LOW RUDDER AUTHORITY

These guys must be in a race because sensible people in a hurry don't sail.

In a jibe, especially an unexpected one caused by a wind shift or quirky swell, there is almost no bite to the rudder and you tend to roll right over. This was always my least favorite part of the race and I only did it with wooden spars for a couple of years. Winging out the foresail was just asking for it.

My father has a great picture of his Rhodes 19 during the Nationals where they put their spinnaker up sideways. They still did very well which surprised one and all. It was, naturally, the picture the press published.

READING MATERIAL FOR AN ENDLESS WINTER

I found this intriguing place while writing the previous post. What can I say? It makes for interesting reading. It's a photo of the books on the Shackleton Expedition that became trapped in the ice and foundered there. I make the assumption that the odd pipe is the Charlie Noble and heated the space, at least a little, when the galley fires were lit.

The library, seen above in a photo by expedition photographer Frank Hurley, has been decoded for the first time-the Royal Geographic Society, working with Dutch digitizer Picturae, rescanned and analyzed the photo and was able to read the titles of the books for the first time.

In addition to Greely’s sad story, Shackleton carried the Encyclopedia Brittanica, plays by George Bernard Shaw, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and a lot more. The books, unfortunately, went to the bottom of the sea when the Endurance broke apart and sank on November 21, 1915. As most of you know, all 28 men survived.

Here’s the full list of books in the library:

Encyclopedia Britannica
Seven short plays by Lady Gregory
Perch of the devil by Getrude Atherton
Pip by Ian Hey
Plays: pleasant and unpleasant, Vol 2 Pleasant by G B Shaw
Almayer’s folly by Joseph Conrad
Dr Brewer’s readers handbook
The Brassbounder by David Bone
The case of Miss Elliott by Emmuska Orczy
Raffles by EW Hornung
The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett
Pros and cons: a newspaper reader’s and debater’s guide to the leading controversies of the day by JB Askew
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Woman’s view by Herbert Flowerdew
Thou Fool by JJ Bell
The Message of Fate by Louis Tracy
The Barrier by Rex Beach
Manual of English Grammar and Composition by Nesfield
A book of light verse
Oddsfish by Robert Hugh Benson
Poetical works of Shelley
Monsieur de Rochefort by H De Vere Stacpoole
Voyage of the Vega by Nordenskjold
The threshold of the unknown region by Clements Markham
Cassell’s book of quotations by W Gurney Benham
The concise Oxford dictionary
Chambers biographical dictionary
Cassell’s new German-English English-German dictionary
Chambers 20th Century dictionary
The northwest passage by Roald Amundsen
The voyage of the Fox in Arctic seas by McClintock
Whitaker’s almanac
World’s end by Amelie Rives
Potash and perlmutter by Montague Glass
Round the horn before the mast by A Basil Lubbock
The witness for the defence by AEW Mason
Five years of my life by Alfred Dreyfuss
The morals of Marcus Ordeyne by William J Locke
The rescue of Greely by Commander Winfield Scott Schley
United States Grinnell Expedition by Dr Kane
Three years of Arctic service by Greely
Voyage to the Polar Sea by Nares
Journal of HMS Enterprise by Collinson

Photo via the Royal Geographical Society

I suppose that all of the crew were glad they weren't playing tag with the Germans on the Somme by the time they got back and read up on the early days of the Great War. It remains interesting to wonder how many of them survived the Great War after wintering over in the Antarctic.

I REMEMBER SUMMER

This was Chicago in the summer of 2016. Some people claim that sailing is not exciting. Idiots.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 42 DAYS

It's hard to imagine going that fast that long sailing alone around the world.

Aerial view of the Maxi Trimaran MACIF with french skipper Francois Gabart

We recently sailed from New York City to Southampton and it took us a full 7 days at an average SOA of 22 knots to cross the Atlantic and the Atlantic tis but a puddle compared to the Indian and Pacific Oceans. That's roughly how fast MACIF sailed every hour of the voyage for 42 days.

Typical route for a racing circumnavigation of the world

I once sailed with another person from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, just over a thousand miles and I was wiped out by the 5th day. On the other hand our Kettenberg had oil lit running lights, a chip log, a 100 year old navigation chart of the area and an old copy of Charlie's Charts. That was the sum total of our navigation equipment. There was no auto-helmsman or any of the scary new-fangled stuff aboard. We were the equivalent of Joshua Slocum but without so many sharp tacks. It was mostly downwind all the way. (there are a couple of puns in there that the discriminating history minded sailors will pick up on)

Since there are very few operational navigation aids on the Baja coast, we figured we were safest about 100-200 miles offshore and out there we could hail passing commerical ships and ask them if they knew where they were and if they would share that information with us. They were all most obliging. On the other hand, all we had to do to find Mexico again was turn to port and keep our eyes open.

I look forward to reading more about the voyage when Francois Gabart writes it up and publishes it. I might have to dust off my French.

LAUNCHING LIKE A BOSS

I just borrowed this from gCaptain.

DELTA OF BLINDNESS

Long ago and far away I was in an advanced, for the time and my age, math class, when the teacher demanded to know why I was squinting at her and in other ways making faces rather than attending to the microprint she was using to decorate the blackboard at the front of the room which, to be honest, I never saw the point. I was sent down to the Stalag Commander's office to await his pleasure and, as it happens, that of my mother, who was summoned to take this disrespectful and thoroughly rotten ne'er do well away for 3 days of bread and water. The truth was slowly revealed to all of us as she dove right into the heart of the matter.

"I couldn't see what she was writing." We stopped at the post doctor shop and found some 89 year old physician who saw action with Custer doing the late unpleasantness with the Indians and he determined, via the most careful and precise measurements known to mankind, that I could not see much further than the end of my nose. Much was revealed in this observation.

I was a devastating player of the game of soccer, so-so at football, and pretty much useless at baseball. As the discerning reader will comprehend, much of my ability in sports of this nature had to do with the size of the ball and the speed at which it traveled. This wan't all. No. The enlightened source of all knowledge suddenly realized that my penchant for coming from behind to win in the sailboat races was due to the fact that I was following the leader until I could see the mark at which point I almost inevitably sailed in for the kill.

Not more than one or two dozen people asked me how I could possibly have gone through years of health class where every year each student is called to the front and compelled to read aloud from the eye chart for the edification of the instructor. They failed to understand that this was competition; this was something I was damned good at; this was a test of memorization, and when one's last name starts with a W, it is not all that hard to memorize 20 or 30 letters sight unseen. What's the point of audible calls if they don't mean it's a game?

The good folk of Huntsville had some sort of optical shop where spectacles could be purchased. I was promptly fitted with a pair. I hardly ever wore them. I mean, guess how much bigger the target pins are when bowling if you can only see a vast blur downrange. You can't miss! You aim for center mass and learn to put some english on it because there is no hope in hell of picking up single pins and getting a spare.

I was also outfitted with a pair of contact lenses and was happyish to wear them and slowly adapt to the agonizing pain discomfort until I wore them too long one day while out racing sailboats and ruptured most of the blood vessels in both eyes. Driving home from the lake and then to work that day was an experience on par with Toad's wild ride. I was completely blind at the end of my shift and didn't see anything after that for the next 3 days. The logistics of getting a sister, who thought it was better to put down blind dumb brothers, to enlist in the quest to join my parent in the sole remaining family car to come and fetch me and the car I had taken to work, was probably screamingly funny to the rest of the family. I don't like to talk about it.

I went crazy mad as a lieutenant and bought two pairs of glasses before deploying for the second time. One was a pair of prescription sunglasses and the other was a nice pair of spectacles that looked good as they flew off my nose about a mile off the coast of the Bahrain Yacht Club (no, not the one in Manama) as my Laser tipped over while in a pretty tight race with the locals and my skipper. I was in the lead on the downwind leg when a sudden gust caught me by surprise. A Laser does a peculiar thing known in the sport as a deathroll when sailing by the lee and getting jammed by a jibe. I hit the rising side of the boat like a ton of cement but the glasses were unconstrained and lived to be wild and free.

It was kind of sad that day to realize one's purpose in life is to serve as a humorous example of blind misfortune. For you see, about a mile off the coast of an island that doesn't rise anywhere more than 3 feet out of the sea, it is somewhat hard for a blind man to see it and head his boat in the direction of home. I was left to follow the others around and around and then follow them back to the marina. Sad really. Didn't really hear the end of it from the skipper until about 3 days later in a minefield.

As the blind do, I felt my way carefully through the tragedy that is the Administrative Support Unit, Bahrain in 1988, and found the doctor shop staffed by one of those armadillos that is convinced that you are some sort of drug seeker and a pest and the worst sort of custodian of valuable government property. She took some delight in telling me that my Commanding Officer himself! would have to sign off on the script to get her to give me a chit good to take to a real doctor of eyes in Bahrain to get my prescription checked and a new pair of glasses in 24 hours. Some people don't understand that I was wearing my glasses and not my sunglasses when the whale surfaced right under my damned boat and pitched me into the water. I could see her just fine.

New glasses in hand, I was prepared for the rigors of combat. I see you sniggering over there! Let me tell you about how we did combat. I would spend between 8 and 20 hours a day in the very very very dark Combat Information Center where I would gaze upon men doing the actual work, occasionally reaching out to rap them on the head when their eyes closed and the drool started to make itself conspicuous on their chin. I payed careful attention to both the search and the classify sonar consoles and the meticulously maintained navigation plot behind me and to the ISS/Hyperfix display units and keenly observed, most carefully, the state of the propellor pitch and the steering indicators and sometimes I merged a sonar shape dragged slightly behind and beneath a zodiac, as I steered it into a mine shape I saw on the sonar display. That was Combat (what we called CIC), and one cannot really do all that from behind some cool blue shades.

The glasses have sallied forth once again dear friend. They were right there on the windowsill just the other night when I put a towel upon the same surface, which movement, pitched them from the third floor window into the cold and dark and snowy night. They safely slithered off the tile roof and since they aren't on the metal roof above the portal, they must have been launched into the ground cover where they dwell even now, in the cold and dark because I'm going to wait until it warms up before I go out and run my hands carefully through the ground cover and retrieve them. I will come across them once again.  But at this point in life I have about 9 pair of glasses lying around, at my fingertips, thank God!

And all this puts me in mind of this wonderful bit from Master and Commander.

Over the years I've seen my glasses fly but I remain convinced they are flightless. They'll be in the tall grass under a poisonous weed.

OH TO FLY

 

Oh to fly like this. A DailyTimeWaster.

The forces and dynamics are just awesome. You see a man in red shorts high up in the air gripping a wheel with despair. Look at the overtowering height of sail and mast and then look at the tiny little bit of rudder up there on the right for your visual enjoyment and picture it's twin on the port side, down deep in the water, pushing the boat anywhere but where the wind blows it next. Things have gone awry for a bit, or maybe forever.

I sailed where the wind was almost never constant. It shifted around unexpectedly. Pitchpoling this boat would be epic.

LAYERED POLYMERS AND THE NEED FOR SPEED

 I got to looking at the arm tonight. It's fibre-glass. It's a layered polymer. As I contemplated it, it struck me that it could use a rudder, tiller, centerboard and a mast with a small sail. It has been a long time since my last competitive sail When I was truly young I qualified for the Laser Nationals in San Francisco. I was 15 at the time and tied for 3rd in the Southeastern regionals. Open invite to compete at the national level. I parted with 14747 most reluctantly. I sailed her to Angel Island a few times but it was nowhere near as lethal as the world championships that year and it was decades later when I was older and wiser.