What makes this blog run?

What makes this erudite sailing blog possible? How does Instagram save all those millions and millions of selfie photos? Where is the cloud? (Many of us don't trust it wherever it is.) How can Gmail save all my emails, even the ones I didn't mean to send? Why does Facebook still have THAT PHOTO of a certain college party after all these years

This video does the best of any to explain the technology of acres and acres of data farms that makes the cloud possible and has taken us beyond the single computer workstation (and shlepping a floppy disk hither and yon) into the hyper connected world. (It must be noted that this video is also a Google advertisement.)

Edensaw Boatbuilding Competition: A Sailing Dinghy Wins!

Most wooden boat shows have live boatbuilding; usually it involves a group of families assembling a quantity of small rowing skiffs which are then launched at the end of the weekend. At the Wooden Boat Festival hosted by the Northwest Maritime Center in Port Townshend, Washington, Edensaw Woods sponsors a boatbuilding competition where they move away from the typical novice boatbuilding event and open it up to a diverse group of boats from professional designers and being built by skilled woodworkers. In this year's competition, built alongside the traditional dory and Irish curragh were two sailing dinghies. One of them, Richard Wood's Zest singlehander, won the competition

Here are two of the boats on the beach after the time-limit for boatbuilding expired, ending all construction. On the left was a dory built only with hand tools. On the right is a 14 foot, V-sectioned sailing dinghy designed by sometime Classic Mothist, Stephen Ditmore. As the photo reveals, Ditmore's team got the hull done over the weekend but the decking and rigging awaits.

Winner of the competition, designer Richard Woods on board at the initial push-off of his Zest dinghy. This is definitely a racing singlehander with hiking wings. (The hull is a relatively narrow, flat bottom shape.) The hull was completed by the team over the weekend and Richard was able to scavenge sailing parts from some of his other projects to get this design sailing in short order. I think the pushee in the photo is Michael Scott who owns several sailing dinghies including a couple of Classic International 14's and who is constantly feeding news tidbits to the blogmeister.

Instead of painting over the freshly applied epoxy, the Richard Woods team decided to apply a silver vinyl decal material over the hull (purchased at an auto supply store). Very distinctive, hence the boat's name Silver Bullet.

Designer of the other sailing dinghy at the competition, Stephen Ditmore sailing his Classic Moth design. Unfortunately we have only seen his Moth show up once at Brigantine, New Jersey.

The wrap up video from the Edensaw competition.


Third Annual Edensaw Wooden Boat Building Challenge! from Al Bergstein on Vimeo.

Geezer Bloggers gather around a Penguin Dinghy

I went over last weekend to help George A. of Mid-Atlantic Musings> move one of his boat collection into a U-Haul. It wasn't a Moth but a Penguin and was being collected by her new owner. George's Penguin dinghy was one of six originally built in the 1960's by a guy named John Walton in Brigantine, New Jersey. This Penguin, most likely being the sole survivor of the six, was being rightfully reclaimed as a family heirloom by John's son Bill, who had flown up from Texas.

In the photo below, George is going over the history of the Penguin with the blogmeister. Turns out George helped build the six as kid. He was on the centerboard trunk building crew. (Forgive the odd colors of the photo but I wanted to highlight the beautiful interior wood of the Walton Penguin and was working from a very dark I-Phone photo.)

Photo by Bill Walton

And from the 1960's, here is the blurb on the Penguin from the magazine One Design and Offshore Sailing annual small class review, .

Some other posts about the Penguin dinghy.

Classic Moths in the Mist

At this year's Classic Moth Nationals we had a marine layer settle in Saturday night, giving us fog on Sunday morning, a rare event for Elizabeth City, North Carolina. The fog started to creep out towards Pamilco Sound around 9 a.m. and racing commenced, on time, in sunshine.

I took a couple of photos.

The fog didn't stop the sailors kibitzing about Mothboats.

Two transoms in the mist. The Laser transom of the Maser and the wide Europe Dinghy style transom of the Mousetrap Mistral.

The view from the Pugh's pier.

The original post of the 2015 Classic Moth Nationals can be found here.

Music Whenever; Indigo Girls "Closer to Fine"

When you look on the InterWebs for the top 100 folk songs of all time you generally won't find the Indigo Girls "Closer to Fine". However, for me, that song makes it into the top ten of all-time folk songs.

The Florida Cricket Class - A Missing Link?

The Cricket class was a 15 foot, chined, V-shaped, catboat with sprit rig and club clew. The class died out in the early 1960's. By that time the Cricket fleet was only found at the Miami Yacht Club and, given the small numbers at the demise, it is today, a forgotten class. But in digging through U.S. sailing history more comes out about the Cricket.

The Cricket class was designed sometime during the 1890's, in or around Atlantic City N.J, where it became extremely popular. Reports indicate hundreds were built and about one hundred were racing out of Atlantic City in 1900. It was, as far as I can determine, the earliest example of a chined, V-shaped sailing dinghy in the United States. More about the early development of the Cricket class (who was the designer? what prompted the design? when did the class die out in Atlantic City?)  has been hard to come by.

In the 1920's, when Northerners began to flock to the remote, but bucolic winter paradise that was Florida, the Cricket class was also exported in numbers from the New Jersey shores. It was reported that twenty five Crickets were shipped to southern Florida with most of them destroyed in the hurricane of 1926. The  Cricket class would rebuild in Miami and would form the core of the Southern Florida Sailing Association (later the Miami Yacht Club) when it was organized in 1928. The Cricket would become the boat to beat in the free-for-all under 150 sq. foot (sail area) class.

When, in 1931, Bill Crosby designed the Snipe for the Florida West Coast Racing Association's free-for-all Trailer class, he must have been mindful that his Snipe would initially be compared against the Cricket class, at least in Florida. Between the two, the hull design similarities are striking. It does seem that Crosby started designing his Snipe using the Cricket as a baseline and then added user-friendly features (a sloop rig with a high boom being the most notable one). The Snipe went on to international fame, the Cricket, to oblivion.

Some photos:

A smattering of classic Florida sailing dinghies; on the left, the Optimist Pram, behind the Pram, a Mothboat, in the center, a Cricket, with the other Cricket, bow on, in the foreground. Behind the Cricket is a Southwester class, designed by Bob Halsey.

Crickets launching at Miami Yacht Club, late 1950's.

Crickets going upwind. In all three of the ones in view in this photo the crew are hiking using skinny hiking boards.

The closest we have to a set of lines for the Cricket was this one-design commissioned by St. Petersburg Yacht Club as featured in The Rudder, 1919. The lines look very close to a copy of the Cricket although the length for this one-design is a foot longer than the Cricket.

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Turns out that the Atlantic City Library has Cricket plans. Here is a smaller scanned version.

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• A blog post about an earlier New Jersey dinghy, the Philadelphia Tuckups of the 1870's can be found here.
• Richard Scofield from CBMM has found a Cricket.

One Project of the Super-Rich

This is one project of the super-rich where the beauty just radiates outward into one colossal superlative and, even if you are to the left of the political spectrum, all you can say is, "Well done, well done!"



LES VOILES DE SAINT-TROPEZ 2015 - DAY 3 : C'est bon ! from GMR+G1 on Vimeo.


My post on the resurgence of the J-class can be found here.

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An aside

Is it me, but doesn't one of the professional sailors look a lot like Otto (Kevin Kline) from a "Fish called Wanda"