String Pullers Convention: The 505 East Coast Championship

I was reminiscing in a email exchange with Kiwi Neil Kennedy about the string puller classes; those dinghy classes that seem to have a mind-bending assortment of rope controls to tweak everything. The old Olympic double-hander, the Flying Dutchman comes to mind as good example. These dinghy classes were more prevalent in the 1960's and 1970's and also can be found in the modern sailing world in other dinghy cultures, such as the English... not so much in the United States... except for the always interesting 505 class. I closed the email saying the 505's were coming to town for their East Coast Championships in September and I would try to get some photos of "string".

I was able to wander around the SSA dinghy park before the event started and did get some photos. Many of these systems photographed below I saw on the old International 14's of the 1970's and 1980's. However, on the modern 505 they have been refined to the Nth degree, using modern materials so they work flawlessly.

This 505 had a condensed user manual electrical-taped on the aft starboard seat tank. I asked the crew about it and he said it was from the previous owner - they didn't abide by the instructions but kept it around anyway.

This 505 dispensed with the jib tracks on the inside of the tank and replaced it with a floating jib lead adjustment using thin spectra line (possibly to bring the lead further inboard - I didn't ask).

The ultimate. Supposedly a German dinghy fitter takes a bare Rondar 505 shell and this is what you get back. Note the hoop center main on a traveler. This allows weather sheeting of the main when you really want to twist off the top leach without having the rest of the leech sag off too far. One other advantage of such complexity in the middle of the boat; you can concentrate more weight in the center and get around the corrector rules.

An older 505. You can tell it has been much modified by the multiple filled screw holes on the centerboard cap. This is an over-under mainsheet/vang control/cleat (mainsheet on the top, vang on the bottom).

The German fitted 505 didn't use a mast ram at the gooseneck. Pre-bend of the mast was controlled by moving the shrouds fore and aft on a shroud track. The 505 mast rake can be adjusted throughout the race. With this set-up, the multi-purchase system used to tension the shrouds is out in the open and not buried inside the mast ring frame. Usually shroud tension on these dinghies requires something like a 36-1 purchase system.

The control console on the German 505. I didn't ask about specific functions of each string shown.

The modern 505 has twin spinnaker poles, slung on each side of the boom. This allows the crew to jibe the spinnaker without ever having to clip the spinnaker pole onto the mast or the spinnaker guy onto the pole - everything is done by pulling a string. This is the custom twin pole fitting on the mast.

Twin carbon spinnaker poles on a 505 where the boom is not yet placed on the gooseneck. When the pole is launched the spinnaker guy is automatically sucked up into the pole.

There are still very competitive wood-decked Lindsay 505's from the 1980's, albeit fully upgraded with the modern kit. The class now allows carbon booms but still requires an aluminum mast.

Some other posts featuring the 505 from the Earwigoagin memory bank.

House Chores

I was vacuuming one of the side bedrooms in our house and came across two small pieces of paper on the floor. In picking them up, I discovered they weren't scrap paper but thumbnail prints (most likely cut out from a contact sheet) of the blogmeister sailing his Laser out of SSA (Annapolis) back in the 1970's. They must have fallen from some book I had re-shelved. I don't know who took the photos. (Warning! Blogmeister with hair and beard)

It looks like it was a gusty northwester as I was sailing upwind towards the U.S. Naval Academy.

Nobody had invented flat leg hiking yet!

From the Earwigoagin archives; a few of the Laser posts featuring the blogmeister.

• Of the Laser Borg
• Blogmeister Returns to a Weekend Laser Race - Part 1
• Blogmeister Returns to a Weekend Laser Race - Part 2
• Speed Bump

505 Dinghy and Annapolis 2017

I wandered over to my old sailing club, Severn Sailing Association, on Sunday and ran into Ali Meller, just in from Laser frostbiting. Ali is a long time 505 racer and I was interested in finding out how preparations are going for Annapolis to host the 505 Worlds in September, 2017. The 505 fleet at SSA is relatively small, ten boats or so, and to take on such a high-profile regatta as the 505 Worlds must be a daunting task for such a small group. To pull this one off, the 505 fleet has gone out to the Annapolis sailing community. Two yacht clubs are sharing the responsibility in running the event, SSA and Eastport Yacht Club and the RC is being recruited from the best of Annapolis. Given the strength of the dollar Ali expects the Worlds fleet to be around one-hundred, which, for North America, is huge numbers for a two man high performance dinghy.

Below is a great 505 promotional video shot by Chris Love, who does all of the Intercollegiate sailing reporting in the U.S. Although the 505 aficionados interviewed in this video downplay the intensity of the class, make no mistake; to race at the top level in the 505 is just below the commitment of an Olympic campaign. A true fanatics performance class.




International 505 Promotional Video from Chris Love on Vimeo.

Two photos of the 505 from the Earwigoagin archives; these taken at a SSA's Tuesday night series a couple of years ago.

Photo John Zseleczky

Photo John Zseleczky

For those who have dug back in Earwigoagin, you may have come across the fact that the blogmeister raced Internatonal 14's back in the 1970's and early 1980's. The International 14 of those years was very similar to the 505, single trapeze, big symmetrical kite. The modern International 14 has developed into a skiff but I occasionally wonder what the International 14 would look like today if it stuck with the rig of the 1980's - probably very similar to the current 505. A photo of the Canadian Harvey brothers ripping it, I think in 1980 (just had to sneak this in).

Photo Ellie Martin

Header Photo: Soling Frostbite from February 2014

I've mentioned this before but it's worth repeating; this blog is all about timeliness. I posted a header photo some time ago with keelboats running downwind under spinnaker but after I moved on to the next header photo I neglected to repost the previous one with a comment (as is my custom - not that anyone has noticed).

This photo is from the race committee I did at SSA for the Soling fleet at the end of February. Luckily it was on the one pleasant weekend of a brutal winter with temperatures in the 60's (Fahrenheit) and a pleasant breeze of about 15 knots. Race committee consisted of two or us but the wind was so steady that we were able to set the course and forget it - just bang off a couple of starts.

Some other photos I was able to snap from the stationary RC boat (since the starting mark was the leeward mark). Click on the photos to view in hi-res.

My good friend Mike Waters had his spinnaker halyard jam while sporting a nice lead. He had to sail a fair distance off the course before his could get the spinnaker down.

Sailing upwind into the winter afternoon sun.

Header Photo: Interclub Dinghies off the Naval Academy Seawall

Interclub Dinghies coming up the last windward leg during their mid-winters - a true mid-winter regatta - held off Annapolis the end of January. A frigid frostbite regatta that proved to me that the Interclub is probably one of the best dinghies when you would want to sail in sub-freezing temperatures.

Stuart Walker's Tales of Cars and Trailers and International 14 Destruction

This past Wednesday, Stuart Walker gave a talk on crewing at Fawcetts,the local chandlery, but two weeks before that I sat down at Stuart's table during a pot-luck dinner (non-sailing related event) and, given the two of us, the talk turned to sailboat racing. Stuart, as expected, has a wealth of stories and somehow the conversation turned to sailing dinghies and cars and trailers. I present two of Stuart's stories.

Sometime in the late 1950's, an International 14 team from Montreal, Canada, was trailering their 14 down to Massachusetts for the Buzzards Bay Bowl, one of the premier events during the early years. As they were getting close to Marion, passing through one of the small Massachusetts's towns, they noticed a fire truck, sirens going, in their rear view mirror. They pulled over on the shoulder to let the fire truck go by, but, instead, the fire truck pulled in right behind them. Sixty years ago there were no custom formed bunks on trailers; this 14 team adopted a common practice of placing a mattress on the trailer and then strapping their 14 on top of mattress on top of trailer. At some point in the trip, this duo, rocking down the highway at a high rate of speed, had tossed a cigarette out the window and, unluckily, it had landed on the mattress, where it started smoldering. The smoke from the fire had been blown flat at sixty miles-per-hour but when they slowed to navigate through the towns, it was obvious to bystanders watching them go by that this car was towing a trailer and boat that was definitely on fire, hence the fire truck was called and responded. Stuart dryly noted that enough of the bottom of this International 14 was charred to be a total write-off.

In story number 2, Stuart told of an English gent who, again in the early days, was finishing off an International 14 in a workshop situated in a room at the back of his garage (to save a few quid, the DIY crowd would buy a cold molded shell from the professionals and then build in the interior, centerboard trunk and gunwhales). The International 14 was nearly complete, just short some varnish coats when the builder's mother somehow drove her car through the garage door, through the intervening wall to the workshop, into the boat, through the back wall to the house, depositing the whole mess in a pond in the back yard. Sailing stories become more and more apocryphal with age, so to see if I could corroborate Stuart's account I went back to the list of English International 14 numbers that Tom Vaughn put together in his International 14 history.

Sure enough, K 736, named Delight built by Ian Cox (a very accomplished 14 skipper) was "Destroyed in accident" in 1960. The next year, Ian Cox, had put together K 753, this time, given the anguish and teeth gnashing that must have happened after the first 14 was destroyed, Ian named the new 14 Despair, (just as Stuart had told the story).

Stuart turns 90 years old in little over a month. He still races his Soling at every opportunity, especially enjoying the winter racing. I asked Stuart if he ever kept track of how many races he's done over his lifetime. He said he doesn't have an exact number but he estimates he has over 6000 hours of racing!

The Ironing Board

The previous post about Ian Bruce reminds me that the Laser dinghy is now 40 years old (the actual anniversary is somewhat muddled - do we go with the first appearance of the "Weekender" at the TeaCup regatta in Wisconsin in 1970 or with the very successful introduction of the production "Laser" at the New York Boat Show in 1971). Tillerman made an oblique reference to the Laser reaching age 40 in this homage to his forty year love affair with Tillerwoman. The Laser is now so ubiquitous, found in every nook and cranny sailing water throughout the world, it is hard to imagine a world where the Laser was the newcomer.

I remember reading about the new "Weekender" dinghy in ODandOY (for young whippersnappers, this was the One-Design and Offshore Magazine, the forerunner to the now Sailing World magazine, of which Bruce Kirby was the editor and the organizer of the TeaCup regatta.) Although the Laser topped the results, there didn't seem to be much to choose from between the Laser and the other singlehander making it's debut on the national scene; the West Coast designed and built Banshee (based on a Flying Junior hull).

I saw my first Laser the first year they came out, 1971, though the dates, times, chronology and characters have been clouded by the years. It was Septemberish and I, as a Midwestern college student from Miami University of Ohio, who couldn't get enough of dinghy racing, had finagled an invitation to the University of Wisconsin Hoofers Intergalactic Tech Dinghy Championships. And as was common and completely normal for a college student who didn't own a car in those years, I hitchhiked those 400+ miles through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and into Wisconsin (this may have been the trip where I spent the wee-morning hours trying to sleep on the hard seats in the bright lights and elevator music of the Milwaukee Airport - hitchhiking being a very non-linear form of travel - but this may have been on another hitchhiking foray into Wisconsin).

The Hoofers Club Intergalactic Tech Dinghy Championship put their 40 or so Tech dinghies on the line, a singlehanded championship that featured mostly current Hoofer's skippers or alumni such as the Harken brothers, Peter Barrett, Charlie Miller and I'm sure there were some scow champions sprinkled in as well. The weather was warmish, the breeze about 8-10 and I finished somewhere in the middle, middle-to-back. A great regatta. There is always something special about the Midwest lake sailing hospitality. On the way back out, I arranged to stop at Peewaukee, Wisconsin where Vanguard/Harken Blocks and North Sails Midwest (Peter Barrett and Charlie Miller) were neighbors in a business complex. Vanguard was closed when I showed up but there was someone at North Sails to show me around the loft. Tucked in one corner was this oddball dinghy with a completely flat deck.

"What is this?" I asked.

"Oh, this is the new Laser dinghy." came the reply.

"What a weird looking deck!" I was having a hard time getting my brain around something so flat looking.

"Yeah," the North sailmaker said, "Around here we've nicknamed them the Ironing Boards."

I nodded in agreement. At that moment I couldn't imagine a boat so different looking (yes, even ugly) ever getting off the ground.

Later that fall I hitchhiked into Annapolis to crew in an International 14 regatta. Good friend Sinjin Martin, who had been selling Ian Bruce's International 14's to the local fleet, was Annapolis's first Laser dealer and they had been selling like gourmet cupcakes. He stuck me in a Laser for a test sail. Light, fast, responsive; when I stepped back onto the dock at SSA I knew this was a special dinghy.

And that ugly flat deck - that kinda grew on you.

#16 - Bumpity Bump

As mentioned in the previous post, I did race committee for the J-24 East Coast Champs run by Severn Sailing Association. It was supposedly a race committee by invitation only which meant it was mostly greybeards and it seemed that we all brought our own wind-sticks and handbearing compasses. Many a lively discussion cackled over the radios about what the wind was doing and should we move the marks or not - credit Mike Waters, PRO, with taking all this cacophonous feedback and making command decisions that turned out to be correct.

I was on the pin boat - the leeward end of the starting line was to be the anchored SSA RIB - the idea being we could control the unruly J-24's with another set of stationary eyes at the leeward pin. I've never done this before; usually when I've been tasked to call the leeward end of the line I've done it from a moving motorboat that we are trying to hold on station - never an ideal situation. Friday we had very clean starts but Saturday the class got more aggressive, we had around 4 to 5 general recalls - still not bad by class standards; which worked out as we were trying to bang out 4 good races that day to conclude the regatta in front of approaching Hurricane Sandy.

From the vantage point of the pin boat, I got to watch the antics of good old bow number 16 who was trying the very risky starting tactic (in this caliber fleet and with a keelboat to boot) of coming in on port and tacking to leeward of the fleet with about 30 seconds to go. The first start on Saturday he made a complete hash of it and ended up slightly below and squeezing up mightily to avoid hitting the pin boat - which he ultimately failed to do. Bumpity bump he went along our inflatable bow and then his rudder fetched up on the anchor rode. In a superb feat of athleticism, one of the crew, lickety-split, leaped over the aft stanchion, straddled the rudder with one foot on top and used his extended leg to push the anchor rode down off the rudder. Quite remarkably, this was successfully accomplished in a couple of seconds and #16 was off to the races. Dutifully we radioed the main committee boat that J-24 #16 had hit the pin boat. We expected that he would take a penalty when he finished, as was written into the race instructions.

Number 16 hadn't learned his lesson for he tried the same maneuver on the next two starts. He didn't hit the pin boat this time but he did create a nice cluster of J-24's, clotted together, all downspeed at the start and straining to get around the leeward pin boat.

It was a grueling day getting four longish races (not only were we the pin boat but we traipsed up and down the course, filling in where needed especially in changing some marks).  I got out of the club around 5 o'clock, went to the beer store to get some storm stock and back to the house to get some food. Somewhere after 6 o'clock, Mike Waters called on my cell phone and wanted me to confirm that #16 had indeed hit the pin boat as the skipper was now claiming that he didn't, only that he had snagged the anchor rode which is not a foul. I confirmed and volunteered to come back to the club but he could tell in my fatigue and I could tell in his fatigue that this was not a battle we wanted to fight. Plus, everyone was hustling to de-rig their J's and leave that night as everyone had places to go and things to do to prepare for Hurricane Sandy. So I didn't drive back to the club and #16 gambled again and got away with a bald-faced lie. I've seen this happen before in sailboat racing, mostly in the protest room, but it doesn't get any easier.

Tip Of the Hat to Number 16 (I have a Filipino friend who maintains that karma always returns the favor) - The Bonzo Dog Band, "I Love to Bumpity Bump".

Kibitzing; Jamie Brickell and Mothboats

I haven't been doing much sailing this fall but I have been kibitzing. Sometimes, you never know when you'll walk smack dab into sailing history. In talking with SSA Lightning sailor Jamie Brickell, he mentioned he learned to sail on a Mothboat, specifically a Skip Etchell's Connecticut design. Well, he added a comment to one of my posts which I'll drag over to this post. At the time, he didn't mention his mother was Allegra Knapp Mertz, winner, four times, of the Adams Cup.

Jamie writes;

My mother, Allegra Knapp Mertz, bought Connecticut Moth #1020 from Skip Etchells in 1947, named her Loon, and frostbited at Larchmont (NY) Yacht Club over the winter on 1947-48. Her husband, Jim Mertz, was a member of American YC in Rye NY, and Loon went there in 1948. She was placed on one of the docks. I was 7 years old at the time and found that I could push her off the dock and go sailing. The only problem was getting her back on the dock at the end of the day. I did this for about 6 weeks before I was caught. Mom came down to the club to go sailing and the sails and boat were missing. Luckily I sailed around the AYC main dock and made a perfect landing, wouldn't have broken an egg, as she said. Looking back, it was probably a bit crazy for a 7 year old to sail around Milton Harbor, and a bit beyond, unsupervised, but that was then. I loved that boat and think it is the reason I am still racing small boats, currently a Lightning, at age 70 with my wife Susie as forward crew. There is a half model of her (Loon) in the American Yacht Club.

Jamie (age 4) also faintly remembers his Mom and step-dad fishing a large log onto the Mothboat to use later as firewood.

For a tribute to Allegra Knapp Mertz, here is a link to her obituary in the New York Times.

I've talked to a fair number of my generation and many learned by sailing on their own; not so much through organized instruction; just going out and going sailing.

All Right Already; Photo of Thistles

To answer any confusion. From the Earwigoagin archives; a photo of genuine Thistles starting at SSA (As Tillerman noted, the previous post had a video of Intercollegiate FJ's racing, not Thistles). Here at Earwigoagin, we do throw the ocassional changeup to keep everyone on their toes.



Photo from John Z.

Race Committee for Thistles; October 9,10

I was Vice Chair for the Thistle Oyster Bowl at SSA on October 8,9. I was expecting to take a camera along and take a pic or two for Doryman, but we had little to no wind. We did squeeze a race off late Saturday in about 5 knots to make it a regatta, but Sunday only teased us with some light breezes in the Severn River; flat calm remained in the Bay. The regatta was called by noon.

The Thistle Class is doing as well as any dinghy class on the Eastern seaboard. Talking with class stalwart Don Moore he can list all the clubs where the class was once strong in the 1960's and 1970's and popular regattas were held, but now.... nothing. But that is how it is with all dinghy classes (with maybe the possible exception of the Lasers). It amazes me the small clubs and lakes the Thistles are still sailed. There are the Pennsylvania lake clubs outside of Philadelphia that I've never heard of. There is also a communal fleet of Thistles that are wet sailed all summer in New Castle Delaware. I have said it before; there is no better sailing dinghy to drift about a lake than a Thistle.

I was puzzling why even fiberglass Thistles have wood gunwhales and wood trim and found out it was a class rule,enforced so the class wouldn't look too plastic. Good rule! I also noted that two of the skippers had been sailing coaches in a previous life. In talking with one of the ex-coaches, I found it interesting, that after coaching kids in plastic 420's and Lasers, they were attracted to a classic dinghy like the Thistle.

I came across a YouTube of an intercollegiate regatta sailed down the road on the Potomac River on the same weekend. You get a good feeling on how the wind teased but ultimately became a no-show.

Oh! Wood Butcher, Slopper of Glass, What is the Answer?

One of the ironies of life is that I, the one who does not let craftsmanship nor beauty get in the way of working on boats (the gorgeous Tweezer was an aberration, due mostly to the efforts of Bill Boyle and George Albaugh..... I wanted to paint that Moth, to hell with all that pretty Atlantic cedar) it is I who seem to be asked my opinion on how to fix boats. I think that people assume that since I've built boats, I must know what I'm doing...Hah!

Last Friday, I wandered down to SSA and ran into Ali Meller, who for a good twenty years or so was Mr. 505 of North America (now he races road bikes and does quite well I'm told). Ali was helping a son and dad rig a newly purchased used 505 and I recognized it immediately as a Lindsay (the spruce rolled seat tanks were the give away). Ali confirmed my guess (in life's quest, knowing the lineage of a 505 may not seem much, but I'll take that little nugget as evidence of a superior intellect) and Ali elaborated further into the history of this particular 505. This 505 was one of twelve of the original batch of Lindsay 505's, where Mark built the wood interiors into a English Parker glass hull, circa late 1970's. We had a good laugh as that would only be knowledge that old fart dinghy sailors would know.

When the son started listing the problems of this older 505 (hey, all old boats have problems), he seemed particularly worried about the ply delaminating on the underside of the deck between the shroud bulkhead and the forward bulkhead. I didn't see a problem... if you can't see it, no problem. but then Ali asked me how I would fix it. How I would fix it??? Hmmmm! Hmmmm! (Try to look confident here.)

"Oh, Just turn the boat upside down, drill some holes, take a syringe and squirt epoxy between the delaminated veneer and the good plywood, take some bricks to force the delaminated veneer in contact with the good ply. Should be good to go. You do have some syringes don't you?" Delivered with surety, I didn't want to explain further, so I begged my leave to continue on my tour of the dinghy park.

It was only getting into my car, that I realized I wouldn't have fixed it that way, I would have cut the delaminated ply away with a razor knife, thrown it away and glassed over it with 4oz. fiberglass. A true half-assed Tweezerman repair.

Here is a top down picture of a later model Lindsay 505. This one has mahogany veneer rolled seat tanks instead of spruce. The used Lindsay I was looking at on the SSA dinghy park also had the foredeck painted, probably because the aircraft plywood, after 30 some years, was getting grungy (it was, after all, delaminating underneath).



And here is a 505 punching off the leeward end of line during SSA's weekday TESOD series.........

Tragedy at SSA

This is a tough one to write. I debated whether to post this at all. Severn Sailing Association's junior sailor, Olivia Constants drowned this past Thursday when her trapeze harness snagged some rigging after her 420 turtled. I don't know the family but there is a universal sadness, disbelief, even bewilderment, among our sailing community when someone so young dies doing the sport we love.

My heart goes out to her family and friends.

A salute to all those Frostbiters

Here, from the Mid-Atlantic. up to the Northern reaches of the East Coast of the United States, winter frostbiting wraps up usually by mid March. In recognition of those hardy souls (Tillerman, JohnZ, Dr. John) thrashing around in dinghies on Sundays, in water just above freezing, here is a video of the Laser frostbiting fleet in Newport RI (I think this may be Tillerman's frostbite fleet).

Frostbiting from Brooks Canaday 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.

Second Sail of 2010

I trundled my Classic Moth off to Severn Sailing Assoc for a sail this past Sunday. I'm with Tillerman on how much fun you can have just day sailing your dinghy. Sunday was a nice 8-10 knots out of the South with warm temps for April. Hiking out upwind, main fully powered up but not ragging, some small surfs downwind. Absolutely delightful.

In 2009, some of my best days on the water were day sails out of SSA. The Classic Moth is not a recognized class at SSA so I have to pick the off weekends which are usually major holidays (Memorial Day, July 4). I had a great time on July 4 of 2009 going up and back between two government marks with three Lasers in a shifty 10-15 Northwesterly.

This past Sunday, I did capsize once when I was running too hard by the lee and gybed accidentally. I actually got clocked by the boom on my eyebrow (have a little shiner there, not really noticeable). Luckily, pieces (i.e boom) of a Classic Moth are light. Yes, water was still a little chilly while I was swimming around the hull, but I was moving as fast as I could to get her upright. I've got to remember that the wind shifts off Back Creek in a Southerly.

Sailing just to be sailing...............

Pic of the Day; What I Look like Laser Racing

Remember my post on my Laser outing during the SSA Summer Series . Well "Che A Matthews Hale" was out taking pictures and took a rare one of me. For those who wonder why my life jacket is half off; I removed the jacket to cool off as I was late getting to the start area for the first race ..... surprise, surprise, I was only a minute late to the start and there was only time to get the jacket over the shoulders and, in my effort to not finish last, I never had time to zip it up during the race.



I'd say this pretty well fits the "Faux Laser Sailor" look. My wife says my summer war paint scares women and small children.

Faux Laser Sailor Hits the Course

Susan Pegel had a list of 7 check offs you need to be a real Laser sailor. Since I only can check off #4 (No coaching!), I now hereby assign myself to the other Laser group, the Faux Laser Sailor (Faux being French for false and the French language, always sounding more sophisticated than English, I'll use it.) Anyway, typical of a Faux Laser sailor, I borrowed a Laser for the one day SSA summer series last weekend.

Being the stubborn older cuss I've become, I enjoy a relaxing Saturday breakfast whilst reading the WaPO paper, which puts me definitely behind the curve as far as SSA's racing schedule. I drove into the club to make the last two minutes of the skippers meeting; the harbor start saw me taking the cover off my borrowed Laser. All the newfangled controls on the Laser finds me running to whatever Laser hasn't launched yet to discover how that outhaul blocks snakes over the SS hook. Oldster sailors like me spend more time saddling up the gear; slather on the sun block, sun hat, plenty of water, sun shirt, some knee pads for those troublesome joints, one of those neoprene hiking pants I bought last year.

I was the last to launch by a long shot, but surprise, surprise as I slopped along toward the start area, the Laser fleet was still milling about the start area. There was a remote possibility I could get there but the wind was slowly dropping. Close but no cigar. I was late by about a minute and (although I didn't know it at the time) at the wrong end of the line going to the wrong side. They say beggars can't be choosers! I still had a good race with the back six or seven (including one or two hot shots who guessed wrong on the first beat).

The wind that day was a light NE about 5 knots which at least kept you on the high side. The motorboat chop was, as usual, vicious, particularly on starboard tack. My goal in the SSA Lasers is middle of the fleet which I fulfilled admirably in the next two races. Unfortunately, the second race where I managed to tack into two unintentional lifts on the last beat, went unrecorded. I finished overlapped on the inside with a Byte who was rounding his weather mark (the finish and weather mark were one and the same). I got the double whammy. He obscured me from the finish boat so I got scored a DNC and then he proceeded to excoriate me for getting in his way. Being a Faux Laser sailor, I have no clue who the other Laser skippers were around me at the finish so I couldn't do a countback. Anyway, a Faux Laser sailor shouldn't care about where he finishes (yeah right!). The third and final race, I was able to pick up 2 or three Lasers at the finish when the wind dropped away and went hard right.

Light air was never my forte but in light air you race with anybody and everybody. I rounded the leeward mark in one race with a junior sailing a Radial rig and I spent much of the next two races tied at the hip with a grey Laser sailed by a petite woman who, I discovered back at the dinghy park, was a grandm.... ahem! .... a woman about my age! Great fun!

One of these days I'll write a blog doing that list thingie about "Why I like sailing my Classic Moth more than a Laser". But bottom line, there were more Lasers racing (25) in this SSA summer series than Classic Moths have racing at their nationals. And hey, I didn't have to hike on that flat deck at all that Saturday! .... well maybe some on the way into the club.

Update: Team APS was also sailing Lasers in the SSA summer series and APS blogger Chris Teixeira jots down his thoughts on the day.

SSA TESOD June 16

Good breeze from the NE with a tricky chop. Tip of the hat to John Z for the photos.

Laser start



505 Upwind



Laser upwind



Bill Beaver flying his International Moth



Fuller Moore, Ted Morgan on RC duty

Tuesday Night Racing Commences

I raced my first Tuesday night for 2009. It was my varnished Classic Moth again, in and amongst the Lasers at SSA's TESOD (acronym definition - Tuesday Evening Sailing One Design). I did this a fair amount last year as well though most Laser sailors think I'm some kind of nutter. The Classic Moth is slower than the Laser (with one or two exceptions) so I've tried to come up with a slow boat game plan. It's tough when you can't hold your lane after a start, or sail deeper offwind angles like the Lasers with their unstayed rigs. Avoiding bad air, you usually end up early to the laylines upwind, which in short course racing, can be either all right or all wrong. Offwind, my higher angles usually put me also out on the edges. I count it as a good race if I manage to finish mid fleet.

One of the attractions of racing Lasers is getting the Classic Moth closer to Laser speed. Part of the fun is tweaking the Classic Moth in ways completely foreign to the Laser fraternity; new sail designs, different masts, even different hull designs!. I've made progress but since I rank myself somewhere between number 6-8 nationally, there are other Classic Moth sailors that would keep it closer with Lasers.

Well this Tuesday was a good day against the Lasers. Very light air is one condition where my Classic woodie can hang with the Lasers and that is what we had. I had one of those days on the start line where the holes suddenly appear at 10 seconds and I managed to get to the weather mark in 2nd place twice. Offwind usually 5-6 Lasers would go by to get me finishes upper mid fleet.

Not bad, not bad at all.

A video of dinghy launching from one of last year's Tuesday racing.