Kiteboarder decides to slow it down......

Zen of Daysailing; Threesome on a Windrider tri

Andros Island, Bahamas.

Music for Friday; Flogging Molly, Salty Dog

Time for a hyperkinetic, rollicking, howling pirate song.

Music for Friday; An Admission

Last week, I was idly clicking through Tillerman's blog lists and was going through one his top ten sailing blogs, Messing About in Boats, and realized that "Messing About in Boats" had a "Song for Friday" section.... in fact he had been doing "Song for Friday" a lot longer that I had been doing "Music for Friday". It then dawned upon me that somewhere in the past I had visited "Messing About in Boats", saw the feature "Song for Friday", filed it in my subconscious, and then resurfaced it in my blog as "Music for Fridays", at that time completely original and brilliant from my brain. Oops! Time to acknowledge the progenitor of my "Music for Fridays". For those who want to go through a different set of YouTube music videos, please take a gander at the "Song for Friday" section over at the blog Messing About in Boats,

Laser Racing; SSA Tuesday Night Summer Series

A YouTube featuring the Laser fleet during last Tuesdays weeknight racing at Severn Sailing Assoc, Annapolis MD, USA. Plenty of breeze and lots of action at the leeward mark as most of the fleet were gybing and rounding the mark in one fell swoop. There is also some shots of carving downwind. The level of experience in SSA's Laser fleet is considerable as attested by the small number of capsizes in these gusty conditions.

The fleet was about evenly divided between Radial and Full Rig as the Radial ACC Championships will be at SSA in just over a week.

Stitching Explained (Stitch and Tape Construction in Boatbuilding)

In reference to the previous post about building Classic Moths using stitch and glue; there may be some out there who do not know what stitch and tape (glue) is about. This video is a good primer on stitching panels together to form a hull. The hull in the video is a Chesapeake Light Craft kit, a Mill Creek kayak. This is a multipanel design and doesn't torture the plywood (like Greg's modified Mistral) to get the shape.

Greg's New Ride

Greg Duncan had his new Classic Moth at Portsmouth. It is a modified Mistral design with a wider transom. Built with 3mm Luan (doorskin ... $15 a sheet). Greg is one of those builders who seem to pop out a new Mothboat every two years or so.

A completely unedited video on his new Moth.



The audio is obscured by wind noise (the wind picked up after the racing ... typical!) and Jimmy Buffet on the car stereo ... so let me translate. Greg says "Europe transom, Mistral nose" which translated means he grafted a Europe transom shape onto the Mistral panel shapes. The Mistral and Greg's variant are built by "stitch and glue" aka "tortured ply", which entails wiring two hull panels together at the centerline and then bending them up into a hull shape. You can change the shape dramatically by altering the beams at the gunwhale as well as attaching a different transom shape.