Dylan Winter films the Three Rivers Race, Norfolk Broads, Part 1

Dylan Winter, who I rank as the best sailing/cruising videographer going on the Internet, has put some video shorts up of this years Three Rivers Race held on the Norfolk Broads, England, the first weekend in June.

From the Thames Sailing Club website , quoted here is a description of the race......

The ..........Three Rivers Race, is organised by Horning Sailing Club....... It is a unique and taxing event which is probably the most unusual yacht race in the UK.

Taking place over a 24-hour period, the Three Rivers Race is a handicap event with entries ranging from dinghies, half-deckers, traditional Broads yachts and modern production yachts......who paddled or quanted under bridges and short tacked up narrow rivers.

The course is about 50 miles in length set around three of the rivers of the Norfolk Broads, the Bure, the Ant and the Thurne, and includes four turning points which may be taken in any order. As the rivers are tidal a great deal of tactical planning is required from skippers and crews to choose the most efficient method of getting round all the turning marks as quickly as possible.

Dylan Winters most likely will combine these video shorts into something grander. I think he is trying to make a buck off his Internet videos (as the English say, Jolly Good..... as he is, after all a professional, and his quality is always superb). These links may eventually disappear as Dylan takes them down from YouTube. Enjoy for the moment.......

The first one shows the pre-start prep and the start of the gunter Rebel class. One can catch the occasional glimpse of some of the unique gaffer river cruisers anchored about. The starting commentator is a nice touch......

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And the start of the Thames A-Raters, probably the most refined light air, small water sailboat in the world. Normally raced on the upper reaches of the Thames; it looks like a fair number of the A-raters made the trip up north to race on the Norfolk Broads. If memory serves, the hulls all date back to the early 1900's and now sport enormously tall carbon rigs with fully battened mylar sails. What looks like a stool fastened to the back deck is actually there to support the mast when the rig is dropped to fit under one of many bridges in this race.

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More to come.......

Tip of the hat to Dylan.........

Music for Fridays; Tenniscoats "Baibaba Bimba"

Japanese duo playing off the urban landscape.........

Tenniscoats - Baibaba Bimba | A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Kibitzing

I haven't been sailing recently; I broke my Classic Moth a couple weeks back and then I decided to modify the daggerboard trunk, so she's been in the shop patiently enduring me hacking and glassing and sanding. The only thing sailing related I've been doing is the kibitzing about sailing; a relative easy thing to do around Annapolis.

Friend Bill Sloan was back in town. He's retired in Florida but comes back once a year to award the Eleanor Ruth Wilcox trophy to the bowwoman for the winning team in the womens Santa Maria Match Race Regatta . I had him and his wife over to the house last Sunday and he related the story behind the trophy....

Eleanor Ruth Wilcox was Bill Sloan's mother; quite an athlete, and she won that trophy at a track meet in Hawaii sometime in the 1940's. Bill remembers the trophy living under the kitchen sink with the detergent, the silver all black, when he was growing up. Upon the death of his mother, Bill rescued the trophy, got a local silversmith to replate the trophy and donated it to the Eastport YC for a "womens competition". When Eastport YC inherited the Santa Maria Cup and turned it into a women's match race regatta; the Eleanor Ruth Wilcox trophy had found a home.

I wandered down to SSA on Tuesday to watch TESOD from the deck and, of course, to kibitz with all and sundry who wandered by.

I asked Ian Burman, Naval Academy Dinghy coach, about the 2010 Intercollegiate Dinghy Nationals held by the Hoofers Club in Madison Wisconsin. Ian was in Madison for 13 days and has never, in all his sailing career, seen absolute calm condition for such an extended period of time. The only way the regatta was completed was they usually got a little breeze just before dusk.....much of the racing was conducted in the last three hours of daylight.

Sean Smith (yes the same Sean Smith that partnered with me on the Nomad sailing excursion ) also sails Chesapeake Log Canoess during the summer. He related how, for the Eastern Shore rowdies/canoeists, the Budweiser 10 oz beers (vs. the normal 12 oz) is the beer of choice. I, never having realized that there was such a thing as a Budweiser 10 oz beer, pressed Sean for more info. According to Sean, Budweiser makes the 10 oz in Houston Texas for the Texas market but it is also distributed (very selectively) in Southern and Eastern Maryland. According to the 10 oz. connoisseur's, the 10 oz Bud tastes better and stays colder longer. More on this story over Here....

And finally, Judy Gebhardt, wife of Laser Grandmaster John (also another boat putterer), related how his shorts magically appear at the washer with epoxy or paint spots all over them. I have the same problem; seeming to forget to change into appropriate "work clothes" when I'm doing some boat work and then, all of the sudden, one of my "Sunday best" has stains here and there. Drives my wife nuts as well.

Amazingly, noone dwelt too much on the slings and arrows of sailboat racing.

Two Over the Hill Dinghy Sailors in Brown Floppy Hats (Vanguard Nomad)

Good friend and Naval Architect, Bob Ames, wanted some video of his Nomad daysailor....sadly no longer in production, having been dropped when British management took over Vanguard Sailboats in Rhode Island. So he recruited two of his ex-International 14 buddies (me and Sean Smith) to sail the Nomad off of Rhode River while he bounced around in his small inflatable with his Canon Movie Camera. It's been a long time since I sailed a dinghy with a spinnaker. Luckily the Nomad had enough stability to tolerate my mistakes, including parking the Nomad beam to the wind during a takedown with the spinnaker full and bye down to leeward.

To my mind, the Nomad is a higher performance take on the Flying Scot daysailor, with an up to date hull shape, assymetric spinnaker, and North 3DL sails. There are no hiking straps; a little disconcerting to Sean who almost fell out of the boat the first time he got up on the gunwhales. The Nomad was quite lively in the 5-10 Southerly breeze we had that day. I can see it appealing to a family where the parents were raised on Lasers and like planing dinghies, but now need something with room for the toddlers.

Laser Performance is sitting on the Nomad molds with no intention to resume production as, in their marketing plan, the Nomad conflicts with the British designed sailboat line up that they now import into the U.S.

Shame.......

In the following video, I'm the one with the life jacket (something about singlehanded sailors, we are trained to wear lifejackets on the water). Bob Ames did a bang up job on editing this clip.

Music for Fridays; Vandaveer "Dig Down Deep"

Friday is indeed a moving target...........

That Damn Lee Shore

No quicker way in sailing to swallow a huge slice of humble pie than attempting to get off a lee shore. This applies to anyone that owns a sailboat that doesn't have a motor. And that means all of us dinghy sailors. You know, the launch off the lee shore that didn't quite go as planned. The one where you didn't walk it out far enough and got blown back to the beach. Or the one where you have to tack upwind between two finger piers, ping ponging off those unfortunate boaters tied off on either pier.

Launching off a lee shore is sailing's equivalent of a comedic pratfall. Most of us are secretly smirking on the travails of someone else failing to make it off a lee shore.... until we screw it up royally (and we all screw it up sometimes).

The following video is lee shore 101. You can't go upwind until you get your fins down, if you can't get your fins down, you get blown back to shore......

I like that reassuring hug at the 2:48 mark.... "Honey, I know what I'm doing...trust me!"

FrankenBoat

Frankenboat - Modifying an existing sailboat hull (usually a sailing dinghy) into a completely different concept.

I must admit a strange affinity to those who develop Frankenboats. It is a very, very tiny cadre in the sailing community who delight in seeing something different in the ordinary, unlike the automobile community where creativity and the mashed up abound, whether it's hot rods, VW Beatles with Rolls Royces hoods, or Honda Civics with dolphin tails. I wrote about my friend Fran who is slowly converting a Sidewinder into a Geezer Sailing Canoe.

And here is a Roger and Williams student who decided to make a high performance skiff out of a Laser hull (tip of the hat to SailGroove).....


Sailing Videos on Sailgroove


I'm always on the lookout for the oddball creative type who has hacked up something old and familiar into something new (who woulda thunk....I own a Frankeboat which I'll get to in a later post)