up elsewhere that I need to attend to, with not a lot of time available to do it all.

We'll see I suppose, as the New Year unfolds.

As it is, I'm rushing around over Christmas. As I do most of the time it seems.

It's pretty clear that the goal I had for getting the boat in a yard or Marina on the hard is totally out of reach. The plan will have to be beach-based. Certainly I can lower the mast and sort out the mast beam on the beach. I don't know whether it's realistic to think about anti-fouling, not if the boat gets wet between tides.

Roll on 2020. I'll have had the boat 7 years next year.

Yacht Design.

I know I'm late to the world of yachting, but like all things mechanical, yacht design does interest me.

I've commented before on the plague of insufficiently supported keels snapping off offshore yachts (possibly the worst type of yacht for this to happen to).

This is a more positive post.

Looking at the latest racing yachts, starting with the one most local to me, Alex Thompson's new Hugo Boss IMOCA boat.

Some interesting design features on that boat already. It looks like the philosophy around the bow on racing boats has changed in the past couple of years. The Mini-Transat boats, with their bulbous bows for increased buoyancy up front are no translating to the bigger boats.

Some good picture of the boat here: https://www.sail-world.com/news/220602/The-new-Hugo-Boss-boat-hits-the-water

If you look at the picture of the box, it's quite bluff and has a whaleback to disperse any water that gets on top of it, so the bow is designed to travel over waves rather than the wave-piercing design previously used.

Makes sense in a boat that is designed to fly or foil, rather than sit on the water. I assume the idea is to get the bow on top of the waves as soon as possible, so the boat can foil. The same bow profile seems to have migrated to a few other racing yachts that have been announced in the paste few weeks.

The bulbous bow design can be seen on the latest Jeanneau IMOCA boats, although they don't foil, I assume the increased buoyancy at the bow helps to stop the bow digging in and slowing the boat. It will also help stop pitchpoling at high speeds.

In fact the new Jeanneau SunFast 3300 has the same bow profile. A very tasty looking boat that... Just need the lottery win...

Finally in the bluff bow category, we have the newly-launched Team Emirates New Zealand AC75 Americas Cup boat named Te Aihe. Maybe not quite as bluff as the European boats, but still has the essence of the design philosophy.

Moving back from the bow, the hull profile has started to flatten out. I assume because the boats (except the AC75) will be mainly travelling at an angle (the bluff bow also makes the buoyancy even along the hull when heeled) or if not heeled, then foiling. Here, drag is the issue, so drag reduction is the key in order to get the boat up to speed quickly. For the foilers, getting up to foiling speed is the primary function of the hull profile.

The AC75 seems to have a flat section apart from the centre, where there is a bulge in the hull. The AC75 has two massive foils that are down all the time and are ballasted. The boat is designed to sail flat and then foil  so reducing wetted area in the centre reduces drag and gets up to foiling speed quicker.

The new Boss Boat seems to be entirely flat, although the long pictures of the hull seem to indicate a long concave to the hull. But that could be due to camera optics. This is definitely designed to sail heeled.

In this regard the Jeanneau IMOCA boats take the design a step further and add concave sections to the hull. Getting the hull away from the water reduces drag.

Finally we come to the foils. The Jeanneau boats are not designed to foil, being a cheaper entry to the IMOCA class.

First it's interesting to look at Charal, Jeremie Bayou's new boat. It can be classed as a transitional design. It has the element of the latest IMOCA design rules, like big adjustable foils able to change angle of attack, but the hull profile (especially the wave-piercing bow and hull bottom) is rooted in the previous designs.

The New Hugo Boss boat takes the New IMOCA rules to a totally new level of design. The boat is currently running large adjustable foils, but I assume they are not the final design.  Interestingly, there appears to be no pictures released of the boat foiling yet. I do know it's been out in the Solent, but I assume the pictures give a bit too much away about the hull's interaction with the surface of the water. Scrub that: seconds after I wrote this footage appeared on Social Media of the new HB boat in full flight.

Of course the AC75 has just been launched, so not pictures of it actually sailing yet. But the test mules run by the different teams across the globe show that the boats will be big, fast, foiling and not too easy to control. It should be an interesting Americas Cup when the final designs run off against one another. I do hope that it will be available on free TV somewhere and not behind a paywall or subscription.

Another interesting feature of the New Hugo Boss boat is the amount of solar panels installed. Virtually the whole boat's top surface is covered by a bespoke solar installation. This allows more electrical kit to be used without having to use diesel to generate it or having to have a draggy water-powered generator. Looking at it, the boat is designed to be run from inside. The aft end of the boat doesn't look to have any equipment for human interaction at all. How that works out when having to trim sails mid-ocean I don't know, but by 'eck it will be fun to watch.

So, there you go. Yacht design at the top end has evolved yet again. The SunFast 3300 looks to take the latest design philosophy and cram it into a 33ft boat. Very, very tasty. Out of my league, but then again so is an old Westerly Centaur!

Still, it doesn't stop me appreciating these new designs and any traits they have filtering down to boats even mortals can afford, even if it's for millionaire mortals. Those flat-bottomed designs would translate well to sitting on mud moorings like mine, all they need is a retractable keel. Now then, I need plywood for a mould and a ton of carbon fibre and resin... anyone got any going spare?

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The Not-an-Upgrade

Well, since I got my cheapo new sail it's been blowing a gale. Go me, commander of the weather!

Anyway, the wind finally abated at the end of last week and on Saturday I could go and do a test fit.

The results were not good. Even though the sail is laminate one from a Fireball dinghy and the measurements were close, the sail is actually too big to fit on the mast. The leech is way to full and interferes with the backstays. Not just in a small way: the top batten jams in the backstays as the sail tries to tack.

I've taken a few pictures. The first pic shows the sail a bit short of the top of the mast and still overlapping the backstays:

At the bottom end the news isn't much better. The boom is at the bottom of the mast and still loads of bag in it.

 

Not much scope to tighten the outhaul either, the sail foot was as long as the boom:

 

 

 

 

 

So, being a £20 sail, do I mess about with it and have a go at trimming bits off, or forget about it?  Can you even mess about with a laminate sail like that?

 

Not sure yet. I'd have to take a significant chunk out of the foot of the sail to lose some height and even then the sail may catch the backstays.

 

Back to the drawing board for now. I do need a flatter sail though.

 

In the meantime, the original went back on:

 

 

Looks better at the bottom as well:

 

 

 At the end of the boom the original sail has more scope to tighten the outhaul. Still some space left at the end of the boom:

 

 

 

One thing I did notice is that the last 12 inches of lift started to get very stiff and I had to sweat the halyard in order to pull it up that last 12 inches.. Looks like the pulleys in the mast are getting a bit stiff. Possibly some lubrication needed or a duff bearing.  So now add that job to the mast beam replacement when the mast has to come down.

 

Ho Hum... The hunt for a decent sail continues....

 

Did I mention that the boat is completely rewired now? Got to feel positive about something... right?

 

In the meantime, more watching on eBay for a sail about 5m luff and 2-ish metres on the foot.

 





Upgrade?

I got a bit of an eBay bargain this week, which I picked up today.

I got a new main sail. Well, not new, I am the skint sailor after all! But it was cheap!

But If it fits (and I hope it does) it should provide a welcome performance upgrade compared to the baggy main that is fitted at the moment.

I'll see what transpires next weekend when I've fitted it.

No photos as the garden isn't big enough to unfurl it. They'll have to wait until I raise it up the mast.

But I have had just enough time today to unstick the sail numbers and the insignia from the sail.