Sunday, September 06, 2009

The Final Chapter - What has happened in the year since the maiden voyage?


I Sailed on Lake Charlevoix –
Lake Charlevoix is an absolutely beautiful lake in northern Lower Michigan. This is where my wife sailed with me for the first time. While our water outings were uneventful in a good way the trip produced some of the first “character” markings in Woodstock. I also lost the keys to the padlocks on the trailer hitch so the car and the boat trailer were inseparable until we got home. Stopping in Traverse City on our way home caused shoppers on Main Street to gather around Woodstock with admiring looks.

Mounting the motor on the transom during trailer transport on this trip apparently placed some strain on the rear seat where the transom knee is attached. In the picture below you see a close-up of the front end of the transom knee.


Some of the plies in the seat have been pulled apart slightly as evidenced by the “scales” which show up as lighter areas. This picture shows the seat about halfway through a repair process where I used a syringe to inject epoxy into 1/16" dia. holes drilled part way through the plywood seat.




This syringe is made for injecting glue into the looses joints of chairs and it worked quite nicely for this repair. The brass nozzle seals well against the hole opening and I observed that for several of the holes I was able to force silica-thickened epoxy into a given hole and have the epoxy come out of other holes or out through the "scales" produced by the delamination. In addition I feel reasonably certain the affected area have some additional saturation of epoxy into the wood fibers.


I Displayed Woodstock at a Wooden Boat Show in Pentwater -
This is a nice little event.  But I learned what passes for a winner in the Workmanship Award category. SMH (Shaking my head.)



I Sailed on Lake Michigan with Jerry! -
Very early in this blog I mentioned my dear friend Jerry whom my wife and I became acquainted with on a local bike path.  I invited him to sail with me on Lake Michigan on a particularly nice day.  I 'm quite certain he enjoyed it even more than I did.



I Returned to Reeds Lake -
One beautiful fall day there was a nice amount of wind so I set off to sail on nearby Reeds Lake. After completely rigging Woodstock I realized I forgot my centerboard at home. I had an elderly couple watch my boat while I went home to retrieve it. Back on the lake, during my second effort to come about, I was on the wrong side of the boat and my effort to move to the proper side only made the boat tip more. Over she went. The boat wasted no time in turning turtle completely. This was my first capsizing event but I quickly remembered that I should pull gradually on the centerboard using my weight to right the boat. But, just as I was reaching for the centerboard I watched it drop into the hull, out of sight. As I was trying to decide on a second plan of attack the boat must have settled into the water a bit more or something because the centerboard floated back up through the trunk, just a little bit. I grabbed it, pulled it out the bottom until it was seated, and slowly applied force to the end of the centerboard.


I righted the boat, lowered the sails, and tried to get back in. I successfully had the boat turn turtle once more on top of me forcing me to submerge myself to get outside the hull. I’ll admit I swallowed a bit of water and the resulting coughing made me wonder for a brief moment if this was really how it all could end. My attitude toward safety took a significant jump to the forefront of my thoughts from that point on.


Anyhow, I righted the boat again and tried to reboard both at the front transom and the rear. No luck. I couldn’t lift my body high enough to get over either transom. About that time a boat that was supervising a crew team came alongside and they lowered a rope ladder so I could board their boat and then transfer to mine. I thanked them and sat in my floating bathtub with nothing more than a centerboard to splash water out of the boat. I was drifting safely toward shore so the situation was not serious.


Then I heard this loud roar and I suspected what was up. Sure enough a resident on the lake had told the local constabulary that there was someone struggling with a sailboat and the authorities had dispatched an airboat rescue team that was flying across the lake toward me with lights flashing. Those guys pretty much took matters in their own hands. They lashed my boat to theirs and we proceeded back to the boat landing.


I lost my glasses, I lost my my hat (retrieved later via phone call from a kayaker who found it), and I lost a bit of body heat, but all ended well. The season ended with me thinking that I’m gonna have to give some thought to how I can successfully re-enter my boat in this kind of situation. Sunfish type sailboats have small cockpits that don't hold much water. My PMD only had about 4" of freeboard with all the water it had in it. I’m also gonna make sure that next time I have something to bail with (Duh!). Sure glad everything in the boat was tied to the boat!


I Did Some Research On Boat Ladders.
The solution I came up with looked like this -


This stirrup runs about $25. I backed up the cleat with stainless steel fender washers behind the rear seat bulkhead. I chose this mounting location so the ropes would be near the centerline of the boat and inside the "dip" in the transom so they would resist slipping off to the side.


I did a dry run with the boat in the garage and I think this should work. I can grab the rear seat and hoist my body up over the transom while stepping on the ladder.


Earlier This Summer I Tried Out Green Lake -
My first outing of the 2009 season! We had moved to a condominium early this spring so the best bet for a sailing lake was Green Lake. Since last fall found me capsizing and unable to get back in the boat I was a little gun shy but my overwhelming desire to get out in the boat found me choosing a day with some brisk and gusty winds.


Well, my lightning fast reflexes and catlike agility (was that a sarcasm detector I just heard go off?) kept the fabric aloft and the centerboard wet. Translation: fear had the adrenaline pumping and every wind shift and gust had me more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. But I was quite pleased that my fear had turned into some degree of forethought and fairly decent body placement. And leaving the jib in the car wasn’t a bad idea either.

I worked and worked to navigate upwind through the small portion of the lake which I have since learned local sailors avoid or get someone to tow them through. Finally I was in the larger portion of the lake and was clear to sail to the far end. I was preparing to come about when a gust became a prolonged blast, but no more than about 20 mph, and certainly no stronger than the gusts I had experienced earlier. As I was holding forth I felt a strange loss of power and I observed my sail going before me. As they say, the wind had gone out of my sails. But in this case the sail had gone out of the wind. The sight of my "modified" mast reminded me of a couple incidents I had read about on the Passagemaker Dinghy Builder’s blog.




I drifted to a dock where a couple of guys held the boat while I stowed the sails and rigging. I rowed back to the boat landing with serious doubts about whether this whole sailing thing was worth it. I found a local company where I obtained a new 10’ length of aluminum tubing ($60) which has a slightly thicker sidewall, .065" instead of the original .057".


The mast step also suffered some minor damage. I chose to use a hole saw large enough to eliminate the affected area and then put wood flour thickened epoxy in the hole. I made the mixture thin so it would pour and the wood flour basically just colored the epoxy. I used a short section of the old mast to maintain a hole for the mast.




The mast hole is displaced slightly aft of its original position. The black ring around the tubing near the dark brown epoxy is some electrical tape I used to increase the diameter of the hole for the mast so it wasn't such a close tolerance fit.


I Made Some Improvements -
I took this mast repair job as an opportunity to refine my rigging and the storage thereof. I will admit I created some “floating furniture” when I made my PMD and, as such, I don’t want to have unnecessary dings and scratches in my finish. The necessary dings and scratches are painful enough. However, even if some additions to the character of my boat weren’t a concern, transporting the boom, mast, yard, centerboard, and oars (at a minimum) and leaving room for something like say, my WIFE, was an issue.


Last year I had already made provisions for some racks for transporting the rigging in the boat. These pictures show my first efforts at securing things using ropes laced through the racks and around the items.




This was a good first effort but even with felt pads in what I thought were strategic locations the racks scarred the varnish on the seats. They were also not rigid gh so they curled upward when the ropes were pulled tight and threading the ropes was a pain. Half of the time I just wrapped up the rigging and stuffed it in the car (the other half the time my wife seemed to want a place to sit).


The pictures below show my most recent effort. These racks mount in the oarlocks and they use pivoting boards to retain the items to be transported. Wing nuts and bolts secure the pivoting boards. To attach the racks to the oarlocks I took long 1/2” dia. bolts, cut off the threaded portion, and drilled some holes for hitch pins.




I actually designed the racks using Google SketchUp which is a pretty cool 3D drawing program and there’s a version available for free download from Google.


As for the rigging itself I initially rigged the mast stays with cord as described in the construction instructions.




While that method was plenty strong and cheap it took repeated trials and much patience to get the lengths and tensions right. And as the cord stretched the attachment would have to be redone. In the course of getting things right, and under sail, I had the clips on the leeward side actually come unfastened when the stay went slack and, needless to say, the mast went down.


Since then I have obtained these stainless steel turnbuckles and the long D-shackle shown.




The little keeper rings for the turnbuckle pins are a challenge to a sailor's fine-motor skills but adjustment is much more straightforward and, short of structural failure, there is no way for the stays to come loose under sail.


A couple other refinements were the addition of a few washers behind the eye strap on the top of the mast for the jib pulley. Now it allows the jib sheet to run freely. And, while the instructions show having one cleat mounted on the fore of the mast, it really fouls up the jib lines while under way. I repositioned the cleat on the aft of the mast and all is well when I come about.


And Then,… There’s Lake Michigan Revisited-
As I said earlier I was beginning to wonder if this sailing idea was a romantic notion whose real nature consisted of repairs, always adjusting something, and “eventful” (and embarrassing) outings. But then I had the opportunity to sail Woodstock on Lake Michigan again. I had been on Lake Michigan once before, but the last time the lake was nearly asleep. There was a bit of breeze but the winds went nearly calm several times. This second time out there was a little energy in the wind. Don’t get me wrong, this was certainly not Lake Michigan unleashed. Lake Michigan is no place to be with an 11-foot boat if the lake expresses its enthusiasm. But this time I had to row into a headwind through the channel leading to the lake and the combination of the wind, the 3 foot waves, and the reflected waves off the pier made headway a challenge and, at the very least, gave me reason to consider caution.


But I discovered a few things. First, once you get into open water the confusion and treachery of the waves bouncing off the piers disappeared. Second, the unpredictable winds of small inland lakes are not as much of an issue on this expanse of water. Third, I am much more confident in my abilities. Fourth, the glitches in the rigging have pretty much been eliminated. And, finally, I discovered my boat is a fine little vessel. The steady wind, the longer swells of this Great Lake, and the fact that my boat floated on top of the swells instead of plowing through them like a heavier boat gave me confidence and made for a most enjoyable outing. An acquaintance who is an experienced local sailor confirmed my assessment when he said he was impressed by how my boat handled the lake. The sun, the blue sky, a brisk wind, and an 11 foot hole in the water called Woodstock sailing on a significant body of water. Words fail to convey the feeling you get from building a craft that is capable enough for a benevolent Lake Michigan and small enough that you can feel every message sent from the tiller, the main sheet, the hull, and from the sounds of the water and the rigging.


Was it all worth it?


Oh yeah!








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