windsend

The Banquet

The Gulf of Maine Ocean Racing Association had it's annual awards banquet at the Taste-O-Maine (sic) last Friday night. Martinis were $5. There was a steel band from Lewiston featuring sailor and GMORA board member Peter Garcia on 1st drum. They played well, but somehow failed to transport us revelers to the Caribbean. People pooled at the far side of the room. Maybe because that's where the bar was.

During dinner Cam Lewis shared his infectous excitement for racing giant multihulls around the world. He's hopeful of repairing his boat (it's missing 30 feet of one bow at the moment from a close encounter with a submerged shipping container) and getting back out there. Unfortunately, it took him half the presentation to realize that the images his projector was putting up were unrecognizably dark. The audience was too polite or too disinterested to let him know. The food was not memorable.

Following dinner, GMORA gave out its awards. Prizes consisted of generally nice if uninspired framed and matted photos by Andrew Sims. Successful racers were recognized. There were some quite parochial 'fun' awards for things like best boat name and best crew (awarded to a skipper?!). The feel good awards of the evening, much deserved, were to Fred Clemens in recognition of his many, many years of dedication to running races of all kinds, and to Dick Hale, as Points East sailor of the year for his continued amazing success.

Fred Clemens

Dick Hale

Sandy Marsters did his usual good job presenting the sailor of the year award, but privately admitted he had missed one big sailing personality story until Friday night. GMORA also gave an award for the best run regatta of the year (Portland Yacht Club's State of Maine PHRF Championships), but unfortunately neglected to see that a race committee rep was there to accept it. It's nice to recognize the efforts of the volunteers who run races, but better if they are around to hear the applause.

Over 100 sailors showed up for the bash, almost double the turnout in 2002. That doesn't mean that participation in racing is up, however. I have put down my own thoughts about improving turnout elsewhere. Hopefully, turnout will be the priority for GMORA in the months ahead...

The Strawberry Farm

We had brunch with the strawberry farmer on Sunday. Went to a nice little country inn in Buckfield. We had been there a few years previously, but it has changed hands since. It's quite a bit more upscale, now. Last time, it was boarding house style roast turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes, squash, and apple pie. This time, they had a nice buffet of fruit, cheese, muffins, coffee cake, and a juice bar. The proprietress told us the problem with being on the Atkins diet was that she couldn't eat her own baked goods. ML had an omelet with cream cheese and scallions. I had 'Crepes David', with sirloin tips and mushrooms. (Only one crepe, actually.)

On the way back, we drove past former farm fields where the black soil was torn up for the foundations of new houses. The strawberry farmer told us that thirty years ago when he started raising goats and strawberries, all the farmers in Turner would get together once a year at harvest time and talk about farming. With his usual bravado, he boasted to them that he would be the last farmer in town. They laughed at him and his goats and strawberries. Now, he says, he is the last real farmer. There are a few people breeding horses or leasing land to big apple growers and a DeCoster egg factory, but nobody making a full time living at farming except him, he says. Of course, he conveniently neglects to mention that he builds houses and spiral staircases himself.

No one in Turner has read James Kunstler: " A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending."

External track

I am going to ramble on about obscure sail technology for a few paragraphs, but bear with me - I might have a point at the end.

External track is an old technology for attaching sails to spars. It's one step up from lacing and mast hoops. Lacing is impractical if you have to raise and lower a sail. Mast hoops are impractical if you want to attach anything else - spreaders or shrouds, say - to the mast over the length you're raising and lowering the sail.

External tracks are lengths of stamped metal that are screwed to the mast. The slides attached to the sail are stamped metal or sometimes cast bronze. Pieces of track just butt up against each other so the tolerance between slide and track can’t be too tight or the slides won’t be able to pass the joints. But they usually work okay unless a joint gets really misaligned or a screw backs out a bit too far.

When extruded aluminum masts came along, spar builders quickly realized that it was quicker and easier to make the sail tracks part of the extrusion, usually inside the mast section. So the slides on the sail were round (slugs) or flat (called, boringly enough, flat internal slides). Because there were few joints or no joint and any joints were well aligned by the mast sleeve the slide tolerances could be much closer. As a result, the internal tracks were a great improvement over external track.

Then, along came full battens (I’ll talk in way too much detail about battens some other time). Before full battens, sail slides rarely had to bear any load when they were moving. Sails usually go up and down when the boat is head to wind and the sails luffing, so there is very little load on the slides. Full battens are now almost always attached to slides and they put load on the slides all the time, sometimes quite a bit. So, any friction between sail slide and track was enormously magnified. Raising and lowering full battened sails can be a real chore. Consequently, over the past few years a great deal of work has gone into creating low friction sail slide systems. Most of these are tracks that are attached to the outside of the mast, but the tracks have no joints or have self aligning joints, the tolerances are close and the slides ride on low friction plastic or even ball bearings. They reduce friction to the point where you almost feel you have to jump out of the way when you let the halyard go. This development is great, because internal tracks are not practical on carbon fiber masts which, so far, are laminated, not extruded.

I recently had a chance to look over a very handsome schooner that was put together at a local boatyard. The boat belongs to the yard owner, and he has spared no effort to make her a thing of beauty, both traditional in appearance and entirely practical in function. He has plenty of sea experience, including a circumnavigation, so he has deeply held opinions about what works and what doesn’t under the stresses of an ocean passage, of which I’m sure he hopes to make many in this boat

She is a wooden boat, and the wood work is gorgeous, above and below decks. If you didn’t look too too closely you would think her spars were wooden also, but you’d be wrong. They are carbon fiber hand painted to look like wood. This is an entirely practical solution. Carbon spars are much stronger and probably 1/3 the weight of wooden spars. They will never rot or check or need varnish. Maybe a little paint touchup, now and then.

The problem is these beautiful modern spars are fitted with external tracks. They certainly blend with the traditional look. But, for me they stand out like a sore thumb. Given the technology available today, I would consider going to sea with this track to be a safety issue. Sure, a nice Antal track might not look quite as in keeping with the rest of the boat, but there are pleny of other non-traditional bits. After all the first thing you see when you descend the companionway of this boat is a very modern, very white microwave oven.

I guess what I'm driving at is that boats all reflect their owner's personality, complete with prejudices and blind spots. No matter how rational and practical we pretend to be, we often make the wrong decisions for the right reasons and sometimes the right decisions for the wrong reasons. So, what else is new...

Different strokes

Two ways to get there in a quick, environmentally friendly way.

Preparation

Two of the most remarkable acheivements in sailing this year were Ken Read's victory in the Etchells worlds and 'Shark' Kahn's win in the Melges 24 worlds. For those of you who don't know, the Etchells is a 30 foot keel boat and the Melges 24 a (surprise) 24 foot keelboat. Both are one-designs, which means the boats are identical in the sense that they are as close to the same speed as possible. The hull, rig, and appendage dimensions, shapes and weights are all carefully controlled and limited. Even total crew weight is limited. The only differences among boats are the sails, the way the boats are set up and the way they are sailed. Both fleets were filled with great sailors.

Ken managed to beat the next boat in his fleet by 49 points. He counted 6 firsts and a second out of 93 boats for a total of 8 points. Next was Judd Smith, perrenial bridesmaid, with 57 points. Last year's champion Stuart Childerley tied for sixth with Dennis Conner. They both had 118 points.

'Shark' Kahn only barely managed to nose out Harry Melges (yes, a Melges 24 Melges) to top the fleet of 68. But the remarkable thing about his win is that he is only 14 years old. He was only one point ahead going into the last race. He showed exceptional poise in hanging onto the lead to finish the race third, while Melges, trailing him early in the race, took risks to try to catch up and wound up with his worst finish, a 21.

What did these two efforts have in common? Preparation. For instance, Ken's Etchells weighed in for championship at exactly class minimum, while his combined crew weight weight was with 1/2 lb of maximum. Kahn's program was equally well prepared. No stone unturned for boat speed, plus practice, practice, practice. The lesson seems to be: visualize what you want for a result, then figure the steps you need to take to get there, then follow them. Don't expect to be able to skip any.

Unfortunately, I've never been very good at doing this. I tend to procrastinate in stead of prepare, party instead of practice. So that's why I'm not a world champion. Or maybe there's something else involved. Talent? Still, until I get my preparation skills honed, I'll never know.

Stylish Sails

One of the few connections I made between my business and the ideas that flooded by me at Pop!Tech this year was Virginia Postrel's contention that style is as important as function to marketing any product these days and Andrew Zolli modeling a coat made from a fabric by Luminex. This fabric is woven with optic fibers illuminated by LEDs hidden in the hem that cause it glow. Now, that would make some stylish looking sails. Of course, the Luminex fabric as formulated for clothing wouldn't work in sails - too stretchy and porous - but there is no reason the optic fibers couldn't be incorporated into laminated sails, or attached to the surface of sails. Something to think about.

Tactical Error

Tracy Edwards just announced her sponsorship coup - $63 million from Qatar for her 110' catamaran and two round the world races for mega multihulls and monohulls. Bruno Peyron, who originated "The Race", the first round the world venue for giant multihulls and who has been unable to find sponsorship for two very similar events reacted angrily, accusing Edwards of "High Seas Robbery".

This weekend at Pop!Tech, I ran into Cam Lewis, superstar sailor and owner of one of the small group of mega multihulls and onetime crew with Bruno on the first cat to win the Jules Verne trophy for sailing around the world in under 80 days. His great comment: "Sour grapes lead to bad French whine."

Casting off

Here is the first installment of my weblog. I intend to keep this focused on sailing and things related, but I may wander. So, I have named it windsend primarily in the sense that sailing is the purpose of wind - wind's end - but also in the sense of something sent by the wind. Not at all in the sense of no more wind because I expect to be windy.

First, some of the credit or blame for the existence of this blog, though not the content, goes to my blogging daughter. She seems to think that there might be others out there who would have an interest in my thoughts on sailing. I am not sanguine about that myself, but I am hoping it will help me preserve some musings for my own future consumption. Maybe the fact that I am making this available, at least, to others will motivate me to add to it regularly, something I have never been able to sustain in my attempts at private journal keeping.