Seen at the 2018 Sailboat Show: The RS21

One couldn't help but notice the small keelboat jammed right up against the fence line of the Sailboat Show. She was tucked into the corner facing Annapolis's dockside restaurant row and sported all the accoutrements of modern keelboat design, reverse bow, bulb keel, skinny rudder, assymetric spinnaker. Once inside you discovered this keelboat, the RS21, is RS Sailing's new entry into the day keelboat market, the design brief targeting the emerging club keelboat market where the sailing club buys the boats and the sailors pay an extra fee to climb aboard and race.

A photo of the cockpit looking aft. Two mainsail cleats; the forward one for the mainsheet trimmer when going upwind, the aft one for the skipper or trimmer that has moved aft for the offwind legs.

Looking forward it is a very clean cockpit.

The bulb keel. It does have a weed cleaner/cutter that comes standard which is a must given the very straight leading edge of the keel. A Torqueedo electric drive comes with the RS21 (You can see the prop in front of the rudder - I think it gets raised when saililng.)

The business end of the mast. Plenty of controls to keep the crew occupied.

Some videos of the RS21 on the water. I would have to say the RS21 most closely matches the market where the popular J70 currently dominates in the U.S.A.

D Zero Video: Is this the one?

I don't really keep up with the machinations of ISAF or World Sailing or whatever the international governing body of sailing is called now - I really only have x-amount of aged grey matter to devote to all the digital information flowing in daily. I did read that there was to be some sort of singlehanded trials to replace the Laser (did they call them off? - or are they still on?). If I recollect, the singlehanded classes that made the cut were the most recent design additions in the mix; the RS Aero, the Melges 14, and the D Zero. And, of the most recent videos of these classes (within the past six months) Earwigoagin nominates this D Zero video as the winner.



Disclaimer: No endorsement of any of these three classes is implied with this post. (My heart belongs to the Classic Moth.) Click here to see some more of Earwigoagin's babbling about these (and other) singlehanded classes.

Header Photo: D-class Swedish Sailing Kanot

Torsten Sörvik

The previous header photo was of the Swedish D-class sailing canoes (kanot) racing to the weather mark. Several countries, Sweden, England, United States, Germany, created cruising or open sailing canoe classes during the early 1900's. (As compared to the faster and more out-of-control decked sailing canoe, which evolved to the modern International Canoe.) At least in this photo, the modern D-kanot now races with a very refined, hi-tech, square top rig. The Swedish "cruising" sailing canoe classes as I could find from the Internet are:

• B-class. A 3.9 meter cat-rigged sailing canoe for young sailors. Max sail area 8 square meters. For a glimpse of a Swedish B-class kanot (blue hull with, what appears to be an OK rig at 1:20 and 1:58 into the video), click on the video in this post. Also, more info here.
• C-class - 4.8 meters to 5.2 meters. Max sail area 10 square meters. Minimum weight 81 kg.
• D-class - 5.4 meters to 6 meters. Max sail area 13 square meters. Minimum weight 360 kg. I've lifted the header photo from the website of boatbuilder Torsten Sörvik, who appears to be the kingpin of the Swedish D-class kanot's.
• E- class - 5.4 meters to 6 meters. Max sail area 13 square meters. Minimum weight 130 kg.

The Swedish sailing canoes all feature hiking boards which extend the hiking skipper out about 300 mm or so. There is a German canoe class, the Taifun, of which I know very little, that also uses these hiking boards. A video from this years Eurocup on a lake in Berlin shows both the International Canoe and the Taifun class racing. I must admit the Taifun looks to be a very sensible singlehander (or a two-hander for smaller crews). Click here for a more detailed post about the German Taifun sailing canoe.



And a Taifun at speed.



And a Taifun at speed, take 2.



All this crusing canoe research was brought about when I was called upon to help identify a sailing canoe model that was picked up by sailmaker, Douglas Fowler. More about this later.

Music Whenever: Hands Up

Hands Up from Bryan Eckerson on Vimeo.


A happy-happy, joy-joy boppy disco dance tune from the 1980's by the group Ottawan. You can glimpse occasional snippets of this old, baldish, be-spectacled guy with a yellow tie bouncing around. A family tradition but nuff said.

Earwigoagin: Ten Years On

Yesterday, November 17, 2018, marked the ten year anniversary of Earwigoagin. I started this blog with a post responding to Tillerman's writing challenge, a take on "Who's Coming to Dinner". Over the past year this blog has been sputtering a bit, posting has become somewhat erratic but I still have material in mind so I haven't decided to wrap up this gig yet. I would like to thank some of the readers who have contributed to Earwigoagin over the years and with whom I have had interesting email conversations; from France, Bertrand Warion and earlier in this blog's life, Romain Berard; from New Zealand, Neil Kennedy; from Australia, Andrew Chapman and Chris Cleary; from Whidbey Island, transplanted Englishman, Michael Scott, and from up-some-river in the Pacific Northwest, traditional boatbuilder Michael Bogoger. I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting at the moment but I'll get around to adding to this list. TOH to my local friends, Tom Price and John Zseleczky who have taken an interest in this blog and offered up their two cents whenever I meet up with them. (And a special nod to Pete Teeling who seems to have this blog memorized, dragging up old posts whenever we cross paths.)

Early on I discovered that if you switched out the header photo every now and then, you could write a post on that photo. If you do an image search on Earwigoagin's Header Photos you get a good snapshot of this blog.

Blogging is, for the most part, an anonymous activity, but I have taken enormous satisfaction that some readers have enjoyed this blog and, also that some readers have been able to take away useful information. Thank you!

• Some of my posts that track the ups and downs of blogging.
• Some of my posts with personal anecdotes.

Almost forgot. I would also like to thank Tillerman for ranking Earwigoagin as his best sailing blog of 2011.

Header Photo: Starkers... Gone!

The previous header photo was the blogmeister idling around in his Maser before one of the starts of the 2015 Classic Moth Nationals. This fall I donated my Maser, number 105, (named Starkers as a Tip-of-the-Hat to her designer/builder, Randy Starks) to Joe Bousquet's expanding Classic Moth outreach to junior sailors. I haven't been racing much and felt Starkers would be better off with a younger skipper. Moth no. 105 was a good Moth. I treat my racing boats as anthropomorphic entities; they have human personalities and there was no doubt Starkers had a will to win. (Don't most singlehander's talk to their boats when racing? I even apologize to my boat if I do poorly in a race.). I like to think she was thankful at being granted another life, like a rescue dog, except in this case Starkers was brought back from an abandoned Laser hull and had a second life as a full-on racing Classic Moth. As a team, we won the trifecta of Gen 1 trophies, the Nationals, the Midwinters, and the Brigantine regatta. Great memories and I will forever have a soft spot in my heart for Starkers, this endearing mutt of a Classic Moth.

• Another Classic Moth goodbye.
• And my early Moths.

Ingrid Albaugh

Ingrid Albaugh

Drone shots from the Volvo Ocean Race

Drone sailing videos are becoming a bit passé. They work better for bigger boats, small dinghies seem to get lost in the distance. Like most techniques, judicious use in mixing drone shots with other camera work seems to work the best. Here is a video of exclusive drone shots that works, because, hey, these are the Volvo Ocean Racing machines and, in most cases, they were being launched and retrieved from the Volvo boats. Nothing like getting some out-of-the-boat video in the Southern Ocean.



Best drone shots of 2017-18 Volvo Ocean Race from ClubRacer on Vimeo.

Aussie 18-foot skiff: Vintage Photos

Some great vintage photos of the Aussie 18 have been filtering out at regular intervals from The Open Boat on Facebook. I'm reposting a couple on Earwigoagin.

Music Whenever: Edward Sharpe, Magnetic Zeros, "Man on Fire"

I haven't put up a music video in a while. Hippie, stoner, Edward Sharpe and his musical troupe, the Magnetic Zeros, they, who keep the Woodstock vibe going in the new millennium, put this great video up to their song, "Man on Fire".

• Edward Sharpe, Magnetic Zeros, Home