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Jul. 2nd, 2006 08:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI'm not dead, just a case of the shiny. Also brother-the-younger is up and cousin San is up so I have been doing all sorts of wholesome activities instead of sitting on my couch and whining about the state of the world. This is probably healthy.
I haven't actually flipped the boat over yet. Sorry to disappoint. The boat is tippy but we haven't had much wind -- enough to make the boat go, but gentle and steady so there has not been any boat-flipping despite my stupid and incompetent efforts at sailing. (Dumb mistakes, I've made a few...)
The boat is not terribly difficult to put together. It only took me two hours the first time and I've improved since then. I need a cunningham for the boat because it currently does not have one. (This is a middling-long piece of rope. It's not got any exciting pulley bits or anything.) I have jury-rigged an appropriate rope but I want a real one.
Sailing the boat is not terribly difficult. I am not sure why people take classes to learn to sail. I'm not *good* at it or anything, but I can make the boat go where I want it to go (within the limits imposed by the wind) -- it's not like I'm having to tow the boat home by hand having used up all the lake in one direction or anything. This took about two hours in a very light breeze.
Things I need to work on with the boat:
-- not dropping the tiller (you steer with it) on tacks. The boat does not self-steer for even three seconds. I should not be dropping the tiller.
-- not getting the mainsheet hooked over the transom (The mainsheet is the big rope that holds the sail at the back corner. It is your primary control for the sail. If it's too loose on a tack, the rope hooks over the left or right back corner of the boat (depends on direction) and the boat leans alarmingly like it is going to tip over. Not only is this disconcerting, it's tough to free it with one hand because there's tension on the damn rope because of the sail and wind.)
-- assembling the boat with the less-frequently-adjusted controls adjusted to match the wind better. Currently the less-frequently-adjusted controls (boom vang, cunningham, outhaul) are set to dummy-beginner settings to depower the sail and help keep me from flipping the boat over. You get more stability (such as it is) but less speed with these settings.
One of the things that I really like about learning to do something that I've never done before is that all of the arcane and convoluted instructions I've obsessively read beforehand suddenly resolve themselves into clearness. Seriously. It's like focusing a pair of binoculars.
What do the less-frequently adjusted controls do?
Outhaul -- it's attached to the bottom corner of the sail, away from the mast. What it *does* is pull that corner out to the end of the boom. (The boat has one big sail. The sail is held upright by a big long pole called the mast. The sail is held out into its triangular shape by a smaller, horizontal pole called the boom.) A looser outhaul makes the middle of the bottom of the sail billow out. A tighter outhaul makes the sail more flat. Too flat of a sail reduces the power it has.
Cunningham -- it's a piece of rope that attaches to the bottom corner of the sail right next to the mast. What it does is pull the front corner of the sail down. I'm not entirely sure what effect this has on the shape of the sail, but if you don't have this and the boat flips upside down, the mast will fall out and break the boat. This is expensive.
Boom vang -- it's a pulley-looking thing that runs from the mast to the boom, below the sail. It pulls the boom down and allegedly reduces the amount of twist in the sail. I don't mess with this because I don't understand what it does.
What else can you adjust on the boat? Lots of stuff.
Traveller -- this is a piece of rope (tied in a loop) that runs from the back left corner of the boat to the back right corner of the boat. It needs to be fairly snug and what it does is makes the sail travel (See? Boat-part names are not so dumb.) from side to side by restricting its range of motion. The tiller parts go UNDER the flat string of the traveller.
Centerboard -- this is a large, non-floating boat part that you shove down in the middle of the boat to make it have something that the wind can push against. Without a centerboard, the boat skids sideways in the wind and can't go any other direction besides straight away from the wind. It does not float and will fall out of the boat if you flip the boat. Because it's an expensive part (all the parts are expensive, some of them more than others), it needs to be tied into the boat in case you flip the boat over. Depending on conditions, you can pull up the centerboard to make the boat go faster or shove it down to get more steering and such. I am not currently smart enough to adjust this, so just leave it all the way down.
Mainsheet -- this is the big rope that all the people in the pictures are holding. Most of the time, the people driving the boat are holding two things -- the mainsheet and the tiller. The mainsheet controls the sail. If the wind hits the boat and you are unprepared and the boat tilts alarmingly, let go of this rope. (It will not all get "used up" if you let go of it. There's a hell of a lot of rope there and mostly it lies in the footwell, getting wet. In the event of emergency, though, you will still have lots of rope to grab onto, so feel free to let go of the rope if weird boat things happen. People who hold onto the mainsheet when they're not good enough to balance the boat are called swimmers.)
So, this is all great and stuff, but what about the actual learning to sail part?
I put the boat into the water (very shallow, even shoreline with sand) and I put the boat together, following the pictures in the book. (I only needed to do that with pictures once. After that, I put it together myself.) I pushed the boat out to mid-thigh depth and I hopped in. I gathered up the assorted boat parts and shoved the centerboard down and put the rudder blade down and sheeted in and that was that. It's not *that* hard. If you do stuff wrong, the boat will not go or not go as fast or tip over. The sail will flutter or flap in the breeze instead of looking all full of air and happy. If you're doing things correctly, the sail quits flapping and fills up with air and looks better and the boat goes. It is entirely possible to sail using "make the boat go and the sail look pretty" as your primary metrics for telling if you're doing it right. If you are doing things more correctly, the boat goes faster. It does not take very much wind to move the boat around, mostly because the boat has a huge, ginormous sail that will catch whatever wind there is. More wind makes things more interesting, I'm told, but for right now, wee little breezes are fine.
I need to work on skills like slowing down, stopping, smoother tacks, boat trim, but yeah. I can sail. As I said, it took about two hours to go from not-sailing to sailing. From here on out, it's a matter of improving at what I can already do and becoming more able to do it in real wind. And yeah, it's fun.
I haven't actually flipped the boat over yet. Sorry to disappoint. The boat is tippy but we haven't had much wind -- enough to make the boat go, but gentle and steady so there has not been any boat-flipping despite my stupid and incompetent efforts at sailing. (Dumb mistakes, I've made a few...)
The boat is not terribly difficult to put together. It only took me two hours the first time and I've improved since then. I need a cunningham for the boat because it currently does not have one. (This is a middling-long piece of rope. It's not got any exciting pulley bits or anything.) I have jury-rigged an appropriate rope but I want a real one.
Sailing the boat is not terribly difficult. I am not sure why people take classes to learn to sail. I'm not *good* at it or anything, but I can make the boat go where I want it to go (within the limits imposed by the wind) -- it's not like I'm having to tow the boat home by hand having used up all the lake in one direction or anything. This took about two hours in a very light breeze.
Things I need to work on with the boat:
-- not dropping the tiller (you steer with it) on tacks. The boat does not self-steer for even three seconds. I should not be dropping the tiller.
-- not getting the mainsheet hooked over the transom (The mainsheet is the big rope that holds the sail at the back corner. It is your primary control for the sail. If it's too loose on a tack, the rope hooks over the left or right back corner of the boat (depends on direction) and the boat leans alarmingly like it is going to tip over. Not only is this disconcerting, it's tough to free it with one hand because there's tension on the damn rope because of the sail and wind.)
-- assembling the boat with the less-frequently-adjusted controls adjusted to match the wind better. Currently the less-frequently-adjusted controls (boom vang, cunningham, outhaul) are set to dummy-beginner settings to depower the sail and help keep me from flipping the boat over. You get more stability (such as it is) but less speed with these settings.
One of the things that I really like about learning to do something that I've never done before is that all of the arcane and convoluted instructions I've obsessively read beforehand suddenly resolve themselves into clearness. Seriously. It's like focusing a pair of binoculars.
What do the less-frequently adjusted controls do?
Outhaul -- it's attached to the bottom corner of the sail, away from the mast. What it *does* is pull that corner out to the end of the boom. (The boat has one big sail. The sail is held upright by a big long pole called the mast. The sail is held out into its triangular shape by a smaller, horizontal pole called the boom.) A looser outhaul makes the middle of the bottom of the sail billow out. A tighter outhaul makes the sail more flat. Too flat of a sail reduces the power it has.
Cunningham -- it's a piece of rope that attaches to the bottom corner of the sail right next to the mast. What it does is pull the front corner of the sail down. I'm not entirely sure what effect this has on the shape of the sail, but if you don't have this and the boat flips upside down, the mast will fall out and break the boat. This is expensive.
Boom vang -- it's a pulley-looking thing that runs from the mast to the boom, below the sail. It pulls the boom down and allegedly reduces the amount of twist in the sail. I don't mess with this because I don't understand what it does.
What else can you adjust on the boat? Lots of stuff.
Traveller -- this is a piece of rope (tied in a loop) that runs from the back left corner of the boat to the back right corner of the boat. It needs to be fairly snug and what it does is makes the sail travel (See? Boat-part names are not so dumb.) from side to side by restricting its range of motion. The tiller parts go UNDER the flat string of the traveller.
Centerboard -- this is a large, non-floating boat part that you shove down in the middle of the boat to make it have something that the wind can push against. Without a centerboard, the boat skids sideways in the wind and can't go any other direction besides straight away from the wind. It does not float and will fall out of the boat if you flip the boat. Because it's an expensive part (all the parts are expensive, some of them more than others), it needs to be tied into the boat in case you flip the boat over. Depending on conditions, you can pull up the centerboard to make the boat go faster or shove it down to get more steering and such. I am not currently smart enough to adjust this, so just leave it all the way down.
Mainsheet -- this is the big rope that all the people in the pictures are holding. Most of the time, the people driving the boat are holding two things -- the mainsheet and the tiller. The mainsheet controls the sail. If the wind hits the boat and you are unprepared and the boat tilts alarmingly, let go of this rope. (It will not all get "used up" if you let go of it. There's a hell of a lot of rope there and mostly it lies in the footwell, getting wet. In the event of emergency, though, you will still have lots of rope to grab onto, so feel free to let go of the rope if weird boat things happen. People who hold onto the mainsheet when they're not good enough to balance the boat are called swimmers.)
So, this is all great and stuff, but what about the actual learning to sail part?
I put the boat into the water (very shallow, even shoreline with sand) and I put the boat together, following the pictures in the book. (I only needed to do that with pictures once. After that, I put it together myself.) I pushed the boat out to mid-thigh depth and I hopped in. I gathered up the assorted boat parts and shoved the centerboard down and put the rudder blade down and sheeted in and that was that. It's not *that* hard. If you do stuff wrong, the boat will not go or not go as fast or tip over. The sail will flutter or flap in the breeze instead of looking all full of air and happy. If you're doing things correctly, the sail quits flapping and fills up with air and looks better and the boat goes. It is entirely possible to sail using "make the boat go and the sail look pretty" as your primary metrics for telling if you're doing it right. If you are doing things more correctly, the boat goes faster. It does not take very much wind to move the boat around, mostly because the boat has a huge, ginormous sail that will catch whatever wind there is. More wind makes things more interesting, I'm told, but for right now, wee little breezes are fine.
I need to work on skills like slowing down, stopping, smoother tacks, boat trim, but yeah. I can sail. As I said, it took about two hours to go from not-sailing to sailing. From here on out, it's a matter of improving at what I can already do and becoming more able to do it in real wind. And yeah, it's fun.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-02 12:37 pm (UTC)Now I want to go and re-read Captains Courageous again!
no subject
Date: 2006-07-03 03:55 pm (UTC)Ask Eric about that. Rather, don't ever ask Eric about that. After going sailing with me at Deer Valley, he decided that I did not actually know how to sail a boat. Something about going in a 360 while approaching the dock. He claims there was a 360, anyway. I was too absorbed trying to get the centerboard up to pay attention to the tiller, and lo, it did not self-steer :)
Outhaul, cunningham, and boom-vang - if Sunfish have these, I never had to worry about it. The camp staff did all the rigging, so already you know more about the sailing thing than I do. I wonder if they had them rigged for beginners.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-03 11:48 pm (UTC)There are ways to rig a Sunfish for racing that differ slightly from how they're recreationally rigged -- but probably nothing you'd notice. (Ties for attaching the sail to the booms instead of the plastic rings, for example.)
Sunfish make great recreational boats for several reasons. First, they have hard-chined hulls (There are corners on 'em rather than smoothly-rounded edges. Sunfish look kind of like |__| in cross section. There are corners. Lasers look like a fat, shallow U in cross section. There are no corners.) The hard-chined hulls make Sunfish more stable, able to lean more, and less likely to flip over in a sudden and alarming sort of way. Lasers flip over in a sudden and alarming way a lot. They're known for it.
Second, the center of effort for a Sunfish sail is about a foot closer to the water than the center of effort for a Laser sail. This means you have less flip-the-boat-over moment coming into play with a Sunfish when the wind blows and the boat (which is already pretty darned stable) can be more easily balanced by people who don't want to hang their butts out over the water all the damn time. Lasers have a higher center of effort and this (combined with the flippy nature of the smooth-chined hull) makes them roll pretty easily and head directly for flip-the-boat-over land unless you, the driver, use your bodyweight to balance the forces on the sail.
Third, there are not very many controls on a Sunfish for people to play with. On a Sunfish, the adjust-under-way controls are the centerboard, the tiller, the traveler, and the mainsheet line. (I don't *think* they play with the main halyard while underway.) On a Laser, the adjust-under-way controls are those of the Sunfish plus cunningham, outhaul, and vang. (The Laser does not have a main halyard [used to raise and lower the sail] because it has a sleeved sail that threads onto the mast sort of like you put a sock on your foot. It cannot be lowered if there's a problem or the wind gets too big. Once the mast is stepped, the sail is up and it is going to STAY up until you unstep the mast or lay the boat down in the water. You cannot save yourself by just putting the damn sail down and swim-towing the boat to shore. I am mentioning this for absolutely no reason at all.)
Sunfish can be sailed by all sorts of people. They are well-behaved boats that probably won't kill you and can be sailed by, say, twelve-year-olds who are away at summer camp. Lasers, though, depend on the driver to counter the boat's propensity to flip. Because of that, people who weigh less than about a hundred and forty pounds have trouble mustering enough leverage to keep the damn boat upright in any serious amount of wind.
Finally, Sunfish are good recreational boats because they are NOT dogs -- they're a lot of fun to sail and they can (with a reasonably capable captain) rise up on a plane and go like sixty. They are hugely popular and widely enjoyed. They just don't *have* to be sailed with your full and complete attention all the time because they are not looking for an excuse to dump you into the drink. Lasers, well, are.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-04 03:09 pm (UTC)I get it now. This is the IRH in boat form.