Moth Chronicles

Boom of Doom

2011-08-14T23:21:00.000-07:00

Some wind today in Long Beach made for interesting test piloting on the new incidence control program:

San Pedro Bay is a decent place to sail in these conditions as there are a couple of long breakwaters. But the end of the channel is somewhat unprotected, has a fair bit of tide sweeping past it, and can be a real handful if everything isn't going according to program.

My plan was pretty straightforward. First, get thrown out of the protected harbor by the cops for speeding. Take a deep breath, sail outside to end of channel where I know it is blowing reasonably hard, find some protected water to play around in, and hope the boat behaves itself. Richard said be careful if you go outside, showing me his 27.9 kt GPS max, so I didn't take it lightly. Would have much preferred to bomb around inside frankly, as per my normal sort-the-crazy-ass-new-foilsystem routine. But I digress.

Thankfully the boat decided to behave, mostly. The new gizmos have pretty much taken care of the wand loading issue, and it is cool to zip along with less load out there. Need to trim the ski way down, and add a bit more gain, but no matter. May still be hanging up a bit on starboard tack, but nothing the air grinder and a bit of carbon won't take care of.

Capsized next to the Lifeguard boat in the lee of the oil island to adjust the wand linkage. They came over to check, and asked the fateful question: "So you're not going to need any assistance at all then?" I wanted to give my pat answer, which is that none of us has a crystal ball, thereby warding off evil spirits with circumspection. Clearly this would have been a better answer than "No", in retrospect!

Headed in as it was getting late. Foiling low to avoid surprises in the substantial lumpiness between the oil island and the end of the channel jetty, my practically new, sailed three times, heavy-duty-so-you-won't-have-to-worry-about-it boom decided to fold in half at the vang. Death roll, fiddle around with alternate sheeting systems off the back rack, get cold and a bit seasick from all the lumpiness. Finally realizing there was no way to sheet effectively and get upwind to the beach, or downwind through the worse water between me and where I needed to go, or in fact anywhere at all except drift up on the jetty itself, I waved the Big Red Boat over.

The BRB is not a RIB, but a 35ft twin diesel screw fire boat that will fit a capsized moth quite comfortably on the aft deck, provided the rig is removed. Which mine wasn't. Bringing me to the day's main lesson: if it is pseudo-nuking and you are sailing in lumpy water when you lose the boom, take the mast down right away and get the sail off, because you aren't sailing home and it isn't going to be any easier to do it with a huge red fire boat standing by after you have developed a case of mild hypothermia.

I'm probably tempting fate by saying it, but the things I expect to break, like all the dodgy parts and contraptions I make in the garage, don't seem to break. Similarly, the original Prowler stuff doesn't seem to break, unless it gets broken onshore or trailering. But anything I pay retail money for in the name of "improvement", like new masts and booms, is doomed!

Not sure I like the filament wound spars at all; I think the next boom will be a nice rolled bit of autoclaved prepreg - like the first boom that lasted me four years and has yet to cash it in. I have enough on without fretting over the possibility of random spar failures.

The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness

2010-12-12T23:48:00.000-08:00

Why do so many multiple World Champions seem to get grumpy and leave Mothing? Boredom perhaps. Or maybe it's that they hate losing so much they can't stomach the fact that someone may come up with something on the design side that no amount of good sailing can overcome.

The pop psychologist in me attibutes this phenomenon to the fact that it must take a hell of a lot of effort to win a Worlds, and even more to win multiple times. So the thought of losing on the design side, rather than the sailing side, starts to seem like an unreasonable chance to take, and even more so if you are involved with building or selling a particular design.

It brings me back to the Fall of 2001, when I had some cash and looked at buying a Hungry Tiger from Mark Thorpe. We chatted back and forth a bit, but then 9/11 happened and it got put on the back burner. I do however recall it seemed obvious to both of us that two foils on the midline was the most likely way forward. He clearly saw the light at the end of the tunnel...and decided it was a freight train.

I wasn't privy to much of the discussion surrounding the adoption of hydrofoils, but there was a lot of discussion back and forth about whether to allow them - for the usual reasons: expense, practicality, decimating the fleet by putting it out of reach of mere mortals, etc. We all know where that led: foilers everywhere, but no more Hungry Tigers (apart from Scott's). The dominant class boatbuilder and three time World Champ, who even beat a foiling Rohan with a lowrider Hungry Tiger in Les Sable d'Olonne, decided he wasn't playing the foiling game. I have to give him credit for going out on a high note.

Rohan then went on to win in 2005 and 2007, affiliated with Bladerider in the latter event. Again not privy to any details, but the end of that story was basically that Bladerider was outclassed on the design side, and is no more. You'd think someone like Rohan would just move on to a Mach 2 and keep sailing, right? But after all that went on, and being so immersed in Mothing for so long, one can hardly blame him for wanting to do something else. Another boat and another multiple World champ sidelined by better hardware.

Fast forward to 2010 and history seems to be repeating itself: a multiple World champ is marketing the dominant boat, and yet another round of technical development threatens to knock it, and the Champ, off their perch. Having witnessed the rise and fall of Rohan on mainly technical grounds, and Thorpe before him, the best stragegery (to quote our 42nd President) for a sitting Champ and manufacturer rep is apparently to make it as hard for anything faster to get to the starting line as possible. Which is relatively easy to do when you sit on the Class Executive Committee.

Thusfar, we've seen the class Constitution invoked against the class rule, basically arguing that the first rule defining the class violates its own Constitution. This seems like kind of a scorched earth approach to winning, but whatever. Not entirely convincing in any event. This argument having failed, the discussion has shifted to Rule 4.2, and the responsibility of the measurer to report "anything which he may consider to be unusual or to depart from the intended nature of the boat, or to be against the general interest of the class." The Rule states further that "a certificate may be refused, even if the specific requirements of the class are satisfied." Unfortunately, the decision regarding whether to refuse a Certificate to a wing hinges upon a tricky, somewhat subjective judgment by the Exec: Are wings against the general interest of the class?

Suffice it to say the positions of interested parties are predictable on this point: boat manufacturers feel that wings are against the general interest of the class, pretty much, and the people building wings obviously feel that they are squarely within the general Class interest. Both factions have vested interests in the outcome. Which is, well, interesting, as the very next Rule, 4.3, quite presciently states the following:

A measurer shall not measure a boat, spars or equipment owned, designed or built by themselves, or in which they are an interested party or have a vested interest.

So, if I follow the news properly, measurers are banned from measuring equipment they have an interest in, but Exec members are allowed to rule on how the measurement rules should apply to equipment that THEY have a vested interest in suppressing or promoting? Perhaps the Class should pass a rule mandating Exec members recuse themselves from debates in which they have a vested interest.

Impressively, the Exec is off to a good start: Bora has been booted from the Exec on grounds of vested interest. But now that the precedent has been set, it hardly seems reasonable to allow manufacturer representatives with equally vested, but opposite interests to remain. Let the standard be applied uniformly.

Drag Queen

2010-04-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

Up in West Hollywood where I work, there is no shortage of queens, but I thought it was high time to broaden the definition, Moth-style, in celebration of the prodigal mainfoil's return from the tank:

For reference, I post the Prowler numbers from Bill's earlier work with John Zseleczky, which was the most efficient foil in that paper (vs a Bladerider mainfoil) for 20fps and 18" immersion, 180lb load:

The two foils are the same area and span. Different 2D foil sections on lifting surfaces; struts should be the same shape but ended up different due to (my) operator error in building the thing. An old photo:

I feel good about these results; they confirm a lot of what I thought in the design stage and what I have sensed on the water, but could not state conclusively until now. I think it is good news for the class in general, because it shows if nothing else that there may be a way to get quite a bit more efficiency out of the boat.

I hope these data will serve as an impetus to anyone who might have been thinking about going completely flapless to get busy on a prototype, as the control system design isn't a particularly easy nut to crack! Sounds like J. Bethwaite et al may have something up their sleeves in this regard; should be interesting to see how our next iteration compares to their design. I have a date with the Shop Bot next weekend and hope to get a new system mocked up before July.

Major thanks to Bill Beaver for once again helping to shed some light on the behavior of these cool little boats.

Speed at Any Cost

2010-02-23T22:05:00.000-08:00

In a recent interview with Tom Brokaw, Bode Miller said:

"Every competitor has a choice. He can walk up to the starting gate, take a look, and walk away. It would be unprecedented, but he could do it." He went on to say that skiing with joy, fully committed in heart, is more important to him than winning races, ultimately.

So when people choose to ignore their blogs for extended periods, or their boats, or their sailing, I always take it as a reminder that all this might not actually matter all that much in the broader context of a life. Maybe they are so far down a rabbit hole in some other area of existence that this seems trivial by comparison. Maybe someone got sick or died, or got married, or got a new job. Had a kid, bought a house. Discovered nuclear fusion, started a company. Found something cooler to do with their spare time, or figure out.

When I finally build my latest scheme and make it work, I doubt it will count for much - even if it is fast. But that doesn't make it any less fun. And that is where Mr. Miller's comment rings true for me: things done with heart somehow count for more than things done simply because someone else thinks you should care about doing them well. And that philosophy, more than anything else, is what will probably continue to differentiate development class sailors from everyone else in the sailing world - no matter what aspect of the design, build and sail endeavor they choose to tackle.

I've never seen anyone sail a whole race, come down to the finish in first, then not cross the line. But I would applaud the sentiment.

When the Spirit Says Stop

2010-01-23T01:31:00.000-08:00

Back in college (uni?) we used to branch out on Sundays, looking for transcendence, or maybe we were just religious voyeurs. One Sunday found us at a Baptist church where we were the only white people in the congregation. The preacher said "I'm a-gonna preach until the Spirit says Stop". Apparently the Spirit was otherwise occupied, because the guy preached for two hours straight. Christ that was a long sermon.

On November 1, when Mothing killed what was left of my L4-L5 disk (admittedly not much), things were going alarmingly well before the crash tack that ended in grief. But the boat flies so high it runs out of rudder, even upwind. So I made a mental note to fix that.

Johnny Z's Eppler hydrofoil tool was only about 50 inches long, which should be fine, but it isn't for a rudder, since the lower end of the gantry is well above the waterline. I went ahead and lengthened the foil. Then I flipped the boat, shot the laser level at the hull waterline, blocked the racks until it was level fore and aft, then mounted the mainfoil and jury rigged the new rudder in a plausible position. Turns out I added about 3.5 inches too much strut, assuming one wants the rudder and mainfoil to fly at the same depth. But I wanted more bow down anyway when flying, and the lifting foil is mounted rather aggressively positive, so I think it will fly up above the mainfoil even if the strut is a bit longer. I did a little math and figured I could scrub a couple of degrees on the bottle screw without looking too weird. Not enough.

I don't mind looking a bit like a truffle hunting pig when I hydrofoil, but an extra 4" of height at the gantry lowers my bow 3" and sailing with the bow seven inches lower than the gantry seemed extreme. So I cut some vertical off the rudder again. It is now 12:30am and the heat gun is blowing on the gudgeon reinforcements; I was tempted to try the whole setup with plexus only but that seemed foolhardy. So a little midnight madness, and some time for blogging while I play fire marshal. I twittered it up. Looks a bit long, frankly.

Tomorrow is the acid test. Zack should be there with the Mach2, Nat and Bobby on CCZs, me on the Prowla, Richard on a Bladerider and a newbie on Zack's old BR for six, which is quite a fleet for this neck of the woods.

And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

2009-12-13T20:36:00.000-08:00

Whatever that was.

I felt a lot like my boat lately when they opened me up and took various bits out of my back, then sewed me up again, all in the name of better performance. On the whole I am improved, but hoping not to repeat the experience any time soon. The boat won't escape a second trip to the operating room, I'm afraid. But that's progress.

The local fleet is going strong, thanks to strong commitment and efforts on the Chinchillazilla and Black Pearl sides of the fleet. They were in Dago over the weekend so one hopes we will see some photos of the action. It rained cats and dogs in LA on Saturday but apparently things were not as hopeless further south.

Lately mothing has been confined to messing with spreadsheets, which are lots of fun actually. I have been trying to figure out how much vertical immersion one typically sails with upwind and down; from Bora's vids on U-tube it looks like 10-12 upwind and I would expect less offwind in flatter conditions - perhaps eight inches?

I plug these various scenarios into the spreadsheet and convert them into torque, in hopes of me, the boat and the planet all staying attached to one another no matter the sea state. I imagine it is sort of like designing a building to cope with wavelike fluctuations in the strength and direction of gravity, only in this case the building has to jump up and down in time to a conductor's wand.

When I was a kid in South Dakota, Ronald Regan funded these ridiculously cool supersonic nuclear-capable bombers called B-1s. Their main mission was to sneak in below Russian radar and annihilate everyone with cruise missiles loaded onto a carousel rather like a thermonuclear gatling gun in the bomb bay. In order to do this the plane was given seriously capable radar-controlled autopilots, allowing it to fly near supersonic at altitudes of about 300 feet. One of the best places to test this capability is over Eastern Montana, which is fairly close to my home town of Rapid City, SD. But then everything is pretty close when you are flying an air-refueling-capable supersonic bomber, and in fact pilots would not infrequently tell tales of flying to England for lunch and being home for dinner. But I digress.

The radar seemed to work well enough, but as in foiling, the margin for error is pretty slim when flying near an interface with another form of matter: birds, the airborne equivalent of the plastic bag, occasionally blasted through the wing leading edges and severed all hydraulic lines, and crews occasionally appeared to stuff the avionic equivalent of the foiling gybe, crashing into the ground out in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. But then typically none of them ever survived to tell their sides of the story.

I don't know what all this proves except to say that Moths are hardly the first craft to have problems flying at extremely low altitudes. The prototype B-1A had so much airframe flex from the rapid pitch adjustments during low level flight that they had to add little canards to the front of the aircraft to avoid making the pilots throw up. The canards are actuated by little accelerometers that kick in to limit the vibration of the airframe whenever it jiggles too much. This is of course the origin of the term "getting jiggy with it".

On a personal note, I like the B-1 for its all-moving tailplanes, which remind me of my mainfoil, except that the two sides can move independently of one another to induce roll (!). Pretty sure I am not ready for that feature.

Critical Mass

2009-10-26T07:36:00.000-07:00

Well, not quite yet, but closer with each boat on the line! We had four yesterday: Nat, Richard and Paul from San Francisco. It was fun. Wind increased gradually from not foilable during the first two races to quite foilable for the last two.

The tilt-a-foil was fairly painful in ultra-marginal foiling, and only slightly painful the remainder of the time. It went pretty well uphill and offwind was decent when the too-short original rudder didn't ventilate. Gybes remain tricky with my short tiller/extension but are coming along; remarkable how easy they were with the old foil but old dogs, new tricks, etc.

Rather disappointed to not give Richard more of a run for his money, but well done on his part after not much time in the boat. PS - Richard I have your coffee mug! Nat had a moment of glory being first to the windward mark at one point, only to have his vang implode again on the downwind. Otherwise the CCZ had remarkably few issues for a homebuild. Paul's Mach 2 looks like it has been set up for a pro: nice and high almost immediately and good height control on all points of sail with good speed to go with it.

In terms of lessons learned, it will be difficult to get the current version competitive in the light, but there is another version coming down the pike. I am encouraged enough to stick with the program; this game is sort of like learning to foil all over again and often enough a good gybe or nice downhill run is as satisfying as a whole string of gybes in the old boat.

I particularly like this shot for showing how close the rudder foil is running to the surface; small wonder I have ventilation woes! Goodbye old, hello new:

New Kid In Town

2009-09-13T22:27:00.000-07:00

Sort of anticlimactic that BobbyK is taking all the footage with him to South Africa, but the CCZ hit the water today in true homebuild fashion, foiling around in spotty breeze until one of the sketchy micropress fittings gave up. Solid performance for a boat whose only dolly is a car! Maybe BKNA will take pity and send a photo! Rumors of a CCZ blog abound, but talk is cheap! So maybe I will get some stuff to post. But don't count on it.

In any event a huge day for the San Pedro Bay Moth Fleet as there are now three functional Moths at ABYC; we would call ourselves the Alamitos Bay Moth Fleet but the cops won't let us sail in Alamitos Bay, which is fine as long as they keep coming outside to get us when our masts break! SBMF. Why don't we get together and call ourselves an institute? San Pedro Institute of Neophytes Sailing Tiny Esoteric Runabouts, or SPINSTER.

Anyway, that's it. Congratulations Nat, well done.

The Monstersphere

2009-09-05T22:52:00.000-07:00

When it's a slow news day and the anchors have to talk about inane freeway chases and make them sound interesting I always joke that the 24 hour news channels are a monster that needs to be fed, whether there is any news or not. I am beginning to think the same thing about the Mothosphere. I have nothing to report. Really. Stop reading now.

Movies are apparently fair game for filler; saw District 9 tonight and enjoyed it though the s/o said it was too much like work! I guess babies are sort of like little aliens, now that you mention it...but it wasn't that only the general adrenalin level. When you give at the office you want something more sedate at the theater.

I have been planning a new rudder for so long I am sick of talking about it. Shut up and stick the thing together already, chump! I pity the fool! Nat even has a tiller for me. All I need is an angel of attack [sic].

No sailing to report as I am working all weekend. Holiday Monday to boot.

Watched a vid tonight about aeronautical oddities. I always wonder when I see these things what happened to the planes. Are they in museums somewhere? Some truly original thinkers, those early aviators, with the courage of their convictions. Anyone can fly they say but it takes a pilot to get back down! At some point there will be a museum with early hydrofoil Moths in it and we will look as antiquated as those old planes. No, son, I was cool. This stuff was all the rage. Really. I have vids on YouTube. What? You mean they shut YouTube down? Always thought we should archive that stuff somewhere on a class website...

None of this makes me go any faster but there is something about Mothies that makes them want to write about sailing when they are not able to do it. Since most people find themselves unable to sail the majority of the time, the Mothosphere makes Mothing tons more interesting between regattas than sailing other boats, and foils make it more interesting the rest of the time. Like Mr. Buchan said in that interview from Worlds: there is something about sailing a boat you can build and redesign that keeps a class healthy and draws interesting people into it. Old School, man. What goes around comes around.

Damn the Torpedoes

2009-08-31T18:41:00.000-07:00

Though I should be out in the garage figuring out how to beat Dave Lister on the water, the urge to take up arms in defense of Blogdom is simply too enticing to resist. I feel like Obi-Wan by the Tractor Beam: "You can't win, Dave. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

And so, proceding with reckless abandon, we put to the fullest test the canard that the pen is mightier than the foil. I am reminded of Rear Admiral David Farragut, who, if Wikipedia is to be believed, ran full throttle through a minefield with an entire fleet of warships to take victory in the battle of Mobile Bay. When one of the ships hit a mine (known as a "torpedo" at the time) and sank, causing the other ships to falter, Farragut yelled down from the rigging of his own ship "Damn the Torpedoes...four bells Captain - full speed ahead!"

This brings to mind my most recent lake foiling experience, during which I managed to foil through the lee of Greg's catamaran, only to discover that a) Carolyn, not Greg was driving the cat and b) she was headed straight into shallow water with billions of small dead trees sticking up from the surface. What to do - tack and risk coming off foils, or Damn the Torpedoes? I think you know the answer.

In trademark style, Tom Petty used Farragut's quote as the title of his groundbreaking 1979 album, Damn the Torpedoes. Living in Southern California always lends a bit of extra relevance to Mr. Petty's lyrics, given the freeway running through my yard...

And so my fellow bloggers, take heart. Lister may be fast, but he probably doesn't sail in your neighborhood, so you won't have to find out precisely how much faster he is than you for a good long time. In the interim, take up your pens, and answer the call. Losers may blog, and bloggers may lose, but no less an authority than Petty would be quick to point out that in Mothing, as in the rest of life, even the losers get lucky sometimes.

Cold Infusion

2009-08-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

Yes I registered for Worlds; no I am not there. Sorry if you were expecting to see me; with any luck we will catch each other in Dubai.

Sailed on a lake Sunday. Extremely puffy, 0 knots ambient, with foilable puffs. Sort of frustrating Mothing, but good practice. New spring held up well after a little maintenance.

Managed a gybe or two - nothing spectacular. Boat is much more stable after putting some more black stuff on the mainfoil at the hull exit - it used to wobble around alarmingly during gybes, then the uni started to break and flake off - always a sign that some beefing up is in order!

Ski is going OK once on foils and is awesome offwind. Transition to foiling is another story.

Somebody was giving me a hard time about the bowsprit crossing centerline. I always figured the wand tip was the thing to put on the centerline! Looks pretty close here:

No smarty pants comments about the line dangling from the leeward wing please - in common parlance that would be the adjustable ride height, but I don't use it much.

One day I'll get around to shortening the bowsprit. One day.

I am so sick of the twist grip tiller and short rudder! Making new rudder. Wetting out 9oz uni is always a drag, so I decided to trade one kind of pain for another and infuse the thing. Time will tell whether I got it hot enough; multiple layers of uni are always a bit tricky!

Masochismo

2009-08-03T21:46:00.000-07:00

Sort of like machismo, but more pain and no bad cologne. Wind from Sunday:

18-20+ mph from due West, regular as Clockwork this time of year, but not always that strong.

Some really good foiling with Richard out on his Bladerider doing some work to windward and sticking a few downwind runs in for good measure. He seems to be making great progress on the boathandling front and will no doubt soon be even more difficult to keep up with. Our fleet being quite small and me sailing Inspector-Gadget-prototype mode has heretofore kept me from comparing speeds against other Moths, but suffice it to say that the boat seems to have decent pace. Richard sent me a file (see below) of his fastest runs with several over 20 knots and I seemed to be going as fast as he was occasionally without pushing super hard, so the boat should do 25 without much fuss, and I still have yet to install the new rudder. Rohan seems to be going these speeds uphill lately so I clearly have a long way to go, but I am pretty happy whenever I can go out and sail these speeds with any semblance of control:

Overall I'm starting to feel like I can trust the boat offwind, which is a huge step forward. But there is still a lot of tuning to do.

It all started to go wrong very subtly when one of my control set points shifted, changing its effective range and launching me into the sky. The effect was almost imperceptible at first and I was tempted to put it down to poor sailing, but no, the boat was actually was trying to kill me! The mainsheet has been sticking lately also, just to make life more exciting, and the rudder flap had started to lose its flap down also, though I didn't realize this until much later.

At one point I pitchpoled in a new fashion. It involved bearing off, accelerating to warp speed, then capsizing slowly to leeward. I was looking a long way down at the shroud thinking "that could hurt" when of course I was thrown off the wingbar down on top of the wire. In the end it didn't hurt, but I did manage a complete cartwheel around the shroud before hitting the water off the bow. First time for everything I guess.

I was pretty much as tired as I have ever been when I got back and was very happy to have Richard and Nat come down and help me onto the dock.

At this point, after at least a year of weekends building and messing about with the tilting foil system, all I can say is that a Moth is about the worst platform for foil system development ever conceived. My hat is off to anyone who does something fundamentally new on this boat and makes it work, because the boat and the speeds it achieves will absolutely kick your ass if the control systems are not functioning perfectly - and they never are in the beginning.

What Comes Around

2009-07-21T20:39:00.000-07:00

More foil porn.

Airchair

2009-07-21T19:45:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that it is late July in southern California, I am chilling out on the couch with some virus which I have decided is either Swine Flu or possibly one of those Coxsackie viruses that makes you sick for a week and then completely destroys your heart over the course of a few days. I would not normally invoke either one, but both happen to be running around my neighborhood at the moment. Rather than continue this morose line of thought I decided to watch a little comfort Tube.

Powerboating is pretty boring in the final analysis but people occasionally think of some pretty cool things to do with all those horses. I thought everyone who cared had seen this before but I realized recently I was wrong:

So if you hadn't seen it before, now you have. They put the same foil setup on kiteboards to make them more usable in light air, and on surfboards to tow in on the big/fast waves. Somebody glommed one onto a windsurfer at some point but wasn't fast, so I guess that's on hold for the moment. There is a great paper out there about another foiling windsurfer from San Fran several years back, which apparently WAS faster than a normal board, but it never seemed to catch on, and who knows how it would stack up against today's technology. Anyway that deserves its own post.

Guest Stars

2009-07-19T21:53:00.000-07:00

Nat and Bobby K were nice enough to take a break from sanding Duratek to show me the rudders they stuck together out of the tooling we made together. Vertical is John Z's Eppler tool and horizontal is from a couple of windsurfer fins I used as a plug for a female tool. Nice to see a finished product come out of all that.

Not long before it's out with the old, in with the new for my boat, minus flaps and such. Looking forward to a bit of added vertical in the bargain as well:

Not much else to report. Tried my new damper today but for technical reasons that only about four people on the planet would understand without me typing for half an hour the mounting bracket for the damper interfered with part of the foil tilt mechanism, preventing me from doing enough foiling to form an opinion. I was a bit frustrated as I had anticipated the problem but had not been aggressive about fixing it before going sailing, but at least now I'm sure it needs to be modified!

I do not think the world is quite ready for photos yet - everything is sort of Terminator-esqe in a Rise of the Machines way, you know, the first one where all Arnold's skin is gone and he is just a skeleton of metal with a glowing red eye lurching toward Linda Hamilton before she drops the 100 ton press on him. Who knows, perhaps the damper will disappear after sea trials like a bad dream. Or will it return as T2, liquid metal? I suppose the fishnet tramps will only add to the confusion when they are installed, which will be soon as the dacron is looking really sketchy these days.

New North sail is looking very full in the top which was nice for today's light breeze, but making me think about growing new muscles to pull on the vang when it gets windy! At any rate the sail is so light the boat won't stay capsized on shore anymore, which is sort of interesting! Exchanged greetings with Richard as he returned to shore looking very stylish on his Bladerider.

Someone in a kayak asked me if my boat was a Laser (!). Of course she asked while I was trying to tack into the basin against a two knot tide in no wind, but I did pause long enough to say "No". Then she said "It's beautiful". Must be the bowsprit. Or maybe the ski, which I almost had to pry some F18 dude away from before launching as he oohhed and ahhhed and poked and prodded to test its little recoil spring. People do so love gadgets!

Enough fun for one day.

Better

2009-07-05T23:17:00.000-07:00

Riddle: What's the enemy of "good"?

Had the boat working reasonably well today in the fading breeze between five and eight pm. California was doing one of it's epically beautiful Sunday evening things with a nearly full moon high in the east as the sun disappeared below the horizon. The breeze held until just before sunset, allowing me to do more troubleshooting than I had any right to expect getting on the water at 5.

I transmorgrified my wand "paddle" into a larger footprint and found it vastly improved performance; a bit draggy at the top end but nothing a step or two won't fix. The foil return action was giving me fits until I realized a line had slipped so I wasn't getting the proper throw on it. After retying it things were better and I had some nice sailing, even getting foiling pretty quickly after the tacks and lifting off in not too much breeze without having to fiddle very much.

Reaching back and forth to my launching point on the beach I was having so much fun I just had to give it one last run before heading in. Of course once I was out past the oil island I got hit by a puff while trying to gybe, at which point my sail was interrupted by a rather loud crack and some crunching carbon as I stuffed it hard. I thought I might have broken a foil, but it was only the magic box glued to the deck letting go, pulling a bunch of paint off the deck in the process, ricocheting off the back of the trunk breaking a little nomex gusset and putting the foil into full negative. While righting I noticed the police boat watching me carefully from a short distance away; whether out of pity, alarm, disbelief or all three I have no idea. Anyway I sailed back with the foil full negative but it was a great day with perfect conditions for fiddling - plenty of breeze to foil but not nuclear and some chop but not too much.

I have decided my new rudder strut will be fashionably longer than the current one. It should be interesting picking an angle of attack for the new section but I'll aim a bit more positive than the difference between the zero lift angles of attack and see what happens...I'll miss having the twist grip tiller extension but that setting should really be on a line anyway so Lister Lever here I come, or what I am forced to assume is a Lister Lever given the prevailing radio silence from that particular part of the Mothosphere!

Independence Day

2009-06-30T20:55:00.000-07:00

Whoever said that the first rule of writing is having something to say clearly never had a bloog! People keep reminding me I have one and neglecting it is giving me pangs of guilt!

First, a thought on masts: Why does everyone keep making them lighter? Wouldn't a heavy mast give you more righting moment upwind? I thought the whole point of lighter masts was to increase righting moment on keel boats that heel to leeward, which Moths don't do very much, and to reduce pitching moment, which last time I checked moths don't do much. So skinny and heavy would seem to be the way to go!

Next, a thought on Moth Sailors. I could cook up a bunch of arbitrary but colorful categories, but they would only be a distraction from the truth everyone, on some level, knows: There are only two kinds of moth sailors, professionals and amateurs. Not that anyone is really making a living from the sailing itself, but there are a whole lot of people in the class who sail for a living, or did at one point. If you do not, you are pretty much kidding yourself if you think you are keeping up with them. And if you are keeping up with them, you are kidding yourself about not being a professional. I so love circular logic! If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns! The next rung down are people who sail a lot and are involved with some aspect of the industry with Moth ties - masts/sails/foils/hardware/boats. They are pros but of a less deadly variety. Then there are amateurs, some serious, some not so serious, some more technically inclined than others. But who really cares? Let's go sailing!

Speaking of which, I haven't been doing a whole lot lately, but new rudder foil is coming together gradually, new mast is working OK, new sail arrived yesterday to replace the MSL 12, which never fails to elicit cries of alarm from youth sailors when I hoist it these days. What?? You've never seen battens stitched in with whipping twine instead of batten pockets? Having battens tack independently of the sail is fast! Funny it has never actually come completely apart though I do seem to find new ways to jam the mast through the luff pocket each time I rig it...speed holes.

Congrats to Eelco for 3rd at Euros and a nice blog. Impressive accomplishment and impressive humility about it all. Kind of puts the lie to my professional/amateur theory, but whatever.

I heard recently how towns all across America are suffering because their fireworks displays have been cancelled for economic reasons, and they cannot afford the traditional 90 minute, $45,000 displays which have become customary. Sometime in the 90s fireworks became ubiquitous in the US; not the kind you can buy but the serious electronically programmed and choreographed variety formerly reserved for the President and major metropolises. What? The football team won? Fireworks! Basball game is over? More Fireworks! Big shopping day? How about some Fireworks! Half the time I don't even know what they're for anymore. Guess they'll have to go back to being special, at least for awhile.

My Boat is Bigger Than Your Boat

2009-05-07T21:22:00.000-07:00

Went out sailing today with a raft of enhancements and was actually coming to grips with them little by little with a fickle breeze providing foiling where one could find it. On the way out the channel, against what must have been a four knot current, several leadmines asked if I was OK. Apparently here in California, the only reason a boater gets into the water is if their boat is sinking. Yes yes I'm fine never mind just making an adjustment. Carry on, as you were.

In keeping with the irony theme it would be perfect if, having waved off all those offers, one were to then encounter a problem requiring assistance. As I foiled merrily across the swell out to the nearest oil platform, tacked, and foiled up nearly to the starting line for the cruising boats I could almost feel myself being smug - that's how well all the new stuff was working. Little self-recoiling ski feeler? Check - bouncing along without a hint of the old geyser effect - seemingly much more efficient, and never tripped tip down once though it spent a fair bit of time underwater. Adjustable linkage length? Performing flawlessly, though it does need a port tack counterpart. Stiffer wand doing its thing - the bowsprit is now the bendiest part of the setup. Aft mainsheet keeping itself out of trouble, except when I forget and try to pass the tiller around the end of the boom!

I sailed into a hole near oil island #1, floundered a bit and while righting the boat suddenly a popping sound and slack shrouds. But everything still seemed attached...with a sinking feeling I followed the shrouds up to the hounds and noticed a new kink in the mast of all things! Random failure. I thought sure it was abrasion from the batten cams but later inspection would disprove the theory. Full on failure about a foot above the join, standard C-tech spar, two years old.

So now I am bobbing merrily about, collecting various bits in anticipation of assistance at some point. Disconnect the shrouds and prodder from the mast and coil them on deck. Untie the clew/outhaul/cunningham. Pull the lower mast section out of the sail and secure it to a compression strut with the sheet. Pull the short broken bit of the upper mast out of the sock and shove it into life jacket. Pull the upper mast out of the sock and tie it to the deck with the tail of the mainsheet. Roll the sail up and jam it onto the deck, and tie it on somehow...at roughly this point a beautiful 25' white power cat pulls up and asks if I am OK. "I'm fine" I respond, "but my mast is broken so I will require some assistance". "Oh" says the driver, "well, the Coast Guard will be here in a few minutes" and he zooms off. Not quite what I had in mind, but there's not much I can do about it! I bob around some more, wondering if turtled is the most stable mode, or if I should right the boat, when I note an absolutely HUGE black vessel bearing straight at me from 500 yards off. Before I have time to contemplate the amount of confetti a moth can generate getting sucked through twin screws on a boat like that, he has backed down, pointed his stern to windward and is parked twenty feet from me. The boat has something like 30 old airliner tires tied on the side for fenders. After exchanging pleasantries with the deck hands and explaining about my mast, it occurs to me that I have never seen any boat this big go into the channel near my club, let alone been assisted by anything like it. I mean, it has a few 20' shipping containers positioned athwartships on the aft deck, and I can barely see the tops. We chat about the water temperature, which is 65 and would have been a problem had I not been wearing, as I always do, a 3mm farmer john under my shorts and spray top. Apparently they are a tender for the local oil platforms and responded to the distress call put out by the catamaran driver.

Meanwhile, something like 30 cruising boats just to weather of me continue racing, assuming I suppose that it is normal for 150' oil platform tenders to stop and shoot the breeze with turtled, rigless moths for 15 minutes. Nice.

Now it is the fire department's turn. They have extremely nice big (maybe 30') red boats with twin diesels and usually when one is motoring toward me it is inside Alamitos Bay to threaten me with a ticket for speeding. But today they are all business responding to my distress call. Except I didn't call, and would have preferred not to bother them, but no matter they are here, and none of my erstwhile clubmates seems to be lifting a finger, so what the hell. I tell them it's probably best to just haul my boat up over the stern and that it probably only weighs 50 pounds, and they are OK with that. They pirhouette and come at me with a swim platform, hook the bowsprit with a boathook and before I know it the moth is on the aft deck and I am wandering around an expansive immaculately white griptex dance floor. We could have fit another moth up there with no trouble at all. Another identical red power boat shows up from downtown Long Beach to supervise. Turns out these boats have another engine just for the pumps and a huge chrome bow nozzle for fighting fires. All in all an impressive day for working boat exposure.

Normally this mast thing is an overnight repair and back on the water tomorrow but I lack an appropriately sized inner sleeve at the moment, so I am down to rigging the new mast. Sounds like it's time for a replacement anyway.

Tinytized

2009-05-02T20:43:00.000-07:00

I wonder if there's some sort of cosmic index measuring how closely one's life matches one's plans for it in the final analysis. If there is one I must be pegging the meter on inverse correlation. None of this seems real. Perhaps I am truly John Malkovich, and he is me, and we are each simply doing our level best given the circumstances.

There is a point at which the Moth ceases to be merely a boat and assumes a larger significance, as though invested with an ambition or longing for the impossible. Flying has always been the next best thing to impossible, and with the possible exception of sex, flying in a moth is the closest most of us will come to transcendence, in a physical sense. Which is why foiling is so popular I suppose.

But that altered state can extend onto land as well, and that is where the definition of Mothing gets blurry. Velocity prediction programs. CNC programming. CAD. XFOIL. Epoxy. Clearly the lure of the design and build is as strong for some as the lure of flying, which makes it all doubly intoxicating.

It seems clear to me that this is why professional boat designers do what they do: sit and think all day about new ways to accomplish things in a slightly more efficient, or elegant, or just plain smarter fashion. They dig the whole process, from soup to nuts. Mothing is just another way to check that box, but on a highly personal level, so when you combine the two, look out.

Perhaps that is why the foils on the production boats seem to get better and better with time: there are factories of smart dudes thinking about how to do this stuff, with all the machinery and resources needed to do a completely ridiculous job of optimizing everything, and the time to spend on it.

The rest of us muddle along on a shoestring and a prayer, hoping we might actually have something to add to the mix in the odd hours away from whatever we do with the rest of our waking lives. For instance, I have no CNC machine, which left me in a bit of a fix for a rudder foil recently. My old rudder works fine but the latest trends suggest I might go better with a new one.

This is how I found myself working backward from positive to negative en route to another positive. It is like 3d photography but everything is 1:1. I could have had something machined but the journey is often as important as the destination and I thought I might learn something on the way. Which I have, but I have learned as much about myself as about the foils really. And that is the point.

There is a feeling you get when you do something a bit crazy and it actually works. Even if it is only a small thing, like splashing a mold, there is a satisfaction in a job well done which doesn't come with the purchase price of a new Moth, no matter how fast it might be - or how expensive.

It is probably this feeling which keeps some people working on new things at home, despite the fact that God is in his heaven and labor is discounted in China. CNC time might be cheap for the big boys, but good ideas are still free.

Everything in Moderation...

2009-04-22T19:15:00.000-07:00

especially moderation. That's my old motto. The jury's still out on whether I require a new one.

Lately I have observed that for a town with as many insanely beautiful people as LA, we have more than our share of unhappy ones. You spot some woman who looks for all the world like she just stepped out of a photo shoot for Vogue, work your way up past the amazing shoes, yoga-sculpted calves and thighs, revealing short skirt, silicon rack/lips and sophisticated dye job shouting "money money money" only to find that despite cornering the market on botox her brow is knit and there is no trace of a smile in that face. I mean, if being beautiful means you have to look like you're on some sort of unpleasant tranquilizer trip, is it really worth it?

I don't know what they put in MDF that makes it vaporize like oil in a diffusion pump when you hit it with a router, but there is nothing that comes close for turning the shop into a Day After scenario (though cutting G10 with a table saw runs a strong second). When St. Helens blew up the ash was four inches thick on my grandfather's car and if he tried to wash it off with a hose it just congealed. The lake where I had my first sailing experiences was completely obliterated that day, but I was reminded of it this afternoon, looking around at all my tools buried in brown powder: small yellow daysailers bobbing around my brain to the Darth Vader sounds of my respirator. It is a lot like scuba diving actually, including the poor visibility. I may have to invest in some more aggressive dust control technology than a roof vent fan.

I have not done much sailing lately. I have done various things in the garage. Somewhere along the way I decided to make a new rudder tool; partly to experiment with geometry and partly because the CCZ boys need rudders so it was a good chance to make some tooling cooperatively. BobbyK and I laid up some strut skins last Sunday on a low-drag tool and I should be able to get a female lifting tool completed by next week. After that we can all start figuring out what to do with the delrin acme allthread that has been sitting around my shop for aeons. I am tempted to go power barring ala Mr. Lister but the Engineers are into screws so some assortment of solutions is likely to emerge.

I went with some windsurfer fins. Glommed them together on centerline and ended up with about a nice span and 11:1 AR. The tool effort is to duplicate the shape for the Nilla Zillas; this particular adventure in formica-coated MDF flangemaking has so far claimed only one guide bearing but the fit is strictly white on rice.

Other projects on the list include improved surface feeler technology, adjustable wand phase, and off in the distance, a refined version of my mainfoil. But no need for that just yet.

Back to squishing airfoils. I am trying to convince XFOIL to accept my modified versions of various shapes but so far it seems to look only disdainfully upon .txt files, preferring DAT exclusively. It is like dreaming you are in a country where you can't speak the language, but somehow you understand everything anyway. Only you are the country and your computer is the one dreaming, like in Blade Runner. It understands perfectly, but remains impassive, as though waiting for some magic word. Which, of course, it is.

4.75, Baby

2009-04-19T08:57:00.000-07:00

Despite having somehow procured the lowest interest rate on a home loan I have ever encountered, GUI is too lazy to get his own bloog, which is fine as it is far easier for me to bloog vicariously about his boat than make any real progress on my own. Somehow he has managed to finish a PhD, switch jobs twice, move three times, buy a house and have a baby during the past two years, during which time he has designed and built two foilers from scratch (though the Guitine has yet to fly) - not including the converted lowrider Skippy2. As nearly as I can tell, he is able to accomplish this because while most builders ponder how many layers of uni to put in their foils, Gui has assembled various components from Home Depot and NAPA auto parts and is already at the lake learning how to gybe! "Flap? I need a flap? What for - the wind is blowing - let's go sailing!" And yes his wife is a saint, or in the run-offs at any rate.

The new Guitine is clearly a step up in terms of cosmesis as there is no irrigation pipe or mild steel throttle cable in evidence and no carbon death needles as suggested by the baby on board. In any event it looks good on screen and the foils should be nice also which in G's hands could be a formidable combo... Secondary bonds on the strut attachments GUI? What were you thinking! Who are you trying to impress anyway?

Possibilities

2009-03-26T20:12:00.000-07:00

"Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."

Time Lapse

2009-03-15T11:47:00.000-07:00

OK for the concrete canoe guys, some technical info from my limited time-lapse experience:

I use a Pentax Optio 30 waterproof camera on "Interval Shoot" mode. I believe the Oregon Scientific ATC3K video camera has a similar mode, but much less resolution.

I import the photos with Picasa3. There is a button above the folder that says "create movie". You specify a soundtrack (must be in mp3 format), then select "fit photos to sound track" option and it will set the duration of each photo automatically.

You can put captions on the photos in Picasa and choose to display them if you like, or put annotations in later after uploading to YouTube.

Put whatever you want on the title slide using that tab, then hit "create movie". It takes about ten minutes or more, depending upon what resolution you use for the original photos - I am using 2MP (whatever that is) to keep processing time down though my camera will do much more than that.

Pick a song no longer than 3 minutes. Nobody wants to suffer through 6 minutes of somebody laying stuff up, unless you really have a lot of photos and it is a big project. Pick an obscure jazz or other tune, or YouTube will eventually disable your soundtrack for copyright violations.

For short 1-2 hour wet layups I started with a photo interval of 30 sec. This is too long. For the vid below I am down to 20 sec interval and about 600 photos, which will cover 200 minutes of layup (or whatever). I think 15 sec would be better but it depends upon the length of the song, length of project and how much memory your camera has.

That's it. Go make some movies - the world is waiting!

We Build Fleets the Old Fashioned Way

2009-03-10T07:27:00.000-07:00

Listen

2009-03-05T21:49:00.000-08:00

Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,
Listen to the DON'TS

Listen to the SHOULDN'TS The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS

Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me --

Anything can happen, child
ANYTHING can be.
- Shel Silverstein

Gossip

2009-02-15T10:19:00.001-08:00

Delilah the Manipulator:

Everybody who comes to my house asks the same question when they roll up: This is where you keep your boat, right? I mean, you don't LIVE here?

I don't know if it's the barbed wire and the junkyard dog (see above) or the welded steel collar around my steel safety door deadbolt, or the graffiti on the wall of the corner hairstyling salon, but nobody wants to believe I live like this apparently! It's less intimidating on the inside. Really.

Anyway a bunch of non-sailing stuff going on 'round here. First, Dan showed up from points North to claim his Guillotine, which had been languishing under the hot LA sun in its seaweed wrap for a couple of months. Neither of us were sure whether to rent him a car and strap it to the roof or crate it and explore shipping options, but Home Depot is on the road from the airport and before I knew it power tools were strewn all over the alley and we had built a crate the size of a FEMA trailer:

With that out of the way, it got strapped on the roof of the Benz

then we fired up the pizza oven, and it was time to go to sleep. Not a bad Sunday afternoon.

Monday AM I turned him loose on the freeways of LA in driving rain to find the FedEx freight terminal which apparently he did because the car reappeared in my drive with no crate and no Dan in sight - he was home for dinner, 1300 miles away. Hard to keep up with that guy:

Word then trickled up from Long Beach Thursday that a layup party was in progress on CCZ#2. More pizza and beer. Do these guys look like professionals or what:

Just what you want to do when you're done designing boats all day, apparently:

Then I get an email from Kirk on yet another way to improve the Tilt-a-Whirl. That may be version 3.0, but I haven't built 2.0, and now may not need to. In fact, I'm not sure I need to build anything, aside from the G10 clamp thingy I've been putting off while I type this.

That's all the news from here. Got a new bike; nothing rides like 4130.

Let them eat cake

2009-01-26T22:04:00.000-08:00

One step closer to the Gui-tine (or was that the Starship Enterprise)?

Magic Wand?

2009-01-20T20:49:00.000-08:00

So, like, I know he won the first race, but what is going on with the wand here? If that's max flap up, everything's different. If not, something seems very wrong?

Photo Credit: Teri Dodds (permission requested - I'll take it down if she objects)
More Photos HERE

I Ain't Askin' for a Miracle Lord - Just a Little Bit of Luck Would Do

2009-01-18T19:51:00.000-08:00

- Steve Earle

I haven't been writing much in the way of technical stuff, mostly because I'm pretty sure nobody thinks what I'm doing can work, and they might be right. I'd rather let the boat do the talking, but sort of like building your own Frankenstein, it takes a while to teach the Monster proper syntax and grammar. Mostly, it says things like "Sheeeeeiiit! YiiiiiiiiiiAiAiAikes! What are you DOOOOOOHOHOHOHing...cut that OWWWWWWWT FAAAAAAACK." Then it takes off maniacally in some random direction, happy as a pig in mud, asking "How would you like your prime rib cooked, sir?"

The jury is still out - way out. The longer they stay out, the better, in my view. But I see them lurking by the courthouse windows, peering in from time to time.

Anyway it looks different now, but I haven't taken any photos for awhile. The basic setup remains the same. Yes, my daggerboard trunk opening is still square. Whatever. I have also done away with the rudder completely, just to make things interesting.

OK I'm kidding about that last bit.

WhY, YoU mAy AsK?

Why not, I say. I am not cutting up YOUR Prowler, so chill out. More to the point, I wanted to get rid of the flap and all its associated flap crap. Theoretically flaps are pretty good, but practically they have their limitations. So I thought I'd play with some other limitations for awhile and see if I could compensate for the theoretical disadvantages by realizing some practical benefits.

I have been flying this way since August or so, weekends mostly. This weekend there was no wind, which was perfect, because I was sick and it was 80 degrees, and there were a million junior sailors at my club, racing a junior championship in everything but 29ers. All in all, a good weekend to be under the weather:

Digging the Perverted Moth blog, though the author appears to have multiple personality disorder, which doesn't really exist, so it's probably OK. The flatpack Moth idea is long overdue in any event, and the writing is a perfect balance of technical stuff and self deprecation. Galeotti is setting new standards for economy - truly impressive. It is like watching a fuel cell that runs on words. How does it keep going? Air bearings maybe.

Looking forward to some serious armchair mothing this week while I recuperate.

Dinner on G-food Street

2009-01-05T20:51:00.000-08:00

Gui's latest effort, the Guillotine. Its namesake cutaway stern has become quite popular, no doubt due to Gui's masterful marketing strategy:

Note the inverted aft deck, and Escheresque vang cutaway:

The Second Coming

2009-01-04T20:55:00.000-08:00

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Right before I moved to California and parked the canoe in the front yard, I felt I had a sort of understanding with that boat - I took forever to build it, had sailed it only a handful of times, yet I was developing a lot of confidence in her. The same was true of the Prowler - I had it pretty well set up for most conditions before I undid everything. Getting back there with something entirely different is a slow process.

Since going flapless, sailing has been a bit like roulette: some days and in some conditions it has been brilliant, but others I spend swimming, without really understanding why. There have been enough glimpses of potential that I have never seriously doubted the thing can be tamed and managed; like a slot machine, she pays out just enough to keep me coming back for more. But excitement wears quickly, and eventually we all want to trade the drama of a high strung filly for something a bit more predictable now, don't we?

I hadn't sailed for a few weeks before today, making lots of little changes to the boat and anxious to try them out. The wind was pathetic until about noon, at which point the sensors rang up 10mph out of the west - pretty much ideal testing conditions. Alamitos Bay was hosting something called the Rose Bowl Regatta, with the top college sailing teams in the nation competing against each other in team racing (I think). Boston College took the trophy home this year, with MIT second and Georgetown third. Those college and high school sailors all know exactly what the boat is, think it is ultra cool, but tend to regard it as completely unattainable and impossibly rarefied. To my mind, these kids are precisely the people who are best suited to the boat, and I tell them as much. I don't know if we have $8000 USD foilers yet, but if we ever get them, I think there will be a pretty big market.

As things transpired, the wind was late, and I felt pressed to get out before the Spanish Armada of 420s finished racing and jammed the launch ramp like oh-so-many Sabots. A quick rig, stash the car, change and launch. I left the boat on the dock to stow the dolly, and just as I was coming back, a gust picked the rig up and dumped the hull into the water, upright. I grabbed the mainsheet, hopped on the deck, and was off in serious style.

The changes made a really big difference in the performance of the boat. There is still room for improvement, but had there been a racecourse set today, I definitely could have gotten round it. Upwind and reaches I could probably have hung in there speedwise; gybes remain challenging. Tacks are a bit slower than before but getting faster - there is a bit more work to do in moderate conditions than with the flap, though the boat lifts off sooner, so it is probably a wash. I have a solution for gybe issues in the works - one never knows but I think I understand the problem and how to fix it.

Interesting to note Scott B sailing a longer rudder. What goes around comes around in borrowed ideas; back and forth between the major manufacturers (though I'm certain they would take issue with the statement). Awhile back I posted about the rudder strut issue on the Australian forum and came away with the sense that nobody really knew why rudder struts on almost all foiler Moths are shorter than the main foil. Crazy - we all sail these things and nobody knows why they look like they do - sort of like Polynesian dugout canoes - "That's just the way we've always done it". It will be interesting to see whether the improved control is worth the drag penalty; seems like this has been tried before...

Zilla Wafer

2008-12-17T18:19:00.000-08:00

What the boat lacks in compound curvature it makes up for in hip hop lyricism (and ease of mold construction).

Check it:

CHIN CHILLA ZILLA

Night Flight

2008-12-07T22:03:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid we had a variety of 8-track players, all of which shared the perplexing feature of having continuous loops of tape with multiple tracks, rendering it utterly impossible to navigate from any given song to another with confidence. There was a button you could push to skip between tracks, and that was about it. Kind of like pulling numbers out of a hat.

I think most of those tapes were ultimately lost to the Arabian sun, as we had a player in the car and summer in Saudi Arabia just doesn't bear thinking about in terms of how hot the inside of a car can get. You open the doors for awhile before you get in - to let the seatbelt buckles cool off; otherwise they will burn you. Many, many tapes were tacoed. Johnny Cash - Ring of Fire. ABBA's greatest hits. And yes, Boney M's Nightflight to Venus. In fact, one of my more piquant childhood memories is driving down the escarpment from Taif to Jeddah in a big block 454 Suburban, eating fresh Pomegranet seeds and singing along to Brown Girl in the Ring, along with Johnny Horton's Battle of New Orleans. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. There were no radio stations playing western music in Saudi Arabia, apart from shortwave, and we had very limited access to anything western, which of course meant that we listened to the same tapes for ever, or at least for a year until they melted the following summer. Consequently a very small selection of totally random, utterly banal features of late 70's popular culture have been indelibly inscribed on my psyche, to my great amusement and dismay.

So it was that Nightflight to Venus (not at all a memorable song otherwise) popped into my head this evening when I looked down at the side of my Moth and saw the moon in its reflection. Of course, it didn't hurt that Venus itself is the brightest thing in the western sky at sunset this week (apart from the moon) with Jupiter just below and to the right. In any event, sometimes the breeze holds right through sunset, and a late start meant I was more determined than usual to get the most from the fading light. December in California being not very unlike December in other parts of North America, only the hardest core sailors brave the cool water and breeze, and most of them come off the water around 3 or 4pm, despite the fact that other people would kill for this kind of year 'round sailing weather. So if you are out there at 5 or 5:30 when the sun is sinking below the horizon, you have the place to yourself - if you can get the old 70s tunes out of your head anyway. Flat water, good breeze, completely idyllic conditions. Tra la la la la.

Unfortunately, machining another set of bearings for my little tilt-a-whirl system did not resolve its annoying tendency to scrub lift on one tack slightly less efficiently than the other, which was disappointing. But each time out teaches me something new, and today was no exception. Pinching along the breakwater I realized beyond doubt that I am able to sustain flight in some lighter breeze than I was ever able to before, particularly upwind. Sort of an unintended consequence, but there you have it. Just amazing the way it hangs in there; I am using a different section that is pretty efficient at high angles of attack, so that probably explains the behavior. Always nice when the boat reads the book.

Bazillion coaches and youth sailors at the club, packing up their Lasers and 420s as I went out. Some sort of coaches clinic. As usual, everyone wants a Moth. They all ask a bunch of questions, and it is sort of difficult for them to wrap their minds around the basic concept of the boat and at the same time realize that you can also hack your daggerboard trunk out and try a completely novel version of something should it suit your fancy.

Strange regatta in Sydney at the moment; any time more than half the fleet can't even get a score on the board in multiple races it makes you wonder whether the people running the event are doing things properly, although come to think of it I didn't post a score in the last regatta I entered either, so perhaps I should say that I can do that without flying to Australia, and leave it at that. I'm sure I'll manage to get down there for an event at some point.

Moments of Clarity

2008-11-27T18:22:00.000-08:00

Forecast pathetic for a holiday but warmed up nicely to drive some sort of thermal into San Pedro. I expected it to hover around 12 but by the time foils hit water it had piped up to 20mph on the Pier J anemometer - a bit much for testing but nothing ventured nothing gained.

As America slid ever deeper into collective postprandial torpor, I hit the beach to skip the tack out the channel. Low tide on the beach puts you in the deep rather quickly, which is nice, except that with a seaway running onto shore it can be challenging to get the boat up and going before it drifts with wind, waves and current a yard or two toward shore, where it is too shallow to put foils down. Had some fun practice with that maneuver; have been sailing from the ramp at Alamitos Bay for months where the most challenging obstacles are a) legions of Sabots and b) no wind. Not even any Stingrays to shuffle for.

Anyway conditions were a bit much to cope with for the old girl not to mention the driver but there we were, headed out to oil island #1 and whatever lay beyond. Actually hoping to tack in the lee of the island, but happy to be going anywhere. Tack #1 OK. Slide over cruising boat, stack, bring it up, flail downwind. What an adventure. Serious speed - not much time to think about relative angles of attack or physics or what have you. Behaving reasonably well given chop and breeze. Lots of detritus floating from recent rains. Still haven't quite worked out how to tack in that condition. Think I need a more efficient rudder to level it all out a bit - always convenient to blame boat for one's own inadequacies.

After blowing a few tacks and the sun getting low, switched to preservation mode and headed back to shore. Piled it in to windward in lee of oil island, righted boat, drifted out of lee and - airborne, reaching. Flying was not really what I wanted to be doing at that moment, to be truthful, as I didn't want to any Gilmouresque foredeck demolition maneuvers, and I wasn't at all confident that the boat was going to stay in the water. But there didn't seem to be any way to prevent it while still aiming for my van on the beach. Sheeted in and went for it, figuring if I auger in, at least I'll be that much closer to the beach when I do.

Pretty sure it's going to end ugly, but nope - solid. Little voice says "Don't think you can just drive over that wave, because you're going to stack it." But after a couple of waves I realized that it wasn't going to stack, had no plans that way, like "stack" had been removed from its 20 knot reaching vocabulary. And that was really nice, given how frustrating the rest of the sail had been. Go straight over them, drive up the troughs, whatever you wanna do. It's your thing. Foil sounds a bit like a jackhammer, but the boat goes exactly where you point it and the foil stays on the painless side of airborne.

This was, in fact, something I had dreamed might be true way back in the beginning, but it was really weird to actually experience it. There is a minimum speed it wants to go, and as long as you keep it heated up, it's perfectly happy. Slow down too much and things get funky. Now all I have to figure out is how to gybe going that fast...

Unfortunately, it all proved too much for the sensor line, which I think is 3/32" spectra with no cover from a spool I picked up on sale. I heard a loud bang, looked down at the deck, but only saw water everywhere. Thought maybe I was sinking, but no - the foil just went full negative and took the hull with it. Sort of like driving a submarine while sitting on the periscope. Somehow managed to not pitchpole. Took a bit of rudder flap out after checking things over and sailed back to shore, which was only another 100m or so.

At this stage of the project I can say that it isn't something you do hoping to go faster any time soon. The idea of doing that is an attraction, rather akin to Sirens singing beautiful songs from rocky outcrops. The actual path to the goal, however, is a long one, and like dropping down into a valley to shortcut your way over to the next peak, you can lose sight of the original destination and end up somewhere else just as lofty, but not at all where you set out to go. I, for instance, had no ambitions to become a rodeo bull rider, but here I am. Odysseus never meant to spend a year with Circe, fathering in the process the son who eventually killed him, but some of this stuff is really beyond our control. You just have to roll with it.

Two Seasons

2008-11-23T21:26:00.000-08:00

Summer and boat construction. Actually it's summer and ROAD construction, up there in the midwest, but periodically it is nice to have a meterological excuse to sit around doing nothing in particular when it comes to sailing. Maybe lay up a Moth. Take the trash out, clean the bathroom, do the laundry. All those things I can't get done on other weekends due to sailing, or during the week due to work commitments. And I don't even have a family. Kind of makes me wonder how people do it.

Should have some pics of the ChinchillaZilla coming together soon; helped the Boyz pile some carbon and nomex into their tool this past weekend, and it was all looking good in there. Photos when I have them. Bobby K is off to China later this week and I think they are hoping to have a deck on by then.

Have my eye on some sexy instrumentation for Le Moth so I can better analyse what it is doing. That should be a fun project.

I could sort everything pretty quickly with some active controls, but that, apparently, would be cheating. Cheating whom is an open question, as I am the only Moth at my club. The temptation is strong, as it would only take a servo and a bit bigger battery -- everything else will be in place for monitoring purposes. But in the end it is probably not necessary.

Just like your parents always said: experimenting with powerful mind altering substances will only get you thrown out of school. Perhaps the situation is analogous to the early 18 era in Australia, where boats had to develop someplace outside the traditional confines of a restricted class to make the next big leap.

I read a great article about Ry Cooder in the New York Times over the weekend, talking about the hot-rodder culture in California in the 1950s, all these people out on the dry lakebeds on weekends, making their cars go faster and faster. It's kind of crazy to think that lots of people would find this sort of thing appealing, given the complete dearth of development-minded sailors here, but I suppose people tend to focus on developing the technologies at hand. There are certainly oodles of seriously souped-up cars driving around town, though one suspects the only racing they see is between stoplights.

Aerospace, another formerly dominant local employer that brought a lot of geeky experimenter-types to this area, is only a shadow of what it once was- though we do have a huge UAV company nearby - started semi-paradoxically by the same guy who made those human-powered airplanes in the late 1970s. It's all well and good that the F35 is driving composite tooling development, but who would have thought that a dude who built the Gossamer Albatross would start a company that would in turn go on to build Skynet-type drones?

Gotta hand it to those sci-fi writers. Asimov wrote I, Robot in the 1950s, for heaven's sake. All that James Cameron Terminator stuff just seems to get closer to reality all the time - life imitating art and all that. But I'm sure Cameron never saw the T1 running for Governor of California, even in his wildest dreams.

Enough annoying links. Have a good week.

No Place In Particular

2008-11-17T18:28:00.000-08:00

So the regatta debut of the New Stuff was greeted with near universal yawns and some derision, but proved extremely worthwhile nonetheless. I knew going in that it would be a tall order to make it around the course, period, but hey: it was the California State Championships, and I was the fifth boat. Gotta support the fleet, and in the words of the omnipresent Nige "If I made something like that I wouldn't give a damn if it was done or not - I'd want to see how it went against some other Moths!"

As things turned out it was all hopelessly anticlimactic. I rolled into Coronado in plenty of time to make the start but there was basically no wind until 1pm, when a breath of air lured us out to the course, dying progressively on the way there. It flirted with us for a few runs on foils, only to wheeze out in the lulls to something requiring a power boat to start.

Speaking of which, I believe the San Diego yachties may be able to lay claim to something called a RIB start, where in pathetically sad conditions the wing of a moth is put on the RIB, which accelerates to foiling speed, at which point the helm jumps on the now-foiling Moth and bears away. In something like 5 knots of breeze it is possible to get some impressively good rides this way - or have fun trying.

In any event, I foiled around a bit - not terribly well, but well enough given the fact that I had never been able to get up in those conditions previously in any reliable way. I did foil by Charlie at close quarters, and had the presence of mind to tell him he saw it Here first, but then I did also spend my fair share of time living up to his expectations of utter and complete failure, head down over the daggerboard trunk, fiddling with lines. In fairness to myself I should say that the 30 knots of breeze last Sunday put paid to my shake-down cruise, and that the boat was not in proper sailing configuration prior to Saturday's festivities. But that would sound like an excuse, which we all know would be lame and entirely uncalled for. Long story short the wind died and we lowrided/were towed back in.

Sunday dawned hot with a forecast high of 93 degrees, which if you subtract 32, multiply by five, and divide by nine will give you a number in something called "C" which apparently means something to someone somewhere other than the US. Here we don't go in for all that hype - our system works just fine for us and we all know what each other mean, even if arcane formulae are somehow required to keep it all feng shui with Lord Kelvin.

I rigged a little thingy to give me less drag and more lift at lowish pre-foiling speeds. Saturday it was just a pitiful bit of line rigged to the old bungy cleat on my tramp, which as you may recall from your own boat is a one-trick pony: if you're not on starboard, forget about it. A double-ended solution was in order, and after pinging Charlie about it on the tow back in, a plan was hatched involving some Spinlock cleats and a fair amount of cash. Call it my fair share of economic stimulus. It wasn't that dear and is definitely sexy - just wish they would make those cleats from something lighter than whatever they are made of.

Thus equipped I missed the 1pm launch by 30 minutes or so and had a good drift/capsize/adjust repeat session out to the bridge, where the wind was eminently foilable. By this point Charlie, Hans and Jack were far down the bay sailing races. My effort to arrive on the scene was hampered by some setup issues which resulted in my warping around and stacking for another hour or so, after which I was rewarded with a sailable boat in a manner not entirely unlike a Genie materializing from a lamp:

"Three wishes? OK, well first, please make the 2:1 on the negative anti-bungee thingy behave itself, and put it in phase with something, preferably the wand there on the bow - yes the thing hanging down." ALAKAZAM! Done.

Next: "Please make the boat stop imitating a submarine." AS YOU WISH BLAMMO - done.

"Now speed this whole program up!" Done.

"Ridiculously excellent! Now, make my wand stop throwing showers of spray every which way like a firehose! What? I'm out of wishes? Well, I suppose I can live with that for today."

I ran around enough to figure out that starboard tack seems extremely quick and port is misbehaving - I've no idea why but it must be something with the asymmetricity of my wand paddle and its unique Coriolis-like ability to slingshot streams of piss ten feet in any given direction +/- 90 degrees of the main velocity vector in non-Newtonian fashion. Last night I watched the stupid video on SA of the little prop-driven wind cart pushing itself up a treadmill, and started wondering whether my wand was violating any laws of thermodynamics by throwing spray so far out in front of the boat at 14 knots. Who knows? It seems more efficient at making waterworks than actuating my wand, but the visual effect is really spectacular, and it will be a sad day when I cut that thing off. You really can't take your eyes off it. I think Charlie's comment was "an incredible amount of spray". Pyrrhic victory.

Never did make the race course. By the time I was sorted they were coming back in. I felt bad and good at the same time - bad because I had missed the races (Charlie won, 2 races to one each for Jack (GO JACK) and Hans (who will no doubt be out for revenge in Australia in a few weeks' time).

I could not help feeling really good also though, because this little project just seems to pay back in spades every little bit of effort I put into it. It may never be fully competitive, but it is just so satisfying to see a problem, conceive a solution, implement it, trial it and actually have it WORK that after a few rounds, one is irretrievably hooked on the process.

Of course, having cut up your only Moth is a pretty good incentive to continue down the road less traveled. I could buy another boat, and would love to race more, but I am simply having too much fun with this to quit.

Twenty years from now, odds are I will be just another guy who tried something kooky that didn't work. But my inner Yoda keeps whispering: "What if WORKS it does? What THEN will you be? Mmmmm?" Delusional. Yes, I know, like Luke in the cave in Empire Strikes Back, conversing with his father, not liking what he sees, and jetting off to the Degaba System without completing his training. Only cost him a hand in the end.

An old girlfriend once said that she always thought it better to regret things she had done rather than things she had not. I suppose I am far enough from the beaten track to not be satisfied with simply sailing a foiler, and even though it is costing me some racing experience, the amount of personal growth my own project provides just seems to dwarf whatever I might otherwise accomplish in regatta terms. Hans, having seen the boat working to weather from astern for a minute or so, made the comment closest to my own thoughts: THAT THING FOILED! THAT'S AWESOME!

Not perfect, not refined, not competitive, not reliable and completely unproven, but awesome nonetheless.

When Moths Dream...

2008-10-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

they probably dream that they're TriFoilers:

If you're thinking "My moth goes that fast" well, you're wrong. But you can take comfort in the fact that your moth foils in conditions where TriFoilers simply wallow - say anything under 12 knots of breeze. And as much as I may envy these guys the ability to look around and take photos with both hands while sailing , it looks a bit, well, sedate.

In terms of outright speed though, there is simply no comparison. The boat is so powerful with its biplane rig and wide effective beam that it can really make the most of whatever power is available in a way that just dwarfs the righting moment of a Moth. When pushed very hard, the windward foil will even pull down a bit - but mind you this is when the boat is pushed VERY hard. And chop? Pretty incredible abilities there also, while we are steering all over in search of the next wave crest, trying to stay out of the sky.

All that speed and smoothness comes at a price - complexity, weight and ease of maneuvering on shore. But perhaps there are some lessons to be learned here, if one pays enough attention.

Pretty good (if short) video

2008-10-22T22:14:00.000-07:00

Looks like Rod Mincher is at it again with his video editing skills. Possibly the best moth vid soundtrack since Nige and "I Am a Passenger" from 2000 or so, which is saying a lot as the number of videos has ballooned considerably since then. On the whole, I still think my favorite song that was ever used as a soundtrack on a Moth vid is the Wise Guys Remix of "The Kids Aren't All Right" - again from the 2001 timeframe. But the lyrics from the first two vids above fit so perfectly it's uncanny.

Nige where is that Hungry Tiger these days, anyway? Cool boat. Lowriders will be super trendy again in about ten years, just like fixie bikes are at the moment. Every once in awhile, the speed advantage of non-foilers in displacement mode is caught on video, as in this video from what I think are the Japan nationals 2008. Of course, the foilers get their revenge soon after, but it might be worth losing a lot of races to school a bunch of foilers to the windward mark in a penultimate Moth. Anyway the soundtrack editor could take a few hints from the Brits, but no matter - it's good to see the moth fleet in Japan doing well, and we'll take whatever video we can get to avoid having to read google translations of Japanese regatta reports from their website.

What Now?

2008-10-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

Chatting to Greg the other day about how things are going and he said "Great. So what's next?" I had to admit I hadn't thought it through - sudden success is like that - you end up on the far side looking a bit dazed.

I have some plans for a new rudder and need to vet the current system in some more challenging conditions before getting too cocky. New rudder may be fixed - no twist grip - I have a bunch of acme threaded delrin rod if anybody needs some, which is ironic as I may now have rendered it superfluous. The wand paddle certainly needs some massaging and there is quite a bit left to do in the marginal air department.

But really what needs to be done most is go mothing with some other guys and see where we are performance-wise. That has been impossible until now, well, because the boat has been sort of unsailable until now - in any serious way at least. But when you can throw in four or five gybes in a row without going completely pear shaped and even manage a couple of foiling tacks it's time to set one's sights a bit higher.

Need to buy some Awlgrip - I'm thinking flat black for the foil because I baked it at 170 but perhaps a shade of something lighter would be more interesting from a spectator standpoint. Assuming it holds together of course; I had some chances to wind it up on Sunday so it's seeing some forces it hasn't seen to date and may decide to fold up, but so far so good. It is a bit wobbly in the gybes but no matter - I hear wobbly is fast. At least my foil has a core, which should count for something.

New gantry fitting - the lower one is egged-out. Fundamentally I don't think a 3/16" pin will go the distance in that location without being replaced about once a year.

Boys down south plan to cut a hull tool sometime soon; it will be fun to see that take shape.

Shaping Up

2008-10-19T22:31:00.000-07:00

The ol' girl is finally starting to act like a proper moth again, after rather a lot of clowning around. For some reason the wind in the little bay by the club was decent for foiling if a bit up and down, with some good puffs rolling through. After reconsidering my set point issues on my bungee (rather a different bungee than you have most likely) I installed a 2:1 in about 15 minutes and eliminated quite a bit of rubber from the deck. Apart from looking a lot more manageable and less like a bird's nest, this allowed me to set the engagement point a lot more precisely and vary the rate quite easily as well. In the first 30 minutes of sailing I capsized perhaps six times to adjust set point, rate, and wand line length, and in the end I had something which behaved very much like a normal moth, with a couple of exceptions: my wand is hollow and kept injecting air onto my rudder during takeoff before the wand started planing, resulting in some slow takeoffs. The second issue is my trunk which lacks any sort of fairing around the foil at all - I'm sure this would help my lowriding speed and takeoff quite a bit.

Next task is to prime, sand and paint the mainfoil, and design a rudder tool. If things keep going this well I might actually be halfway competitive next month in San Diego or wherever we are racing next. There is a regatta later this month at ABYC also but not sure I am ready for that quite yet, esp. against Graham Biehl in his newish Velociraptor (I think). Those 470 dudes are some good sailors.

Managed to foil for over two hours inside the bay where the speed limit is 5mph so either the Patrol was on a rather long coffee break or they have decided I am not worth the trouble. I try to only foil circles around the boats that cheer first; some guy in an electric picnic boat just couldn't get enough gawking and decided to bear off onto my course just to leeward of me at the very moment my rudder ventilated. So now I am careening directly at him at a high rate of speed from about 20 feet away. I had to completely bail to avoid T-boning him. Not his fault but people seem to assume I am in a lot better control a lot more of the time than I actually am. I suppose that's why they put the speed limit at 5.

I have the wackiest paddle right now; it is pretty big and a bit concave going forward - this makes for a nice little geyser effect on one tack and something akin to a soda fountain on the other, with lots of splashiness. Probably not fast but today it was holding height really well so I can't complain - paddles are easy to change - just a few minutes with the belt sander or cut it off and glom something else on.

All this effort only to have a Moth that sails like a Moth. Like someone said - it's the journey, not the destination; I am learning so much every time I go out that it is pretty addictive. As I told Nat and Bobby K today it's like making a new paper airplane every time I go out except that instead of throwing it and watching it I get to ride the thing. Sailing a moth you've bought is fun, and it is a lot of work getting any moth set up properly to the point where it is reliable. But refining a new system and figuring out how to sail it when you've built it yourself is a completely different level of satisfaction. Days like today are sort of hard to comprehend - it seems impossible that the boat could be doing precisely what it should in most situations, and yet there it is - just like the Infinite Improbability Drive in the Hitchiker's Guide. To recap:

This is a moment for superb and delicate concentration. Bob and float, float and bob. Ignore all consideration of your own weight simply let yourself waft higher. Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful. They are most likely to say something along the lines of "Good God, you can't possibly be flying!" It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly be right.

Waft higher and higher. Try a few swoops, gentle ones at first, then drift above the treetops breathing regularly.

DO NOT WAVE AT ANYBODY.

When you have done this a few times you will find the moment of distraction rapidly easier and easier to achieve.

You will then learn all sorts of things about how to control your flight, your speed, your maneuverability, and the trick usually lies in not thinking too hard about whatever you want to do, but just allowing it to happen as if it were going to anyway.

Girl crewing a 420 yelled "I LOVE YOUR BOAT" which is touching given i've hacked it up and added all sorts of new kit. Either any boat looks really good on foils or having one black and one white foil is somehow more attractive than two white ones. Maybe it's the splashy paddle.

Watched Mars Attacks again the other night. That movie is a classic.

Sorry no new photos or video from today; left the camera at home. Pity in a way, but sometimes it's more important to make progress on the development side than to document it for the rest of the world. Actually that's probably always true. But it doesn't stop me from typing stuff here anyway.

Invention

2008-10-15T21:53:00.000-07:00

I've done it! I've done it -

Guess what I've done!

I've invented a light

That plugs into the sun

The sun is bright enough,

The bulb is strong enough,

There's just one thing wrong -

The cord's not long enough.

- Shel Silverstein (from memory)

This country is rapidly falling apart, and my beautiful, tatted-up heroin addict patient has three different bacterial species eating her heart. I can pretty much guarantee that she doesn't have any money to pay for anything I've done for her at the hospital over the past three weeks, which doesn't really affect me directly, but does point out the fundamental instability of our current healthcare funding system. At the moment, our hospital absorbs the costs, then charges more to everyone who can afford to pay to make up the difference. So my insurance rates go up to pay for her care. Fine, but as costs climb, many healthy people drop their insurance, leaving fewer people to bear the burden of the unfunded, and driving insurance costs up even further in a vicious cycle. It is all completely unsustainable.

I have been working for the past 20 days or so in a row, and consequently not making much progress on the water. The latest efforts have been to adjust my foil control system including the wand stiffness, paddle size, and refining some stuff on my deck that is unique to my setup. Might be time for another visit to the saltwater tackle shop.

Si Payne apparently feels his new Mach II foil is sufficiently advanced that it warrants a Quiz. I won't speculate on flap retention mechanisms, but will simply say that losing flaps is not something I worry about much these days.

And then there were three

2008-09-18T22:18:00.000-07:00

Back down to three hydrofoils...this one's gone garden gnome.

Had some fun with the new ATC3K taped under the wingbar on Sunday; finally edited the video down. It is quite possibly the most boring video in the world, but the soundtrack is pretty good. Anyway another vote for this camera - it rocks even though you can't see what you're shooting precisely, because there's no viewfinder or LCD. So it pays to have a laptop or some camera along that can play the card files when you are setting up on a small thing like a Moth, so you can set the angle and check it. But I got pretty close with the "Ah - that looks pretty good" point and go method.

Nothing earth shattering to report, boat-wise. Still plenty of work to do, but now I know what direction to go and what the priorities are. Greg showed up with his boat du jour and managed to shear both the propeller and the rudder off, but that was all sort of predictable as it was all only held together with bondo. It's always fun to see what propulsion system will show up on that thing; generally they last about half an afternoon, but are exceedingly cool and stylish before they burn out. It is like Mothing with Inspector Gadget as your crash boat - we're never sure who is going to have a harder time getting home. I was thinking of towing him at one point, but he got a good workout with the double bladed paddle, which is just as well as I've never tried to tow anything with a Moth before and I had enough trouble staying in the same zip code without trying to tow anything.

No mechanical failures or anything, but I deliberately set out for the lumpy stuff at the end of the channel and control system developed a flavor of post-traumatic stress disorder bordering upon catatonia. I have not pitchpoled at two knots since sailing Bill's Skippy II - reminded me of those fishing boats that get sucked under by submarines driving through their nets, disappearing without a trace.

Two industry guys here interested in putting a build program together, which is v. cool from my standpoint, as now I have some locals to chat Moths with. And a 3rd reportedly en route from points East - could go from zero to four boats in six months, which would be pretty good growth for a single club I think. And that is without anyone buying any boats.

John G. put in a Cameo out of the blue, literally, the way he usually does. Somehow it always works out, no matter how last minute or where he is holed-up on his hold-overs. I must not have enough of a life or something, but it is always great to see him and get the latest word from down there.

I thought I was over traveling but it would be fun to get down south and meet all these antipodean internet personas in person, as the class seems to draw lots of characters.

More testing on the wkend if I can get some thumbscrews lined up. Need to put pen to computer screen on that project.

Splooge-n-Go

2008-09-13T22:07:00.000-07:00

Decided I was having some trunk flex issues with the new trunk so rocked the methacrylate and some old nomex/carbon plate this morning and gave it some little rampart-like buttresses, more horiz than vert if that makes any sense.

I have learned from Gui not to let any repair job stand between me and the water if the wind is blowing - that guy is a genius at going sailing no matter what. Bill broke Gui's gantry one afternoon, and rather than pack it in, Gui took a few spanners, duct taped them onto the broken tube like his boat was the Terminator, and went right back out. The "Don't take no for an answer" school of Mothing.

So when it was time to put my thrice-repaired tramp back on and head for the club today, but the little voice in my head just wouldn't let me out of the garage without some little rampy buttresses, the thought of Gui's spanners, some Home Depot methacrylate and the belt sander somehow converged in my head, and BAM - a little carbon pyramid, minus a couple of sides. Perfect.

The boat is behaving itself really well for having just been gutted; not ready for prime time but in flat conditions doing everything a Moth should do, and some things better than Moths have done. So that is gratifying.

The lumps are more challenging but I am progressively coming to terms with them. Learning some lessons the easy way and some the hard; had one great pitchpole today which was fun as it hadn't happened in some time.

Upwind seems pretty well sorted though it had a mind of its own through the lumpy stuff at the end of the channel today and didn't want to stay in the water at times.

First foiling gybes on the new foil, which was sort of exciting. You don't do that with a Moth until you can trust it to hold altitude pretty well. Small step, but progress nonetheless - it's only the third time I've sailed the new foil so I feel pretty good about how things are going.

Toward dusk with the wind fading I attempted to obey the 5mph speed limit coming back up the channel, but could not manage to go that slowly when foiling seemed possible. So I heated it up on a reach aimed straight at the windward rock jetty, which was only about 200 feet away. The fishermen and I are getting accustomed to each other; some of the kids freak out when they see me heading straight for them, only to pull a last minute tack or whatever, but mostly people just watch. This time I got airborne just in time to bear off in the lee of the rocks and go foiling downwind for a few hundred yards right along the jetty, maybe fifteen feet to leeward of it. I was so close I could hear people speaking quite clearly to each other in quiet voices as I foiled past. That was the only noise apart from the splash of my wand. Eventually a lull forced me to gybe away, heading straight for the other jetty now and a shoal, approaching rapidly. Pulled out the third gybe of the day and hooked back up in time to keep it rolling. Now I was perfectly lined up on the big boat finish line with a whole fleet of 44 foot whatevers behind me in the channel. The new foil holds altitude lots better than the old in the light stuff - kept thinking I would drop off foils as the breeze was really light now, but I just kept foiling straight across their finish line, at which point the RC were kind enough to give me a hoot and a cheer. Amazing how foilers continue to elicit these spontaneous gestures of support from people - I'd have thought fatigue would have set in by now. Then again, I am the only foiler here.

More sorting tomorrow. Still plenty to be done.

Aldous

2008-09-09T23:20:00.000-07:00

Feel like I've been derelict in blogging lately, taking advantage of everyone else's industriousness. So thanks to everyone who's been posting - I'm sure sometimes it seems a chore but I enjoy reading my way 'round the Mothosphere.

I suppose I should have an opinion on the new Payne/Amac effort, but a) who cares what I think and b) so far it looks just like a Guillotine. I'm sure it will do all the right things eventually; it will also do some things better than have been done before, if history is any guide.

What my own effort lacks in funding and sex appeal, it makes up for in chutzpah. I think I understand why Amac does this stuff though - it is hugely satisfying and great fun to design and build something and then sort it out on the water. Now if only I could find a way to get paid for it, we'd really have something.

Whoever wrote that interview of the top BR and Prowler sailors on the UK site, my hat is off to you. Just the sort of thing the class needs to have as a resource. I have to admit that after reading the various opinions on everything, however, I was less convinced that anyone really knows what these boats actually do or why. You have a good sailor like John Harris with a solid boat but no real inclination toward design or construction win out over Amac, who has probably the most sophisticated technical understanding of Moths in the class, though it was obviously very close. I think what this means is that there is no substitute for sailing a lot if you want to win things.

Whilst sorting out my boat, Douglas Adams quotes keep coming to mind. Though he is widely quoted as saying the secret to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss, the second part of this adminition is often overlooked. So here, to refresh everyone's memories, is the quote, which I purloined from some website claiming to purloin it from Hitchiker's Guide. As it is copyrighted, I will probably go to jail, but this is just too relevant to Mothing to pass up, and I'm certain everyone reading this blog has a copy of the book at home anyway.

How To Fly

© by Douglas Adams

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.

That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it.

It is notoriously difficult to prize your attention away from these three things during the split second you have at your disposal. Hence most people's failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating and spectacular sport.

If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phyllum and/or personal inclination) or a bomb going off in your vicinty, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches above it in what might seem to be a slightly foolish manner.

Waft higher and higher. Try a few swoops, gentle ones at first, then drift above the treetops breathing regularly.

DO NOT WAVE AT ANYBODY.

When you have done this a few times you will find the moment of distraction rapidly easier and easier to achieve.

You will also learn about how to land properly, which is something you will almost certainly screw up, and screw up badly, on your first attempt.

There are private clubs you can join which help you achieve the all-important moment of distraction. They hire people with surprising bodies or opinions to leap out from behind bushes and exhibit and/or explain them at the critical moments. Few genuine hitchhikers will be able to afford to join these clubs, but some may be able to get temporary employment at them.

"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." - Jeff Goll

2008-08-25T22:19:00.000-07:00

Back on the water after a two month hiatus. That was rough; mothing was the centrepiece of my physical training program, such as it was. I had to resort to mountain bike riding of all things - tough, but good company. Now back to the water. I am sore after only a short session.

I have learned to multiply my estimated times for any major construction project by about 2.5 to get them to correlate with reality. This is mostly down to job-related issues, but also to my habit of perseverating over design options. There are people who can motor right through this stuff and crank out functional items, but these people are mostly professional, or have done it before in some capacity. When it is the first time and there is no instruction manual, lots of options present themselves. Frequently several are tried before the first one proves the most feasible and achievable - a design orbit of sorts.

The short version is that it works. It is not perfect, and there may be some heartache involved in getting it perfect, but overall I am amazed that it is as close to a functional setup as it seems to be straight out of the box. The amount of empirical guesswork involved in getting to the water yesterday was considerable, and yet there I was, taking off. It does everything it is supposed to do - not always to the proper degrees, but what do you expect with only an hour on the water? At any rate the required steps from here are iterative, in areas where iteration was anticipated and easily accommodated. It is a keeper. Need to sand the foil to something better than 150 now I guess. I am still a bit concerned about breaking foils off, but a lot less so than previously. I should be able to sail this one until v2.0 is ready.

I think I have had a glimpse of the future, but time will tell. It always does.

Rocklands

2008-08-12T22:11:00.000-07:00

When I lived in Georgetown (DC) there was this little wood-fired barbeque place right down the street that was entirely too convenient and tasty. I had it on speed dial so I would not have to wait through the line at the cash register; I would saunter in, pick up my order immediately and sit down to eat at the common counter. On the wall by the door hung an incredibly massive chain-like device made of cast iron, with each link having a different shape, plenty of spikes sticking out, etc. It looked like something from a medival dungeon; a human anchor of sorts to keep people from wandering too far. The sign next to it on the wall said "What is this?" I think there used to be a TV show where people were asked to identify found objects - generally metal ones no doubt plowed to the surface by farmers. That's where I get all my obscure, impossibly weird metal objects - the farm.

Godfrey N. Hounsfield, in accepting the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine for inventing the CT scanner, said of his childhood:

I was born and brought up near a village in Nottinghamshire and in my childhood enjoyed the freedom of the rather isolated country life. After the first world war, my father had bought a small farm, which became a marvellous playground for his five children. My two brothers and two sisters were all older than I and, as they naturally pursued their own more adult interests, this gave me the advantage of not being expected to join in, so I could go off and follow my own inclinations.

The farm offered an infinite variety of ways to do this. At a very early age I became intrigued by all the mechanical and electrical gadgets which even then could be found on a farm; the threshing machines, the binders, the generators. But the period between my eleventh and eighteenth years remains the most vivid in my memory because this was the time of my first attempts at experimentation, which might never have been made had I lived in a city. In a village there are few distractions and no pressures to join in at a ball game or go to the cinema, and I was free to follow the trail of any interesting idea that came my way. I constructed electrical recording machines; I made hazardous investigations of the principles of flight, launching myself from the tops of haystacks with a home-made glider; I almost blew myself up during exciting experiments using water-filled tar barrels and acetylene to see how high they could be waterjet propelled. It may now be a trick of the memory but I am sure that on one occasion I managed to get one to an altitude of 1000 feet!

Now that's my kind of Nobel Laureate.

So years from now when my moth is hanging in the rafters of the barn getting shot full of holes by grandchildren with air rifles, parts will start to fall off, and they will probably have no idea what things like this are for:

Come to think of it, I'm not so sure what it is for either. But maybe that will never happen, as the barn, built in 1915, somehow got hit by the Jet Stream last week in a severe Bow Echo and was completely shoved off its foundation. This barn has seen a few wind storms before, and has been progressively reinforced over the years, which is why it was not simply destroyed. I would say it wasn't bolted down firmly enough, but the winds were clocked at 115mph only a few miles to the west, and the 5/8" steel bolts holding my cousin's grain bin to its foundation are still in the concrete - well half of them, anyway. Every last one sheared off, at which point the bin flew several hundred feet into a field. This kind of damage extends from South Dakota to Chicago - a distance of over 500 miles. Tornado schmornado - they should really be making natural disaster movies about Bow Echoes.

What all this has to do with Mothing is anyone's guess, but then these things aren't always obvious until later. So I'm going with it.

Scott made some interesting comments on the future of the class and all I have to say is, well, if you want to be me, be me, and if you want to be you, be you. 'Cause there's a million things to do, ya know that there are - ya know that there are - you know that there AAAAHHHRRR...

Dawn Goes Down to Day

2008-08-05T21:48:00.000-07:00

I used to love the forum on the Australian moth site. It was full of all sorts of technical discussion on the latest developments. At some point people stopped posting stuff and it started to, well, suck. Which is OK because it remains the only Moth forum on the planet that I know of. So I still go back there and re-read all those old posts from time to time, if only to remind myself of an age in Mothing when people were less guarded and trying to help each other along.

But no one really posts much useful information anymore - technical information is guarded like it's the family jewels. And maybe that's OK - after all, if the last few years have proven anything, it's that there are far more people interested in sailing foilers than in designing and building them. So if you are one of the few people developing new things, you are in the minority, and the stuff you are making is potentially more valuable than it ever was before - potentially.

The bar has been set pretty high and there is less low-hanging fruit to pick, or so it would seem. To move the current state of development ahead, you really have to put some effort into it. This puts the process out of reach of most amateur builders, or at least those without access to good software and CNC machines, which is pretty much saying the same thing.

It appears increasingly that the only people with enough time to do development work of any real value and sail at a high level are people who neither build nor blog. It doesn't hurt to be independently wealthy either. Or to dream.

I keep waiting for John Harris to post something about the setup he used to win Worlds. It's always nice when a champion does this to sort of clue everyone else in about what worked. Perhaps the class is too contentious for this sort of thing nowdays, but if so, it's a real pity.

If the House is Rockin', Don't Bother Knockin'

2008-07-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

Pretty interesting times up in the fluoro suite on 5th this morning, when a 5.4 Richter earthquake set things shaking. Apart from my patient deciding she didn't want to be secured to the table in any way despite being five feet from the floor, it was all pretty surreal. There was about a second-long pause while the phenomenon registered in my brain like the answer to a quiz show Question: What makes entire buildings bounce up and down and sway continuously, without any warning whatsoever? Um...let me see...ooh it's on the tip of my tongue...I'll have it in another two tenths of a second...AHA! An EARTHQUAKE! But of course I was too busy trying to keep the patient from falling off the table to say much apart from "That's an earthquake" in response to her "WHAT'S THAT!?". In an odd sense it was nice to have a patient freak out about something objective - generally it's the misplaced expectation of great anguish that is most difficult to manage. With an earthquake, there's no doubt: something weird is definitely happening. Fear is entirely appropriate.

Fortunately, steel girders and modern structural engineering being what they are, the whole works just gets going like a big spring and oscillates for awhile. At least this time. Someone said "maybe this means we won't have a big one for awhile", but I'm not sure there is any reason to feel confident with seven or eight local active fault lines crisscrossing the immediate area overlying a convergence zone between two techtonic plates.

Phones are worthless immediately after a quake. We couldn't even make calls within the hospital there were so many people on the phone. Someone should really make a public service announcement: IN CASE OF EARTHQUAKE, UNLESS YOU ARE PHYSICALLY TRAPPED BY FIRE, DEBRIS, RISING WATER OR OTHER IMMEDIATE LIFE-THREATENING EMERGENCY, KINDLY STAY OFF THE TELEPHONE SO THAT PEOPLE WITH REAL PROBLEMS CAN USE IT. Instead, all the lines get tied up by people calling their friends in New York or vice versa to tell them they are OK. Let's just presume, disasters being what they are, that barring a major pyroclastic flow or tidal wave in your particular zip code, if there is no immediate structural damage to anything around you, the vast majority of people are LIKELY TO BE JUST FINE. No need to call and reassure each other - this is not Chixulub, a nuclear holocaust or the Permian extinction, it's just an earthquake. Assume the best and if you're wrong, well, there's likely not much you can do about it anyway. You'll find out soon enough. In the meantime, do your job.

I did learn however that text messaging is a great way to keep people in the loop. Apparently, from a data standpoint it puts far fewer demands on the system, and even at the height of the post-EQ hysteria I was able to receive and send text messages without any problem whatsoever. Pretty robust stuff.

After they took us out of "EXPECT MASSIVE CASUALTIES TO FLOOD YOUR DEPARTMENT MOMENTARILY" mode, life went pretty much back to normal, except the news stations couldn't stop talking about it all afternoon. They found one brick wall somewhere that fell over, and kept playing the image in a continuous loop to indicate the scale of the disaster. All that was missing was a headline: "Brick Wall Falls Over In Garment District - Mayor Holds Sidewalk Memorial Service for 127 Fallen Cockroaches and one Rat". Said one surviving Roach: "I've lost everyone - brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, my 54 babies - all gone in an instant. As though being a cockroach weren't enough of a sign, I now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that There Is No God. There is only Franz Kafka."

I halfway expected the Moth to have jumped off the sawhorses or been crushed by falling paint cans, but it was still sitting there when I arrived home, waiting patiently for me to install a final bulkhead. We're on the back stretch now and for the first time in several weeks hydrofoiling is starting to look halfway plausible again, which is always a good inspiration.

Zeno's Paradox

2008-07-23T21:02:00.000-07:00

Just like the Australians to bust out with the Moth Blog Worlds and appoint all Australian judges. I suppose it should rationally go to the country with the highest top three finishers at worlds, and nobody else seems to be taking the initiative, so I say more power. To the people.

Funny thing about virtual mothing - it's a lot like a parallel universe to real mothing, and we know that parallel lines never meet. Stuff happens over here, but nothing happens over there, and vice-versa. So while I'm sitting here typing I should really be out in the garage trimming bulkheads, but after working eleven hours sticking sharp objects into people I stopped off and had a nice meal and a beer at the local watering hole, and now it's 9pm and I just want to chill out and do a little virtual mothing while my brain decompresses. Perfect. It's like somebody said - those who can, do, and those who can't, write. When impossibly charismatic and beautiful barmaids introduce themselves and tell me to have another beer, I do. But it interferes with my writing.

There have been a lot of hints here about stuff happening in my garage. When I am done with them and have had a chance to see how they work, I will post about it, but not until then. It might cost me a place on the podium at Blog Worlds, but whoever said that stuff about swords and pens has obviously never been in a swordfight. I mean, where is the Amac blog about the development of the Bladerider? Speaking of which, if you should venture out to Skye, be sure to look this guy up. It's in a little industrial park, but well worth the trip. And be sure to order yours about a year in advance - just like your Moth.

Mothus Interruptus

2008-07-02T23:11:00.000-07:00

Feeling like a Gary Larson cartoon in the garage today, the one where the surgeons are operating and one says to another, as the stomach goes flying onto the floor, "Save that bit. We might need it". If a moth had a stomach, it might well be the daggerboard trunk, and there it was in pieces on the floor. Beautiful foil-shaped hole in the bottom of the boat - pretty, but not fast. Oh dear. Negative space, right there in my Moth.

Fun to see the posts from the boys at Worlds; much more real-time posting this year so far than last. It will be interesting to see who can keep their blogging together during the racing - the mark of a true Jedi (assuming of course you managed to con Virgin Atlantic into thinking your Moth is in fact a windsurfer, which is the first level of proficiency). As I recall, WPNSA's internet access was not fantastic, though that will likely have changed since 2005. Any number of internet cafes in town though.

I must confess I am secretly enjoying my self-imposed moth hiatus. Right now mothing every day for two weeks sounds like a bizarre form of torture, like being on a crack binge (not that I would know what that is like).

George had a great idea today - sort of like a Netflix of moth foils out of Annapolis, except you send them your foil, they tow it up and down a tank, and then they paint it for you instead of paying you $5/month. Sounds like a pretty good deal, especially if your boat happens to be disemboweled at the moment. Sign me up!

Switched over to mountain biking while the Moth recovers from surgery. LA is actually a fantastic town for it; climbing up my favorite trail is one of the few things I do that gets my heart rate up higher than mothing.

Tools of the Trade

2008-06-27T20:53:00.000-07:00

Hope the mystery Moth sailor in the photo won't mind my posting it for the mothosphere...sometimes a still can convey motion in a way video can only hope to emulate.

With all eyes focused sharply on Weymouth and the blog posts trailing off like a mid summer marine layer in LA, one would think all the non-traveling moths on Earth were simply sitting in sheds, dormant with envy. But we are all up to things, perhaps in inverse proportion to the frequency of our blog posts.

We have all kinds of foil development and testing going on on both coasts, a bunch of home builds going on, people talking about building masts, and French dudes stuck on the beltway outside DC headed for Goddard Space Flight. Winglets playing hooky in NX5. Who would ever have thought.

Having recently blown out yet another set of tramps I am on a quest for something more worthy of the application than ripstop dacron. Complete crap that stuff. Might be hitting the tramps too hard with my knees on the tacks, but I don't think so. And I don't think I'm asking too much to expect more than six months (or less) from a set of tramps.

Got some vang rings. Not Australian, but they have the virtue of costing $9 a copy rather than $40, and they are even titanium. Maybe someday I'll upgrade but these seem pretty trick. Rolled them around on the desk a bit at work today absentmindedly. Not one person who saw them asked what they were for.

Some discussion re: weather in Weymouth and all I have to say is Good Luck predicting it. In 2005 the International Canoe Worlds were there; it blew 20+ for four days of sailing before the regatta, then incredibly light and shifty for a few days, then moderate breeze for the final two, and a nice 15-18 for the New York Cup. Real smorgasbord.

Looking forward to some great internet mothing over the next few weeks and to seeing what new gadgets and ideas show up there, going whatever speed.

Dubai, we have a problem...

2008-05-26T19:39:00.000-07:00

Just reading FigJam's pre-regatta "what difference does it all make" post and concluded he clearly needs to go on over HERE and have a little fun with the demotivator generator, a la:

Apologies to Oskar but he is at least credited on the photo. I have no idea who the sailor is, but someone is sure to tell me shortly.

The Eastern Front

2008-05-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

Apparently I am too stupid to have learned anything from Napoleon and Hitler's mistakes, carrying on in a multiple front war. On the Western Front I am figuring out how to sail a moth, and on the the Eastern Front I am reinventing some critical parts of the boat. As I have observed before in these pages, these activities are to some extent mutually exclusive.

Last week was devoted mostly to sailing, planning for a small weekend regatta. Gybes are OK in most conditions now, but tacks have some catching up to do, as I discovered watching Charlie and Dalton sail away on the upwinds. I would normally have done my best to attribute this to their superior technology, but Charlie then proceeded to switch boats with me and the result was the same: he who tacks fastest wins by quite a bit. I also discovered that I have been sailing a bit too high an angle upwind and that VMG is a lot better going a tad faster. Overall Dalton consistently first to windward mark, then Charlie, then me, then Jack, and the order at the first mark would be the order of finish in a two lap race.

My only moment of glory was in the final race of the first day, which was a two mile screaming reach to the end of the breakwater with a gybe and then a single gybe run up the channel to the club. It was blowing 20-plus and the reach was extremely fast; it was impossible to head up at all as the boat would simply speed up and there was not enough righting moment to cope with the increased speed. So to get around the jetty I had to oversheet, slow down, then sail a bit higher and bear off again. There is nothing spectacular about this apart from the fact that Charlie, Jack and Dalton had not sailed in that sort of condition very much so their boats had serious stacking problems all the way home, despite maxing out rudder cant. Before I learned how to gybe I spent a lot of time blasting around this Bay in much choppier water, so I had the boat set-up pretty well for it. The rudder did vent a time or two but non-fatally. As a result I won the race by about 30 minutes, after stacking once in the serious lumps while trying to gybe, then foiling all the way up the channel going double the speed limit.

There is some interesting rigging creeping into the class from all these skiff sailors, much of which I intend to copy as it is simply better than what my boat came with. But none of it makes any difference if you can't tack reliably.

This week I am focusing more on building stuff in hopes of showing the various people around the world who have helped me with this project that it in fact is moving along. Speed has never been my forte when it comes to building, and this project is a bit problematic in that I am doing things that no one has done to a Moth before. I'm reasonably confident that it will work, but no one can really tell me how to build it because there are no precedents. So I spend a lot of time thinking about the various ways of building things before building them. Bill almost had me talked out of my new trunk design yesterday, but thinking more about it his idea would require quite a bit of fancy designing in CAD that I don't have time for. My current plan will work as proof of concept, at the price of a little convenience in rigging. Next iteration will be a bit more user-friendly.

So the new trunk in process:

Time to figure out how to drill 440c; I'm not terribly optimistic but it has to be done. Might have to wait for the lathe though as I'm not sure I can hold it still enough in the drill press vise. Going to start on the second foil also as I have a few ideas on how to make it stronger and if others' experience is any guide I will need another soon anyway.

One Step Forward

2008-05-06T09:49:00.000-07:00

and a step or two back again. That's how this mothing stuff seems to go. You start to feel competent in one aspect of sailing the boat, and then conditions change and suddenly you realize you didn't know quite as much about things as you had hoped.

As usual the forecast was wrong yesterday and a nice southwesterly came up just as I arrived at ABYC. Having never sailed from there before I launched and proceeded to sail out the channel. This was more than a little challenging, as it was basically upwind in this sort of breeze:

made even more interesting by the eddies on the back side of the windward jetty. In any event there was more clowning around than usual just getting to a place where I could foil without running into a pile of rocks in five seconds.

There was some serious lumpiness running; I have never sailed out of a wave going to windward before but definitely ventilated the main foil at least once and I wasn't flying very high. So I pointed up behind the outer sea wall where the water was flatter, practising some tacks. I was just starting to get into a rhythm with this when I noticed the mainsheet was parting; it had about four strands of core left at the block. I guess end-for-ending it the third time was a mistake. Anyway capsize, tie knot, end for end again, and sail home. Downwind.

I have been pretty happy with the gybes lately but I drifted far enough down in the mainsheet fix to get out into the lumps again and I have to say with gusts definitely over 20mph and the newly reknotted mainsheet about a foot too short it was a handful. Downhill speeds are just fantastic in the puffs and combined with lumpiness, choosing the point to gybe is key, along with the usual adjustments to keep the boat in the water when the forces of aerodynamics are trying to launch everything into the sky.

So I capsized more than usual with the mainsheet coming out of my hand on the gybes, but managed to make it back in OK. New mainsheet on order.

Next item of business: new trunk.

Ventilation Whoas

2008-04-24T22:23:00.000-07:00

Little thread on Sailing Anarchy got me thinking about ventilation. I'm sure this is probably obvious to anyone who has watched the videos, but this is my take on the phenomenon.

Main foil sails through a small trough (wand wake, or just bad luck) and gets air onto the low part of the strut, which is rapidly immersed again, Whereupon ambient pressure goes WAY down from atmospheric, and then that little bit of air next to the foil just progressively expands to fill the entire low pressure region - PV-nRT? Air expands to fill the region of the foil where ambient pressure is lower than atmospheric - if it were higher than atmospheric then air bubble should not expand at all or "move". Amazing how much space air takes up when the pressure goes down.

That's my theory and I'm sticking with it. You need a way to get air onto a part of the foil that is normally continuously immersed - whether AOA sucking it down a vortex from the surface, or some sort of local temporary thing just putting it down there (e.g. hand of God). From there it just spreads like a turbocharged fungus.

I think putting fences on the leading edge is wrong. Bubble is always on the aft part of foil on the laminar flow sections and propagating down the concave part aft of max thickness. Rudder might be different story if you steer too hard at the wrong speed, but once established these foil farts all propagate the same way - down the trailing part of the foil, and onto the lifting foil if it gets that far, where the pressure is even lower...

Maybe (colder) more viscous water makes the pressure lower on aft part of foil. Seems like it might. Will have to try it out with a scale model and some maple syrup. And pancakes - no tow test is complete without pancakes and a wormhole or two.

Naval Gazing

2008-04-18T23:46:00.000-07:00

Trolling around YouTube waiting for the latest layer of epoxy to kick tonight I encountered an interesting video which recapitulates something I first considered several months ago with respect to Mothing, namely the degree to which the class has followed and will continue to follow an open- vs. closed-source information and development model.

When I first began following the class, I had no first-hand exposure to Moths, and this remained the case for seven or eight years until purchasing my first boat from abroad in early 2007. This remove allowed me to project all sorts of ideals onto the class which likely bore little resemblance to actual class practices, but seemed nonetheless attractive.

First and foremost was the notion that in this fleet, as opposed to nearly every other dinghy class on Earth, contributions from regular class members to the development of sailing boats
are encouraged and in fact formalized as a goal within the class rules. To wit:

The intention of these class rules is to give the designer and builder the fullest liberty in design and construction, within these rules to develop and produce faster boats.

Though obviously critical for any class with "development" aspirations, such a clearly-stated policy of promoting contributions from "users" of a technology to the development of that technology bears a strong resemblance to the open software movement, of which Linux seems the dominant example.

This "open-source" philosophy is essentially a value judgment on the part of the class, betting that the cumulative contributions of many talented designers and sailors will outperform, if you will, the efforts of any one organization in terms of moving Moth design forward over the long haul. It is also a powerful statement about the value and importance of development itself.

What we have seen recently with the success of Bladerider is in some ways a challenge to this thinking: a corporate entity with commercial interests designing a very competitive and innovative boat and investing heavily in making that boat perform better than its competitors, many of which predate the Bladerider. Some might argue that the Bladerider's success stems in large part (or entirely) from ideas and concepts borrowed from the common practices of the class, including the wand-driven flap, the tilting gantry rudder, and other now-common foiling moth features. Be that as it may, one must nonetheless acknowledge the technical ability which has gone into developing these systems beyond their previous levels of function, only to be copied again and employed by other amateur moth-builders in a kind of reflected wave.

Whatever the reason, the Bladerider has driven an expansion of Moth sailing into populations of sailors who previously seem to have steadfastly ignored the Moth. This "user" population comprises some stellar boathandlers and sailors who seem to have limited interest in the wholesale development aspect of the boat, preferring instead to take a known platform and work diligently to learn to extract the maximum speed from it. This growth has injected new vitality and enthusiasm into the class internationally and has facilitated modest fleet growth even in countries as dinghy averse as the US.

Patents are certainly a potential issue for the class. At least one Moth manufacturer has applied for patents on several of its boat's features. So the issue is real, and that reality invites the class to look collectively at it and take a position.

One might for instance require that all technology used on Moths be licensed to the class under the GPL or something equivalent. Exemptions could be created for commercially available blocks and other commonly used devices - or not, as simple non-patented substitutes are available for almost all current Moth hardware.

But this is hardly realistic: no company will work hard to develop ideas and test them if other builders can simply come along behind and reap the benefits without incurring any costs. At any rate they are unlikely to present a problem to an individual seeking to build a one-off copy of a commercial product, which is the most common objection raised against them. So patents are here to stay.

None of this would have made it onto this blog were it not for the following video, which jogged my memory by providing some examples (mountain biking etc.) of other technologies that have emerged through the user-level efforts of dedicated amateurs, following (in many cases unconsciously) open source models similar to what the Moth class has expressly promoted for decades.

The Moth of Narcissus

2008-04-13T23:01:00.000-07:00

Perusing a personals advert from a comely young lass recently, it occurred to me that the reason she needed a personal ad was that she didn't have TIME for a boyfriend. Between her triathalons, incessant tourist vacations to exotic lands, work, and non-stop swimming-running-biking during the week, a guy would have to be a triathelete to spend any time with her. "He needs to be someone who can keep up with me" the ad went on, "someone with a brain, not a couch potato, who is creative and interested in learning new things".

Well, I have news for you sweetheart: all those guys are just as self absorbed as you are. What they need is someone who isn't trying to win triathalons, someone who is into, well, stuff that doesn't compete as much with what they are doing. It isn't that one shouldn't want to be a triathelete; it's only that if you are one then maybe a couch potato is precisely what the doctor ordered: to cook your high-starch meals, iron your skimpy lycra suits, and drag your tired ass and all your equipment around the country to your meets while holding down a job so you can focus on your sport. After all, the last thing a narcissist needs in a mate is another narcissist.

So when I see ads like that, I wonder: is modern singles society just a bunch of narcissistic, nutrition-obsessed, neurotic exercise freaks talking past each other? And is this why so many single people are out there in their mid to late 30s - ages when women were once considered old maids, and men confirmed bachelors?

If so, it's not looking good for yours truly. Work, sailing and building are crowding all those would-be evenings out, well, out.

Breeze came late to Long Beach today, catching me at my computer. So it was a mad dash to drag the Moth out from beneath its rubber tree camouflage and rock on down to the beach. Only the beach today was different: all winter long I have been wondering why I am the only one on the beach when I go sailing, and the answer is that Californians don't consider it a good beachgoing day unless it is over 80 and sunny. So the beach was packed with people, the water was an interesting shade of stinky, and had lots of grass floating in the surf. The wind was dying already around 3:30 when I launched but out beyond the breakwater it held on for a good long time and I had some nice gybing runs down behind various cruising boats who must think I am completely mad - gybing every 30 seconds or so, making it most of the time but occasionally screwing something up enough to capsize. As the breeze moderated I wasn't even going downwind very fast in this mode - just getting up to speed on a reach before pointing it down and going for it yet again. At first I was depressed as they seemed to have gone better last weekend, but by the end of the day I had regained the lost ground and even began to appreciate new subtleties of the gybe.

Then the wind shut off and I had a very slow sail back to shore, where couples feuded in the parking lot and various children attempted to commit suicide by running full tilt out onto Ocean Boulevard faster than their fat, inattentive parents could catch them up - but not for lack of screaming. One thing drunk, beachgoing Californians seem to do very well is shout completely trivial or private information at each other loud enough to make you wonder if there is some emergency at hand. It makes the occasional "stop you little shit or you'll get run over by a car" seem halfway normal even.

So in my ripe old age I am beginning to appreciate why yacht clubs were formed in the first place. They may have their issues, but at least one does not have to kick bags of half-eaten fast food out of the way to put one's boat on the trailer in the parking lot.

2008-04-11T20:23:00.001-07:00

Two very interesting videos posted recently.

First is Rohan's footage of himself sailing downwind in breeze at Garda. Really nice clips. Good to know that really good sailors look really ugly going downhill in that crap too, except his gybes, which are fantastic. If you've tried it, your heart starts to beat faster just watching. And it isn't the music:

Second is JPZ posting two vids with spectacular real-time footage of a Prowler rudder ventilating under pretty ordinary circumstances. It appears the section is pretty much always ventilating a little bit, and when the lifting foil is close enough to the surface this propagates and stalls both foils. In the second video the tip clearly hits the surface though. First time I have seen so many examples on one clip. Rock on JPZ! (Who IS this guy anyway?)

Smooth Sailing

2008-04-06T23:23:00.000-07:00

I was thinking recently about a perfect Moth day, in the best of all possible worlds. What I came up with was get up after a good night's sleep, eat something, stumble out to laundry room en route to garage, grab coverall and don in ambulatory fashion, kick on some clogs, mix a bit of goo and glom the bottom of a hydrofoil on using obligatory "every clamp in the joint" technique, throw sailing stuff in truck, hook boat up, drive to Long Beach for a sail where there is a steady 10-15 from the southwest. Sail for a few hours, ideally in close enough proximity to other fleets of racing dinghies that they can appreciate what they are missing. Practice tacking and gybing in the flatwater lee of a long seawall all afternoon. Make progress, feel reasonably in tune with the boat, have something click in your boathandling so that gybing no longer seems impossible and is in fact borderline predictable. Go in, derig, fix a few things, change, stop by the club to snarf a few Hors d'ouerves, and drive home, stopping en route to pick up stranded, post-collegiate, cute but ditzy in that narcissistic "I'm out of college and I don't know what to do with my life, so I'm hitchhiking around the country instead of getting a job" way American hitchhiking backpackers from Mini Mart in Compton and buy diesel for $4.19 a gallon. Come home, crack the foil out of the mold, put it in a heat box with a controller to post-cure for eight hours at 135F, put some pasta on the stove, and eat it while blogging a bit about the day's events. Now what's not to like about a day like that? Sort of isolating, all this foiling, but at least I saw Charlie and Hans out on the water and had a chance to say hello. Owe Charlie a big one for reminding me to replace the tiller centering bungee I so foolishly removed at Coronado. Big mistake, that. Makes a HUGE difference coming out of the gybes.

Have to echo Mr Dubai moth guy when he says "I LOVE SAILING MOTHS". You have to earn a Moth's love, which is notoriously fickle and can waver at the slightest unexpected ferry wake. But when it's going well, it's REALLY going well. Even surfed a powerboat wake upwind for half a mile today - that was a first on foils. Just sort of bizarre to be sailing twenty yards off their stern for that long.

The sailing shoes have sailed their last. Time to bust out a new pair from the archive - too bad they no longer make the Lotus kayaking water shoe as it is possibly the greatest sailing shoe ever, apart from the Converse Chuck Taylor.

That's about it. Going back to centerline sheeting, after monkeying around with boom sheeting for months, which I adopted rather accidentally. Just better to have it somewhere predictable when everything is heading South.

Sorting Things Out

2008-03-30T21:08:00.001-07:00

Above: Long beach pier data 3/30/08
Below: Seal Beach wind sensor (other end of the sailing area - a bit more sheltered)

Pulled the blue pajamas out for one final fling today as the forecast said breeze and the air and water temps are both about 50. Borrowed a page from Bora's book and spent the afternoon in one big "Don't take no for an answer" gybing session of figure 8s. Too much rudder lift at first had me wonder what was going on but turned out my little hinge covers were actually doing something. Wand is too darned stiff so downsizing the fishing pole. Making some progress with the gybes but truth be told probably not the best conditions to be trying them in as it was sort of game on. A bit more sorting out to do with switching hands but overall reasonably happy with my progress. Sailed quite late and was the last one off the water after all 30 or 40 kiteboarders packed it in. Should have quit sooner as was definitely slipping backward by the end. All in all a lovely day, though I did see one dead seal which was sort of depressing. I guess they have to die sometime. Not many sailboats out today - thought I saw some A-cats in the distance when I was rigging but it seemed pretty gnarly for a mast that tall today and they all zipped in before I got out.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

2008-03-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower.
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

- Robert Frost

Stop lights had me in an existential frame of mind today. Here in LA everyone drives everywhere, and the people who stubbornly refuse to drive or use public transit get run over. It's pretty much that simple. So everyone takes two tons of steel with them wherever they go. And they seem to love to accelerate that 4,000lbs of steel to amazing velocities before encountering the next physical obstruction, which is generally a traffic light, requiring them to press their shiny disc brakes into service and send the remaining 30% of the energy they just used to accelerate themselves to Warp 9, back into the atmosphere as heat. So when the BMW next to me floors it as the light turns green, I look on with wonder as it flies down the road, only to stop at the next light and wait for me to catch up. At which point I wonder: are we all in some sort of cosmic race that no one told me about?

On the race course, it's all clearly defined, and we accept that getting to the finish even one second sooner than the other guy is significant. After all, on a Moth, the benefits of skill actually do translate into significant amounts of time and distance - never mind that the finish line is generally in the same place you started - and who knows? Someday you may be tapped to sail your Moth up the Alaskan coastline in the dead of winter delivering pertussis vaccine, and lives may hang in the balance. One missed gybe and little Jimmy doesn't make it. Kind of makes you feel good about all that practice now, doesn't it?

And evenings in the garage? Simple. Decades hence sailors will still refer to the pioneers of foiling as giants among men - like Paul Butler and the sliding seat. Never mind that sliding seats were in use by others well before him - somehow he gets the credit, which probably beats winning any race when it comes to infamy.

So my advice to all you budding foilers is to give up on beating Si Payne and Rohan and the rest of the really great sailors who spend incredible amounts of time figuring out how to sail Moths faster than everyone else. They are probably more focused than you, have made more time in their lives for this than you have, and likely had more talent to begin with - unless you happen to be an Olympic level sailor yourself (in which case what the hell are you doing reading my blog)? The rest of you, think up some useful little gizmo or technique that pushes foiling technology forward in a useful way, name it, and show up at a regatta somewhere. Whether it's a May Stick, Veal heel or an F-box, your place in the history of the class will be secure, and forty years from now no one will care whether you finished first in the racing. After all: there is only one World Champion, but there is almost certainly still a lot of low-hanging technological fruit out there to be picked in this Golden Age of hydrofoil sailing.

Worst case scenario? It doesn't work. But in the end it's better to regret the things you have done than the things you haven't. Or is it?

Off to see the Wizard

2008-03-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

Ah, Spring! Season of slightly more reliable winds, fair temperatures, no heating bills, and cautious optimism.

Big weekend for mothing both here in the US and in Australia, where the NSW titles are underway. For us it's the first ever (as far as any of us know) Moth Pacific Coast Championships, at Coronado Yacht Club in San Diego, CA. Over ten boats are expected, with four journeying down the coast from as far as Seattle, one from San Francisco, one from Detroit and around six locally - possibly more. Woo Hoo.

The fleet is out today tuning up without me, as I had other obligations. Occasionally I question whether I have my priorities straight, but it was very difficult to arrange coverage for Easter weekend at all, let alone the Friday preceding, especially given that I called in a favor to get LAST Friday covered. I have one of "those" kinds of jobs I guess you might say - no rock stars here - unless they're sick anyway.

Foils are coming along nicely, but it's time to go sailing for a change. New proto sail for the boat so will be interesting to see how that goes. Apart from that it's all in the corners and whether you can put them when and where you want them without cashing it all in.

Moving On

2008-03-12T00:43:00.000-07:00

Blog has taken a back seat to much of everything else lately. As the old canard goes: Those who can, do. Those who can't, write. Not sure where that leaves me in the scheme of things tonight, but I have a good idea...

Drinking Maudite listening for sounds of carnage from the bad bearing on my vacuum pump motor, or so it seems. The little ceramic heater is cranking away in a race to get the epoxy to kick before the motor dies permanently. Fortunately for me the death seems to be lingering on a bit.

Not much available time before PCCs in Coronado in 1.5 wks. OOT this coming weekend so it will all go flashing by and I'll be gasping for air on the upwind legs in no time. Certainly need to amp up the fitness regimen and tighten the hiking straps.

Alex finally made it out of LAX back to his home galaxy last week, but not before a glorious Sunday of ripping around Long Beach harbor on the Moth. Sorry to see him go as he was actually a lot of help laying up the first set of foils, and won't get to see the finished product - at least for a while.

Anders stopped down and got foiling just long enough to get half a mile offshore before he tried to tack. I had launched him on a water start, but out there the wind had dropped and he had no idea how to get into the boat. So he drifted slowly back to shore, getting progressively more hypothermic all the while. Good sport about it though. He was fine once the boat was up, but righting a Moth in light air has no equivalent in the dinghy world - or anywhere else outside the circus.

Off East for the coming weekend to see the boys and get in on a little baptism, Russian Orthodox style.

Flow

2008-02-21T23:34:00.000-08:00

A week ago I met Zach in Long Beach for a tune up. It was late morning, with the wind at 10 and forecast to build. We were both itching to get out and do a little sailing in advance of the San Diego regatta. So after cursory introductions we rigged and went sailing. Zach's friend Grant jumped in Zach's boat and foiled a bit. Then Zach and I went out and tooled around for awhile, after some fidgeting around with the cable attachment on my boat for a few minutes.

The first bit was really nice, with a steady breeze from an odd direction - south. The wind is almost always westerly in Long Beach, and when it isn't, something is up. In this case, the something was a big veer and fill from the southwest:

Anyway the puffs were magnificent and we had some fun reaching and working upwind. At the end of one long reach I wiped out and Zach gybed away to head back toward shore. I righted my boat on port tack and was about to bear off and follow him when I noticed a bright blue doublehanded cat blasting into sight from the windward side of the island. As I was sailing toward them I thought I'd just watch, as they were REALLY moving in the breeze.

Cats like this aren't a dime a dozen in Long Beach. There are some cat sailors there, but most don't launch from the beach, and certainly not new-looking Nacra 20s with new sails and FRA sail numbers going like bats out of hell! They tacked onto port in front of me and to leeward and I thought, OK, let's see what this blue banana boat can do.

So I sheeted in and started to point with a ton of Veal heel in wind that was probably 18-20 and relatively steady. I expected to reel the cat in but that didn't happen, first because they were damned quick - maybe even faster through the water than I was, though I was pointing a bit higher - and second because I kept climbing away from them when I was really more in the mood for a drag race.

So I sheeted out just a tad and bore off to see how much ground I could make up. Mind you it was a tight reach but the Moth was sailing beautifully with great control thanks to my latest flap mechanism tweaks and I was heating it up as much as I possibly could. Bottom line is that those cats are really quick! I gained on them steadily but not dramatically, keeping them in view about 100 yards off my starboard bow. We sailed like that for probably five or six minutes - the Nacra was hauling the proverbial mail, with both crew fully trapped and the boat nearly flat and under perfect control. The afternoon sun was getting lower in the sky, lighting up the gold sail and the bright blue hulls. I almost forgot what I was doing, just watching that boat fly across the harbor - which is saying something when you are sailing a Moth! But it was one of those Zen-like moments when you completely forget that you are sailing three feet above the water at 20 plus knots and all the balance, rudder and mainsheet work just fades from consciousness. We could have been satellites orbiting some distant planet - it was like I was there but I wasn't the one sailing the boat. And I haven't been smoking any medical marajuana! (It's legal by California state law, BTW).

When the cat was close to the west oil island they tacked, and I decided to take their stern to say hello. They were a bit surprised to see me there, presumably because they had seen me over by the oil island and had not been looking back over their shoulder at 20 knots to see if any other boats were overtaking them! I would have rolled them eventually and if I had been going hard upwind I would have crossed them by a considerable distance after their tack, but it just goes to show what a long skinny displacement hull, tons of righting moment and a big efficient sail can do for a boat - even one that weighs over 400 lb. Impressive beast to say the least.

I later learned at the Moth regatta from some cat sailors that Performance Catamarans (maker of Nacras) has changed into French hands, and that the new owners have moved to town with their families. No wonder they looked so good on the water!

As much as I liked the look of their boat under sail I don't think I'd trade my ride for theirs, however. There is something about a Moth that makes you feel a bit more like a pilot and less like a skipper, and though displacement sailing can be fun, I don't think it will ever be quite the same for me. The stakes are a bit higher in foiling as our crashes are harder and more frequent, but the payoff in speed and the sensation of literally flying the boat are well worth the periodic tumble into the drink.

Low on Excuses

2008-02-02T19:24:00.000-08:00

The essence of vacuum bagging being, well, vacuum, and nearing the point in my own project at which the ability to apply atmospheric pressure in a coordinated fashion might well be a limiting factor, I dragged the Welch Duo Seal out of long retirement to see whether it might be coaxed into suction once again. I procured this pump through the largesse of Big George, who somehow had managed to come into two fifty dollar Duo Seals, but only needed one. So for $50 in 1999 US dollars (roughly equivalent to $400 of today's dollars, at least when it comes to purchasing anything from Australia) I became the proud owner of a somewhat dilapidated Welch Duo Seal 1400. Or I think that is the model anyway - can't really tell because IT DOESN'T HAVE A MODEL NUMBER. THAT'S HOW OLD IT IS. The serial number is 434; I saw one on eBay the other day with a serial number of 107,000 that was made in 1982! Anyway we are dealing with some seriously old machinery here - probably from the 1940s.

After procuring the pump from George in 1999, it sat in one storage facility or another, completely unused, until last week. I had plugged it in and watched it whirr, but had never tested it with a gauge to see exactly how badly - ahem - it sucked. George had replaced some seals on the thing when he bought it, and told me he could never get it to go much beyond 27"Hg, which is pretty poor vacuum from a pump that is theoretically capable of millitorr performance. So my expectations were pretty low.

All the oil had drained out, so after getting some mailed in from Grainger, and a trip to Culver City Industrial Hardware for some plumbing fittings and a vacuum gauge, we hit a balmy 17" of mercury. This was over ten inches Hg shy of where I had hoped I might be, and ten inches of mercury is a lot of mercury - 254mm worth, or a third of an atmosphere. Either aliens had sucked away a third of Earth's atmosphere, or my pump was in tough shape.

Being a pessimist and knowing the pump had not performed perfectly even before I bought it, I decided an inspection was in order. Mind you I had never performed any maintenance on a vacuum pump of any kind prior to this endeavor, but fools rush in as they say. Fortunately, vacuum in 1940 was a fairly straightforward affair, and three wrenches are all one needs to fully disassemble the thing - well, plus or minus.

There is a lot more to the pump than this photo indicates - namely another rotor/stator setup like this one further down the shaft, a bunch of seals, etc. But this is the heart of the matter - a rotor mounted eccentrically within a stator of larger radius, with spring loaded vanes sweeping varying radii as the rotor turns, effectively increasing the volume allocated to a particular number of air molecules 850 times per minute, with the intake rotor exhausting to the exhaust rotor, resulting in some serious vacuum if everything is functioning properly.

Unfortunately, visual inspection failed to demonstrate the source of my evils. So I phoned the repair desk at Capitol City Vacuum outside Washington, DC and basically pled ignorance in hopes that someone would take pity on me and tell me how to make my pump work. Fortunately Frank on the technical desk, aka Jedi Knight of Duo Seals, told me what to buy and what to do.

Basically he told me to get the basic repair kit (because my vanes are metal they don't wear out like the newer ones do) and a can of Vac Seal and put the pump back together. But the critical bit of information is that the stators are ADJUSTABLE. If they are too far from the rotors, the pump will not pump down. We are talking about 0.001" of clearance here, or less.

While I was in there I replaced the shaft ($40) so the seals would work and the pump would stop leaking oil everywhere, and then reassembled the thing. Unfortunately, an earlier "repairman" had overtightened one of the 5/16" bolts holding the intake side of the pump together, so it was not possible to get it tight. A trip to Auto Zone was required to procure the requisite Heli Coil, which worked like a proverbial charm - or at least allowed me to put the pump back together again.

What it did not do was get me enough vacuum. 25" was the fruit of all my labor. I assumed I would have to completely disassemble the pump yet again and readjust the stators, the thought of which made me look around for other projects, like finishing the wiring on the air compressor...

So I did that, fixing the pressure switch in the process, replacing the main tank valve, putting waterproof steel/plastic flexible conduit over the motor wires, and rewiring the mag start. Then I turned my attention back to the vacuum side of things.

In my zeal for applying Vac Seal, I had put perhaps a bit too much on the intake reservoir flanges, and decided to double check the gasket. Sure enough, it had moved out of position. Could this be the source of my troubles? Tracing the original gasket on some new gasket material and cutting on the lines gave me gasket number three, and without Vac Seal this time I reassembled the pump and plugged it in. The result? 30 inches! The atmosphere has returned, and we can breathe again!

I really don't know if I would recommend this course of action to anyone, but for $75 in parts I saved myself the cost of a different pump, or about $300 on eBay last time I checked. This fix was much less trouble than it might have been, and if it had been any more trouble I might have been better off sending the pump in to be overhauled by a professional.

What does this have to do with Moths, you might ask? I find myself asking the same question, and I have come up with the following answer:

Historically, mothing has been a class of do-it-yourselfers, experimenters, and development-minded individuals. Foiling seems to have brought an entire cadre of world-class sailors in, who have little interest in building boats or rebuilding vacuum pumps when they could be out there improving their boathandling. These guys will be super fast, as long as their boats remain competitive. And that is the point: when a new idea comes along, and proves faster than a current production boat, what will all these rock stars do? Will they get new Moths, or will they get grumpy and fork off into one design? Only time will tell whether the shifting sands of development sailing are too unsettling for their one-design taste.

For my part I will say that blogging is yet another time sink that the best builders and sailors seem to have little inclination toward. Sailing, building and blogging each compete with each other for time, to the extent that no one can really do all three at a high level simultaneously without becoming professional. Even then, people like Amac seem to have their hands full with the design, build and sail program, ignoring blogging completely. Rohan sails full time and manages to blog from events in real time, but he doesn't design or build his boats. So these activities are to a certain extent mutually exclusive. This seems like an argument to forget about the internet, and focus on building and sailing. But without blogs, the class loses cohesion, and we lose the ability to live vicariously through each others' experiences, which is a good deal of the fun.

At some point, each of us has to throw down and declare our loyalties. Personally, I like figuring out how things work, and how to build things myself. I also like the design process, and I like interacting with people who think about design. So it should be no surprise to find me smelling of acetone, covered in vacuum oil, swearing over the radio at myself for having forgotten yet again to install the shaft keys before bolting the stators on for the fifth time.

I have followed the Moth class for years because it seemed to be filled with other people who could have a good laugh at themselves and their tiny boats while moving design further down the track - people for whom a good stack is almost as much fun as winning a race, and who like to build boats almost as much as sailing them. I eventually bought a Moth and started sailing in the class for much the same reason, although the advent of foiling hastened that involvement. To the extent that recent trends seem to be moving the composition of the class more toward professional sailors, and away from designers and builders, the fleet becomes less attractive to people like me. But that is no fault of the class, and it certainly moves the sailing itself up several levels, which is great. In any event, the Moth continues to be a development boat, and develop it will - probably faster than many expect. Interesting times ahead!

Nothing Like a Little Competition

2008-01-29T23:42:00.000-08:00

Well, it was only a matter of time.

Si Payne finally decided to show the world he's more than a string of excellent regatta results with a very well written blog from Perth, Australia. He's been tuning his new Fastacraft F Zero down there, giving the term "taking delivery" an entirely new and more literal meaning in the process. I will clearly have to be more efficient and pithy in my posts to weather the onslaught of his terse, finely crafted prose, though Si seems to think rebuilding his rudder mechanism is grounds for pity, which strikes me as rather Sheila-ish.

The past three weeks have seen a fair amount of progress in the garage, but not much on the water where the LA Moth Fleet Majority of One is concerned. Between monsoons, garage roof water leaks, dodgy 220V magnetic motor starters, and rebuilding my trusty Welch Duo Seal, I've been a busybody out there. The good news is, I'm only a rebuild kit and one bottle of PVA away from being able to get this party started. The molds are pretty much ready to go, barring any more unforeseen rain inside the shop. I still need to purchase a router and work out a method of convincing it to obliterate G10, but these are mere technicalities. Moving across the country and setting up a new shop is certainly taking its toll on my rate of progress, but it is all coming together nicely.

The South Coast midwinters are nigh, scheduled for Feb 15-16. I have only one free weekend between now and then, so at least one day this coming weekend will be devoted to wand adjustments and bellcrank shaving.

Closing the Place Down

2008-01-06T20:02:00.000-08:00

With a big storm rolling through over the past two days we had a very nice breeze from the usual direction in Long Beach today, but the skies were overcast and it was raining. Not exactly your stereotypical California Dreamin' weather, but perfect for some high speed mothing.

As my wetsuit just seems to keep getting thinner and now has a few holes in some rather stragegic locations, making for an anxiety-ridden wade into the surf, I decided to break out the polar bear suit and stay dry. A fleece suit under a drysuit kicks so much thermal ass that it isn't even funny, and it's more comfortable than a wetsuit. I was actually hot a couple of times, despite repeated swims, clouds, and 53 degree air and 53 degree water temp.

Something possessed me to finally implement a wand improvement I had been thinking about for some time, removing a degree of freedom from the thing and moving the pivot a bit, which in turn required manufacturing a new daggerboard cam. I swung big, moving the cable attachment almost 2 cm from its previous position (18mm to be precise), and creating a proportionately taller DB cam to take the throw on the other end with the same DB flap deflection range. I didn't have time to fine tune the new wand pivot before sailing today, as the glue kicked overnight and I was running late as it was, but this is what it looked like after some sanding with 36 grit to get the most offensive globs of epoxy off:

Basically, I just made the whole thing about 5/8" thick to remove the propensity to pivot axially. It tends to do this under load because the end of the ball fitting is actually over an inch outboard of the point where the original pivot arm attaches to the hull. So in its original configuration, the wand can move significantly aft without the ball moving aft at all, because the whole works just pivots around the ball, resulting in less fidelity between what the wand is doing and what the flap is doing.

To combat this, I glued a chunk of 1/2" G10 onto the top portion of the pivot arm, then ran a 1/8" sheet of black G10 down over this block and the adjacent original mounting block for the ball fitting. Then I moved the pivot point down a bit, because the bolt head was preventing me from jamming various rods into the receiver. I mean, what's the point of having a receiver if you can't jam rods into it? Anyway, this allows me to use an overlength rod and have it protrude out the top beyond the pivot in case I want to revert to Maystick mode, which I'm not sure I do, but options are always nice:

Right so now the bolt needed to be about 2cm longer, so I added that to the McMaster list on Saturday (recently discovered that their LA shop is local to me - this could be dangerous) and came home with five 8-18 stainless 70mm M6 hex shoulder head partially threaded bolts for the low low price of a gazillion dollars - the standard McMaster price. But they have everything, and if you call before you go the order will be in a box by the time you get there. That place is worthy of a PhD thesis in logistics. I came home with lots of other things, too, like metric drill bits and tons of tiny taps and dies that will come into play at a later date.

But back to the pivot - oh yes - always check your new cable length and wand ROM (range of motion) after messing with anything - small changes can make big differences. In this case, the new DB cam is so much taller than the old one...

that it forces the cable to take a rather acute bend at the deck bracket, increasing the friction a bit. The bow alterations didn't cause too much problem otherwise; the bolt was a bit overtight so the friction was higher but nothing some extra shock cord couldn't handle (shock cord setup not shown in photo):

Anyway, off to the races. Or rather, off to an empty beach with a huge line of flotsam at the high tide mark from the recent storm and nobody sailing except one kiteboarder. I mean, what is it with those guys? Usually they don't sail because there isn't enough wind. Then, when the wind is ripping, they stay home because it's cloudy and rainy. My theory is that they don't sail when it rains because they aren't trying to win anything - someone told me recently that they are starting to race kiteboards around the buoys, but they are going to have to go hydrofoil to get upwind very well from what I have seen. Apparently at least one person around here is doing that and the windward performance is startlingly superior to a regular kiteboard.

When I put the foil in at the beach, it became apparent that we were dealing with a bit too much cable length, resulting in too much flap down at just about any altitude. Lacking a Dremel cutoff wheel and a 10-32 die to re-establish threads on the rod, I opted to just hook the sucker up and go sailing.

And what a sail it was. The wind graph, courtesy of iWindsurf, and the passing weather system:

I started sailing at about 2pm, after micropressing some little copper gizmos onto my shrouds to keep the prodder from exploding, and talking to yet another guy about how I should join Alamitos Bay Yacht Club. OK OK - you guys are right. Just be sure to have some Portsmouth races while we wait for the Moth fleet to build up a bit.

The basic surf and sea outlook was this:

Though there are no whitecaps, that is only because this is Long Beach, and you have to go way out to get those. It is probably blowing 15-17 in this photo, and there is quite a bit more surf than normal. I didn't really think about it beforehand, but launching through this surf was challenging with the onshore breeze. Between waves the water was too shallow to sail, and when a wave came along, I was about two feet from touching the bottom, so I would shuffle like mad (stingray shuffle) with the boat in tow between sets and try to right it before getting set ashore by the next set of waves and the wind. Took me a few tries before I got away with a sensible waterstart instead of wasting all that time standing on the daggerboard and waiting for the mast to come up. Much quicker to start with the mast in the air if there is breeze.

Anyway sailing with too much mainfoil lift is an art. Basically, the boat was just flying a bit too high all the time, and I did various things to compensate, all contributing to less AOA on the mainfoil. First, I sat farther forward than I have ever sat. It didn't make much difference going to windward, but on any other point of sail the speeds were high enough that I just had to get rid of some lift. I wasn't in front of the DB case, but that's only because there is no tramp up there! Of course I was using a fair amount of rudder flap also, but there is only so much of that to go round, so I wound on another couple turns of gantry.

All this scrubbed enough lift to make for some ludicrously fast reaching. The wand was so sensitive that the boat would pretty much leap back to ride height if the nose went too low, but the rest of the time it just sat on height and went like a bat out of hell.

Until it came to running, that is. Offwind the whole works was simply flying too high for me to gybe. I did make it around once in relatively competent fashion, but nothing like I was hoping for based upon last week's ride. Serves me right for screwing around with a perfectly good setup. The ride altitude was simply a bit too high, and the flap was very sensitive, so I would achieve level flight sitting ultra-far forward, but then had to scoot back a bit to get around the mainsheet while initiating the turn. That tiny shift of weight alone, in combination with my overdriven flap setting, was enough to induce too much lift and start the whole works hobby horsing, which at the speeds I was going is really some mad sailing, and no way to set up for a gybe. I would move back a foot and into the center, and all hell would break loose, as the bow rose a bit and the wand finally clocked through its final 25 degrees, causing too much flap up and a consequent descent nearly to the surface, at which point the flap overdrive and speed would launch me skyward again, only to repeat the process until stacking it in one way or another. All this didn't keep me from trying many, many gybes, but reaching was going so well I eventually decided to give up on the gybes for the afternoon and blast around instead.

Probably not the best day for it in the end, given the recent rains, which scooped all the trash from the five county area into the LA river, where it descends toward the sea in a veritable avalanche of shit until it hits the trash booms at the mouth of the river - just next to my sailing area. Booms catch probably 95+ percent of the detritus, but I did have several interesting sightings: one mostly-submerged dark green plastic Wal Mart garden chair, several tree branches, plywood, lots of palm fronds, and various other potentially foil-killing pieces of junk. Caught a couple of plastic bags but ripped right through at least two after a brief stumble. Caught one on a run near the tip of the main foil and it got torn to absolute shreds by the time I slowed down enough to take it off. Amazing forces at work down there - bags feel a lot like solid objects when you hit them full on.

I suppose it is time to mount the Velocitek. I have been putting it off as most of the time I really don't care what my speed is - bragging about that crap is so gauche. Fundamentally the foils have a certain amount of drag and I think various Moth sailors have explored the upper limit of the current setup pretty well by now. But today I was going consistently way faster on the reaches than I have ever sailed this boat before, and it made me wonder how close to the limit I was getting. I mean, it was really fast. Ridiculously fast. I was way forward on the wing bar, basically even with the DB or a shade toward the back, and if I got a bit high I would just sheet in a bit and drive the nose down, which is really easy with weight that far forward. If I went too far down, the hyperactive wand would bring it back up instantly, and I would sheet in and drive lower. Again, and again, and again, hiking harder and harder and harder, steering through the wave sets to stay at about the same height. Keeping the nose down by sitting so far forward was critical, again with lots of gantry on and a fair amount of rudder flap. The overall ride height was actually pretty low and I only ventilated the rudder a couple of times.

At one point I was near the beach and decided to buzz a big cruising boat some distance off that was headed away from me, downwind under sail. It was probably a mile or more distant. Fortunately, the point of sail to get there was a deepening reach, and the wind built progressively the further out toward him I got. All this made for a really quick trip. I have done 18 knots on a canoe, and this was just a huge amount faster. It may have been 25 - I have no idea. It would be nice to have some sort of official number - to gauge my progress by if nothing else - ergo the sudden interest in mounting the V-tek.

I probably had five or six very long reaches like that before the sight of a tree trunk bobbing merrily along made me realize I was playing some pretty high stakes roulette, so I did some tacking around near shore. Finally I was so knackered that I was actually getting worse with more practice, so I did my best to get in through the surf without getting pulverized. I only had the waves flip the boat over its nose from one wing bar to the other one time, which was interesting and had never happened before. Fortunately there was no damage to anything.

I may take some height off the DB cam and move the forward cable attachment point back toward the pivot a bit to reduce the bend on the cable. The system has plenty of power in it to move the flap, so giving some power away to lower the frictive loads is probably a good idea. After doing that I'll recheck the cable length and trim or extend ends to suit. I have been doing some kicking around on the net to find alternatives to these sloppy little quick-release, off-axis-load balls and I have found some good options to reduce play and friction. So there will likely be more changes to the cable ends and/or a new wand receiver/pivot to suit. Apart from the cable length issue and shortening the cable cams a bit, I'm pretty happy with the new setup and I'm confident that with a bit less flap down the boat will be back to her old self on the next outing.

Long term there is a lot to do to make this whole height control thing better. I have lots of non-sinusoidal ideas about flap response that I may implement on this boat, but for the moment the goal is just to make simple changes to the current equipment to get it functioning reliably enough to improve my offwind boathandling while I finish the new foils. If I can learn to sail this boat reasonably well then I will have a good basis of comparison for the new system as we develop that, not to mention a huge amount of fun.

My best Wallace and Gromit/Wrong Trousers "Cheese" impression

Rocket Science

2008-01-01T20:27:00.000-08:00

In my exuberance to revamp my wand to a more functional state, I have concluded that a straight wand is better than a bent one. There has been much talk of straight wands being superior to bent wands in terms of performance, but my preference for the straight wand stems from the profusion of straight objects available for use as wands and the ease of attaching them to a pivot set up to accept straight wands.

Changing things around with your wand system is not without its risks, however, as became apparent when I reached the beach today only to discover that the quick release attachment to my main flap had vibrated off the cable and disappeared onto US 405 somewhere. Hmmm...must have been that lock nut I decided I didn't need to replace after trimming the cable...

Because I was late getting to the water in the first place, this was not good news: the sun sets rapidly in January and the wind was set to diminish rapidly. The situation called for a quick rummage through the tackle box to see what might possibly be substituted for a 10-32 threaded female quick release rod end. All was looking bleak when I spied - Yes! - those plastic batten ends from the carbon battens I inadvertantly sent to Australia with Lust Puppet! One looked like it might conceivably thread onto the end of the control cable with a bit of persuasion, and just like magic the ID was slightly smaller than the threaded shaft and it went on like a dream, giving me a slotted end to attach to the ball fitting on the daggerboard with - you guessed it - whipping twine, side-on, topped off with a layer or two of electrical tape for good measure and go-fast looks. It almost looked factory when I was done - sort of scary. But would it work?

The nearest NOAA buoy pegged the water temperature at 53.8 today, sort of chilly but in the end not too bad as I never got wet above the waist. In fact I was sort of hot in my fleece, with temps in the 60s and a 6-8 knot offshore breeze. There was just enough wind to get on the water, bear off in a small puff and - presto - up on foils we went, just like usual, except the downwind was dead easy in the almost perfectly flat water. Gybing was going almost frighteningly well but I only got about 40 minutes in before the wind went to crap and I did the usual pump around the harbor looking for any remaining breeze for a couple of laps before calling it quits.

Of course, whipping twine is a bit more difficult to remove on the other end, but nothing a pair of wire cutters couldn't handle.

I suppose the lesson here is that for all their subtleties, these boats are really not that complicated, and one can learn a lot about what is essential and what is not by removing bits and McGyvering around small problems. In similar vein, my boat seems completely happy without a May stick, which is not to say without a bungee. From this bit of information you can almost certainly guess which bit of the wand system I forgot to reassemble before going to the Harbor on Christmas Day...

Latest quest is for a testing platform for the new foils. Ideally a light, reasonably modern lowrider (I know -- starting to be an oxymoron) that I can cut the trunk out of. A current foiler would be fine also but it seems a waste of a main foil and one hates to take older foilers out of commission as they make great learning boats. Anyway if you know of any lowriders for sale in Australia near Melbourne for a decent price with a decent rig please let me know as the shipping from there would be relatively straightforward at the moment.

Hosted the Chesapeake IC contingent en route to AUS for IC Worlds this week - quick pick up at the airport, home cooked meal, then back to catch the connecting flight by 9pm. Nice visit but entirely too short. Racing begins in earnest tomorrow - catch the action on www.icworlds.org and www.intcanoe.org/forum .

More photos from Christmas Moffing:

And just to whet the appetite:

Moth Moth Baby

2007-12-16T20:34:00.000-08:00

All of Long Beach seems to have decided it's Christmas, and that recovering from seasonal parties is the order of the day on Sunday. So not too many people were out enjoying the 8-10 knot breeze that piped up out of the west today. Hell, there may even have been a few twelves in there. Anyway it was enough to have to pull on some cunningham to depower while foiling. Not sure exactly how much water time I logged - something over an hour but probably no more than two. Funny how we put so much effort into the sport for so little time actually doing it. But then most sports are that way I suppose.

Linked up with Bobby K and Alex on the beach, who were in recovery mode but looking very relaxed. Took time getting rigged and fielded the usual assortment of questions. Ran into Chad from North Sails - 49er sailor friend of Zack Maxam's from San Diego. Seems keen to find out more about Mothing so will have to get him out on the Prowler some time soon. Was not able to coordinate sailing with Charlie and Zack as I was on call and did not know what time I would be able to leave work, so impossible to set anything up especially with the iffy forecast of 10-12. But checked forecast when leaving and I'm learning that if any wind is forecast by NWS for Long Beach then it is generally enough to foil in the afternoon, which is pretty nice as there is almost always SOME wind forecast.

Which reinforces my notion yet again that a Moth is a brilliant water toy. These things allow you to play extreme apparent wind games in so little wind that anything less would not be enjoyable in any other boat either, which is pretty obvious when I am the only small boat on the water in all of Long Beach Harbor. Is there any other boat that makes light air sailing this much fun? If so, I haven't seen it yet. I haven't even seen the A-cat guys out practicing much lately, but they are probably enjoying a break from sailing after the runup to their Worlds in November.

Working on fairing some foil tools, then mounting and assembling the materials for a layup. May try infusion as my parts will have a 90 degree bend in the middle and I'd rather not have epoxy running down the ends as the layup progresses...then again I suppose that would lean it out a bit, which is always a good thing. But I rather like being able to tack the layup in place and sort the bag before hitting the goo switch. The down side is figuring out a way to get the resin to the mold surface, but a bit of strategically placed flow media should do the trick nicely. Failure isn't cheap but it may be a necessary part of the learning curve. I'm not underestimating the difficulty of bringing it off as friends have had some puzzling failures recently.

Who knew formica made such a nice sanding batten? Oh and pool noodle foam trimmed with scissors. What commercial was it that ended with the word "SMOOOOOTH"? Or was it a sitcom? Maybe Don Knotts said it. Anyway the facets and grooves are disappearing nicely with a bit of old Spanish Archer.

Alex pointed out today that I receive more questions about my van than I do about the boat - or at least as many. From different groups of people of course. Funny how people gravitate to things they understand but which are just outside the mainstream.

Nice policeman pulled me over to inform me that I was grinding my wand off on the pavement on the way home, which is just as well as I plan to revamp the entire thing soon anyhow. Seems a bit strange that he didn't inquire about the DC and SD license plates on my rig, but I guess the boat was getting all the attention.

Time for a bit of sanding. Looks like Mothing for the Holidays as I will be working sporadically through the remainder of the month.

Mothing to the Beat of a Different Drummer

2007-12-09T10:47:00.001-08:00

Another boring moth day at Long Beach:

If there is a reason to sail anywhere else, I haven't found it. There's even a good cheap breakfast and coffee shop nearby to help you fuel up before hitting the water: Chuck's Diner. Highly recommended - on Ocean I think.

Nobody out but me and the kiteboarders. I noticed they were all hanging pretty close to shore - I think this is because they cannot go upwind reliably, which I would think is a total drag, literally and figuratively, rather like downhill skiing except there is no chairlift to carry you and your equipment back up the beach. So everyone launches, does a few tricks on the way downhill, then sails to the beach, gathers the equipment, and walks back up the beach with their kites flying directly overhead. It is like some sort of bizarre parade or ultra slow-mo NASCAR event: go fast, jump up jump up and get down, turn left, walk up beach, repeat.

I sail out of the same spot, sheet in, sail about forty degrees higher and just as fast, sail upwind for awhile, turn down, reach and gybe, crash, futz with gantry, futz with flap, sail downwind some more, turn right, repeat.

In an interesting twist, I left the rear bung out, so my moth was getting progressively heavier throughout the afternoon. The interesting bit is that I think it actually helped me going upwind. Getting a few gallons of water to windward of the foils does wonders for your righting moment in a good breeze - boom right on centerline, pointing like mad, going like a banshee. I don't think I've ever gone upwind that easily or that fast before in breeze - perhaps the added ballast had nothing to do with it and it was just me figuring a few sail controls out, but it was certainly different from what I had experienced earlier in the afternoon. I do have to say that the wind was really up toward 20mph during that run - strongest of the afternoon, so perhaps that had something to do with it. I had the pleasure of sailing across the bow of a big leadmine on that tack; they were coming downwind along the beach and I was going up again. I don't know what it was but I was going uphill like a freight train.

Finally the remaining freeboard seemed quite small and I realized the bung issue and sailed in. Capsizing in the surf is not a good thing to do when your boat is too heavy to lift, but actually it wasn't too hard to lift the bow and get the tramps lined up with the waves to keep it from crashing around on the rack bar while the water drained out.

I keep stepping on fish in the surf. Not intentionally - I just walk around launching my boat and occasionally the ground wiggles frantically under my shoe as if to say "HEY - you're crushing my pelvis!" Greg tells me they are probably stingrays and that I should shuffle my feet to build up static electricity and shock them away before I end up with a spike in my leg. I think I have been fortunate in that most of the ones I have stepped on have been small, so they probably can't sting effectively yet. Either that or they are flounder or regular skates without stingers.

I regretted not having my camera in my life vest, as the sea lions had taken up station on the 500 gallon floating steel diesel tank which serves as a mooring ball for the tanker loading line. Sailing out toward it the sun was low in the sky behind, reflecting off the waves like a thousand mirrors, and where the water meets the sky a family of huge sea lions perched on a steel fuel tank, sunning themselves, with the bow of a huge tanker poking in from the left side of the frame. Maybe they'll be back again next week. They didn't seem to mind me much though when I came back down to windward of them the mother seemed to be smelling me, like a dog will sniff the air to pick up whatever it can. Who knew sea lions could smell anything? Anyway I have come close to running over seals but I think their reaction times are generally are too fast to get hit. I would really hate to run into one of these mammoth sea lion suckers in the water because I'm pretty sure that once off foils I'd be lunchmeat. They must weigh 5-600 lbs.

Offwind going better; played with gantry a lot and felt much more stable. Technique is probably improving also but having the proper setup makes the whole thing a ton easier.

I suspect there are many combinations of setup and technique which are all sailable. It is surprising how very small changes in flap or gantry angle change the downwind experience though.

One day I'll get the Velocitek out and find out how fast I am moving through the water. Frankly I am more interested in the tacking angles etc. though.

Alex Adams is still lurking about somewhere in the vicinity so perhaps I'll be able to get him out again before he disappears back to Weymoth.

When I got back to the beach and drained the many gallons of water from my boat, I walked her up on the beach where, despite the sun glaring in beneath some dark clouds, it began to rain lightly. The clouds then moved off slightly to the east, creating full double rainbows silhouetted against a dark gray background with the beach and palm trees bathed in bright golden light in super high-contrast from the low sun angle. If it hadn't been for the sirens and police helicopter circling overhead, I would have felt like I was an extra in the Wizard of Oz or some other dream-style Hollywood vehicle. But it was only my Moth and the natural beauty of southern California in December.

It was cold on the beach as I de-rigged - something like 55 degrees with the wind diminishing. May need a thicker wetsuit. Water temp lower than last week by a noticeable amount so probably mid to high 50s; possibly an effect of the rain we've been having and the surface runoff.

Picked up a clear plastic bag on the mainfoil out by the sea lions which sounded like an angry growling dog swimming along very quickly beneath the boat for a few hundred feet. Quite funny. Had to capsize to see the thing - completely transparent.

Linked up with Greg at Randy Reynolds' Christmas party, which was fun. Christmas boat parade was on, so had to leave the rig on the main drag and walk in a half mile, in the drizzle. The plan was to pick up the molds for the new lifting foil that Greg finished machining last week, duck out, and go to my work holiday party in Hollywood after stopping home to change clothes. Then I had one glass of wine, visited a bit, tried a jello shot, had some food. Combined with mothing all afternoon, a couple of drinks rendered me completely unable and unwilling to walk a half mile in the rain with hydrofoil molds, not to mention unable to drive my car in any sort of wakeful state up 405 and navigate into Hollywood. I did manage to make it home later after a few cups of coffee, but that was all the night had in store for me. Though I regret missing the work party, on the whole I have to say that I think I have my priorities pretty straight.

Control is Overrated

2007-12-01T19:40:00.000-08:00

Well when I finally awoke from my stupor this morning and checked the weather, the forecast was for 22-29 from the West with gusts over 30, but when I looked at the buoy, it said 10 with gusts to 15 at about 10AM, so I figured I'd chance it as the Sunday forecast was light and variable. So off I went. In the end, this is what the wind graph at Seal Beach/River's End showed:

Not bad mothing. Lots of smoking around upwind but serious control issues offwind. Some of these are due to my funky rudder twist repair, but some are just sheer stupidity and inexperience.

Lots of Lasers and Club 420s out, and I mean LOTS. US Sailing has a center at Long Beach, and I'd estimate something on the order of 30-40 youth sailors on the water racing in these conditions. Water temp from a nearby buoy was just a touch under 60 degrees; air temp when I started was 57F. Pretty hard to complain about this place from a weather standpoint.

Rains on Friday washed many, many plastic bags into the water. These sound distinctly like solid objects hitting the foil when you hit them at speed, and if they are big you basically crash. I thought one of them must have been a large fish, but no. I did hit other submerged things but apparently they were softer than my foils as I couldn't see any damage.

Smoked by the 420s upwind only to thoroughly embarrass myself heating it up on a reach, going too high, and stacking it - on camera. I'm sure there will be some YouTube clips but I didn't talk to them except to ask what my score for the stack was; they rated it a 7.5. Too bad I couldn't keep the wheels on for a minute or so as the RIB was wound-up and following me and the breeze was fantastic.

Replayed various types of offwind altitude debacles for most of the remainder of the afternoon; I have had a much easier time in the past maintaining stable flight offwind so clearly something is amiss with the wand setup. It doesn't help to have a sticky twistgrip either but I think I am not getting the proper wand response. I play the weight shifting game and adjust the rudder flap slightly as well as using the rig very dynamically to push the nose down when needed, but I need more help from the flap. May have to switch to straight wand but I think lubricating the cable and eliminating play will be the first order of business. The boat has been well used and some maintenance is to be expected.

Flying gybes require stable altitude control, which I didn't have today, so not much progress there, except a few which were pretty close to sticking but poor steering meant I dropped off foils before the end. Heading up aggressively is pretty important I'm finding, which is obvious from all the videos but it's always different doing it yourself.

Met Ed Hencken on the beach purely by chance as his son Hans was out Lasering. Apparently Hans, who has his own Bladerider that he shares with his two siblings, let the sailing program rope him into signing up for a team or something(!). I'm sure it's good practice, but I'm sure Hans was itching to be on his Moth today rather than the Laser, especially with me zooming by in various states of combobulation.

Clearly some momentum is developing in the San Diego fleet. Charlie McKee is trying to convince James Spithill to ship his Moth to SD to sail with Charlie, so that's another potential addition to the fleet. Ed knew of at least two more new boats coming to the area beyond Zack and the BR distributor in Newport, who each already have boats apparently. Looks like I'll be driving south to their regattas if the wind is good; otherwise launching from the beach at Long Beach is actually a pretty sweet setup even though the amenities are very basic, i.e. sand, water, wind, and a bathroom that is so basic the cinder block stall walls are only waist high. No footsie sting operations going on in these babies, I tell ya.

Anyway it will really be interesting to see what happens to the pecking order in the fleet with all these good sailors getting involved. Boathandling is such a large part of the game that bona fides may not count for much until people get enough sea miles under their foils to foil around the course. I expect I'm taking a bit longer than most to get the hang of offwind sailing, but truth be told I haven't worked on it very much until now, so I probably just have to pay my dues and figure out what the boat is trying to tell me once I get my flapper flapping. Can't wait to get together with some other Mothies and compare notes again as I haven't really sailed with any other Moths since BR days in the other Newport, an entire country and a summer away from sunny CA.

Foil development project is coming along; just about the time I get my current boat working properly again I'm sure it will be time to switch to the new one. It's a hard life, but much better than the alternative as the saying goes...

Moth Talk, LA Style

2007-11-22T15:16:00.001-08:00

Some time ago on the UK Moth listserve there was some discussion of appropriate terminology for the gybe-to-weather technique used (to debatable effect) by rohanveal.com at the Denmark worlds. Some thought the term"Gack" too hoodie for the moth "class"; hence "wearing ship" was offered up as a substitute. This suggestion was universally ignored as far as anyone on this side of the Atlantic can tell.

Because all this gacking happened long before anyone began working on the foiling tack in a serious way, the following corollary question was never asked, at least publicly: If a foiling gybe is a gack, is a foiling tack a fack?

Entire vistas of unexplored linguistic potential open before us. Let the games begin.

Blogito Ergo Sum

2007-11-20T20:05:00.000-08:00

It's official: we exist.

Without a presence in cyberspace a fleet just isn't a fleet anymore. No place to hang your cyber-wetsuit, dry your cyber sailing shoes, fix your cyber-yacht, or compare cyber notes. No place to exchange cyberpleasantries, or take a cybernap.

With all due deference to our video gaming programmer brethren at Sim City, we now offer a web portal to the ultimate in online entertainment: reality. Now you can visit our website at www.int-moth.us, get all hot and bothered, and actually contact someone RIGHT NOW who will take all that pent-up anxiety and direct it somewhere more productive than Sailing Anarchy forums. That's right - if you play your cards right, you can actually go sailing on a Moth. We give you gps coordinates and a time, and you give us, well, nothing. Unless you're unbearably attractive and female, in which case some of us may accept payment in smiles.

So forget Will Wright and the upcoming release of Spore. You've been there, and you have the myopia, bad posture and carpal tunnel syndrome to show for it. Take the blue pill, drop through the wormhole over at our website, and don't ever look back. When it comes to Mothing, the truth is so much stranger and more wonderful than fiction that software engineers will need decades to catch up. And when they do, we'll have moved on yet again.

Can't Get There From Here

2007-11-05T21:13:00.000-08:00

Off to the beach on Sunday, only to find foggy conditions, 64 degrees and wind out of the west at 3 knots. Greg was so discouraged he rented a bicycle for the afternoon. He tried to talk me out of going sailing, but I wasn't listening. Sure enough, the sun finally burned through and the wind picked up to about 7 knots - foiling conditions.

So I rigged the boat after driving around Long Beach for an hour looking for change for a 20 and some press-on copper shroud placeholders to keep the prodder out of tilt-a-whirl mode. Lumbered into the surf, which is sort of like the surf in your bathtub only with more plastic bags floating in it, then up, up and away.

Mothing in this condition is really a lot like iceboating in that the apparent is pretty much always enough forward that without trying very hard you can convince yourself that you are going upwind on just about any point of sail north of a very broad reach. After reaching around going quite fast but not making any progress toward my destination (the other side of oil island #1) I realized that if I didn't try to point at all cost I was never going to get anywhere. I mean I was zooming all over the place to no great effect, sort of like we used to do in high school on 8th street but with a lot less horsepower and no girls to talk to. The leadmines I buzzed were all agaggle but they left me in their martini-scented bad air and disappeared.

So that was a good lesson: if you want to go uphill, try pointing. I know it sounds stupid, but fundamentally it isn't that much different from reaching, except that you are going slower. So my new technique is to go about as slow and high as I can go without dropping off the foils or working too hard, and heel like crazy. I haven't fired up the Velocitek in earnest yet but am looking forward to seeing some VMG numbers (or CMG or whatever).

There are about four or five people in the country who can gybe on foils, on a Moth anyway. Maybe seven if you count the kids in San Diego. Since none of us have been foiling longer than a year, I think we can pretty well conclude that this is not rocket science, and that anyone who practices diligently will figure it out. Keeping it figured out over a range of conditions and making it reliable would seem to be the real challenges, but that has as much to do with height control as anything else. So if you're one of the gybing few, congratulations.

Please do not interpret this as a plea for advice on the subject, however. I am entirely as capable of stacking it in repeatedly until I get the hang of it as you were, if not moreso. When I do get the hang of it, I will probably not spend much time writing about it. I mean, we are not talking about anything truly difficult like tacking a Canoe here, which if anyone in the world ever figured it out would certainly be news.

The interesting thing about Long Beach on Sunday was that the wind was blowing 12-15 from the West out by the breakwater (sort of SW of my launch point - mostly S), but a gentle Santa Ana filled in from the North along the shore, which faces South. The gradient breeze between these two locations veered dramatically the closer to shore I got, until, well, I couldn't get there at all, and not for lack of pointing: the wind just got progressively lighter and and more adverse as one approached the shore, until it stopped blowing at all in a small band just outside the surf. OK I got there, in lowrider mode, sitting well-in on the tramp. Or close enough to swim for it.

I have concluded that Acetate is fast. I have no data to support this conclusion, but I have messed around with it enough to know that it isn't slow, and that is enough for me.

Mutha of Invention

2007-10-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

If you've never seen one, a Prowler rudder flap mechanism is sort of like having a small swiss watch made of nylon sitting in your tiller. It is controlled by the skipper via the tiller extension, which connects to the tiller via several satellite uplinks, a modem, and a rubber hose. But this is not just any rubber hose, mind you! It is a rubber hose worthy of German engineering awards, with RTV applied strategically to internal worm gears, small transverse hoselocking fiberglass keys, and small springs to maintain an all-important, quintessentially hoselike circular cross section while being tortured at impossible angles by the skipper! Within the tiller itself, this same highly-engineered and reinforced "hose" attaches to a worm gear actuating beautifully drilled acme threaded captive nuts, sliding one of them fore and aft when the tiller is twisted. This nut in turn pushes or pulls a small rod from a model airplane, which in turn tilts a cam and pushes on another rod. It is this final rod which plunges headlong and fearlessly down the trailing edge of the rudder, only to be held captive by a rotating brass barrel within the wafer-thin rudder flap itself. This assembly is the sort of robust, beautifully designed mechanism one expects from a builder with a thorough understanding of both his product and his craft.

Of course no mechanism is immune to abuse, and in this case the rubber hose itself is generally the first element to give up the ghost when abused by newbies or simply used a lot. Mine failed and was shortened once, only to split nearly in two a short while later. Thankfully neither of these failures caused any hardship in returning to shore. Not a great inconvenience, and relatively easily repaired - with the proper tools. And good light. Some patience doesn't hurt here either. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

None of these qualities were in great supply this past Sunday, when a small group of enthusiasts gathered to put the Prowler through her paces. Naturally I had overlooked the needed repair from the previous weekend, as my foils live in the back of my van most of the time and only emerge when they go on the boat. Fortunately on Sunday I noted the broken tiller hose before we all got fully rubberized in our wetsuits, so that a repair was easily effected in the warm Southern California sun with a minimum of discomfort. OK, that last part is a lie. We were all suited up and ready to go, and I pulled the rudder out of the van with no extension on it. Hmmm...

Perhaps this would be a good juncture at which to note that at least one of the members of the group had driven two hours to try the boat. And that this person has a habit of writing in sailing publications with a rather large readership.

I have often found when confronted by such moments that the most useful demeanor is one of puzzled nonchalance, of the sort one might assume had aliens snuck in through the van's air vents and sabotaged the tiller in an effort to keep foiling technology from reaching the rest of the galaxy. This strategy generally buys me enough time to figure out whether I am completely screwed, or only mostly screwed, before a small mutinous riot ensues and whatever credibility I possess in the world of Mothing (admittedly not much to begin with mind you) evaporates like starter fluid from hot carbon fiber.

As one might gather from the description above, the Ilett adjustable-flap tiller/rudder is not a machine to be disassembled without trepidation, a controlled environment, and a small team of Swiss watchmakers in white lab coats with magnifying jeweler's loupes to relentlessly track and recover any and all lost micro-components. So while headlines such as "Moth Newbie Bombs Utterly in Attempt to Impress Well-Known Journalist" and "Back to the Farm League for LA Moth Sailor" flashed through my mind, I reflected calmly upon my mantra: This looks like a job for some Duck Tape.

Now before you get all hot and bothered about my conflating avian species with adhesive products, I'll have you know that I've done my research on the subject. It is well known that during World War II ducks were in fact employed alongside women in factories to help fill the shortage of qualified male workers. In some of these factories, ducks rose to levels of management, and some even managed to sock enough cash away to go out on their own as war profiteers in the tape industry. Hence the name Duck Tape. Enough said.

Where were we...oh yes - assembling swiss timepieces on worktables consisting primarily of sand. After a moment's flirtation with an orange screwdriver, a voice from Vancouver echoed through my head, recalling a certain afternoon spent on hands and knees in the lawn searching for critical elements of a Prowler tiller adjustment mechanism. Not wishing to add to the folklore on the subject, and well aware that the most deadly element of a recoverable situation is overconfidence in one's ability to reassemble complex mechanisms, particularly when dressed in a wetsuit with rivulets of sweat pooling in its nether-regions, I offered to no one in particular, as though expressing a view that the tiller might in fact spontaneously recompose itself, and has done so in the past on numerous occasions, the statement: "If only we had some tape".

Before we proceed further, a bit of background. When God invented the four wheel drive, four door, long bed diesel Ford pickup, He kept it to himself for many eons knowing, in fact, that if any reasonably industrious, independent human ever obtained such a vehicle, they might in fact be able to accomplish feats formerly reserved only for Gods and the cast of Star Trek. The ability to summon soggy rolls of Duck Tape from ether was apparently one of the long list of said feats, fiery thefts notwithstanding, which confined Prometheus, his Ford pickup, and his liver-eating eagle to a remote mountaintop in symbiotic immortality. Fortunately for the purposes of our story, the secret was already out, and just such a roll of Duck Tape emerged from just such a Full Sized Crew Cab Diesel Ford pickup. Man, I love it when a plan comes together.

Elitists among us might opine that Duck Tape is no match for the ingenuity of Swiss watchmakers, but in the interest of brevity, suffice it to say that they would be wrong:

Though a first attempt suffered from inexpert application, a retape of the joint provided a stable tiller universal (and more importantly an entirely stable foiling experience) for the whole afternoon. Duck Pride! Look on my works, ye reclusive Australian artisans, and despair! For I am Ozzy-mandius, conjurer of Duck Tape, ruler of nutshells, king of infinite space!

Ok, on aesthetic grounds we are not quite up to Pininfarina standards. But the smile on my face from doublehanding the Moth in divide-and-conquer mode for hours, capsizing in a huge variety of ways, losing my hat, recovering it, and finally succumbing in a tag-team mothing session to a rather-too-large windless patch, is none the smaller for it.

Of course it may have transpired that, despite mutual consent and due entirely to uncontrollable circumstances, said writer, sailor, and otherwise generally intrepid adventurer was left rather ungainfully bobbing about in Long Beach harbor with a longish swim to shore. If so, I expect to be roundly pilloried shortly in the sailing publication of your choice. But with any luck I'll have a chance to make it right down the line.

On which note a concluding poem:

I Could Give All to Time

To Time it never seems that he is brave
To set himself against the peaks of snow
To lay them level with the running wave,
Nor is he overjoyed when they lie low,
But only grave, contemplative and grave.

What now is inland shall be ocean isle,
Then eddies playing round a sunken reef
Like the curl at the corner of a smile;
And I could share Time's lack of joy or grief
At such a planetary change of style.

I could give all to Time except - except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,
And what I would not part with I have kept.

- Robert Frost

Supernatural

2007-10-22T19:32:00.001-07:00

A 48 mph Santa Ana pummeled Cat Beach, creating sand dunes around parked cars. Photo GK.

Ol' Santana ain't got nuthin' on the Santa Ana that cranked out of southwest Utah and opened a can of good ol' fashioned Whupass (TM) on southern California Sunday. The beating mainly took the form of wildfires caused by downed power lines, which then seemingly burned half of Malibu, along with various other parts of the Southland area. The fires were aided by the 5-7% humidity of the wind. From a mothing standpoint, it was a total washout, with gusts to 48mph on the breakwater outside Long Beach. Winds in the mountains were recorded at speeds up to 111mph.

Strangely enough, there was virtually no wind in Seal Beach when I went into a kite shop for some supplies, but when I came out fifteen minutes later there was amazing breeze and the tiny channel between Seal Beach and Long Beach was pure roiling spindrift. The wind was puffy but remarkably strong and it stayed that way for several hours, showing no signs of backing off as we patiently walked to a nearby restaurant for lunch, came back, hung out by the cars letting our ears fill up with sand, and finally rolled out of the parking lot and drove home without untying a single line from the trailer.

More Mothing next week, and more info on the fires HERE

Moth-jitsu

2007-10-14T22:04:00.000-07:00

Headed out to oil island to tank up

It occurred to me today, while watching pretty good sailors flail around with the Moth, that there are two more or less distinct skill sets at play in this game. First, there is Mothing. This involves somehow getting yourself onto a very skinny boat and keeping it upright long enough to sail it. Mothing would also include figuring out how to do tacks and gybes in lowrider mode, how to carry the boat into the water, etc.

Foiling incorporates Mothing, but then rapidly transcends it. Suddenly there is the possibility of flying too high or too low, auguring in to windward, stacking, capsizing to leeward by heeling ever so slightly in that direction, trimming the rudder, and aerial gybing.

Foiling seems to get people into Mothing, but Mothing keeps them busy for awhile before they can get very serious about foiling. Of course there are the talented exceptions, but these people spend a lot of time sailing small, high performance dinghies for the mostpart.

Today we got out late due to a running marathon in Long Beach that closed half the town down and prevented us from accessing our launch area. So over the fence with the Moth and out to sea. Phil and Greg each took a turn with impressive virgin talent on Phil's part and a big improvement by Greg over last week's effort. I made some cable length adjustments which seemed to smooth things out a bit but I think the gantry needs some fine tuning as I am up and down a bit too much offwind. Conditions were perhaps a bit much for learning at 12-15 earlier in the day, moderating toward sunset. The tiller universal cut my second go short but hung in there long enough to get me back to shore.

Cold enough in the water for a drysuit, though apparenly the seals on wetsuits are so good now that you don't really get wet in them any more, so the difference between wet and dry is becoming a matter of semantics. Greg had a toasty full arm wetsuit on and seemed warm enough, though he was generating a lot of heat through hard work and capsize recovery getting to know the boat.

Breeze moderated toward end of the day but there was enough left after Phil gave up the boat to take him for a brief foil two up. He is 160 and I am about 165 for a total of 325 pounds on the boat. I went out on the rack alone and kept him in the middle for fear of getting a bit too powered up, plus it's kind of hard to coordinate with someone new to the boat. So he got a taste of foiling anyway. Impressive what these foils will lift when they have to.

Ran into fireball twirlers on the beach after dinner and got some video but then they ran out of gas, so you will just have to take my word for the fact that it was a pretty sight while it lasted.

More photos coming whenever the blogging software lets me upload them.

Phil demonstrates Karate Kid moves on the launch pad

If you spent more time mothing and less time standing around looking geeky you'd be able to gybe two up like Bora...

POIDA (Pics or it Didn't 'Appen)

2007-10-09T21:54:00.000-07:00

Some photos and video from the other day. Thanks Greg!

Flyby Vid

Sign of the Times

2007-10-07T00:09:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if my paper delivery guy aims for this Agave, or if it reaches out somehow and grabs the paper, but the plant is the closest thing I've ever seen to kite-eating tree. I mean, I walk out to find an LA Times stuck in the Agave at least four mornings a week, sometimes more. Maybe the paper guy doesn't like Tequila? Anyway it's apropos because the Times' editor just quit within the past year after the parent company (Chicago Tribune) cut the newsroom staff to unprecedented levels, so they're dealing with some thorny issues at the moment.

Sailing-wise, apparently Long Beach is one of those fantasy spots where the wind blows reasonably hard, even when it isn't supposed to! With weather like this it's tough to figure out why there isn't a windsurfer strapped on every car: 15-18 and steady from the West, high 70s air temp. I will say that a fair number of kites were out today, and weaving between them does require a bit of care, as most of them are just reaching back and forth on the edge of control trying not to go downwind! The ones trying aerials sensibly venture farther out, presumably so as not to be tied in knots by the newbies. In any event a fine sailing day with Greg out on a new prototype picnic tri he's working on, which proved a very capable R&R vessel and video platform. Horses for courses. Everything held together pretty well on both boats although my vang needs rerigging so the sail looks like hell in the video, and Greg did lose his daggerboard at one point. He gave mothing a lengthy try with mixed results but made quite a lot of progress on what is admittedly a steep, slippery learning slope for a guy used to sailing foilers with THREE foils...he mentioned that yesterday he and his friend A. had the speedo pegged at 38 MPH (33 knots) FOR MOST OF THE AFTERNOON. Something to shoot for I guess...

I am working on the gybes but actually was having enough problems tacking today - probably 17-18 out by the oil platforms and lumpy but I think it was just not enough time in the boat lately. Never really had any problems tacking in that sort of wind before so it was kind of surprising in a very annoying way! Three A-cats out today (presumably training for worlds next month in Islamorada) but I was basically too knackered to do any speed testing against them after breaking my tacking sequence down and building it back up again - fortunately the last tack before heading in was a beauty so I felt like I was back on track.

Still haven't got the Velocitek mounted on any sort of plate so no tracks to share.

Canoes should be at the HPDO at American Yacht Club in Rye and I think Peter and Bora were planning to be there with Moths, so it will be interesting to see what Bora writes about it.

Vids coming soon, so stay tuned...(don't you hate it when they say that?)...

Alive to Foil another day...

Moth Myths

2007-10-03T01:07:00.000-07:00

At some point there was some talk about whether seaweed is a big problem for hydrofoil Moths. In general, the consensus among experienced foiler sailors has been that it presents no more of an issue than in other boats, which is probably true. However it must be the case then that kelp is excluded from most people's definitions of seaweed, because short of hitting a crab pot (ask me how I know), few things will bring a Moth to a halt from full foiling height like a nice big clump of kelp.

I have no idea how difficult it is to back a VO70 down to clear the keel, but I suspect it is easier than trying to sail a Moth backwards. If you're lucky, you'll only grab a small bit of the stuff, which will make your Moth nose around in the drink like a pig searching for truffles while you sort out what to do next. I have to say that it does provide excellent practice in crash tacking, because the clumps are often barely visible until you are on top of them and if you're foiling, you have about two nanoseconds to execute an avoidance maneuver.

Going to need another wetsuit - I'll bet the water at Cabrillo Beach wasn't much over 60 today, if at all. Nice place otherwise, but not much use trying to sail on the inside by the launch ramp as it's too shallow and there's too much weed. Extremely tame racoons add some novelty value to the whole experience around dusk.

Pity the Poor Wingbar

2007-10-01T16:33:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in Ohio my trailer axle failed and the trailer tipped over on, well, my Moth wingbar. The whole program ground to a halt on the shoulder, and then it started to rain, just as the last light was fading from the sky. It was all pretty catastrophic - one moment you are listening to the radio in air conditioned comfort, with a little John McLaughlin guitar jazz playing, and the next moment all hell has broken loose and you are dragging some amalgam of carbon, wood, rubber and steel down the interstate making all kinds of sparks and ugly noises. I managed to right the trailer and drag it to the nearest off ramp, then rebuild the trailer by replacing the undercarriage with a new one. That got me to California, where my moth was now unsailable. So one of my first projects after setting up the garage shop was to undertake a repair. Just in case anyone else out there ever has to do this, I'll post the steps I used. It goes without saying that you should use full barrier precautions with the epoxy and avoid inhaling too many fumes, and always use a nice particulate respirator with a tight seal when sanding composites. These instructions are aimed at people with some experience building composite widgets, but not much, because that's me! And if you are not of a technical bent, or have no interest in knowing how to accomplish this task, you can stop reading now and go back to YouTube, unless you are at work, in which case you should get up and go for a cup of coffee.

1. Make a new partial circumference carbon sleeve, using the intact bar as a male mold. I used two strips of 5.7oz carbon, wrapping the tube with mylar packing tape as a release agent. There can be no gaps in the tape or you risk it sticking to the bar, and the fewer tape wrinkles the better. Squeegee as much resin out of the carbon as possible before sticking it on the bar, and then wrap the whole mess with peel ply and electrical tape, stretching it a good bit as it goes on to provide uniform tension. If you can find 2' tape great, but it's usually expensive and the skinny stuff works also if you don't mind doing a million wraps. You should overlap about 50%; more is better but anything over 50 takes forever. Make this sleeve twice as long as the area you are repairing.

2. After the epoxy kicks, Take the sleeve off the tube, pull the peel ply off, and admire it for a second. Then cut it in half normal to the long axis. Trim half to fit inside the tube. Sand the inside and outside of the broken tube, and the inside of one of your two sleeves (the other one has a peel ply surface on its outside so it needs no sanding). Now they are ready to bond over the c-shaped broken tube. Lube up the sleeve with thickened epoxy (I used West System High Density Filler, which I think is just milled cotton fibers - a bit heavy but really strong) and jam it inside the broken tube (this will stretch your vocabulary so it's best to not have any kids around while you do it). Take the other sleeve and bond it over the outside of the broken tube. Put some peel ply on or just wrap it with Mylar packing tape, putting LOTS of tension on to compress the outer sleeve against the broken/half tube and against the inner sleeve. If you put too much tension on, you will end up with this section being smaller diameter than the rest of the tube, which is undesirable cosmetically but otherwise of no particular import. As a final step, put the bar into position on the boat, with the ends telescoping over their respective mates. This will ensure that everything is lined up while it goes off. It goes without saying that some tape shoule be applied over the socket in the broken bar to keep goo out, and it doesn't hurt to put a little wax on the crossbar male ends; otherwise the bar may be permanently bonded to the cross bar after this step! Give it a night to kick.

3. When you are done, you should have something that looks like this:

It has a big hole in the end for the front cross piece, but you really should not be able to see that hole, because this part of the bar has a cap to keep water out. So the next steps are to reinforce any partially weakened tubing that was not covered by the sleeves (a good bit in my case) and then make an end cap and bond it on.

4. I had a good bit of bar where two or three of the layers of original carbon had been ground away, but not the entire wall. This needed to be reinforced to get that part of the bar back to its original strength. This is pretty straightforward - just sand the bar a bit, cut some long strips that extend slightly beyond the affected area, put them on and wrap with your tape of choice. It might look something like this while it is curing:

5. Make an end cap. This is sort of a two step process. To brigde the big hole in the end of the bar, you need to put something into it to provide a nice surface for the carbon to lay on, because otherwise it will hang in space and not be the right shape. So the strategy is make a light cap using some sort of foam as a mold, then release that, get the foam out, trim the cap, and then bond it to the bar as a second step with more layers of carbon over the top and tape over those to compress it all. Simple, right? Again, be sure to keep goo out of the socket.

6. After this step, take all the tape off. You will likely have plenty of surface imperfections, bumps etc. unless you have been doing this for awhile. So get out a chunk of 2x4 and some 36 grit sandpaper and make it look right. You have probably used way too much carbon and resin, so some of it needs to come off anyway. Your tramps have to slide over this thing, so there should be no big bumps or ridges on the main part. My corner came out a bit bumpy because I didn't do a careful job with mylar while making the end cap, so it didn't fit quite right. I also used the wide tape on the corner, which was suboptimal because it bunched up inside the corner. So put the mylar on carefully and use narrow electrical tape for best results. I did not grind the bumps off the corner because there are only three layers of carbon there and they are pretty highly loaded. So far it has held up well.

7. After an 30-60 minutes of hard sanding and trimming you should have a functional bar. You will note, in the case of a nice prepreg original product, that the end you just repaired is somewhat heavier than the other end. But don't sweat it - it's pretty much impossible to match prepreg resin ratios with a wet layup, and with some care you should be able to maintain a better balance than this, which isn't really that bad in my view:

That's it. Now rig your tramps and go sailing!

Los Angeles Moth Fleet - A Majority of One

2007-09-30T21:26:00.000-07:00

Somebody once said (not sure just who) that Democracy is the recurring illusion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. On days like today you have to wonder. A bunch of kiteboarders showed up at Cat Beach in Long Beach Harbor, played around for awhile, decided there wasn't enough wind to have any fun, and went home. I arrived and rigged my moth at about 4pm, just as everyone was leaving. Some kite guys came over to ask me what my boat was, and they seemed genuinely surprised that I could go out in 8-12 knots of breeze and have a good time. The Moth may not be for everyone because it is fragile, difficult to sail, and sort of expensive compared to kiteboards and windsurfers, and the Moth's foil system may be pretty crude, but it seems unique among fast wind toys in that it is fun in the moderate stuff - not just when it is blowing old boots! In conditions like today, I'm hard pressed to think of a boat I'd rather be sailing, but then that's why I sail a Moth I suppose! Just figuring out how low you can soak it before falling off is completely challenging and interesting, at least for a novice like me. Some of the windsurfing guys were complaining about the lack of wind also - none of them were sailing. This seems strange, because I am pretty sure they can hoist 10 or 11sqm of sail on those things, which should be plenty of sail to have a lot of fun even when it is light. I guess it's true what they say - eventually you get used to any amount of speed.

Welcome to the working week

2007-09-26T22:58:00.000-07:00

Hello to all my friends and family, and anyone else tuned to this frequency. You are listening to Planet Moth, broadcasting from the z-axis.

This blog is basically about Mothing and my life, in no particular order. Hope you enjoy reading it.