Sail with New Freebooters

My apologies to those of you who have been checking for new posts on this site. It looks as if I cannot commit to the steady stream of output characteristic of a true blog - my life just doesn’t work that way. However, I want to assure you that I haven’t given up and gone away - there’ll be another burst of activity in a week or so.

A very quick look at one or two events that I was following fairly keenly until the interruption:

The 2008/2009 Vendée Globe prizegiving featured a huge firework show. The record crowd of 120,000 people thronging the beach were lucky - the afternoon’s thunderstorms faded away before the ceremony.

29 contestatnts have already signed up for the next race, in October 2012, and many of them are competing in this year’s Figaro.

Speaking of the Figaro, Jann Eliés took his first tentative steps at returning to competitive singlehanded sailing after his serious fractures in the Southern Ocean. He couldn’t take it easy though - he won his first race and the next one. His orthopaedic surgeon must be shaking his head in despair.

Meanwhile, the committee that  controls the rules for the Vendée Globe boats is having discussions about the number of canting keel system failures competitors suffered. It will be interesting to see what they come up with in the way of rule changes - something on the lines of giant ski-bindings, perhaps? There has been a range of different failure modes, so it’s going to need some serious study.

Hilary Lister is back in action again, now round Land’s End, past the south coast of Wales and across the sea to Ireland. Most of her problems last year were caused by lack of wind, but now the team is facing rougher conditions. The procedures for coping with this are sometimes dramatic, so we shouldn’t be surprised when some of the reporting becomes sensational or controversial. For a dose of reality, check out Hilary’s (proxy) blog posts and Tweets.

By comparison with all this, my life has been rather easy. On a trip to the UK, I managed to meet Russell Ferriday (his site only works with IE, not Firefox, sadly) and even motored a few hundred yards round to the berth where Russell was planning to step his mast. A month later, Phyllis and I attended the Lee-on-Solent Centenary Ball at HMS Sultan and met many old friends, including one who assured me that the pound would recover some of its value against the euro by the end of this month. It’s beginning to look as if he was right, for which I am immensely grateful because my pension is paid in sterling and I live in France.

Some while back, I met Rick Willoughby on a forum at http://www.boatdesign.net . I was a little skeptical of a thread dedicated to travelling downwind faster than the wind, powered only by the wind - until Rick guided me through the associated physics.

Later, I discovered that for Rick this was only something that fell out of his work on a much more serious project which should interest anyone concerned about the way we waste energy in today’s world - but click on the audio player below and listen to him talk about it rather than getting it second hand from me:

On Saturday 11th July 2009 at 13:00hrs, three 67ft steel hulled yachts - Adventure, Challenger and Discoverer - crewed by Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force personnel, will set off from a start gate off Southsea Castle. They’ll be bound for the Canary Islands, on the first leg of a year-long round-the-world Tri-Service Adventurous Sail Training Exercise open to all UK service personnel, Regular and Reserve.

The event is organised by the Joint Services Adventurous Sail Training Centre (JSASTC), whose mission is:

to develop the personal qualities essential to members of the British Armed Forces through adventurous sail training in the Service environment.

The circumnavigation is planned to include participation in the Rolex Sydney to Hobart Race in December 2009 and Antigua Race week in May 2010.  All legs will be conducted as Adventure Training expeditions and will be either cruises in company or races in the spirit of Corinthian competition, with the emphasis on safety, seamanship and teamwork. Each crew consists of a skipper, a mate, and 12 others divided into two or three watches. Skipper, mate and watch leaders will all hold relevant qualifications and have done the required amount of sea time in their roles.

The boats are Challenge 67s, designed by David Thomas and Thanos Condylis, of which Devonport Management Ltd. built 10 as the one-design class for the 1992 British Steel Challenge. Two skippers placed in this race have been in the news recently - Mike Golding (second) and Pete Goss (third).

By 1996, the race was known as the BT Global Challenge. There were now 14 boats and Mike Golding won.

I’ll be in Gosport (the home of JSASTC) myself in April and in early June, so I hope to be able to take a look at the boats before they leave UK shores. They will probably have changed quite a bit since they were first designed and built - for a start, we’ve learned a lot about preventing the rigging failures caused by the incessant slapping and banging on long ocean passages. Francis Chichester’s Gipsy Moth IV’s stainless steel mast tangs suffered from metal fatigue en route to Australia, and several of the original Challenge 67s suffered rigging screw failures in both 19923 and 1996/7.

I taught myself to scull when I was nine or ten years old. The only trouble was, I did it the wrong way.

I put my oar in the sculling notch in the dinghy’s transom and held it like a rudder, with the blade vertical. From that starting position, it was easy to see which way to twist the blade so that it scooped water backwards like a propeller - but it meant that my wrists were doing the work, and I had to twist them a lot to obtain a shallow enough angle to get the dinghy moving from a standing start.

It was afternoon when I invented my sculling technique, so it was only a few hours before a friendly adult arrived after leaving his office, and showed me the proper way. Here it is.

While you’re learning, it’s easier to sit on a thwart, face aft, and use both hands - partly because you can see which way you’re twisting the oar.

• Lay the oar in the sculling notch with its blade horizontal.
• Hold it with both hands, elbows down and a little further apart than the width of your body.
• Set the backs of your hands outwards, in line with your forearms, so that you can easily bend your wrists both ways.
• Leave your wrists floppy. Since they are below the oar, each time you drive the oar from side to side the pushing arm will twist the blade the right way.

Try a few gentle strokes. It’s easier to start with the oar on one side or the other than in the middle.

• Oar handle to the right (port, since you’re facing aft), now push it to starboard with your right hand.
• Your right wrist swings under the oar, twisting the left-hand (starboard) side of the blade upwards. For now, just relax your left wrist and let it be led.
• Swing the oar handle right across to starboard, then reverse the movement by pushing to port with your left hand, keeping both wrists floppy.
• Your left wrist swings under the oar, twisting the right-hand (port) side of the blade upwards. For now, just relax your right wrist and let it be led.
• Repeat.

You’ll almost certainly go round in circles. Keep practising, adjusting the side force on each stroke to even out the swings. Every now and then, you’ll probably need to lift the oar out of the water to take an extra bite on one side or the other to straighten up.

Once you’ve developed a feel for making the boat go straight, you can increase the power by using the pulling hand as well - but let the pushing hand, hanging below the oar, control the angle.

With a bit more practice, you’ll be able to sit on one side of the boat and scull with one hand while you work your way around the trots or the marina pontoons or up narrow creeks. No smelly, buzzing outboard - and no frantic shipping of oars and rowlocks when you come alongside. Bliss.

Mike K-H is a doddering old fool who should shut down his blog, sell his PC and buy a rocking chair.

Nobody actually said that - at least, not in public. But after last week’s performance, I couldn’t really blame anyone if they did, could I? A long time ago my favourite form master told us not to make excuses, because he’d heard them all before, so I won’t. I’ll just do my best to be more careful, no matter how little time I have.

Blogs tend to die off if their readers aren’t fed a steady diet, but that diet should also be healthy. I don’t want to be part of the majority of publishers on the web, filling it up with rubbish and misinformation, so I will always be grateful to those who - like Peta Stuart-Hunt just did - not only read what I write, but take the trouble to correct me when I am patently wrong.

I’m also happy for people to disagree with me when the truth is debatable. I don’t ‘nofollow’ the links in my comments, but the only ones I delete are those that try to promote some irrelevant product or website without contributing anything to this one.