Bennetts Beneteau

I had the pleasure of sailing with Bennett, Ed and Ian on Bennetts new Beneteau, 37 feet long built in 2011 and quite beautiful and fast.

Ed and I left our cars at the Harlem and got into the rented car at 7:30 A.M on May 30 for the ride up to North Wickford,  RI.  The boat was almost ready to go. But I noticed that one section of the stainless steel tubing that holds up the bimini had come loose from the socket which holds it in place and was dangling, though fortunately the two allen head set screws which clamp it into the socket were not missing. So during Bennetts drive to drop off the car, he picked up a tool kit and the broker went and got his allen wrenches and this was fixed. This repair was at the bottom of the diagonal from the upper right down to the left, to the built in starboard davit.

We also got a bottle of Spray Nine cleaner and took up a lot of the pollen that coated the boat -- another disadvantage of being on the land.

I was all in favor of not dropping below five knots to make sure that I got home reasonably early so as to not miss the flight that Lene and I are taking to Amsterdam today, the day after our arrival. But it was tough at first using the motor only. Somehow we seemed to have good tide at first and good wind later, after we got south of  Point Judith and headed west to home. 

We departed at 1:20 pm and arrived at City Island at 10:20 am the next day, May 31 -- 21 hours for the 130 nautical mile passage, almost six knots. Two rainstorms before dinner, the first light and the second heavy, showed that the new boat is toasty dry inside. I am calling her "the new boat" because her current name is "Ohana" (I wonder what that was all about) and Bennett has not yet selected her new name.

Dinner was fine despite confusion as to provisioning. We had trouble finding the switch that controls the solenoid that lets propane flow from its tank to the burner. We also found that the yard had not done a good job of flushing all of the propelene glycol (pink antifreeze) from the fresh water tanks. The water had a funky taste and smell, so we used bottled water to boil the pasta. And we had only one pot so after draining the pasta (no strainer or pot holders so I used the lid to keep the pasta in and clothing to hold the pot) I poured the jar of vodka sauce (which had been placed in the refrigerator) into the pot and with low heat and stirring it all got warm. The only utensil was a spatula but with it and fork we got the pasta onto plates.  No salt, pepper or grated cheese but it was warm and filled our bellies. We also had confusion about the accompanying salad. We had four prepared packaged bowls of Ceasar salad that I had not known about. And redundantly, we had lettuce, tomato and cucumber, but no dressing for the salad I had planned to make. So I added some of those fresh vegetables to the prepared salad, used its dressing and again, the crew was happy.

 Ian and I were off duty from eight pm until one am. So we missed the passage through The Race, which I was told was made at 7.5 knots speed over ground, near the slack. 

We have tentatively decided that the boat does not have a speedo to measure speed through the water, and no instrument to display such, or at least we have not founds such yet. The relevant speed, except for racers, is SOG, with water speed useful only to know how much positive or negative effect the current is causing. SOG and depth ( and we do not yet know whether depth is calibrated as actual number of feet of water, like on ILENE, or number of feet below the keel, which some prefer) are shown in data boxes on the Raymarine radar/chartplotter display. It is a larger and newer model than ILENEs. 

Bennett has to learn how to use this tool better, which will come with reading the manual and playing with it. We were shown a control for changing the brightness, which must be turned way down at night, but we forgot how to do it and could not figure out how to do it once it got light in the morning whereupon we could not see the screen. But we also had two Ipads with iNavX, so our position, course to waypoint and speed were always known. Our use of the Raymarine unit as a chart plotter had to end earlier when we ran off of the edge of the chart. The prior owner had the electronic chip containing the charts for New England. This extended only to the waters of extreme eastern Long Island Sound and we sailed off the edge it its "known world".

We had experimented with the sails, including the in-mast roller-furled main, with vertical battens, but the wind was either too light and or too much in front of us from the west to be used consistently and so we had motored the whole way until about 3 am when the wind came up on our starboard side in the teens, and we sailed home on a beamy close reach and made up to seven knots.  The boat is beamy and carries her beam well aft making her stiff (stable against excessive heeling) and roomy. Both sails are drawing well but both could use an inch or two of luff tension next light wind day. Their halyards can both be led aft to the cockpit.

She has an interesting and clever hatch board. It has a built in lock at the bottom, is hinged at the top from which it lifts up and aft and then slides in horizontally, forward, under the coach roof. So there is no need to find places to stow the hatch boards and lock. Her built in cockpit table has wide side extensions and a socket in which to plug a detachable electric lamp for evening enjoyment on the mooring.

The propane tank is rather smaller but there is room in the locker for a second one. The locker is a rather flimsy thing with a strap to hold down its lid, located on the deck in the port aft quarter. (To reach it, you lift up the helmspersons seat to starboard and then the port quarter of the cockpit bench tilts lifts up and outboard to port revealing a space for a life raft and the propane locker.) The less rugged construction of the propane locker is not unsafe because in the unlikely event that propane leaks, it will leak out into the cockpit sole and thence flow out over the stern, which is quite open save for two lifelines, and not up across the raised threshold at the companionway into the cabin. There is very little backrest for persons seated on the sides at the aft end of the cockpit and at the helmspersons seat. So at least one of those blue folding seats with back rests will make for more comfortable seating. She has many fewer lines than On Eagles Wings, but most of them are not whipped, so there is still something I can do to be useful during future sails.

Bennett, Ed and Ian on the Harlem launch

All told it was a very easy and pleasant passage and upon returning to the Harlem I drove Bennett and Ian to Bennetts home in NJ. 

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March 4 Belle Island Anchorage Miami Beach to Cooleys Landing Marina Ft Lauderdale 35 6 Miles

An interesting passage. We pulled up the anchor at 9:45. The tide was helping us on the way out of Miami. The main ship channel was free of  cruise liners (on Wednesday) so we were able to use that channel without the police directing us to turn back, and requiring the more circuitous industrial route We had only one tow and barge to avoid.

But the wind was in our face and once we got to Government Cut proper, big rollers from the sea were coming directly in. Built up by ten to twenty knots of wind from the east or south east, over a long time and distance, those waves confronted the tide flowing out and produced waves up to ten feet high which tossed ILENE about. Our bow dove under some waves with salt water bathing the deck. Good thing the hatches were not just closed but dogged down very tight. we closed the companionway hatch cover just in case, but no salt water came that far back to enter the cabin. And when our bow was lifted high up by other waves, a few gallons of seawater entered the cockpit through the stern swim platform but drained quickly back out. The sails, our strong engine, could not be deployed to get us through this bad patch faster because the wind was in our faces. We do not give the kitties big breakfasts on such days and their crying was not from nausea but caused by fear and discomfort.
Once clear of the Cut and its extending sea walls we turned north, and put out the small jib and things stabilized a bit. But we were still close to the wind and only making 4.5 knots; not enough to get to our destination in time. So we changed to the genoa and with the wind now on or near our beam we made seven knots, on a rolly ride with five foot waves pushing on our starboard quarter. But at seven knots we were now going too fast -- we would get there too early. We had to arrive at our destination, a few miles up the New River, at 4 pm, when it would be slack tide. If we were earlier or later, the strong tidal flows in that river would make it difficult to get into the slips which lie perpendicular to the tidal flow. So about an hour before the waypoint marking our turn west into the Port Everglades Cut to Fort Lauderdale, we switched back to the small jib and slowed  back down to four knots.  We were also happy to have the self tacking small jib out because the turn to the west would involve a jibe. We had planned for the 3:30 opening of the 17th Street Bridge across the ICW in Ft. Laud, but sailing with just the small jib until a few hundred yards from the bridge, we still got there too early, and made the 3;00 opening. Better too early, which can be solved by slowing down, that too late, because there is a limit on how fast we can speed up.

This is someone elses idea of beauty and is big and probably fast and unusual in design and color and parked near Steven Spielbergs mega yacht that is pictured in the post from our early spring 2012 visit to this city.

So we had to slow down and solved this by drifting north in the ICW in neutral and maintained steerage  with the wind and tide until we turned left into the New River. We had a scare when we heard on the radio from a friendly power boat of New Yorkers that the railroad bridge, one of the four we passed under, was down for maintenance; it is normally up and out of the way except when a train comes. That would completely screw up our timing issue. But it went up again, just in time, and we had an easy landing and were all tied up by 4:15, talked with our new neighbors, took showers, a delicious steak dinner aboard and tried, without success, to watch Downton Abbey via WiFi.

Cooleys Landing and Marathon are both municipal marinas in Florida but they have diametrically opposite pricing policies to influence the length of ones stay. At Marathon they give a bargain price to those who stay long term. One night on a mooring at the monthly rate is only ten dollars, which is less than the price of dinghy docking and restroom use on a daily rate for those on anchor. Here in Fort Lauderdale we pay only $1 per foot per day for dockage with the BoatUS discount, but only for ten calendar days per calendar year, after which 20% higher rates apply. Here they incent short term stays unlike Marathon which favors those who stay for the long haul. We are peripatetic nomads and have never stayed on our boat anywhere for a month.

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Tallinn Estonia Maritime Museum

We were let off the boat here in Estonias capital from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm and took a shuttle bus from the cruise ship dock to the edge of the medieval walled city up on the hill. Lene rode back (round trip bus fare $10.00) but because the Maritime Museum was half way back, I walked.

We were without the company of our companions, Mike and Linda. Her broken wrist was causing increasing pain so they went to a Tallinn doctor who replaced her hard cast with a soft one at a ridiculously low price, by US standards.

In town Lene and I took a free two hour walking tour led by students or recent graduates of the local University who majored in "Cultural Theory".

She spoke with flawless English, quite engagingly, with humor about Estonias tangled history of centuries of occupations by Scandinavian nations, Tzarist and most recently communist Russia and with a briefer time under Hitler. Its current period of freedom, since the early 1990s, is the longest in its history, and while it has a sizable Russian speaking minority, this history makes it highly unlikely that they will seek "protection" from Vlad Putin.

The huge freighter load of logs we saw come in at Warnemunde likely was loaded in Tallinn, lumber being Estonias chief export. While Lutherans form the largest organized religion, they are a minority in a nation which is overwhelmingly secular or as our guide called them Athiests. As a result, many of the large churches whose spires dot the skyline, are now museums. LOTS of towers:

Small one with Lene

This one is called Look Into the Kitchen

Estonias independence was won in "The Singing Revolution". The nation has huge mass organized singing festivals, but under Russia only government approved songs were allowed. But in the year in question, at the end of the officially approved program the crowd broke out in uncontrollable spontaneous leaderless disapproved anthems of freedom. The Russian army chose not to mow down the crowd and victory was won. There is a bas-relief sculpture honoring Boris Yeltzin. 

Here is Freeedom Square and next the top of a huge glass cross dedicated to freedom.

Trip Advisor gave our daily tour exceptionally high praise and it covered the same sights that Celebrity sold for $45 per person. We happily gave our guide €10, about $13.50, as a tip. So with $20 as bus fare, it cost us a total of $33.50 instead of the $90 that Celebrity was charging.

I bought a small bottle of Vana Tallinn, the local 90 proof Estonian Liqueur, but our guide warned us that the local specialty, amber, is all imported.

This cathedral was built in the late nineteenth Century.

From the top of the walled city looking to the new modern city and then from the base of the old city looking up to the top.

 

I am a sucker for Maritime Museums, and I have to admit that Tallinns was not the best I have visited. Built with a modern concrete structure inside the shell of a medieval tower, it sought to cover fishing and caning, military, freight, cruise ships and sailboats from prehistoric times to the present and while part was in Estonian and English, the history of the Estonian-Russian naval war of 1918-20 was in Estonian and Russian, which left me ignorant of this obscure chapter in world history. Here is our ship from the rooftop of the museum, where they have a nice cafe.

After the steam room we took in our first show. It told a new story of a couple overcoming obstacles to their marriage, consisting almost exclusively in 1980s pop songs and set in Wonderland and Oz. Whimsical fun with high production value. Then another great dinner aboard.

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Old Star Photos

Most likely this is racing at Larchmont Y.C; time frame between 1914 to 1918.

Ev Emerson Photo Collection

Ev Emerson Photo Collection

The origin of the Star boat

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Scows at the 2015 International Moth Worlds

Seven Australian scows, a mixture of old and new, are sailing in the 2015 International Moth Worlds hosted by the Sorrento Sailing Couta Boat Club, Victoria, Australia. For news on the 2015 Moth Worlds, it is worth clicking over to the popular Sailing Anarchy blog for Mr. Clean has been omnipresent, recording races live, doing interviews and documenting the ups and downs, both on-shore and in-the-water, of the professional programs that dominate the hi-tech foiler crowd. The scows are definitely the amateur, old-fashioned, side-show in this regatta, but, to Sailing Anarchys credit, they have been devoting some of their coverage to the scow crowd.

Back in September, Aussie Mark Hughes, wrote me an email with some links to a flat-pack scow kit he had designed and, from which, one hull had been built over the 2014 Australian winter. It was a modified Ray Hilton Bunyip IX design (the plans which have been posted on this blog). It consists of pre-cut carbon/foam pieces which are assembled inside a snap-together jig, also supplied in the kit. Pretty nifty but there were some unanswered questions I had about the construction. (Such as how do you get the carbon/foam panels to bend into the jig?)

Mark has a blog on his M-Scow-03 design which offers up, for free, the plans for this scow Moth. There are 10 PDF plans as well as CAD cut files available for download.

Here is one of his PDF sheets. Very high quality CAD work here. Again to open this PDF in another tab, click on the pop-out icon (the box with the upward facing arrow, upper right corner).





Ah, it seems the blogmeister has lost his train of thought and digressed away from the scows in the 2015 Worlds...but, patience dear reader, there is a connection. It turns out the Brian Sherring, the owner and builder of the first M-Scow-03 is sailing at the Worlds and he was the subject of a Mr. Clean interview which can be seen over here on Facebook.

There are two other scow photos of interest from the 2015 Moth Worlds, both of them Im reposting from Sailing Anarchy (again a TOH to Sailing Anarchy for covering some of the scow stuff).

Father/son team, Ian (dad) and Andrew Sim (son) in front of their scows. Andrew is sailing a 1980s vintage Stunned Mullet design. The blond wood decks are lightweight hoop pine plywood, which was an Aussie-only product of the 1980s and no longer available. His dad, Ian, is sailing a more modern foam/glass scow design. (Photo from Sailing Anarchy)

Wednesdays racing for the Worlds was canceled when a vicious low decamped over Sorrento. One of the French father/son combo, either Jim or David, decided to take his scow out for a burn in the gale. (Photo from Sailing Anarchy)

Its also apropros to repost this YouTube on the Aussie Scow Moth (Ian Sim is the fellow who is last up in this video):

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MacGregor 26

When the MacGregor 26 came out in, I think the 1980s, I and other sailing purists were horrified. The MacGregor 26, the sailboat that was a motorboat, or vice-versa, had the effrontery to strap a big outboard on the back and become a very quick motorboat, one that could easily pull a water-skier. My thought at the time, "why not just go out and buy a nice little outboard skiff rather than this sailing/motor bastardization?" Im sure, this was the same thought many other sailors shared. It seemed the the #1 marketing point of the Mac 26 was its motorized performance as shown in this video (this is not what a sailboat is about! What about the ambience, the wind and the waves?).



I recently had a conversation with Jim, a retired boat dealer, 35 years in the industry, and he couldnt say enough good things about the MacGregor 26, enough praise to make me feel that my first knee-jerk reaction may have been unwarranted. Eleven thousand of the 26s were built, seven thousand in the U.S and four thousand distributed world wide. Those numbers alone make the MacGregor 26 one of the most successful small cruising sailboats ever built. Jim told me this real life story of one of his customers to demonstrate the capabilities of the MacGregor 26.

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Two fathers with their sons trailer launched their MacGregor 26 out of West River one Friday night and motored the mile or so over to Rhode River to spend the night off of one of the small islands. Saturday morning, early, they blasted over the flat calm waters of Chesapeake Bay to where the fish were biting. They fished all morning, grabbed a lunch in the spacious cabin, and, with the breeze up, filled the ballast tanks for a pleasant sail back to the take out ramp at West River.

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Jim, who sold and also owned the 26, ticked off several selling points of the MacGregor 26:

• A great family boat because the kids got to do the things they enjoyed; water skiing, tubing and not so much the things they found boring, such as drifting in light air. Plus you could get to the anchorages quick enough to enjoy swimming and hanging out with other kids.
• A very roomy interior. With the MacGregor 26, designer Roger MacGregor anticipated the latest "French" styling of Beneteau and Jenneau with the high freeboard and swoopy coach-roof, all in the name of interior space.
• Decent sailing performance. Jim is an accomplished sailor and took the MacGregor 26 over to the Bahamas and did a circumnavigation of the Outer Banks.
• Trailerable, so you could get to a place to sail to the Bahamas or the Outer Banks. Or you could just pull in to a beach.

I must admit, Ive never been on a MacGregor 26 (overall though, I havent been on many different cruising sailboats so that isnt much of a surprise). After my conversation with Jim, I will give Roger MacGregor credit. It appears he was a design genius to successfully combine all these capabilities in one boat (my sailing snobbishness aside).

Here is  a drawing of the MacGregor 26M, which I think was the last model of the 26 (the 26X was the first). Thanks to bluefreeyachts.com.au where I got the image.

Plenty of MacGregor 26 cruising videos up on YouTube. Here is one of them.

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Virginia Beach Optimist Project

Update from Als project at the end of April, 2013:

Well, I really have been working on this baby but being retired takes up a lot of time.  For the last month I have been trying to get her finally ready for the water.  What this in essence means is that i have sanded, and sanded and sanded some more.  I have used every type of sanding device that i know of including wrapping a piece of sand paper around a 3/8" drill bit and sanding along some of the rough fillets.  What I have definitely learned is that neatness is worth a lot and I was not as neat with the epoxy as I could and should have been.  This left a lot of high spots and some really sharp edges that could do a job on little knees.  They are all gone now and another thin coat of epoxy has been rolled over all the unpainted areas, mainly the inside of the boat but also the spruce part of the gunwales.  I plan on attaching strips of mahogany as the outer rub rail and just vanrishing these.  No epoxy.  They are almost ready to attach.

I have made my mast and gooseneck from PVC..  The mast 1 1/2" pipe cut to length and then reinforced with treated wood and the goose neck is from a 1 1/2 x 1 1/4" tee.  My boom was supposed to be a 1 1/4" hardwood dowel but HD and Lowes both have ceased carrying that size (where i live) so the closest I could come was a poplar dowel 1 3/8" in diameter that I sanded down and have a nice fit into the 1 1/4" side of the tee.

I also found that my back couldnt take much more bending over to work on the inside so I made some 24 high saw horses that bring the boat to a perfect (for me) height to save my back.  Cute little things.

Today I attached to rudder.  Put the pintles & gudgeons on and took a lot of time to make sure I got it right. I think I did.  The rudder and tiller look really nice.  Hope they work as well as they look.

Now I am at the stage of what next? It appears that a dinghy dolly will be that project.  I havent found actual plans for one but have seen photos and  figure that I can make something close to what Ive seen that will fit the bill.

There is one more go round with epoxy filling some dings and gouges and no doubt some sanding after that.  Then it will be a clean up and Helmsman for the inside.  Really cant wait to do that finishing.

 

 

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