Sep 11, 2011
More dingy sailing
Today was the second day out with my Flipper sailing dingy. No camera this time since I was alone. I didn’t have Rasmus as crew, and there was quite a lot of wind. I managed a fairly graceful launch and headed for the open water, tacking a few times in the harbour and only screwing up slightly. Outside of the harbour pier the wind picked up and I started getting a feel for the balance of the boat, hiking hard and nervously controlling the mainsail to adjust the power: to get this thing to really fly I need to install the trapeze or sail with a friend for extra weight.
I made it across to Nacka Strand in no time at all, planing at what felt like at least ten knots at a close reach with slightly slack sails to moderate the power. I turned around and started sailing in the other direction. The hiking straps had pulled a couple of large stailess steel screws loose so I headed back to do some repairs. Suddenly my coordination failed, I was late in letting the mainsail loose in a strong gust, and the boat capsized. I used to sail Lasers in Dar es Salaam, so I knew (in theory) what to do. Grab a hold of the centerboard before the boat turns turtle, and pull down. In a Laser this works every time, but the Flipper is a bit larger, and has a much higher mast and more sails, so no matter how hard I pulled on the centerboard the boat remained on it’s side.
My drysuit was keeping me … well dry … but hanging on to the centerboard, doing chin-ups to apply more weight was becoming tiring. A family sailing boat stopped to check on me, but couldn’t do much to help. I swam around the boat to check if the sheets were loose and undid them from the cleats. I tried again, unsuccessfully, for about ten minutes until I realised that the way to do it was to chin-up and then wrap your legs around the centerboard, hoisting yourself out of the water completely to use all your weight to right the boat. I finally got the boat right-side-up and headed back to the harbour, exhausted but pleased.
All in all I love sailing this thing: it is quite challenging, but goes like a #€@%!. Lessons learned: trapeze needed for single-handing this thing, always let sheets out before trying to right a dingy, and get a whistle so you can attract attention if you get into trouble. Upside down in the middle of a heavily trafficked shipping lane is not a good place to be.
Sep 11, 2011
It floats (barely)!
Yesterday Rasmus (my younger son) and I premiered the Flipper Scow I’ve been renovating since last autumn. Even in light winds we could tell this is one fast dingy. Most things worked (just some minor equipment failure), but there is a leak in the cockpit portholes (Henrik, a fellow dingy sailor at the club suggested vaseline, which might just do the trick) and some other more obscure leak that slowly fills the outer hull with water - some considerable amount of which we had to drain before being even remotely able to pull the thing up the slipway. I’ll have to look into both those problems, and possibly add some sort of puncture-resistant floatation bags in the dingy so it can’t sink.
Aug 29, 2011
The Futurist's Dilemma
In this 1964 clip from the BBC Horizon show, Arthur C. Clarke makes a fairly precise prediction, but one that is only half right. “We’ll no longer commute in cities,” he says, “we’ll…
Jul 27, 2011
Defending The Generalists In The Web Design Industry
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In recent years there has been a move away from generalist Web designers to specialists such as content strategists, user experience architects and front-end…
Jul 18, 2011
Rasmus helping me renovate my Flipper sailing dingy. I’ve spent the last six months on this project…
Jul 18, 2011
Winter feels far away right now. This was taken seven months ago. Note my frosty moustache…
Jun 15, 2011
Magical fruit, from Married to the Sea.
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This is some sort of blog where I post stuff that catches my interest. Sometimes, in a burst of creativity, I post some stuff I've made myself, but lately I've been mostly putting pretty things here.
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