Vacation is over :( Back to the FR :)

 

It’s hard to convey how much fun I’ve been having being back in Louisiana without Myrna.  Last time I was here I was going insane working around the clock to get her ready to go to France.  All of my friends were here too, but I was too busy to see them.  It was not a good time in many, many ways.   This time I’ve made up for it, and inevitably fallen back in love with New Orleans.  It’s just an extremely fun place, especially these days with the Saints going to the Superbowl and Mardi Gras bubbling up from every pothole in the city.  I love being from here.

That being said, I’m excited to get back to FR to get on the water.  Actually very excited to do some real sailing again.  I’ve got a few little jobs to do on Myrna when I get back, the most significant being changing the standing rigging from steel to Dynex Dux from one of my new sponsors, Colligo Marine http://www.colligomarine.com/ .  This will save a lot of weight aloft allowing me to sail with a bit more sail up than usual. 

I’m also hugely excited to hoist some of the new sails I’ve built at Ullman Sails Gulfcoast.  We’ve built a Code 5 for tight reaching in light to moderate breeze and also to use as a downwind sail in winds above 30 knots.  It’s essentially a very flat spinnaker with mystical powers. 

At the moment I’m finishing up a new screecher that Dave Ullman designed last week.  It’s a slight development of the screecher I used in my last two races.  Most notably it’s a higher aspect sail built from a lighter material from Dimension Polyant www.dimension-polyant.com .  It has a very interesting luff curve to accomodate luff sag, and we jokingly refer to it as the Code PI.  I’ll post pictures later (as soon as I find the freaking camera cable). 

So I have one more week in the States and then I’m off to Paris, basically, because I want to watch the Saints at the Superbowl with my people.  People who are freaking out about the Saints right now.  It’s not like they are just talking about them all the time, it’s more like brain damage.  You drive around New Orleans and there are literally people all over the place yelling Who Dat! for no reason.  It’s awesome.  Combine that with Mardi Gras season, and I the brain damage case is even stronger.  I’m not far from it myself right now, and basically I have to leave before I too transform into little more than a drooling digestive tract that yells a lot. 

I’ll be back in May after the 800 mile Mini Pavois. 

SPONSOR PLUG!   This edition, Columbia Sportswear and Ullman Sails.  POW!

Sadly, those sun glasses are no longer with us.

More later.

-Ryan

Back home.

Man it feels good to be back in Louisiana.  It’s strange understanding everyone around me.  I haven’t been able to do that for a while.  However, considering some of the things I’ve heard, there is something to be said for not knowing what people are talking about.  It’s also strange to be back in texting land, where I send and receive text messages all day.  There are benefits to both lives, and neither one is better at this point. 

The trip from Lanzarote to Guadeloupe was pretty straight forward.  The high pressure system that dictates the trade winds was pretty far south when we left, and light airs dominated both the west and southern options so we went south towards the Cape Verdes where we had an option to pick up some fuel if necessary.  It’s a conservative option for delivering a boat, but meant we had to cover a lot more distance to get to Guadeloupe because we were so far south.  So in the end it took us 18 days to sail 3,650 miles, and the crew which included my Dad, Phil Bylsma, and Tom Mullen did a really good job of staying on task.  There were four of us in all, and most of the trip was done with the spinnaker in winds from 15-20 knots.  I’d wake them up at least once a night to change from spinnaker to code zero, or to gybe and they were all enthusiastic to do the maneuver.  It’s a pleasure to work with people who actually enjoy sailing

Here is the foredeck of Kativa, complete with a dingy and staysail on hanks.

And here is the foredeck crew, Tom and what’s his face.  We had a system and nobody else was allowed in front of the mast

Our only equipment failure for this leg was a spinnaker halyard shackle failing at 2:45 am (of course) the night before we got into Guadeloupe.  Once again the team got on deck and we recovered the sail from the water without damaging it or the spinnaker sock.  Because it was only blowing 16 knots at the time we sheeted in the mainsail super tight and headed dead downwind so we were going very slowly with the spinnaker right along side the boat.  Three of us grabbed one tape while my Dad drove and had the sail on board within a few minutes. 

The most regrettable event of the whole trip happened a few days before we finished the leg when we hit a whale very hard.  After hitting the keel it surfaced next to the boat and turned and hit the rudder.  It is quite upsetting to me still because it was definitely bleeding a lot, and I could see it struggling in the water as we sailed off.  I will never forget that image, and I hope to never to do that again.  Our boat is 42,000 lbs and we were going about 9 knots at the time, so we must have done a lot of damage to the 20′ whale.  I don’t know what kind it was.  Truthfully I hesitated about even including this in the blog, but it is an unpleasant reality of sailing offshore.  We sailed away unscathed in this case, which would be unlikely on a racing boat like a mini.   Okay, enough of that.  I want to change the subject.

So I’m in Louisiana visiting friends and getting things lined up for my winter training assault in La Trinite, which after sailing on boat with headroom, refrigeration and hot water, excites me very much.  I struggle a great deal with displacement boat sailing, and look forward to flicking water off of Myrna’s bow in a month or two.

It’s good to be home too though.

-R

Okay, today we leave to cross.

I bought four Budweisers to celebrate the halfway point.  It’s the first time I’ve seen Bud since being in Europe.  Of course we are in the Canaries, so it’s a little different.  The trip looks like it will be slow.  There is a lot of light air forecast, and we are going to have to sail way out of the way to get any pressure.  Near the Cape Verdes I think.  The trip down was easy and we did the 700 miles in 3.5 days in strong downwind conditions.  Now that’s over though.  Anyway, we’ve got to cast off, so, bbfn and I’ll write again in St. Thomas. 

-R

Transatlantic today.

I’m leaving to bring my Dad’s boat to St. Thomas today.  I’m back in Spain with my Dad, Phil and Tom.  You don’t know these people, but they all be good.

I spent the last two weeks in Paris studying French and this is what I learned:

It was nice staying in Paris.  I walked around a lot.  Until I couldn’t anymore, actually.  Fortunately I had a new pair of shoes from Columbia which were extremely comfortable compared to the old Crocs I was threatening to sport in Paris.  I visited some interesting cemetaries and found one that I found particularly great:

Well, I gotta go fuel up the boat. 

First stop is the Canaries.  Looks like there will be a lot of wind on that little leg.  Update from there.

-R

 

Back in La Trinite s/Mer

And it feels good.  Winter is approaching here and the weather is cooling a bit.  The delivery to Sotogrande from Sardinia was very easy, if not boring at times.  A lot of motoring in the middle of the Med with the last bit from the eastern part of Spain to Gibraltar downwind in light air.  We did quite a bit of spinnaker sailing along the coast in lovely conditions that are worthy of one of the biggest gay-ball songs ever written.  In fact I made a video of our trip along Spain.

Observe:    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTQWZfi1_Bw

Gibraltar was really amazing though.  I will look for any excuse to visit again.  Here are som pictures from the top.

Here is the ridge view of clouds being launched from the windward side into vortices.  Very cool to watch in motion.

Here is Dee with the clouds flying into the Atlantic side.  They are not going slowly either.

I’m going to Paris tomorrow as a guest of Lablee family for a fun wedding at a castle.  There is rumored to be a pony and all kinds of good stuff. 

-R

I’m in Sardinia and

 it’s beautiful.  Sailed here from Corfu, Greece through a nice chunky front that caused a great deal of flash flooding in Sicily and Tunisia and unfortunately there was quite a lot of human life lost on land.

  Dee and Tif did well, and the trip was relatively uneventful for us, beyond a 40 knot squall in the early AM hours the second night out.  It was upwind the whole way, as usual.  We leave tomorrow for Spain.

 

Okay let’s talk about sails.

So I’m preparing for life on the Gulf Coast again after this delivery is over.  I hope to build more sails at Ullman Gulf Coast over the winter break.  It has been really great working so closely with Dave Bolyard and Dave Ullman.  I cannot emphasize enough the value of sail development  and it’s relation to boat speed.

Before leaving La Trinite sur Mer I took my main and jib to a local loft and measured them in every dimension so there would be less guess work with the new set.  I also analyzed all the patches and batten details looking for improvements in weight and durability.  It’s a funny line to be walking the first time around and there are some things we nailed, some things we overbuilt and some things we underbuilt.  It’s all pretty obvious stuff to see when the sail is lying unloaded on the floor. 

So we now have detailed, real world numbers on a main and jib that have exactly 1,000 miles on them.

-Patches for luff and leech on both sails:  some will be bigger, some will be smaller, and the design will change a bit for the full hoist and first reef patches on both main and jib.

-Patches for batten ends:  all will be bigger except for one.

-Radial tape reinforcements to control bias:  I will suggest we rid of some entirely and extend others so they are doing more work.

-Batten placement:  The third batten is doing a lot more work than I imagined.  That will be moved on the new sail.

-Luff/Leech reinforcements will also be refined around the Dimension Polyant cloth we used.  Basically smaller and lighter in most areas and extended further up.

-Roach:  Will not change.  A six foot square top is enough for this boat. 

-The luff will be extended a bit now that I know the optimal rake position for my boat upwind.

There are some really weird loads happening with these large square top sails, and with what we’ve learned from this first set, I firmly believe the next set will leave little room for improvement.  I’d go into more detail about the measurements above, but I’m treating it like proprietary information belonging to Ullman and Dimension Polyant.  Because of all they have done for me, I want these groups to benefit from this info before anyone else.

 

I’ll make another post when I get to Spain in about a week. 

-Ryan

In Paris now.

I’ve spent the last couple days packing up my friend Arnaud’s apartment, and cleaning his car so that when his family comes out to visit they will not be too shocked to see the amount of crap I have stacked in the downstairs bedroom.  I moved there a little over a week ago.  It’s near La Trinite in a small town named Locmariaquer  (pronounced: lock-my-yack- care).  It’s beautiful and has three bedrooms and two bathrooms.  It’s the first time in years I’ve lived alone, and I was enjoying it.  However I won’t be back there until the middle of the winter. 

The other part of this equation was packing the boat up.  She is tidily packed away at Charlie’s place with all the loose deck hardware off, boom and bowsprit down below, tape on everything that needs UV covers, winches and clutches covered and the mast safely hanging inside a small warehouse attached to Technologie Marine.  So that’s all good.

I have been spending my spare time with France Birch, Mike’s wife and the mother of my friend Tifenn.  The three of them have been and continue to be extremely helpful to me here in France, and have been great company to boot. 

France is in town visiting her apartment and working to get some visas for a music group from the Dominican Republic.  She’s been working with them for a couple years now.  Anyway, the point of this is that we’ve been eating a lot of Oysters at lunch time, and they are getting really good.  I’m guessing it’s a result of the season changing and the winter approaching.  The one’s I had earlier this summer didn’t even compare to oysters in Louisiana when they are in season.  The same can be said for the one’s I’ve been eating lately.  When I get back to Louisiana I’ll have to do some more measured tests.  Lie detectors, sensory deprivation, stenographers wearing blindfolds: that kind of thing. 

So now I’m in Paris, and Tifenn and I leave from here to go to Athens to meet my friend Dee at the boat.  Dee’s flying in from NOLA, and she’s sailed on the boat quite a bit.  I think it’s just the three of us for this delivery to Gibraltar, because my Dad may have to get back to the States for a little while.  It’s been six months for him on the boat, so…

 

More on this later.

-R

MINI TRANSAT OBSESSION! and the Med?

I’m glued to this race right now.  If you had told me it was possible for a series boat to lead the MT fleet I would have never believed it, but that is happening under the relentless attack of Francisco Loboto.  There is really no excuse unless the protos are holding back to be conservative.  The boat’s Francisco is in front of  right now cost 3-4 times as much, weigh as much as 500 lbs less, have taller lighter masts and deeper keels and are all carbon fiber.  I won’t even mention the canting keel advantage, because even down wind it’s significant.  So basically what he is doing is really phenomenal and inspiring.  This is a battle of mental strength and he is winning on many levels.  It’s like “Scanners” where if you look at him he’ll make your head blow up.  That’s what’s happening offshore right now.

Now that I’ve mentioned my enthusiasm for Francisco’s work he’s bound to break something.  Therefore I’m not including a link to the race.  You know, the rules of superstition and stuff.

Okay, enough of that.  What’s happening with Myrna?   Tomorrow I’m taking the mast down and bringing the boat to Charlie’s, Technologie Marine to get a bottom job.  I’m also going to prepare the boat for a new sponsor who is supplying synthetic rigging which is way freaking lighter than the steel stuff that’s up now.  I’ll mention them when we have the details ironed out.  

 I’ll take the weight savings aloft and remove the equivalent from the bulb to lighten the boat a bit more.  Than I’ll add more sail area with the new main and jib, because I think we can get away with it.  I’m not the type of person to say I like pushing my boat or going “balls out”, or decorating the walls with balls or something to do with balls, but I know what my boat wants and for some reason she likes having a lot of sail up.  I’m hoping to better define an “edge” by lightening the boat a bit and adding a smidge more upwind sail area.  Plus it will be fun to drill holes in the bulb. 

I’m going to Paris on the 18th or so to visit, then I fly out Athens maybe? to help my Dad deliver his boat to Spain.  He’s out of crew and as usual I get the tap.  It will be fun to see him.  We always have a good time sailing together and arguing about what sails to put up.  Then he tries to convince me that he’s preparing “the best steaks ever” and comes on deck with these black things that are oozing a mixture of blood and oil all over the place.  The bleeding grease shanks are usually followed up with a warm Red Dog, and as boredom mixes with beer I’ll start to joke with him about how he destroyed my childhood, because it always gets a reaction.  Inevitably we both end up laughing our asses off about it, because we both know wouldn’t change a thing, even if we could.  I’ll do an interview with him for those who don’t know him.  I leave for that trip on the 23rd. 

-R

P.S. I am not sponsored by AIG.  That was a joke.  I’m actually sponsored by Blackwater USA with logistics and catering supplied by the CIA. 

P.S.2 I like this picture by Bruno Bouvry  www.imagesdemer.com

 

SA article two and the word “releived”.

It’s posted:  www.sailinganarchy.com

I left Jesse and Conrad yesterday to get back to La Trinite.  Jesse seems very well sorted out for Transat and only used my help because I was there.  Conrad still has a few things to do, but is pretty well taken care of at this point.  Chris Tutmark and Craig Horsfield seem really sorted well, and didn’t require any help from me at all which shows they are well organized.  Most everyone is ready to go from what I could see. 

The Editor at SA said they’d be following me in the Mini Transat closely.  That should be easy to do since I can blog about it from land.  I guess he didn’t catch that I’m not going!  I hope that doesn’t throw a wrench in the works for SA.  I sent him an e-mail already. 

Strangely I don’t feel upset or anything about not doing this year’s race.  I’m excited for the guys who are going, but not jealous which surprises me.  I thought I was more petty than that.  I must be slipping.  I just feel relieved to have the hardest part of the mini over with.  That is the refit.  I’ve still got a small work list, but it’s nothing compared to the massive amount of work (for me) I put in over the past year.  Mostly I’m just feeling relieved to have gotten here, sailed in one race and made my sponsors happy with a good result.  Now the fun part starts and I am doing the budget for next season.  A budget which includes hotels with internet!   

Speaking of budgets, look at this:

The massively modified and amazing Gitana 11, now 78 feet long preparing for the Route du Rhum in 2010.  One of Gitana’s problems being the 95′ Idec to port.  The other being the 100+ foot Sodebo about 100 yards away to starboard.  Consider this: the Route du Rhum is a solo race.  These are big boats for solo racing, and they are as fast as they are big.

As a sixty foot ORMA class trimaran, Gitana 11 sailed the 4,000 mile course in just over seven days under the spell-like control of Lionel Lemonchois.  It was a sublime accomplishment.  Historic and poetic. 

Sometimes these races are won by men behaving like machines, but Lionel’s record showed me solo racing can be more than that, and that’s why I’ve come to France.  On the mini it’s hard to get over the mechanics, because the boats are so small and are rarely, if ever fully in harmony with the sea.  The big multihulls are a much better medium to interact with the sea.  Their highs and lows are proportional and extreme, and to me it’s the purest and most honest way to go offshore. 

Until then, minis.

-R

Sailing Anarchy Post.

I guess they are doing it in two parts.  www.sailinganarchy.com

Beyond that I’m in La Rochelle helping a couple Jesse Rowse and Conrad Coleman to prepare their boats for the Mini Transat.  It’s something I wish I had for all of my races, and I can offer it, so I am.  Maybe one day it will come back to me.  Who knows.  I’ll keep you posted about the race.

-R

Why am I doing this again? Oh yeah, I want to go sailing…

Hello all.  I just wanted to share with everyone, everything I do, every day, Just so you all know how much work is involved in preparing a boat for a singlehanded ocean race.  So, let’s begin:

I’ve been sanding my mast for the last four days in preparation for installing all the hardware including spreaders, shiv boxes and rigging terminations.  I picked it up on Saturday from Fort Lauderdale after borrowing a trailer from The Edison Sailing Center here in Fort Myers.  Four days of sanding later, over one hundred dollars in sanding discs, and a lot of carbon dust matted on sun screen and the tube looks beautiful.  However, I will never again be so liberal with carbon/epoxy putty. 

I’m also including images of the chainplates which I just finished building to allow for overlapping headsails upwind.  This should vastly improve Ms. Minkoff’s light air performance and make her a much better all around performer. 

-Ryan Finn

Forte Mast Day 3 (wet from hosing)

Mast Day 4 (today)

Day 4, all of those sanding discs on the ground were for the last five feet!

Day 4, Ready to be rigged.

Inboard chainplate, day 1 or 2

Inboard chainplate day 4Inboard chainplate day 6day 6Day 6 still

Last day, port side

Rigging the mast.

I’m waiting for some parts to come in from McMaster Carr before I can start drilling holes in the rig.  Spent most of the day measuring and marking the rig for all fittings and designing how all these things will attach to the rig.  I’m totally making this up as I go along.  I spoke to Tony at Forte (mast builder) about three times today and also chatted with Trevor Baylis about something that sounded cool in my head.  Glad I did.  I needed them to talk me out of experimenting with something that could have been messy.  More later… 

Here are some images from a couple weeks ago of the deck with the new toe rails, cockpit foot chocks, Lewmare deck hardware and theescape hatch i’m installing. 

-R

Rigging terminations! What about them?

The past couple of days have been rainy, so I took advantage of that to have an actual weekend.  Today however, beautiful weather, and beautiful weather only means one thing for my campaign,  work day. 

     I started the day experimenting with some 6mm carbon pins that I was going to use as lashing points within the mast for the standing rigging.  I have a spare section of my mast to play with for this, so I did a little destructive testing.  I tied one end of the loaded part to a tree and the other to my truck and put it in reverse.  All three carbon pins shattered.  There goes another great idea. 

You can see the mast section starting to fail.

Changed the angle of the load to mimic the real life angle of the load.

 

   The mast section and G-10 backing plates were in fine condition though, so I decided to try something else.  Above are pictures of the prototype lashing termination.  It is a solution that I am confident will work for the new mast.  Not only is it lighter and stronger than my original solution, but it’s also easier to make.  I’ll include pictures of the internal parts tomorrow.

-Ryan

Tick-tock…

I’m spending a lot of time on the rig making sure everything is snag free and positioned properly.  For a singlehander, making sure the rig is near perfect is a top priority.  Anything that goes wrong up top becomes a huge problem when you’re out there alone, and it costs many many miles against your competitors.  So I took a long time making the parts today for the rigging terminals. 

They are not perfectly machined by any means, but they are hand made from G-10 and for the most part are smooth where they need to be so the lashings do not chafe.  I’ve got a couple to touch up tomorrow. Each one was roughly sculpted with a dremel tool, then sanded with 100 grit, 220 grit, 320 grit, and finally 400 grit.  I then polished them with a common oil based product known as spf 50 sunscreen.  It’s what I had laying around.  The two right most ones are for the headstay and the baby stay.

The same sanding process took place with the mast.  These holes line up with the lashing plates above, which will be mounted inside the mast tomorrow.

I didn’t use sunscreen on the mast though   That will be clear coated after it’s finished being rigged.

-Ryan Finn

Easier = Better?

Today I finished drilling and sanding all the holes for the rigging and forestay.  Then went about installing the lashing plates.  I started at the masthead because they were easy to access, and went with my original plan which was to tap 3mm bar stock into the lashing plates, pull them through the inside out and use a nut and washer to hold the plate in place for the lashing or loop or whatever.  I did this, and it was no more difficult than installing any other bit of rig hardware that requires screws instead of pop rivets.  I’m not using pop rivets anywhere on my mast.  It’s the “pop” part that bothers me about installing them in composites. 

  

 

This worked fine, but there was something about the process that seemed a bit overboard.  So for the rest of the fittings I’m not going to be screwing them to the inside face.  instead I’ll let the lashing/splice (thinking more splice these days) hold the plates in place.  It will allow some movement on the slack side, but very little and the mold release film inside the mast will keep the plate from chafing the inside.  Basically I’m letting the parts do their thing.  I’ll just have to keep an eye on it for a couple days to see if anything bad happens.  It just has to last for 5,000 miles to pass my standards.

No set screws in this lashing plate? We'll see...

Tomorrow, I’ll move to making a masthead crane fitting and figuring out the 2:1 halyards for the jib and storm jib.

-R

Today, again…

So, I’ve figured out where my halyard shivs need to go for jib and storm jib, and also for fraction spinnakers.  However, there was no reinforcement in those areas so I had to add them before I get on with installing the shivs.  It was a bit cool today, so they didn’t cure hard enough to sand, but I’ll get that done tomorrow.

The bit I have wrapped at the mast head is a part I’m using for the mast head crane.  I put mold release on it so I can pop it off tomorrow and continue working on the crane.  I made the masthead shiv box today, but didn’t get a picture of it.  I’ll get some tomorrow. 

When I wasn’t tending to various bits of lamination I was finishing off my new pushpits which needed a bit of styling on the foot mounts, and primed one for painting before running out of primer.  Must remember to get some more of that in the morning.

Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow…

-Ryan

A few words on the election;

I keed, I keed.  The last thing anyone wants to hear is my opinion on politics.  Come to think of it, it’s the last thing I want to write about.  I did vote on Tuesday though

So today I sanded all the reinforcements on the rig for shiv boxes, prepared for jib and storm jib shivs, did some more lamination on the masthead crane, and finished painting the pushpits and pulpit.  Flat black of course.  This gets rid of annoying little reflections at night which can cause fatigue at 3 am. 

For the 2:1 shiv boxes I’m using little micro blocks which have a breaking max working load of 500 lbs.  Instead of using rivets or screws, both of which go through the carbon tube, I will be using some G-10 plates, mounted on top of the mounting plates and laminating them to the mast.  The holes pattern the blocks come with are too close to the mouting hole for the block to use in a carbon rig.  Maybe a couple mm, which would be okay for an aluminum tube, but so would pop rivets.  

Croc shot for Solo.

The 2:1 halyards are to reduce compression on the rig.  The shiv is significantly lower than the forstay holes.  This gives significant clearence, preventing lines from chafing on eachother.  My left finger is aproximately where the 2:1 will terminate.  I’m going to be using a square top jib, so being two-blocked is not a concern.

The next shot is of the masthead crane.  It’s actually a left over bit of toe rail that fit the bill, so I just added a bunch more carbon to it.  I’m using it for the main halyard shiv and the masthead spinnaker shiv.  The part extending to the left is for the 2:1 termination on the main and the windex.  There is also a bit sticking forward for the wind instrument wand.  I will attach this to the masthead cap tomorrow.

Later.

-Ryan

Happy Hallowhere the hell did I put the last piece of 320 grit?

Today, 2008:  I tabbed in the 2:1 shivs,

I joined the crane box to the cap,

(that is just the mocked up bit.  The structural lamination is curing right now)

and while those things were curing I did more destructive testing with the truck and then a 10:1 purchase with me hanging from the mainsheet.

I was curious how small the line diameter I could go with for the loup around the lashing point.  Good thing I did it here too, because the small dyneema, though strong enough sawed right through the carbon wall of the mast bit.  Basically, fill the hole as much as possible, because it spreads the load.  I’m comfortable with the final loup I made which ended up being about 9mm in diameter. 

  The last thing I did for the day, and probably the most important thing was to laminate a piece from my smoothie blender which I broke from over tightening.  I’ll have pics of that tomorrow.

-Ryan

Todayer than yesterday.

Yesterday, before leaving I laminated the masthead crane.  I was running low on hardener, but I chanced it.  Anyway there wasn’t enough for th epoxy to kick fully, so I had to peel everything off this morning, clean the crane again, and re-laminate it.  It was super sticky, so it took a while.  Anyway it is nice and cured now and ready to be sanded.

I also spent a few hours sculpting the G-10 lashing eyes for the running backstays.  Uppers, lowers and runners.  I couldn’t get a good photo of the sculpted bits, (the were all out of focus) but they look cool. 

 

Above is the first one laminated to the rig.  I’ll clean it up in a couple of days so it looks good, and then re-laminate it again with more uni carbon, and it will look nasty again.  Two steps forward, one step back.  I only did the port side today.

And then the blender base.  See, I told you…  Blender base.

I’m going to Fort Lauderdale tomorrow and meeting with some folks, coming back on Monday night.  Tuesday I’m painting the deck with Steve Olive from the Edison Sailing Center.  It will be nice to nick that off the list.

-Ryan

Today, We Paint!

Non-skid that is…

Paint day 1.

As of today I am very close to having the runner tangs finished on the rig.  There is just a bit more cleaning up to do and they should be good to go.  I wish I had a load cell.

Dave, the welder, showed up about the same time Steve Olive did, with the spreader inboard ends welded and tapped for the 8mm threaded uni joint.  I will clean them up a bit to fit the spreaders better, then it’s just a matter of making the mounts for them on the mast.

Then Steve and I set about applying the first coat of non-skid.  So far so good.  Anything inside the blue tape will be without non-skid.  Tomorrow should be our last day of painting.

More later.

-Ryan

Paint day 2.

 

Today the second and last coat of non-skid was rolled on.  Huge thanks to Steve Olive from the Edison Sailing Center on helping me with that.  He’s a hell of a volunteer. 

No pics, because it doesn’t look much differant from yesterday’s. 

 I’ll spend tomorrow and Friday packing everything up for the move to Louisiana.  I’m bringing the show there to finish building the mast and to build the sails at Ullman Sails Gulf Coast.  We’ll splash Myrna Minkoff there and do loads of testing before sailing across to Florida again.  I can’t wait to get back to my home, Louisiana.  It’s been a while.

-Ryan

Dude, road trip!

Tape peeled.

The areas that are not painted will be done in Louisiana.  I’ll be roll and tipping the vertical sides and a few spots on deck.  From the cabin top clutches to the mast will be non-skid free, so the lines don’t get chewed up.  The vertical sides  of the cabin top are bare too to make room for the Lewmar branding.  Once the Logo is on, I may non-skid there too.

You can see here that the deck where I will sit most of the time is bare too.  I will be glueing down a thin foam material there which will be covered with a dacron or spectra stickey back to keep the foam from gouging.  It is way more comfortable and works well as a non-skid.

All the lovely new Lewmar gear on display. 

-Ryan

Next stop, Louisiana

Took about an hour this morning to check some bend characteristics of the new mast.  This is why I chose a small D section. 

The rest of the day was spent packing up.  She’s pretty much ready to hook up to and roll away, once the Excursion is packed with all the gear.

More later.

-Ryan

Drive, yawn, drive. Hey, the Vendee started today…

Tonight I’m sleeping in a Hotel 8, watching C-Span, and looking forward to getting Myrna Minkoff to Dave Bolyard’s loft (Ullman Gulf Coast) tomorrow afternoon.  The Vendee Globe started today, and I’ve been bugging friends such as Katie Ambauch and Jan Brandt to read the results to me over the phone.  The whole time my Dad and step mother would suffer quietly while I geeked out about results.  Results, which this early in the game are almost meaningless. 

 

However, let’s put our hands together for the current VG leader, the lovely Safran.

-R

The eagle has landed.

We arrived yesterday afternoon.  I parked the boat between an old I-14 I used to own, which has had some damage from hurricane Ike, and a Wavelength 24, which is the keel boat I started racing on forever ago.  It’s funny how much less boat there is with the Wavelength than the Mini, even though it’s 3 feet longer.

Here is the view from the deck of Myrna Minkoff of Lake Pontchartrain.  Thanks to Dave Bolyard for finding me a spot at Pontchartrain Yacht Club.  I look forward to launching here.

-Ryan

Getting Settled

I’ve been running around catching up with people as I haven’t been here for a year.  It’s nice to see everyone, but I also feel a lot of pressure to get on with the job at hand.  In Fort Myers I had no social obligations, and I’m trying to get that bit over with in one shot this weekend.  I did manage to get some work done the other day with my Dad, who did some taping off for painting while I made a prototype part for the spreader attachments.  Here is a photo:

Yes it’s ugly, but I just wanted to go through the process to see if another option revealed itself.  I have no intention of attaching that part to the mast, and now have a much better game plan for the spreader brackets.  I’ve become a firm believer in modeling the part first before jumping in head first.

-Ryan

More stuff.

I’ve got a good solution for the spreader brackets. 

I’ll laminate that little bit onto the mast and call it a day.  Below are the rest of the brackets and the gooseneck fitting, curing over molds.

My Dad helped me yesterday too which was nice.  I had him cut off about 15″ of canard (daggerboard).  After sailing the boat for several thousand miles I feel I just don’t need the whole thing.  I have a fixed keel with a forward canard, and the old length was just under six feet. 

-Ryan

Stuff Part 2

So the brackets are roughed in.  I’m working on some other projects for the chainplates inside the boat, but I won’t show those until they are further along.

You can see they are not all lined up perfectly, but they ar not all the same size at this point.  My goal was to get them so they are angled upward correctly.  Now I’m going to laminate these parts to the mast and build up the laminate to twice what it is now on the brackets.  Then I’ll shape them and make them pretty and stuff.

-R

Bracket, brackets, brackets!

Strapped down the little bits with uni.

Then laminated them to the mast.

More later.

-Ryan

Hinges, hinges, hinges!

See, hinged spreaders.  Will it work?  Not sure.  Does it look cool?  Hell yeah!

I’ll be spending all of tomorrow making temporary vectran rigging so we can step the rig and measure for sails. 

-Ryan

Bench test.

Today I’m going to tension this puppy up horrizontally so I can measure for the standing rigging and check some of the fittings under some sort of static load. 

Please excuse me for using the word “puppy”.

-Ryan

Fence Test.

So here she is tensioned up against a fence.  I was amazed how stable the spreaders became once there was some tension on the whole rig.  I feel pretty good right now, like I’m at least heading down the right path.

Here are all the Lewmar purchases I could dig up in my bag of Lewmar goodies.  You can see I’m starting to undo Dave Bolyards fence with all the tension, and I’ll have to whack that back into place after I’m done. 

My Brother, Jeff and Dad came to the boat this afternoon to help.  My Dad sanded the recently painted brush strokes on the deck and my brother and I measured for all the standing rigging.  I have not seen him in a year, and we are all pretty excited to have him back for the next week or so.  I probably won’t get anything done tomorrow.  Have a nice turkey day.

-Ryan

Reality time, USA!

I had a great Thanksgiving holiday, especially the food.  I don’t know If any of you have had the privilege of eating in a Louisiana household, but it’s something to write about.   I have forgotten how much better food is down here.  Not like you can’t get better food in NY, but you have to pay for it.  Here everybody knows how to make great food.  I do not  count myself among them. 

So I started doing some scheduling and reality started to surface.  I cannot get Myrna Minkoff properly prepared by myself.  I need to bring in reinforcements.  People who are more skilled than me, and who want money.  I need to get back to my part of the deal and begin preparing the boat for launching while the rig is being finished.  The guy responsible for this work is a personal hero of mine, but would kill me if I mentioned his name.  That’s just how he rolls.  That said, I trust him completely. 

Now let’s review why we do this again.

-Ryan

Getting closer to my world.

I’m finally getting down to what I love to do most with these boats, besides sail them of course.  Compared to sailing anything “work” like is a very distant second.  Anyway, I’m rigging the deck with the last bits of deck hardware and sorting out the running rigging systems, which is great fun.  I’ve also solved one of the strange and annoying quirks of fully easing the traveler all the way to leward without fouling the line.  I’ll show that tomorrow.  Below shows the traveler with the little carbon risers I had to make to accommodate the natural arch of the booms movement.  I had to make these hallow, so you can through-bolt the traveler to the top part and then through-bolt the bottom of the riser to the deck.  There just isn’t a screw long enough to do it in a solid piece, and that is all I could come up with. 

The yellow circles in the cockpit are in place of a hole left by the speakers that were there when I bought the boat.  The first time I turned on the instruments I noticed the compass heading was wavering back and forth, this while I was on a trailer in a warehouse.  I looked below at the fluxgate compasses and they were mounted right in between the speakers!  Now I have pieces of G-10 there which lets a nice amount of amber light into the back of the boat and makes me feel all fuzzy.

-R

Traveler detail.

Yesterday I spent about three hours at the dentist having a tooth prepared for a crown. It was super fun!

Anyway it was also rainy all day, so I didn’t get much done.
However here are pictures of the traveler control lines.

In the first picture you see the setup all tensioned up with a line running to the end of the traveler attached to the triple block that goes to the cleat. I’m not exactly sure yet where that line will terminate but it will be something like that.

In the next picture you can see the line slackens as you ease the car to the end without offering any resistance for dropping the traveler. That’s a good thing.

Thank you Lewmar for all the toys to experiment with.

-Ryan

Mmmm…

Not too much happening today.  I finalized some sponsorship stuff with Sevenstar Yacht Transport www.sevenstar.nl/,  mailed in some stuff to Artforms www.artformsinc.comto have the new t-shirts made and wired 500 Euros to Classe Mini for next season.  Around lunch time my Dad and I headed down to the boat to start installing the deck hardware that had been dry fit.  That meant making compression posts out of G-10 tubes and cutting out G-10 backing plates for all the new little bits.  All these little things add up time wise.  Having my Dad’s help here was great as he did most of the cutting out parts while I figured out where they all went. 

Me making compression posts.  (See Lia, pictures of people doing things and stuff:)

We beaded a bunch of stuff today for the traveler and runner system.  It will probably be too cold tonight for it to cure, but should be fine tomorrow around lunch time.  Once it’s cured I’ll tighten up the nuts so there is a good barrier of sealant between all the mated parts.  When It’s cold I use  Bostik Marine 920 www.bostik-us.com because it cures in colder weather.  When it’s hot out I use 5200 because the Bostik kicks too quickly in the sun.  All of this stuff is really tenacious, but it’s perfect for offshore work. 

(Pic of my Dad grinding on G-10)

 

Then we came home to have Egg Nogg Daiquiris (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daiquiri) with the family.  Those things are potent.  Just another example of Gulf Coast awesomeness.

We are going to try to step the mast tomorrow.  We have been waiting for the water to rise, but it keeps getting blown out of the lake by strong NW winds, so we are going to step it right on the trailer.

-Ryan

It stands.

Well it’s up.   My friend Jeremy and I stepped the mast yesterday with a borrowed gin pole.  It was no problem to step, and much easier than the old heavy aluminum mast.   By moving a set of shrouds inboard as I have I’ve changed the sheeting angle of the jib from 18 degrees off center to 12, which I hope will improve our point ability.

Here it is with the mast upright, all the way forward in the deck partners and headstay at it’s shortest length.

And here it is with the mast raked all the way aft in the deck partners and the forestay eased out.

Because the carbon mast is a lot stiffer than the aluminum one, I can’t induce as much pre-bend in this mast as I could with the ali rig.  This will effect my ability to flatten the mainsail as much as I used to be able to do when the wind picked up.  However because of the adjustable rake, I will be able to move the center of effort aft in light air which should help prevent the lee helm Myrna gets upwind in less than 5 knots of wind.  I will also cut the spinnakers for this mast aft position so I can squeeze in a bit more sail area with the weight a bit farther aft.  For regular upwind work and close reaching I will set the rig in a more vertical position.

-Ryan

Bits and pieces.

I worked well into last night to get some fittings properly installed in the cockpit last night, because I knew that it would rain all day today.  So this morning my friend Pat and I un-stepped the mast right before the rain came.  I’ll de-rig it for the experts to finish, and get Ms. Minkoff prepared for a road trip to New Orleans to do the bottom at Clark Thompson’s shop, Cat 5 Composites.  That trip will happen on Thursday. 

Right now I’m doing some drawings for Dave Bolyard and Dave Ullman, who are together at the Ullman Sails Meeting in Dallas.  Hopefully the upwind sails will be designed by the end of the week.  Beyond that I’ve been trying to finalise the branding on sails and hull with Sevenstar, who are shipping the boat.  I’ve been shopping the material around trying to find them the best price, and sending e-mails to some car wrapping places for doing graphics on the hull.  That’s what rainy days are for though.

Snow day.

It snowed today in South Louisiana.  Very unusual for this place.  Of course that means the whole state of Louisiana shuts down.  I was supposed to drive Ms. Minkoff across Lake Pontchartrain today, but there was too much question about whether the bridges would be open, then I found out Clark’s guy’s were all taking the day off.  So, resigned myself to indoor heating and will have to do it tomorrow. 

Kind of cool, but I hope I never have to see this while I’m sailing. 

-Ryan

Home coming at Cat 5 Composites.

Well, we are back at the place it all started, Cat 5 Composites.  Clark Thompson (my co-skipper from the 1-2) lined it all up and we will be painting the bottom inside.  That’s right, we are finally going inside!  I’ve had enough of the fickle weather.  Before we go inside though I need to finish sanding the baltoplate copper bottom off, which is really fun, so we can put the new e-Paint on which will be white and really nice looking.  I’m also fairing the bulb a little just to fill the hallows and gouges from oyster shells. 

Doesn’t that look fun?  That’s copper dust, which is really great for you!

And here are my creepy neighbors.

They are called IOR boats.  A half tonner and a quarter tonner according to the ancients.  Actually they were both Katrina boats given away.  The white quarter tonner “Looney Toons” was donated to myself and Clark to play with a while back, but we were so busy with Myrna Minkoff that we never got around to fixing her.  All I did was remove some bottom paint and drill a 1.5″ hole behind the keel so she would drain after the frequent rain showers we get down here.

One day.

-Ryan

Unwanted discoveries.

Well actually, it’s good we found it, but I didn’t want to add anything to the work list.  Clark’s partner’s, Royden and Sean, found some cracks in the bottom radiating from the canard case.  I saw them, but just assumed (probably out of laziness)  that they were just cracks in the fairing compound.  The guys at Cat 5 suggested that it might be in the laminate so I ground a section out to discover they were right.  (see below)

So Clark prescribed my grinding off the skin in those areas and relaminating them with carbon.  I’d doing the prep work and Cat 5 Composites is doing the lamination and vaccum bagging. 

  Myrna came with the typical mushroom throughhull fittings which always bothered me, so this gives us a good oportunity to make the speedometer and depth sounder flush mounted.  I’m really trying to spin this to myself.

-Ryan

Untitled

 I had help today with the boat from my Dad and good friend Daniel.  They taped off the topsides for painting.

 Meanwhile I ground out a rebate for the speedo in front of the canard case, and one aft for the depth sounder. 

Then Daniel and I worked into the night attaching more deck hardware.  One of the problems with doing all the deck hardware at one is that I don’t know where everything needs to go yet.  For instance I’m not quite sure what solution I’m going to use for the below deck purchase system to pull the mast forward and aft.  I think that will be the last bit to go on when the mast is finally stepped.  Whatever I end up with it has to be very strong, because the load on the rig is quite high at the deck partners.

-R

Merry X-Mas!

I’m in Fort Myers, FL visiting my family.  It’s a lot of fun to see my Mom, Sister and Brother.  I’m now fat.  Before Leaving Louisiana I received an early Christmas present from Samson www.samsonrope.com .   This is the initial general rigging.  A lot of 12 strand Amsteel (dyneema) and AS78 for making loops and other rigging tid bits.  Also 500 feet of 6mm Warpspeed for halyards, all white with black fleck (dyneema with polyester cover).  I’m using dyneema everywhere because it is more reliable than vectran.  You can tie it in knots, you can leave it in the sun, you can bend it a million times and not worry about it exploding.

On a funny note one of the many little things I requested was 75 feet of 1/8″ dyneema,  and Samson decided to unload a reel of back order that was sitting around the warehouse.  So instead of 75′ they sent me 3,280′ feet of black 1/8″ dyneema (the bottom reel in the picture).  That should last for a while.

Have a safe holiday.  I’ll be back in Louisiana on the 26th.

-Ryan

More time in the studio.

I love working under a roof.  Next time I do this I’m renting a warehouse so I can live and work around the clock.  At the moment I can only be at Cat 5 with a chaperon because of insurance issues.  This is good and bad, because I’m forced to use volunteers during the weekend, but bad because I cannot stay there putting in 18 hour days, which I would love to do right now. 

Today my long time friend and default brother Daniel helped me.  He spent the whole day preparing the bottom a bit and making backing plates, while I solved some rigging problems. 

In the following picture you will see the jib lead system.  I’m using a 6:1 for the inboard lead and a 3:1 for the outboard with the 1/8″ Samson AmSteel that I just received.  I’m using different purchases because the jib is always trying to pull outboard anyway and when you are sheeting that far outboard the loads are usually less than they are upwind.  The question is how well it work in the mid range setting.

And now for the forestay adjuster.  As a forestay I’m going to test Samson AS78 which is basically SK78 Dyneema.  This will allow me to bring it all the way to the deck and aft with an eye splice and thimble.  It will cascade twice from there to make a 4:1 purchase that is adjustable from a clutch on the cabin top.  The reason I want to bring it all the way to the deck is so there is no enlargement of the stay above the forestay attachment with either multi part purchases or thimbles.  I suspect that would create problems when reefing the jib and probably force me to detach jib hanks in order to lower the jib to the deck. 

This is just a temporary setup to get the spliceing lengths sorted out.  I need to order a couple thimbles from Precourt for the final product.

And just in case anybody was curious what I do when I cannot work on my boat.  Well I was stuck with the family for Christmas and my Aunt Katie brought my Mom a Poodle calendar, which she does every year.  My Mom has poodles, which drive me crazy, so I went through the entire calender and added people’s eyes from a Vanity Fair magazine.  This poodle has David Schwimmer’s eyes.  I also ate a bunch of stuffing and turkey.

Bye now.

-R

Holidays are bad,

For me at least.  I’m waiting impatiently for some stuff to come in the mail.  Most notably a through hull casing for the speed transducer.  I cannot laminate the bottom until I have both depth and speed transducers installed!  So Daniel and I set about other tasks.  In the past four days I accomplished what would normally take me 8-10 days because of his help.  It’s great to be able to hand off a task to someone who can and will accomplish it without any fuss or compromise.  Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, it has been a godsend to be inside.  If any of you are considering re-fitting a boat, rent a warehouse and live in it with the boat.  You will be twice as efficient, and the weather is always stable inside. 

I’ve completed a huge work list and it’s time to move onto another one.  There is a bit of lamination on the horizon, and a bunch of rigging, but it’s a pretty big turn once the bottom is painted. 

We installed the pushpits and some little padeyes on the floor of the “back porch” as I like to call it. 

I’m going to attach a lee cloth to those padeyes and a net on the push pit so I can stack water outboard and aft when sailing off the wind.  It will be like a big basket to toss gear into.

This pic is from yesterday, and only shows the starboard side push pit installed.  But you get the idea.  They look a bit big and clunky, but are very light aluminum.  I set to geometry up aft so there is a good place to sit when using the “head”.  The old push pits were up by the traveler, so the cockpit seems much larger with them all the way aft.  And the black paint is spray on truck bed liner.  It’s really easy to apply and really tough.  I use mat black because it doesn’t pick up any reflections at night which can be fatiguing at 3:00 AM when you are steering.  That only really applies to the stanchions and pulpit.

-Ryan

Warrant for my arrest…

Sorry, just wanted a good headline.  Anyway,  I didn’t take any pictures today because there was just too much of a mess around the boat when I left.  I brought water containers to the boat today to check out how many I could put in the “basket” on the back porch.  Clark Thompson and I figure we could put about 200 lbs of water and other goods back there pretty easily.  There are definitely times where that will come in handy. 

Also, I worked out a system for the outhaul today so there is a 6:1 purchase on the cabin top running through a block at the mast base and then up to the boom.   At the outboard end it will run through the mainsail clew and back to the end of the boom so that in the end it’s a 12:1 purchase.  I’m doing this so there’s a single line inside the boom for the outhaul, instead of the six part purchase, etc.  This will be simpler and it eliminates the chances of the outhaul fouling the three reef lines that also occupy the little space there is inside the boom.  Also, if you’ve ever had to un-f%$# an outhaul system from inside the boom while sailing, you would be able to appreciate all the moving parts being external.  And of course, it’s a smidge lighter where it counts. 

I’m becoming desperate to go sailing.  I was showing Clark the boat today, discussing some ideas since a lot of what I’m doing now is a result of our observations during the Bermuda 1-2, and we’ve decided to go for a sail this Friday on a Flying Scott.  They are pretty terrible boats, but everyone races them here, and they are accessible.  Here’s a picture that captures the intensity of Scott sailing.

I know, I know.  I just need to get out there.  I have only been sailing once since being back in NOLA! 

-Ryan

HA!

I got my package this evening, so tomorrow I’ll install the through hull for the B&G depth sounder and we can start laminating.  I also received a bunch of raw material for the mast to slide in the deck partners from the ever holy McMaster Carr and some magical goo called 345 from Jamestown Distributors.  These are basically a bunch of backed up orders from the holidays. 

Here is a picture of the outhaul setup on the cabin top that I was describing yesterday.  It’s hard to tell, but this is the 6:1 part of the cascade.

And here’s a pic of the boat with aft the aft stacking lee cloths I’m working on, and some water jugs for sizing.

I think I’ll make them taller.  I’m trying to find a good material for them.  My stacking rack lee cloths down below are made from ballistic woven Kevlar, which work very well.  I could stack broken glass in those things and they would be fine.  Outside though the Kevlar will degrade quickly in the sun, so I’m thinking woven spectra if I can get it through the Cat 5 connections, or maybe some sort of rubberized woven glass fiber will do the trick.  These things tend to take a beating, so I’m not playing with mesh or laminate sail cloth.  Maybe I’ll just leave the brown paper. 

I also did some chainplate lamination inside the boat today.  I’ll photograph that tomorrow.

-Ryan

Out of town.

I’m in Edgewater, Florida putting the Owen Clarke production mini together right now www.m65usa.com/m65.html

While the guys at Cat 5 finish Myrna’s bottom repair and prime her for painting.  Also Mr.Baker has started on the mast as of yesterday and his guys should have it ready in a week depending on the weather. 

All they have to do is fair in the repair and it’s ready.

Here is a picture of the below deck chainplates I did before leaving for FL.

And here is a picture of the 20:1 purchase for pulling the mast forward at the deck partners and the 10:1 for securing it aft.

That is the cabin top.

Beyond that Ullman is designing the sails right now and they should be ready to start building when I get back to Louisiana.

We have been working until midnight on the M65, but I’ll try to get an entry every day or so about what’s going on here. 

-Ryan

M65, mini class USA!!! Eleventythousand, AWESOMENESS!!!!

Okay, maybe we’ve been working too much, but I need to get this lovely little boat into the water and sailing so I can get back to my little project.  It’s a good project though, and I like everyone involved.  Also there is progress on Myrna while I’m out, so it’s not like nothing is getting done. 

As for the M65, I spent a good bit of the day fairing the bulb. 

Jeffrey and I then finished installing the hardware that we had available.

I’ll get a better picture of her tomorrow. 

Todd Fuhrmann, who built the boat worked on finishing the rudders.

The rudders are beautiful, and a good two generations beyond what Myrna Minkoff is sailing with.  They are a tad deeper and with a shorter chord.  Todd has done an excellent job with this build and we were really psyched to see how well the rudders came out.   

Due to persist ant rudder envy, I’m talking to Tim Sadler from Owen Clarke design, about having a carbon set built for Myrna from these molds.  I’ll sail this boat, and if I like the feel of them I’ll go ahead with the new set.  In my case where I’ll be racing an older boat against the new protos during the Mini Transat I have to optimize the platform I have.  So with a new, more sophisticated carbon mast, boom, deck layout, sail plan, dagger board design, lithium ion batteries, and new generation rudders, I’ll be able to close the gap a little on the newer boats.  That’s the theory at least.  Of course it all has to stay together.

More tomorrow.

-Ryan

Parts trickle in.

I’ve installed all of the Lewmar deck hardware, and Todd is painting the keel.  Just waiting for Jeffrey to bring the rest of the Ronstan hardware up from Miami and we’ll get on that through the evening.

I’m preparing to hang the rudders at the moment.

Here is the primed keel fin.

And the lovely little tripple spreader rig from US Spars.

We set the rig up a couple of days ago.  The M65 has a narrow shroud base, much more so than even the Pogo 2, which will be great upwind and will allow the code zero to be sheeted very close to centerline for light air upwind work.  Because it is so narrow Owen Clarke opted for a triple spreader rig which was repeatedly showing to be all around quicker on the velocity prediction program (VPP).  I believe it’s the only series mini to have a  spreader mast.

-Ryan

Camera Cable

I left it at Porta Fiberglass where the M65 is.  I’m flying back to NOLA to continue working on my boat while the rest of the parts show up and Todd and his guys finish some details with the m65 like installing the keel and the “garage door” companion way.  I’ll have Jeffrey send me some pictures.  Anyone who has spent even a couple minutes with him knows, he takes a lot of pictures.  A trip to China for him would be like this “and here I am taking a picture of my new shoes at the Great Wall” etc…  It was fun working with him though, and I’ll be seeing him and Christian Fittipaldi in Miami some time next week to finish the deck hardware and do some test sailing. 

I’ll post some pics tomorrow.

-Ryan

Okay, back at the house.  Here are some pics of the M65 as I left her.

And the booty shot.

From left to right, me, Todd and Jeffrey.

Three very tired people.

-Ryan

She is painted.

This Saturday, Raul and I primed Myrna’s bottom with EP- Prime 1000.  It’s a very sticky epoxy primer that their EP-ZO-HP http://www.epaint.com/products/46 bottom paint binds really well to.  This is their high performance bottom paint and the finish is really hard.  Unlike their EP2000 the HP is not a water based paint, and the EP2000 wont bind to it, so no orange this time around.   I took loads of pictures and will have a camera cable tomorrow. 

-Ryan

Sleeping Myrna.

Here she is waiting patiently to go outside.

And the stern view.

I’ve got to run over to Cat 5 to do some little things before going to the Dentist for the final visit today.  I’m starting to see a horizon to all of this.

-Ryan

Preparing to leave the ward at Cat 5.

Today I spent the day doing things I can’t so easily do with the boat outside or in the water.  Instead of painting the transom I just bought a roll of white vinyl and stickered up the transom so it will look painted in pics and from any reasonable distance.  I just want to get her in the water at this point.  I also started with some little refinements to the water ballast system, mainly how the pump is mounted in the interior.  This time the pump will be mostly glued down with 345 instead of relying on stainless hardware to hold it in place.  I’m trying to get all of my 345 jobs lined up so I can attack them in one shot. 

Here is a picture Clark sent me of my coloring the bow numbers on with a colored pencil.  It took me forever.

Okay, it’s just vinyl.  I just wanted people to think there was a reason this was taking so long.

-Ryan

Back to Mandeville,

Where my mast and the Ullman sail loft are.  My sailmaker is in Key West of course.  It is migratory season for sailmakers right now.  They will be back on Monday. 

Yesterday I rented a load cell and weighed Myrna.  Since owning her I’ve suspected she was overweight by about 200 lbs because of her glass hull (not deck) and the thickness of the foam they used to build her.  Plus, the laminate is pretty thick compared to some of the boats I’ve seen.  Anyway I was right, she is 200 lbs overweight.  It’s not water intrusion or anything because I’ve already moisture metered the hull, so there is not much I can do about it but add sail area and try to sail her well.  So with the mast, boom and rigging she will weigh a little over 2,000 lbs (907 kg).  Still this is 200 lbs less than she weighed for the Bermuda 1-2 because of lighter sails, mast, boom, and batteries.  Plus a few little odds and ends that are much lighter than before such as hardware and escape hatch, etc…  Okay, so a modern proto weighs around 1760 lbs (800 kg) and has more righting moment with a canting keel/water ballast combination, so theoretically should be significantly faster.  That is great news for them, but I still think that a strong result in the Mini Transat is up to the skipper, and I am driven to focus exclusively on good preparation and sailing smart.  On top of that, Myrna is a beautiful boat that loves being offshore.  I can’t wait to show what she can do.

Here is a pic of the repaired area around the canard box and with the through hulls all made flush.  From front to back: speedo, canard, depth sounder, water ballest scoop and keel.

And here is the fake painted transom.  You can’t tell it’s a sticker in the picture and that’s all that matters.

They canceled my dentist apt from Monday, so tomorrow I’m going in for the last visit, then I have to return the load cell.

-Ryan

I have a sailboat?

I’m  starting to realize that I can soon go sailing.  I spent the weekend plotting my course for my qualifier and I’m excited about getting out there.  I have dreams about sailing Myrna Minkoff in her new configuration and at least in the dream she is really alive. 

Besides plotting my qualifier, I’ve also done some little odd jobs. 

One being to fill the holes I cut in the ballast tanks.  I had to cut them out to access the nuts for the old push pits.  On the new pushpits, I laminated a G-10 “thumb” that the tube slides onto with a through bolt.  This way I don’t have to go in there anymore.  This was the second time I’d put a hole saw to the tanks to do something with push pits or stanchions.  Dumb.

Also did some 345 work with the chain plates below deck.  I wanted to be able to load them in more than one direction in the case of an emergency.  The little carbon parts were already made, so I just stuck them on. 

And here is Myrna docked at my friend Pat’s house. 

-Ryan

Mast hath beguneth againetheth…

Yesterday Barry and I picked up the mast and moved it under Pat’s porch so his guys could work on it in a more controlled environment.  They did some more bracket lamination, while I went to have lunch with Pat and his friend Yves, a baker from Brittany.  Yves wanted to meet about writing a press release about me for a publication in Lorient.  It should be fun, because Yves wants to play up the Louisiana connection to Brittany as much as possible, with humorous spins buried throughout. 

I also met with Dave Bolyard and discussed sails.  While in Key West, he and Dave Ullman met about the mainsail and jib design.  We will start with an over sized, unfinished sail, and once the mast is stepped again we will get some more precise measurements for Ullman to design the desired luff curve into the sail.  Then we go sailing and check it out. 

And just to see how far we’ve come, here is a picture of Myrna from September.

The black part of the cabin top that runs aft is where there was water in the core from some self tappers that were used to hold down a hand rail or something in the past.  This is mid repair.   Here’s a tip: don’t use self tappers anywhere outside on a boat.  Any boat.  You can also see the beginning of the inboard chainplates.

-Ryan

I’M IN MIAMI!!!

And I’m okay.  We are finishing the M65 and should be able to go sailing tomorrow.  I will take pictures of that for you all.  I have not been online since coming here a few days ago, but all it well.  There is no internet where the boat is or where we are staying, and no time to go out of my way to get online.  Will keep you posted.

-Ryan

I actually went sailing…

I’m in Miami preparing the M65 www.minisinamerica.comand we went sailing on Wednesday.  She comes from the drawing board of Owen Clarke Design and as expected she sailed beautifully.  With the large overlapping headsail and narrow shroud base she pointed very well.  This makes me very excited about the new sail configuration for Myrna, because this boat definitely went upwind better than my boat in its old configuration.  I’ll be here for a few more days working on some final details for the M65 and sailing a bit with Christian Fittipaldi before heading home to prepare Myrna’s mast for stepping.  According to Pat, Barry has done a beautiful job finishing my mast and I can’t wait to get some pictures online.  It’s nice to go sailing again and Myrna’s day is just around the corner.

Me and Christian checking the helm of the M65 on our initial sail.

This illustrates how tight the sheeting angle is on the genoa.

We will be sailing again tomorrow.

-Ryan

Sailmaking time, USA!

I got back to Louisiana last Wednesday and we began working on the sails.  It’s been great working with the Ullman group down here.  I’ve known them for a while, and Bolyard runs a pretty tight ship.  So far we’ve just started the mainsail.  Lots of little details to plan out before we began cutting, so it’s been fairly intensive.

Here are all the cut panels for the Mainsail and the scraps of beautiful Dimension Polyant woven pentex.  This stuff is wicked.  Very light and very stiff.

Here it is ready to be assembled.

I also had a special guest this weekend.  Gale Browning, the woman who last raced my boat in the 2001 Mini Transat as passing through on her way to California and stopped by to visit her old boat and see what I’ve been doing to her.  Naturally, she was not taking the easy path to CA, but instead riding a motorcycle.  It was great to talk to her and go over everything.  She also revealed to me the the main designer of Myrna Minkoff was not actually Finot, but rather a rising star in the world of yacht design, Guillaume Verdier.  He was working for Finot/Conq at the time, and apparently this was his take on the previous Finot design. 

I also recieved a bunch of clothes from Columbia Sportswear and now have a fabulous new wardrobe, part of which I’m sporting in the next picture along with Gale Browning.

More mainsail stuff tomorrow.

-Ryan

Holding pattern.

This is a glimpse of the sewn panels (now in 3 large panels) with all the reinforcement strips for reef points sewn down.  We are waiting to hear from Dave Bolyard, my sailmaker and Ullman Gulfcoast owner.  We need to talk to him to discuss some ideas before we carry on.  He is of course racing in the J22 midwinters, because that, be like, what sailmakers do. 

And here is the daggerboard or canard that Barry reshaped for me and painted.  It is super fine now.  I’ll use it upwind and will build a case for it so it can be stacked downwind.  I have a piece that was cut off from the bottom to plug the hole while reaching and running.

This daggerboard has been brought Columbia Sportswear. 

-Ryan

Dave……………Dave……………..

I received my B&G displays yesterday from the repair shop in Fort Lauderdale.  I installed them today and am pleased to see the familiar red glow burning on through the night.  It’s like I’ve finally flipped the power switch on Myrna and she is awake and waiting for her orders.

The title of this post was brought to you by H.A.L.

Sleep well.

 

-Ryan

Little things today.

I spent the day doing the final little bits for the mast.  I’m modifying the mast head crane to mount the VHF antenna and the wind instruments.   I’m taking molds from there to make the parts off the mast.  No picture, because there ain’t much to see.  Also I’m modifying the spreader brackets Barry did to accept some skateboard bushings to dampen the movement of universal joints for the spreaders.  No pics of that today because I just don’t have something I want to show there yet.  Maybe tomorrow. 

I also laminated some nuts to the inside of the mast at the base so that the mast base will be removable.  I used a bit of G-10, routed out with a nut inside and a small G-10 cap to compress it with another nut to squeege out all the 345 epoxy.  That’s right, “squeege”.

When it has cured I’ll remove the screws and the nut you can see (there are nuts buried inside each of those) and then I’ll attach the mast base.

I used the left over 345 to glue on the mainsail luff feeder.  I used the old one from my previous mast and it needed some filling for the new tube.  I’ll rivet it on when it’s cured.   These are one of the most important pieces of equipment for singlehanded sailing.  These days, I won’t even go sailing if there isn’t a really good luff feeder on the mast.  Without it you have to wrestle the luff in the mast and run back and forth between the mast and cockpit when hoisting and reefing. 

It’s just a bunch of little stuff these days.  I should get my standing rigging next week, at which time I’ll splash the boat and step the rig.  From there we’ll get a little more info about mast bend characteristics and Dave Ullman will figure out the luff curve he wants us to put in the mainsail. 

-Ryan

Another good thing in motion.

Today I spoke with Rick at US Spars.  They are building my standing rigging.  Initially we are going with dyform so I can see if there is anything that needs changing before I go with some of the more expensive and labor intensive PBO rigging.  If I can get that this week, the rig will go up and we can finish the mainsail. 

Also, Julie nested the jib today.  We are using Dimension Flex pentex, and as you can see it’s a cross cut sail.  The material is really light.  I went one weight lighter than what DP and Ullman were recommending, and I want to see if the sail can handle it.  It seems tough for it’s weight though, and I’ve used the Flex before on other boats with a lot of success.  This sail will have two reef points, and it will be interesting to see how it holds up offshore.  The first jib and mainsail are essentially an experiment for us to push the material and see what we can get away with for the Transat sails.

 

Here is the much smaller and much heavier jib from my old mast.  The new sail is about 35 square feet larger, and  with the first reef in will be as large as the old jib. 

Yeah, Myrna is going to be much quicker than she was for the Bermuda 1-2.  This I can see now.  Reliability is the next priority.

-Ryan

Is the answer in skateboarding?

When I was in junior high and high school, I skateboarded a lot.  There was once a time when I couldn’t imagine not wanting to skateboard.  Three broken ankles, one broken arm and two concussions later, I can’t remember why I felt that way.  But, I may have found a redeeming feature from my past that will help me with my mast.

What I did was flatten the outboard end of the brackets.  Between the spreader and the uni-joint I put two pieces of g-10 to act as sliding plates and a skateboard truck bushing to dampen the movement up/down and fore/aft.  This may have a few benefits, but the first one is that it will stabilize the spreaders when I’m stepping the rig so nothing gets over extended in any direction.  Beyond that I’m still waiting to get my standing rigging and as of this morning they hadn’t started.  It is holding me up because I can’t touch the sails until the rig is standing.  Ooof!

And here is the gooseneck Barry built.  It’s very simple and very light, and for some reason I have not seen one like it before.  I hope there’s not a good reason for that.

-Ryan

I love Samson!

I came home this evening to this.

It’s the rest of my rigging and should take care of me for a long time.  Samson www.samsonrope.com gave me more than I had requested in each line, which is great because it allows me to refine the running rigging on Myrna to the point where everything is working perfectly.  

All of my sponsors have been an amazing to me, but Samson and Lewmar have gone way beyond what I could have wished for.  Neither company has ever flinched at a request, and they both always over deliver.  It is deeply inspiring for me and makes me want to do the same for them.  

I need to get the big Lewmar branding on though.  All I have are these little decals and two large ones that are in white, which doesn’t really show up well on my boat.  I’ll send Lewmar an e-mail right now.

I have a few more logos to put on there still, but it’s coming together.

-R

P.S. Standing rigging is in the mail as of yesterday afternoon.

I’m out of town.

Of course that means I’m in FL.   I’m only allowed to go to Florida if I leave Louisiana.  New rule aparently.  Anyway, I’ll be back in LA tomorrow to continue with the rig and getting it stepped.  

Now picture time.

 

Okay, I have a really bad internet connection, so no pics.  But the rigging is all in and I’m busy attaching it to the rig.

 

I’ll get something tomorrow online tomorrow.

-R

Did I mention tomorrow?

Here are pics of yesterday, tomorrow!  

All my halyards, sheets and guys,  from Samson, of course.

All of the white line is 6mm Warpspeed, which is a Dyneema with a polyester cover.  I’m using that for the 2:1 main halyard, masthead spinnaker and fractional spinnaker halyard.  For the 2:1 jib and storm jib halyards I’m using 4mm Validator SKB which is a Vectran/Dyneema blend 12 strand with a poly cover.

When I first started sailing solo, I thought everything had to be color coded, etc, but then after doing it for a while, I realized none of that matters.  By the time it matters, you know exactly what line does what regardless of the color.  You just know.  I’ve sailed Myrna 3,000 plus miles and never accidently opened “the wrong” clutch, and that has nothing to do with color, because you do that at night with the red lamp on, so…

Here is the lashing for the D#2

And here is the  modified masthead for the super awesome instruments.

When it’s clear coated it will make more sense.  The flash makes everything look kind of creepy.

More of this tomorrow.

 

-Ryan

Dry Fit Time.

 I’m fitting the standing rigging on the mast and figuring out how all of this will go together.  The more it comes together, the more it makes sense to me, even though I designed the damn thing!  ”Design” can only be used loosely though, because I’ve been improvising the design of this mast the whole time as it was being built, and I never made any detailed drawings of anything.  I’m starting to feel quite good about it now though, and it’s pretty clear to me that this will be a very sophisticated mast in both performance and execution.  It’s already looking that way.  I’m glad I hired Barry to finish her off, because it looks very professional now, where as I would have probably just filed down the edges, and spray painted the whole thing black or something.  

I found a disc today that Katie Triplett had in her possession for several years.  It’s a collection of a few videos from my transatlantic delivery of the Open 50 Artforms from 2005.  It’s great to be able to relive those moments spent flying across the North Atlantic with Kip Stone and Greg Feldman.  In my opinion Artforms was one of Owen Clarke Design’s masterpieces.  We spent day after day knocking off 300 + mile days with little or no effort whatsoever.  I had a lot of fun working with Kip in those days, and miss watching the miles dissapear in Artforms’ wake.  I’ll post them to Youtube tomorrow, so you guys can have an idea of what I’m talking about.  They are on a friend’s computer.

 I try not to think about the big boats anymore because they are so far from my grasp and require major sponsorship dollars to build and race, but these videos make clear that I’m simply in denial.  I want to sail on a boat you can stand up on and walk around!  One that doesn’t pitch around like mad and goes really fast, not just “fast for a 21′ boat”.  But, I’ll have to keep pushing through the Mini ceiling to make that happen.  I appreciate deeply the opportunities Kip extended to me during those days, and look forward to getting back on the water with him one day, whether it’s his campaign or mine.  

Back to work.

-R

And picture time.

So here are some pictures of the dry fit.

Mast with halyards run.

 

Tie down for inboard shrouds.

 

And 2:1 Jib halyard with a 40mm Lewmar flying block.  

*People keep asking me why I’m using a 2:1 halyard for the jib and mainsail, and the only reason I’m doing that is so I can reduce compression on the mast.  It reduces compression by 50%, which is a big deal when you are bashing away to windward for a day or two.  Yes it means there is more line in the cockpit bags, but that is only really an incovenience for day sailing.  Offshore you won’t be confronted with that on a daily basis.

-Ryan

* A friend of mine sent the following correction to me regarding the above post.  I had to explain to him that I have a BFA in oil painting, and still count with my fingers.

“I don’t know if this information is usefull to you but I think your numbers are off on the advantage of the 2 to 1 halyard system. I agree that the force required to lift will be half but the compression on the mast (which, I believe, is your main concern) will be cut by 1/4, not by 1/2. so if your are lifting 100 pounds, there with be a compression force of 150 pounds even though the pulling force on the down line is 50 pounds. not trying to be a smart ass but if you are running your numbers close, I thought you should take a look at this.”

Rig up tomorrow.

I’m stepping the mast in the morning.  I moved Myrna to Pontchartrain Yacht Club and assembled the mast there to the point that it is ready to be put on the boat in the morning and jin poled into place.

PYC.

 From there we’ll take some measurements and finish the mainsail and jib.  Then the mainsail goes up with the RBS battens.

RBS sent us two sets, a carbon set and a glass set.  We want to see how durable the carbon ones are, because they are three pounds lighter than the glass set.

From there we’ll mark the mainsail track at each batten end, at every reef point.  Then the mast comes out again and I’ll reinforce those areas with carbon and install the wind instruments and nav lights and of course, paint the spreaders so they don’t look insane…

Then it’s rig up and go sailing time.

-Ryan

Holy S#!% !!!

What’s this?

That’s right, she floats…

It was a pretty long day, but ultimately Pat and I were able to step the mast.

I was able to play with the mast a bit with the adjustable forestay and deck partners, and it is pretty amazing.  I have never sailed a boat that has a rig this adjustable while sailing, and am pretty excited to do so.  The mast rake can be set from forward of vertical to 5.5 feet aft, which is to the cabin top bulkhead with varying prebend settings independant of the rake.  It’s either the mast of my dreams or the mast of my nightmares.  Either way, I’m excited to find out.

-R

Things.

Dave Bolyard was swamped for the last week, so there was no room for me in the loft for the last couple of days. That’s okay because I have plenty of rigging to do, and the boat looks just like a mini right now.  If you didn’t know any better, you’d assume it’s ready to sail.

Here is the super awesome Ullman Code Zero (screecher) that Bolyard built for me for the Bermuda 1-2.  You can see in this picture that the hoist is short because of the new rig, and it’s sheeted inboard of the outboard shrouds.

      And here is a picture of the rig raked forward.

I spend some time in the loft today making my padded canard case, and will spend all of tomorrow there working on the jib. It rained all day, and I’ve been tired so, I’m calling it a day.

-Ryan

It’s official,

Long hours in a sail loft are much easier than long hours in a boat yard. It’s a much more stable environment, and just feels like less work than say, installing deck hardware or laminating.     Today we started back on the jib. Dave sewed a couple panels while I cut strips for the clews and tacks.

 I spent the rest of the day sewing the tapes and a couple more panels until the sails started to look “sailish” at the end of the evening.  

This was the first day Dave let me sew on my own sails.  Now that he sees I can do it, I think the whole process will go quicker because I don’t have to rely on one of his guys to build it, and I can just carry on with his input as he works on other projects around the loft.  I used to work in a service loft, so working on sails isn’t new to me.  I also used to think I hated sail making, but now that I have done everything there is to do on my boat I realize that sail making really isn’t so bad.  At least there isn’t any sand paper involved.  

Now it’s time for rigging nugget:

For anyone doing a cascaded system where there is dyneema going through a thimble when there is a situation where the timble is hauled close to the termination point for the splice, make the splice really large, so there is no tail passing through the timble.  

This way the splice never has to pass through the thimble under load, and the tail won’t be revealed by working it back and forth around the radius.

More sailmaking tomorrow.

-Ryan

Picture time

I don’t have a lot of time to explain, but here we are with the jib up to mark the spreader where the leach hits the top spreader with the rig raked aft a bit.  It’s being blown into the rig from the windward side, so the full overlap is not apparent.

Here’s the jib, as I left it tonight.

This is horrible timing, but I have to leave town to deal with a rash of family issues that popped up.  When is that ever good timing.  I’m going to talk to Dave about paying his guys to finish the jib, so it’s ready when I get back.

-Ryan

A quickie.

I’m in Fort Myers now.  My Mom broke her leg on St. Patrick’s day.  I flew out the next day to help my Sister, Katie move from upstate NY to Florida to help my Mom, so she can help my Mom.  

The first day Katie and I drove to Baltimore.  The next morning I met with my agent Beth Perry, who is in Baltimore with her company Sailing 360 Sponsorship ( www.s360s.com ).  We then did a quick photo shoot for Columbia ( www.columbia.com) on Tim Troy’s Open 60, Margaret Anna, which went really well.

Katie and I then drove 22 hours strait to Fort Myers with her dogs and a truck full of her stuff.  Once we got here I took a shower and a late afternoon nap.  Now it’s 1:30 A.M. and my sleep cycle is totally off.  

Tomorrow we are going to Sarasota to visit a very good friend of ours whose sister just died from cancer.  We will also be going to her funeral on Monday.  It’s been a weird couple of days.

I’ll be back in the loft on Tuesday to finish the sails.  

-R

Just because you can…

Doesn’t mean you should.  The jib is pretty much finished as of today.  I spent the last couple hours of the day making my hanks while watching, well mostly listening to a movie.  One of the problems with my campaign is that I don’t have much money at all, and I can do pretty much everything that can be done on my boat, so when I see a Precourt hank design that I can make myself, I buy Precourt’s little machined part and do the little 4mm double splice bit myself.  I forget however that just because I know how to do these things, doesn’t mean I should when there is so much else to do.  I should have just bought the finished Precourt hanks, just like I should have bought an off the shelf mast/boom, and a set of sails, and blah blah blah.  It all adds up to be a lot of hours.  I wouldn’t say I’m kicking myself, but I’m definitely flicking myself a little, because I’m not sailing yet.  

No pics today.  I destroyed my laptop power cord trying to fix something, so I don’t have a good place to load pics, etc…  The little box started making an eeri whining noise which was soon followed by a strange smell.  I tried to pry it apart to fix it, but gave up after breaking a nice kitchen knife.  

I plan to put the boat back in the water tomorrow, hoist the jib for a final check before the batten pockets go on, and then get back on the mainsail.

-R

One down,

One more to go before I can start preparing for the qualifier.

Here is the finished jib without the batten pockets.  

I may have to relocated some of the lead positions for this jib.  What I have will work for a qualifier, but I don’t think it’s race ready.  My old jib weighs 23 lbs, and this one weighs 16 lbs, with the battens.  It’s also about 30% larger.

I worked on the main all day, and will continue pushing on that all week with a lot of late nights at the loft.  It just has to get done.

-R

……

Just got home from the loft.  It’s now 11:13, and I’m off to shower and sleep a bit before the morning.  Then it’s back in the loft again.  Dave game me my license to Adler today.  That is his prized zig zag sewing machine, and the one which my mainsail is mostly built on because of the corner patches.  For me to use it I had to agree to drive to Mobile and have it repaired if something happens to it.   I managed to get a lot done today, and loads more done this evening.  So far so good.

-R

BAM!

 

Mainsail done.

I worked on this all week to get her done by Friday.  Friday night, it was  finished.  I would work all day with Mark Oswald on the floor, and when everyone went home Dave Bolyard would let me stay and do more work.  I’ve heard a lot of mini sailors moan about how expensive Mini mainsails are.  I used to moan along with them, but now I get it.  There is simply much more work involved with a mini main than there is with say, a Hunter 27 mainsail.  On my mainsail for instance, we chose to build in a bunch of radial tapes at all corners where there will be point loading.  Then we went for a corner patch more commonly seen on tri-radial sails which is a bit lighter, but a bit more labor intensive.  Also you have many more reef points to sew in which require you to maneuver a lot of cloth into a very small machine.  And after that is all done, you have six full length battens to sew down.  So, besides the sewing you are also required to make a lot of parts.  The labor involved makes these special little sails significantly more expensive than your standard keel boat mainsail.  Mine was free of course, but if I had to build one for someone else it wouldn’t be cheap.    

It’s great to have so much support from Ullman Gulfcoast, and I am very happy with what we’ve come up with.  There will be some little tweaks here and there with batten tensions etc… but nothing too unusual for sail #1.    The clew of this sail is higher than normal to accommodate the rig being raked aft.  Otherwise the boom would be too close to the cabin top winch and if a winch handle was mistakenly left in there during a maneuver, well, it could be bad.

This sail is eighteen pounds lighter than the old mainsail, and the jib is 9 lbs less, so the weight savings aloft, just for the sails is significant.  

The  next step is to take the mast down, and reinforce the track and do some other little modifications to make the rig more reliable.  

More to follow.

-R

Rig down…

Don’t worry, we took it down to do all the reinforcements along the luff track.  It didn’t fall.  That would require actually going sailing!

The reason we have to do this is because without it the full length battens will peel the track off under compression.  That is pretty much a show stopper, and I’ve consulted extensively with the American mini sailor Jesse Rowse about the issue.   

I also spent a good part of the day working on the spinnakers with Dave Bolyard at Ullman Gulfcoast.  We did measurements for the A2 Runner, the A1 all purpose with a reef point, the Code 5 blast reacher sail, and the Screecher reacher.  I then spent a few hours figuring out how large each sail should be, and trying to tweak the crossovers between these sails so Dave Ullman, the sail designer, has something to work from.   My basic approach is really simple, maybe overly so, but it’s all I can come  up with.  I take the desired size of the screecher, and the desired size of the A2 (my largest sail), and divide up the difference in square footage between the remaining two sails (actually three sails with the reefed A1).  This should allow me to stay true to my waypoint during the zillions of wind shifts that occur during an offshore race.  I don’t like to bang corners for my sail wardrobes, and I don’t like there to be big gaps in the crossovers.  It’s a gamble, and there are too many other things to lose a race on out there than a blatant, at the dock, gamble.   

-R

Bits and pieces

I’m almost done with all of the mast chores.  Just waiting for my carbon tape to come in the mail, which was ordered two days ago, next day air of course…  Anyway I’ve been doing little things that I had shelved for a while.  I’m finished modifying the mast crane which now looks like a porcupine with tabs, flanges and tubes stuck all over it.  Here it is now,

and 

Yes, that’s bird paint on the VHF antenna flange.

Here it was months ago, before I really started considering that I had to put instruments up there.

It should look really funny with the wind instrument, windex, VHF antenna and masthead light installed.

I’ve got to run to NOLA to bring a Beneteau 40.7 to Slidell for the start of the Two Against the Lake Race, which is doublehanded.  I love that race but hate the boat.  I don’t even remember how to sail dead down wind.  It should be fun to get out there though.

-R

I’m going sailing tomorrow.

On my boat too, not a Beneteau 40.7.  Devon and I raced the Beneteau  this weekend in wildly shifty and light condtions.   There were only seven boats in our class.  We managed a 3rd and had a good time out there, even though there were a lot of wind speed readings of two knots or less!  A Hobie 33 and a Flying Tiger 10 corrected out over us by around two and a half minutes for the 16.5 mile race.  We essentially lost all our time on those boats in the last 4 mile leg which was downwind in 5 knots of wind, but that’s handicap racing…

Anyway, Pat and I stepped the mast today, and I spent the rest of the day doing rigging stuff to get her ready to sail tomorrow.  I should be very excited about it, but I have some family issues that are weighing heavily on my mind, and I feel a bit like I’m just going through the montions right now.  I’m sure that will lessen as Myrna’s little secrets start to show themselves to me, but that’s just where I am right now.

There has been a lot of work this week that I didn’t blog about.  Let’s do that then.  Highlights:

-My Dad took my trailer to St. Augustine Florida, so now I have to sail over there!

-Because he took his truck Pat and I had to move the mast to Pontchartrain Yacht Club with two bicycles.  It’s only about a 15 minute walk, but it still made for a good sight on the lake front as people were jogging by.

- I paddled my boat down the bayou last night with one ore, because I’m too lazy to drive to Slidell to get my engine out of storage.  I moved Myrna up the bayou because the water had dropped dramatically at the yacht club.

-I’ve been working late into the night out there, and the bugs are here for the summer!

I promise I’ll take pictures tomorrow.

-R

So far, so good…

She’s faster!  Last night I went sailing with Collin Ross and Chris Morency who were helping me at the Pontchartrain Yacht Club to get the boat ready to sail.  We left in a light breeze which quickly picked up to 10 knots once we were away from land a bit.  Myrna Accelerated very quickly and felt much more springy than the last time I sailed her.  She used to heel longer in a puff before accelerating, but now it’s a quick heel, slight ease of the traveler and immediate acceleration.  This is certainly a result of huge weight savings aloft coupled with new sails that are both bigger and lighter.  Plus Dave Ullman did an amazing job designing the sails and they trim beautifully.  With his mastery of the Melges 24 class he understands perfectly how to design fast sails for small boats like a mini.  Plus, as far as I know, he is the only designer in the Melges class building mainsails in dacron, and he wins with them!  I’m using woven Pentex, but the characteristics are similar.  

I’m going to spend the rest of the day preparing the boat to work perfectly, because yesterday we just sort of threw stuff together to get out there.  Myrna’s not quite a perfectly functioning organism yet, so I have quite a bit of work still.

I cannot find my camera, so Chris took a picture with his phone just so I’d have proof!  

 

More later.

-R

The verdict is in…

I had been questioning whether this was the mast of my dreams or nightmares.  It’s the mast of my nightmares.  This rig is a death trap. 

Clark and I went sailing today with his son Phin.  The average wind was around 12 knots and we had the boat going quite really well upwind.  The inside outside rig needs tuning still, but basically it was quick.  There is however a lot of movement from the top spreaders.  The leeward one was swinging around like wild and the windward one was moving fore/aft about three inches in the chop.  I don’t like it.  I knew there would be some movement, and that was the point, but this is too much.  Clark and I talked about this for a while, and then bore away to sail  back in to Mandeville.  We didn’t have a mast head spinnaker, but put up the fractional one just to have some fun.  So with full mainsail, jib and the fractional spinnaker we were making around 10 knots of boatspeed while sailing above our polar angles.  This is where the nail was driven in the coffin though.  We watched the top spreaders as the boat accelerated and slowed against the back of waves.  The mainsail was pushing the top spreader directly in line and the windward spreader was lining right up with the leeward one as the mast loaded up.  We were sailing underpowered and the mast was already trying to invert.  In racing conditions this thing would be overboard very quickly.  I’m talking to people now and looking for answers.

 First thing’s first,  the rig needs to come out again.

-Ryan

So here’s the deal,

I spoke with Jesse Rowse and Barry Baker about some options.  I’m used to working through ideas with these guys, and it’s always helpful.  Jesse went through a lot of BS with his mast initially, which we discussed a lot as it was happening, and Barry has decades of experience and is a bit of an artist.  Barry and I looked at some parts and came up with a plan.  My goal is to have the rig down, fixed and up in the same day.  So I’m just lining everything up so it can happen at once.  

I spent the rest of the day installing a new pilot control head on the tiller and reinstalling the stacking bunks.  I’m having a hard time getting the Navman pilot to recieve NMEA info from the B&G instruments.  I had it working a couple years ago, but something ain’t right.  I forgot how tedious those bunks are to install and it took me the rest of the day to do those.  

I feel better about the plan and it shouldn’t take long because we are going for a much more traditional fix than what I have up there currently.

-R

Does this look familiar?

It’s been my proto/proto mast throughout this whole development.

There are a lot of little holes in it.  

I had to go to Slidell today to dig around the storage unit for that bar.  It’s the old spreader bar from the top spreader on my old mast.  I knew I kept it around for a reason.  I spoke today with Tony Delima from Forte and Jim Stone from Hall, and discussed going back to the old school and they both thought was a good idea.  One of the things I overlooked in this older technology is the fact that in my current rig I have completely eliminated mast twist from the picture.  With the spreader bar I’ll be inducing mast twist downwind which may actually help further stabilize the rig.   Maybe I’m reaching here, but you would be too if you’d gone through the amount of madness I’ve been going through to get to this point  

I’ll carry on with electronics tomorrow, and get everything set up so that the mast can come down Wednesday morning.  I want to have it back up by Wednesday evening.  

Please cross your fingers that this works.  I’m getting worn down a bit.

-R

Out with the new, in with the old.

At the moment I’m wearing my Stewie pajamas, eating what can only be described as Mexican lasagna, and drinking a dirty martini.  All around I’m feeling pretty good about what’s happening with the mast.   Yesterday I went to Cat 5 Composites to make the spreader bar for the lower spreaders.  They happened to have the material and Barry talked me into replacing that one too  since it wasn’t much more work and we knew it would work.  So I spent the day making all of the parts I’d need to do the modification and prepared the rig today removing all of the really neat looking expensive, and overly creative mechanisms I had labored over for so long.  Amazingly I didn’t mind seeing it go, but you wouldn’t either if you saw what the mast was doing with the spinnaker up!   In the end that’s all that matters, and there is no use dwelling on the lost time. 

So here we are at the begining of the removal.

Barry came by this afternoon and looked at what I was doing and warned me of a couple of stress risers left over from the flanges so I filled for/aft fissures with epoxy and put carbon band-aids on them.

So first thing in the morning I’ll put a coat of UV protector on those bits of lamination, assemble the rig and put her up.  After that we’ll go for a sail and see what’s what.  

And I obviously found my camera, so I’ll take some real pictures this time

-R

A good and long day.

It’s now 10:45 PM and I just got back from the boat.  I was on a role, so I put on my light Titanium windbreaker from Columbia, so the mosquitoes and gnats wouldn’t be as bad, and kept doing little rigging jobs and making changes from the work list Clark and I came up with.  

Jeremy Richmond and Pat helped me step the mast today, and it is much much more stable and controllable.  It’s funny, now that the rig is stabilized, I feel stabilized.  My emotional world has become very tightly wound up in this project, which tends to happen when you have been working on something like this for so many months.  The anxiety about the mast was sort of paralyzing for a while, and I think I’m on top of it now.  Fingers crossed.  

Besides getting the mast up and tuned here is a list of things I did this evening:

-Attach all the wires coming from the mast, nav lights, wind instruments and VHF.

-I made the mainsheet system a 6:1 and changed out the triple becket ratchet block to a 40 mm block.  The 60 mm was too heavy and kept falling onto itself whenever there was any slack.

-I put the 60mm system below deck to pull the mast forward and made the mast aft purchase a 40mm system instead of the 30 that was there.  They are both 20:1 purchases.  

-I made put on a mast boot at the deck that allows the mast to move fore/aft.

-I made the 4:1 forestay adjuster a 6:1 purchase, which is just a cascade of sailmaker thimbles to a clutch.

All of the rake and bend systems that I thought would be enhanced by the hinged spreaders actually work better with the fixed spreaders.  There are a bunch of reasons for this that I don’t feel like going into because it’s late.  But they work much much better.  Prebend is much more controllable because the fixed spreaders are not inducing bend as they load up.  The hinged ones did because they were swept back under load, and it was a vicious cycle.  

It’s going to be too windy tomorrow to go for a sail, and I don’t have line bags yet.  I’m waiting for the breeze to drop to 8 knots to go check the systems.  The line bags thing may sound like a lame excuse, but I’ve done too much sailing in my life to put up with spaghetti everywhere.  It just messes up my matrix.

Pat’s girlfriend took pictures of the mast going up and she’ll mail them to me tomorrow.  I’ll insert them into this post when I get them.

-R

What are these?

 

The pink forms represent myself opening up to the things in my future, good or bad.  The red line represents all the negativity in my life, and its relation to my vulnerable state.  The artwork on the wall refers to lost opportunities and how I Cherish them all, and the curtains symbolize the unknown.  Don’t read too much into value inversions between the  chairs and TV dinner tables.  I put those in there just for compositional balance.

Okay, just kidding.  These are actually aft floatation.  I’ve been putting off a huge list of things.  One is floatation.  I did these at Pat’s house tonight so I didn’t have to fend off mosquitoes all night.  I got pretty well eaten last night, so I did all the measuring this afternoon and got back to the house around 8:30 pm.  I’m bringing these pink things to Cat 5 tomorrow to have them filled with foam and laminated.  Then I will bond them to the aft quarters of my boat to make Myrna Minkoff class legal.  I had so much other stuff to do in the past many months, and I didn’t know what I was going to do about this exactly, so here we are.  Should work fine and be a clean install.

 While Cat 5 is working on these I’ll continue with the refinements Clark Thompson and I worked out.  I like sailing with him because he’s a very observant and competant sailor who is also very creative.  We are able to come up with a list of problems and potential solutions quickly and normally we pick the right one by the time we are back at the dock.  I’ll see if we were right soon enough.

Yes, that means I have not gone sailing since changing the rig.  It’s been consistently blowing 15-20+ knots for the past 4 days or so, and I don’t want to have to sail Myrna full ballast etc for her first, post first, sail.  The idea is to ease into these things when there is so much prototypical stuff going on, and it gives me some good time to tick off other objectives from my work list.  Things like aft floatation, which have been looming like old psychic debt.  

I also spent the some of today working on the in-hauler for the jib, so now there are three lines on both sides controlling the floating ring for the jib sheets, and I’ll be able to haul the clew way inboard for light upwind work.  The in-haulers are split into a bridal situation forward of the mast and then run aft to a single cleat on the cabin top.  So you pull one line and port/starboard jib leads are hauled inboard.  

Yesterday I finished all the stand-offs for the main traveler.  For all of these jobs there was a lot of running around, but I made up for most of it by working into the night and was getting home around 10 PM most nights.  

I feel like I’m on a roll now, but need to sleep better at night.  Pat has a tin roof, and my bedroom has a tree growing right alongside it.  With all the wind we’ve been getting the tree has been scraping it’s branches along the roof and I am waking up at all hours of the night with some really really horrifying dreams.  All very gory and I’m blaming them all on the fingernail/chalkboard sound coming from the ceiling above me.  In fact last job of the day is to crawl out on the roof tonight and cut those branches.  Thankfully I have my head lamp on the dashboard of my truck.  

In fact, I have two items on my truck that tell how I start and end my days.  A pair of sunglasses and a headlamp.

-Ryan

Bug spray and sunscreen.

People are always like “What’s the secret to your constant and aweful sheen?”, and I’m like, “Bug spray and sunscreen, girlfriend!  Don’t say nothing though.  It’s my trademark.”

  Anyway, that’s me at 11 last night.  I kept trying to capture the gnats in action, but they don’t get the nickname “no-see-ems” for nothing.  I love Louisiana, but the bugs have been insane.

I don’t have much time because I’m sailing across Lake Pontchartrain today, but here’s the vang.

And here’s the compass heading on one of the autopilot control heads.  

Myrna rising!

-R

TransPontch

I’m just sitting in the bar room at Southern Yacht Club waiting for the wind to lay down a bit so I can start testing my autopilot and deliver the boat back to Mandeville.  Collin Ross and I sailed Myrna across the lake yesterday.  There are still some things to tune in the rig, but it is much much better.  I think we are in the clear for now.  It was an upwind port tack beat for 25 miles and Myrna is noticeably faster upwind than before and she points better as well.  The wind was blowing around 12-15 knots and we were fully ballasted up the whole way across with a significant Lake Pontchartrain chop.  The only time our boatspeed was below six knots we were pinching up to avoid tacking to get into New Orleans Municipal Marina.  

So Collin and I got in to NOLA and picked up Dave Bolyard, Clark Thompson and his son Phin.  Then we did a little Wednesday night race, and finally got some off the boat pics of us sailing.  We look like a bunch of refugees on a little boat like this, but it was a lot of fun.

I was hoping to get some pictures that showed the whole sail plan, but there you go.  Phin just chills on the back porch and askes hillarious questions.

More later.

-R

Love is in the air.

Well, mostly it’s smashed all over the deck…

Love bugs!  They are nasty, and when the wind dies this time of year, they are on you.  The worst part about them is that they are very delicate and soft, so when you try to “shoo” them away they just smear on your arm or whatever.  By the end of my first solo trip on Myrna it was total carnage on deck because I had to do a bunch of sail changes and there’s now love bug mash all over the boat.

These were taken yesterday afternoon when I was delivering Myrna back from NOLA.  I left in a southerly breeze of about 10 knots and had the spinnaker up immediately to check the masthead bits.  We were moving at a steady 8 knots in totally flat water and in the little puffs coming off land we planed immediately at over 9 knots.  Myrna is accelerates more quickly than she used to and the bow pops up more readily than before. 

 

The best part is the mast is totally stable now, so that anxiety is reduced drastically.

Here are the inhaulers in action in light air.  

with love bugs all over the place.  They got much worse too!

The overlapping headsail and lightweight Dimension Polyant material makes Myrna much faster in light air.  I was also able to play with the mast rake and it didn’t totally eliminate the lee helm when the wind fell below 4 knots, but it was an improvement over the old set up.  It would have been deadly fast to have Myrna in this setup for the last Bermuda 1-2.  I feel justified in doing all the work I did, even if it took much longer than I was expecting.  

I’m now getting ready to do my solo qualifier and hope to leave next week for my 1000 miles.

Lot’s to do to prepare for the trip.  On the list are the charging system, a new batten system on the luff of the mainsail (see picture on post above) and a bunch of other tweaks that are a result of my stuborness!  

-R

P.S. It’s really great to be sailing again.

Sponsor Announcement!

I’d like to introduce my newest sponsor.

Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics (www.walleniuslines.com) have come on board to ship my boat to Europe and not a minute to soon.  They were interested in my project, like the America’s Wetland message, and just wanted to be part of the team. 

A special thank you is in order to my agent Beth Perry from Sailing 360 Sponsorships (www.s360s.com) who brought my project in front of Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics.  She’s worked tirelessly on helping me and is the most prominent touchstone for my project.  My goal is to make it pay off for her in the in the coming years.  

-Ryan

Tomorrow’s another day…

But you can never take today back!  So I ran some errands, and put a new tiller extension on the Columbia Sportswear sponsored canard.

and among many other little things I’ve been doing, I also re-nonskidded the foredeck, because it was only grippy when the deck was dry.  This only happens on minis when they are at the dock.  In almost every sailing situation, nothing is dry onboard a mini.

I also fit the solar panels.  These are amazing because they also tell one’s future if you stare into them long enough.  

Of course they don’t do that, but they do let me fall asleep offshore which at least helps me manage my future a little bit better.  

Tomorrow I need to run to Baton Rouge to register my bateau for the Wallenius trip to Europe.  It should be utterly tedious and unrewarding.  Anyone who knows me knows I hate responsibility and the paper work that is involved.  

Bureaucracy is alive though.

 

-R

Countdown…

I’m getting ready to leave.  I’m hoping to go on Wednesday, but there is a lot of little stuff to do that could add up to prevent me from leaving that day.  I didn’t go to Baton Rouge today because I need a notarized bill of sale, and that should be here soon.  I’m packing stuff up and doing little odd jobs on the boat now.  Tomorrow I need to go to the Ullman loft and tweak the main and jib a bit before leaving and I also need to laminate some holes on the ballast tanks that are leaking. 

The leaky tanks are from a gian hole saw hole I had to cut out to get my hand in there to undo a nut for the old pushpits.  I tried to seal that hole the easy way, and that just didn’t work.  I hate water down below, so I am doing some lamination in the morning.  I had to get back there today with a grinder which was really nasty.  I have stuff down below so to keep the dust from making its way all around the boat I sprayed water all over the aft quarters to keep it nice and moist for the dust to stick to.  It seemed to work pretty well.  

I also had a visitor today.  A 6′-7′ alligator swam up the bayou and right past the boat.  Normally they are not so bold, and to be honest it looked like it was just out for a nice stroll and seemed to be smiling.  It was quite funny.  Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera.   

I’ve got to run to Slidell and put some stuff in storage.  I’ve been ready for this moment for a long time.  

-R

I’m leaving tonight

I’ll be checking in by cellphone at every cell range I can get to.  Beth Perry or Pat Kent will be updating the blog as I go.  All of my waypoints are near land, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be get through.  

Here are the legs.  

1. Ship Island light house to Tampa Bay ship channel.  

2. Tampa Bay to a light north of the Dry Tortugas.

3. Dry Tortugas to a light south of Apalachicola.

4. Aplachicola to Fort Myers.  

I have a bit of a treck to get to Ship Island and that’s why I’m leaving tonight.  

I’ll be in touch.

-Ryan

Errr, umm..:)

Of  course by tonight I meant this morning.  The wind last night was gusting up to 20 knots straight down the Bayou Castine channel, and I didn’t feel like I could short tack out because it’s very narrow for a long way.  Nobody would have been around to get me out of the mud.  So I got some rest instead and am off to walk down to the boat.

Photo by Bill Fraught.

Bye now.

-R

A quick pit stop Gulfport….

Hi there Ryan is finally sailing and he left me his info. to update his blog – this could be dangerous! Here is the latest, on Thursday Ryan called to say that he was headed into Gulfport, Mississippi for a quick pit stop. There was a big breeze and Ryan’s main sail had started to come out of the mast track The bolt rope was too small a width in the windy conditions, luckily there was no damage to the main. Ryan was able to quickly swap out the bolt rope. On Friday he was back on the water continuing towards Florida and hopefully the wind will hold out to finish his 1,000nm journey before shipping Myrna Minkoff to Europe.

Happy Mother’s Day to all Moms. Well I’m sure Ryan would say that!

- Beth

Where is the wind?

The lack of wind..

Here is the OPC weather prediction center’s forecast for today. Painfully light winds if any. Hang in there Ryan!

Fighting for miles.

Well, I’m made it to Fort Myers very early yesterday morning.  All up the trip across was about 440 miles, which took me three and a half days, a very slow pace.  I was becalmed on a daily basis and rarely saw wind over 10 knots.  I had to do a lot of sail changes and maneuvers to make it to Fort Myers without an engine.  

 I was hoping to make this qualifier a vacation and sleep a lot, but there is no way to do that when the wind is light and shifty because you simply won’t go anywhere and I have, like, these deadline things.  This means I will have to do my qualifier in France because I didn’t make the 1000 miles, which is just another set back.  Just add it to the list

It all started with the 70 mile trip to Ship Island off the coast of Gulfport, MS.  The trip out there was easy enough and I made a very nice discovery about the turboed Myrna that I had not anticipated.  On the beam reach north of Cat Island which is just west of ship, the breeze picked up to 15 plus knots and Myrna started planing flat out with just a jib and mainsail.  Flat and fast with all the water ballast and gear stacked.  She would never do that before and it’s exactly the reason I had Dave Bolyard build my flat screecher sail at the Ullman loft in Mandeville before the Bermuda 1-2.  Clark and I call it “the thing” because it’s the thing that the IMOCA open 60’s do so well with the apparent wind well forward of the beam, and we could only get Myrna to do it a 100 degrees true in 12-15 knots.  Now with the new larger sail plan and the carbon mast she does “the thing” with main/jib at about 80-90 degrees TWA, which is really exciting.  It’s not like the boat goes 15 knots at that angle, but she will now average above 8 knots which is two knots above hull speed and feels great.  

Here we are leaving Lake Pontchartrain.

Also upon rounding Cat Island to sail upwind to round Ship Island the wind increased and I had to reef the mainsail, and discovered that her heavy air upwind speed has gone up a lot.  She feels like a rocket upwind in over 15 knots now and seems to just launch forward when before she would just punch through.  I used to look at the gps speeds fluctuater rapicly (because Garmin dampening is pretty bad) from around 5.7 – 6.2 knots upwind in breeze.  Now, with the same gps the speed fluctuates from 6 – 6.5 knots (sometimes up to 6.8 which I know is BS).  These are not good representations of real upwind speeds, but it does tell me that the average has gone up significantly and you can feel it easily from the helm.  What’s great about this is that I was only trying to improve her speed in light air when I made these modifications.  I’ll take it.

Here I am taking my mandatory picture in front of landmark for Classe Mini.  It was very wet and at this point and you can hardly see the fort on Ship Island in the background.  

Here’s the not so good part.  Once I was outside of the Mississippi Sound and beating int some really short steep waves that were being compressed and stacked in between Cat and Ship Island, I noticed the mainsail luff peeling out at the mast.  This was with the first reef in and the peeling stopped at the top two battens where the battens were under a lot of compression.  Conversly the head of the sail is bein leveraged away from the mast by those battens as one applies leech tension.  So I spoke to Sam Vasques at Gulfport Yacht Club and sailed to the club under jib only to meet him.  He helped me put the boat away and gave me a couch to sleep on.  Then I borrowed my friend Jeremy Richmond’s Dad’s truck the next morning (it takes a village) and brought the sail to Dave Bolyard’s loft to switch out the bolt rope to a larger one.  Dave mentioned to me that he thought the bolt rope was too small, but I liked the way the sail went up and down and wanted to see what would happen.  Well now I know what he knew!  We play mental tug of war often and I’m getting used to him winning.  

So I get to the loft, drop the sail off, drive to NOLA to pick up some spectra luff tape from the North loft there then drive back to Mandeville and Mark (Oz) Oswald and I set about doing some surgery.  He and Julie Bolyard did the bolt rope which I made little bits or something small and tedious, and we cut the boltrope down at the head and attached two plastic slugs which we knew wouldn’t pull out since that is where the biggest aft loading is happening.  

The next day I left again and the big breeze had shut down.  I missed a really good window for sure.  I would like to annouce this now.  The Gulf of Mexico has officially shut down for the sweltering summer which approaches.  She takes a vacation like this every year and lies around getting fat and lazy, only to punctuate her behavior with a hurricaine or three.  It can be pretty aweful, but like a family member, we love her anyway.  Either way, I was off sailing in the Gulf of Mexico again.  The place where it all started for me so many years ago. 

I’ll continue with the rest of this tomorrow.

Here’s a picture Sam Vasques took while towing me out.  Part of the tow agreement was that I had to participate in their boat parade which was litterally the least I could do considering that Same came and got me at 11 pm two nights before.

 

I stole this from Facebook.  He called the picture “BET and 32 0z.”   The back story there is that he picked me up and we grabbed some beers on the way to his house.  Sam and I sat around for a while watching cable.  At some point it occured to us how funny it is that a bunch of people thought I was bravely sailing alone into the Gulf of Mexico while I was actually laying on Sam’s couch, showered, drinking a big beer and watching a really dumb movie on Black Entertainment Television.  These things happen.

-R

New Sail time

Well, she’s off to Europe.  Matt Scarpelli and I drove from Florida to Baltimore with Myrna and over the course of four days we managed to get the boat loaded on the Wallenius Wilhelmsen ship http://www.2wglobal.com/www/wep// .

PPhoto by Beth Perry (she c0nsistently takes good photos).  Guy decorating boat: Matt

 Well actually Matt and Beth Perry managed to do it.  I was not allowed into the shipping area because I didn’t have the proper identification.  Matt also managed to prevent an 18 wheeler from taking my mast out while it was backing out of the loading area.  Big shock there.  Why wouldn’t that happen at this point?  Thankfully Matt smokes because otherwise he wouldn’t have caught it.  

More significantly we managed two trips to South of the Border http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_of_the_Border_(attraction)  in South Carolina, and had a great breakfast at Pedro’s diner.  South of the Border is a roadside sociological event, and I recommend anyone who is driving up or down I95 to visit.  It’s super bazaar.

Before leaving Fort Myers I received my new spinnaker in the mail.  Dave Bolyard overnighted it to me to make sure it fit, and it is a big improvement in both cloth weight and shape over my current spinnaker which is a cut down fractional runner from a 30′ sportboat.  This is a design straight from Dave Ullman and Bolyard and the team at Ullman Gulfcoast knocked it out very quickly just for a single hoist in Fort Myers before Myrna was packed up for France.  It’s an amazing group to be working with.

Dave Ullman is busy designing the rest of the sails and I plan on spending the next week in the loft puting those together with Bolyard before leaving for Europe myself.  No rest for anyone here.

-R

Calm before the storm.

I’m in Boston today visiting with my friend Tifenn Judet de La Combe who has been helping me sort out some logistics in France from the French Library in Boston.  We are heading up to Maine today to visit with her Step Father Mike Birch, who is a legend in the world of solo racing, and one hell of a nice guy.  We will also see my friend and mentor Kip Stone who I worked for for a few years during his very successful campaigns on the beautiful Owen Clarke Open 50′ Artforms. 

It will be very good to relax with them and discuss the upcoming events in my life and campaign and catch up with the events in their lives.  They have been where I’m at many times (in fact Mike is building a boat for himself right now) and understand the stress and fatigue factors that I am experiencing at this point.  Honestly, and they may not know this yet, but I need them to help me get my head on strait and to try to help me remember that this is supposed to be fun.  To race and do well means first having a boat which functions perfectly so that it is simply an extension of the sailor’s every synapse,  and secondly it’s all about attitude.  In my case one may be directly tied to the other, but until Myrna is working completely I will not know.  That said I need to improve my attitude to get her to that point.  So I head North for council before I jump into the fire of preparing Myrna for the qualifier in France. 

Please excuse my lack of updates, but I just wanted a break from all things boat for a while. 

I’ll do an Ullman sail update before I leave for France on the fourth.

-Ryan

The New World!

Okay, I’m sorry I’ve been out of commission with updates.  It’s been hard to find wireless I can get onto with my computer.  Anyway, this place is great!  I’ll name drop later but everyone here has been great so far.  I have to run though because Jesse Rowse and I are about to head out to pick Myrna up in Zeebruge.  A quickey about La Trinite: It’s gorgeous and it’s pretty much a boat factory at the same time.  I’ll update more soon.

Louisiana oysters are still the best though (sorry Brittany)

-R

Boat is at home base.

Jesse and I put Myrna away this afternoon.  We pretty much drove strait to Belgium and back in one shot sharing driving napping duties.  It’s pretty amazing actually.  His little four cylinder diesel was able to tow my boat up all the hills and everything!  I would have never believed it unless I saw it.  We are in Lorient now heading back to pick up the car I borrowed from Kip’s very dear friend Arnaud.  Then it’s back to La Trinite for me to start putting Mrs. Minkoff back in order.  Looks like she made the trip with no problems.  Unfortunately little gnomes didn’t crawl all over the boat fixing stuff for me.  Guess that’s one myth about Belgium that is busted.

More later.

 

-R

OKAY!

So, what’s up?.?.?.  While I love being here in La Trinite, and am generally happy with “things”, not everything is peachy-rosy.  Some have been squishy.

What I didn’t cover:  My Gulf of Mexico crossing ended up being a good sea trial.  That is, I discovered a lot of problems.  The most obvious one occurred during the last ten hours of the trip which was upwind in 18-20+ knots.  The boat felt great, better than ever.  For the first time I was really enjoying sailing this boat upwind because she seemed to leap forward into the wind like she was meant to go there, which she’s not.  That’s all fine and dandy, but for the final 4 hours of sailing the mainsail track started coming off at the head of the first reef.  I was not too happy about it to say the least, but nursed the boat to Fort Myers beach, feathering the mainsail and pinching with a sea state that was flattening in the lee of the beach.

This happened in the same way the luff pulled out originally, a lumpy sea state and one reef in the main, except now, with the luff problem solved, the next guy in line is the track.  I was in a rush to pack the boat up and get her to Baltamore to ship so we didn’t do an in depth inspection of the rig before Europe.  Once in Belgium though, Jesse and I inspected the rig and found other places where the bond between track and mast was bad, and I have decided to replace the entire track instead of wasting my time and energy with this one.

Finding a good solution in La Trinite wasn’t as easy as I though though because very few people use a D section mast here, so the Holt/Allen aluminum extrusion doesn’t quite fit properly.  After talking to several “giants” in the field of minis and maxie multihulls I was able to locate a rig guy who has an expensive carbon solution that he’s used on his brother’s mast for the past year with no problems.  So tomorrow I will go to Belz to do some dirty work so he can clearcoat the new track he’s put on.

Sea Trial problem #2:  My instruments don’t work.  Except for depth and voltage I have no good data coming from them, so I had to sail the whole time in a light and shifty breeze with an autopilot that only drives to compass.  It’s not a set up I would bother starting a solo race with.

ST problem #3:  Once at the Edison Sailing Center in Fort Myers I left the boat tied up with the instruments still on.  I do this often, for no really good reason.  When I came back to the boat the next day the autopilot had every conceivable alarm sounding and the ram was running back and forth sporadically.  I’m guessing the computer is fried.  I have no idea why it waited for me to get to the dock to do this, but I’m glad it waited.  I need to find an electronics guy here to help me solve both of the above problems.

Classe Mini Problem #1:  Cat 5 was not able to get my floatation sorted before I left, so I am having to do this here.  I’ve been at Charlie Capelle’s yard, Technologie Marine, where they build beautiful boats in any material you can imagine.  Charlie’s 40′ trimaran Acapella (http://www.acapellaocean.com/) is there too and it is flawless.  Totally gorgeous.  This boat has an amazing history, but that’s material for a book not a blog entry.  Anyway, he has opened his doors to me and lets me run around there using material etc… as if I know what I’m doing.  Thankfully I don’t consider myself a craftsman because among his projects my work would be embarrassing.   So I’m building 6 foam forms that fit together on port and starboard and will be laminated to the inside of my boat.  It’s a pain in the ass to do this after the boat is built, because normally this sort of structure goes in before the deck is attached.  It should only be two forms, but I can’t fit two forms through my hatch!

Class Mini Problem 2: I need to buy a new liferaft to be legal to the new rules.  They used to allow a modified version of the raft I have, but not any longer.

Class Mini Problem 3:  My deadline to finish my qualifier is the 30th of this month.  At this point I don’t have a working boat that is class legal.  The electronics are the biggest question mark because I have no idea what the problem is with them, and it may not be anything big at all.  But I wouldn’t know!

I can get an extension for the qualif, but that means I will likely miss the start of the English Mini Fastnet race which starts on the 5th of July.  Without that race I cannot qualify for the MT.  So the timing is as tight as it possibly could be and I’m still not in the water.

On top of those problems is the one that calls the most shots around here.  I’m pretty much out of money.  After paying to transport my boat by land in the U.S. and Europe and paying to have my mast track issue resolved and paying for the other half of my new batteries, there will be very little money left.  Basically I’ll have enough left to have the boat inspected by Classe Mini and enter a couple of races.  But there’s certainly not enough in my bank now to pay for a new raft, boat insurance for the Mini Transat, all the race entry fees,  and other safety equipment like flares and a survival suit.  That is my reality, and I am fully responsible for it.

I’m not giving up on the Transat qualifier, but unless I can resolve some big issues in a very short period of time and a sponsor steps in after I’ve qualified, I’m out of options.  I was supposed to do some fund raisers before I left the U.S., but just like the boat, I ran out of time to organize such events.

I hope I have not let anyone down who is reading this.  Things are not really so bad.

I have a great place to stay (above: Myriam Marello’s apartment designed by Nigel Irens), a loner car, I’m surrounded by boats and people that we only read about in the States (see picture below), and if I don’t make the Mini Transat start there are still plenty of races that I can do to get some great coverage for my current in-kind sponsors.  Also the experience of training out here for the 2,600 mile Les Sables- Azores- Les Sables Mini race happening next year will improve my odds of placing very well.  So I’m just going to keep at it like I have this whole time and we are going to get the results we are all hoping for from Myrna.

Sorry for taking so long to get this in print, but for obvious reasons I’ve been putting it off.

Thanks again for reading.

-Ryan

Let’s move on then.

So today is a good day.  All six pieces of laminated foam floatation are bonded to the interior of the hull.  Here are four of them, in case anyone was interested in seeing them.

There is a 3mm sheet of marine plywood laminated to the tops because they may be subjected to a lot of abuse since there will be a lot of gear placed on them while sailing.  The sides are just thin walls of fiberglass.

I have to do a bit of lamination on the inside still, but that should be pretty strait forward at this point.

I also have had some very good oysters here.  People are pretty outraged when I say that the oysters we have between Louisiana and Apalachicola, FL are the best in the world.  So I’ve been eating a lot of the local oysters to get to the bottom of this argument.  The one’s pictured below have made things a little less clear, and I’ll have to come home and check.  But these were pretty damn good.

They used to live in front of a friend’s house here.  The nice thing is, when the tide goes out, you can walk out there and grab them.   If only there was a way to get Northern Gulf Coast oysters here so we could have some sort of contest.

Here I am writing this blog.  I’m including this picture because my room is so dark that without the flash, I didn’t know half of those things were in this room.  I mean, what’s that stick thing?  I’ll check after I’m done writing this.

I’m glad the room is dark though, because dusk isn’t until after 11 pm here and dawn is only a handful of hours later.

Tomorrow I’ll finish with the foam installation and I’m meeting with an electronics guy named Olive who is a friend of a bunch of friends and the B&G guy for the Gitana team.  I hope my problems are really easy for him to figure out, because you know the guy has seen everything.

-R

Alright, let’s do this!

I know nobody is reading this blog anymore.  I can see the stats.  So now it’s time to take the gloves off.  I’m printing everything right now.  Every high and low.  I’m also going to start blaming everyone for my problems, so sit tight…

So, without any further delay, I want to list the top ten parties I deem responsible for screwing me over this year.

1. The media.  I’m suing the internet.

2. People from the mid-west.  No explanation needed.

3. Blockbuster.  I have not lived in New Orleans for years.  Stop calling me about late rentals!

Okay, I’m B.S-ing.  I just wanted to do a build up to a rant that doesn’t actually exist.

Look at this!

That’s the mast.  There is a carbon tube (not uni-directional) bonded to the mast and faired in with epoxy puddy.  Mostly it’s microballoons.  I sanded this last weekend and Sebastian at Pro-Fil Composites routed out a slot down the middle and clear coated it.  This shot was before I sanded it.

I just picked it up last week, because I didn’t have the money until then to pay for the work.  It was expensive, but should work.  I’ll take a picture of the finished product soon.  It’ looks very nice now.

AND THIS!!!

I spent the last two days in Lorient at this old WW2 submarine base getting my ISAF safety at sea certificate.  I need this to race in B level offshore races here.  It’s all about the paperwork over here, which doesn’t quite suit me.  What does suit me is that I was ten minutes late on the second day, freaking out, because I thought everyone would be pissed for me holding up the class, and when I showed up, there were folks hanging out smoking, and other people hadn’t shown up.  So what my close friends call “Finn time” on account of my Brother, Sister and Dad always being late for everything, is simply known as “time” here.  Am I generalizing?  Sure.  What are you going to do about it?

Onto more personal matters.  I have the mast and am ready to put the boat in the water to sort the electronics out.  That help is free for now, so I need to make sure I’m not wasting Olive’s time and have everthing in order for him to go through.  I have not launched the boat yet because I need insurance and have been working with Beth Perry on that.  We have a quote that is of course high, and prevents me from buying safety equipment to race, so I’m trying to sort out my plans for the rest of the season.

On Wednesday I get a survey for the insurance company (165 Euros).  Hopefully I soon after get a policy after dropping $1,600 Euros to get the paper work flowing.  From there I move the boat to down town La Trinite s/Mer and step the mast somehow.  I pray this can all happen next week.

Then I work with Olive to get the electronics sorted for real, not just testing leads etc…  Who knows how long that will take.

After that I need to get the boat measured by Classe Mini to make sure it’s legal to race (at least 200 euros).  I need to get that out of the way soon, so I’m not doing it right before an event.

Then, I need to borrow a life raft, survival suit, and maybe some flares.  It just depends how much money is left over after I buy the EPIRB.  They are very strict about regulations here and my EPIRB and raft are not up to standards.

My goal is to do the Mini Port Medoc race which starts on August 26th (www.voile-medoc.com).  It’s a 280 mile solo race, and it’s the only one I have a chance at making considering my finances.

What’s difficult about this is that I have so many in-kind sponsors who have given me great equipment to work with, but I never was able to raise any money for logistics or get the safety equipment sponsored.  Logistics and safety equipment have eaten my personal budget.  So that’s where I’m at.

If anyone who reads this knows anyone with the following equipment who isn’t using it from August 23rd to August 30th, please let me know.  I need to squeeze in one race this season at least to justify any worth to my in-kind sponsors.  If I sound desperate, well, you don’t have to read between the lines.  I will return all of the equiment immediately after the race, but this is the last race of the season besides Transat, and I can’t qualify for that now.

-Liferaft:     must comply with ISO 9650-1 standards.

-Survival suit:    must comply with ISO 15027-1 standards, category A, guaranteeing a minimal thermal protection of 0,75 clo immersed (whatever that means) and it has to be stated on a tag attached to the suit.

-EPIRB:    The 406 Mhz and 121.5 Mhz Sarsat-=Cospas EPIRB autonomy must be of at least 48 hours at a temperature lower than 20 degrees Celcius.  The MMSI number has to be coded for the ongoing year in the name of the boat and owner (Myrna Minkoff and Ryan Finn).

-Flares:      4 red parachute flares

4 automatic red hand flares,

2 floating smoke flares

1 Seamark dye marker (min, 40 gr)

2 white signal hand flares

-Dan buoy to OSR standards

-Watertight high powered spot light

Those are the big ticket items, that I need to race.  If you read through it, thank you.

Yes, I’m looking for a job here and studying French.

Well, now you all know what’s up!

And that stick in the last post isn’t attached to anything.

-Ryan

Today is Pat day.

I spent most of the day stripping the paint off the rudders and filling the lows to fair tomorrow.  The rest of the day was spent sanding the EPaint bottom of Myrna and her keel.  I’m dedicating this activity to Pat Kent.  He was often reminding me that the bottom was not smooth enough to race with, and that the boat might actually sink out of shame for hitting the  starting line with such a rough bottom, blah blah blah.  It wasn’t a priority in Louisiana though, at least that’s what I told him.  However, now that I can smell an approaching race I can hear his voice again, and somehow he’s more convincing, so I went ahead and did it.  The activity may seem ritualistic, but it actually does make the boat go faster.  The bottom is nice and smooth Pat, you can rest now.

This has actually been a few days work, and I sanded through in some spots on the keel.  I’ll go over those areas with more EPaint and sand it down again.  www.epaint.com

I’ve also made headway with the safety equipment for the Mini Port Medoc race on August 26th.  Conrad Colman (www.conradcolman.com) has offered to lend me his life raft,  survival suit and flare kit for the event, which is hugely kind of him, and cuts down a lot on my cost for entering the race.  Mike Birch may also have a suit to give me in the nearby city of Auray, but I need to go check it out and see if it fits all of the certifications required by the class.  It would be nice to own one though, especially if I am going to be sailing this winter here.

Now this!

Mast track.  More like it, eh?  Thank you Sebastien at Pro Fil Composites.

More sanding tomorrow.

-R

More fairing rudders. Primed port sides of both, then need to sand the primer. Also did some electronics stuff and met with Olive. He’s got the wind wand and was testing it on one of Gitana ?’s computers to see if it’s okay. I’ll meet with him in the morning again to check the cables in the rig, then I’m joining a yacht club here to get liability insurance through the FFV and picking up a survival suit at a pizza restaurant. I guess you can make these post titles as long as you want.

uɐʎɹ-

Like sanding asphalt.

This EP-Prime is tough stuff.  It’s a two part epoxy primer, and if you can spray it on, do so.  Spent hours today hunched over one rudder with a sanding board getting this thing smooth.  I tried using a power tool, but couldn’t control it enough for this fine work, especially when you are trying to protect the trialing edge of the rudder.  Plus it just wasn’t sanding as well as the board.

The black spots are carbon and they show the high spots.  This side is pretty good now, and I’m almost done with the other side.  When both rudders are fair, Charlie is going to help me spray them with another thin coat of EP-Prime, one last bit of sanding, and then we’ll paint them.  I was going to use orange EP-ZO-HP, which is what the bottom is, and is Epaint’s high performance paint, but I changed my mind.  It’s fast stuff, but nothing is as fast as no bottom paint, and since I can lift the rudders out of the water at the dock, I’m just going to paint the rudders orange and then clearcoat them.

I have to go to Lorient tomorrow to meet Conrad for the gear, so won’t be onto the other rudder until Saturday, unless I get back early

Also got word back from Olive about my B&G mast head wind unit.  He thinks it’s “out of order” as he put it.  He’s bringing one from work so we can continue checking the instruments and wires.  He also may have a spare one for me which would be quite nice.  Additionally I picked up Mike’s survival suit from the pizza shop.  I don’t know if it will be legal, but I’m brining it to find out.  It’s been used.  Mike didn’t tell me how, but I’m sure it was necessary.

-R

Sorry for the slight blackout period,

Ryan has recently received a new computer from his Mother, Dr. Abbe Finn, P.H.D., or “Doctor X” as she is known to RFOR.  The significance of this is that this computer has a disc drive which enabled Ryan or “Rybo” as Doctor X calls him, to load his Rosetta Stone program which contains the entire language of France, known as “French”.  So rather than spend time updating his blog, Ryan has been spending his time gently massaging this program into his cluttered and inefficient brain.

He would like you to see the stickers he put on his little boat, hold on, I need to look up the name… Myrna Minkoff?  That’s what it says.  His boat, Myrna Minkoff.

Apparently he had been trying to get those big Ullman stickers to say on his sails, but nature would not allow it, so BAM!  on the side of the boat.  It says here that the Lewmar Sticker is also new.

Then there is this.  Personally I find this disturbing, but hey I just work here.

A Grim Reaper?  I think a Jesus fish would be more appropriate.  Oh, wait, it says here it’s was a sticker being sold for a cancer charity initiated by Tom Neill.  Interesting choice of characters.  Oh, apparently it’s an reference to Tom’s series of boats named “Nightmare” which had the GR as their mascot.  Take that Jesus fish!

Tempting fate or tickling it?  Beats me, I’m just filling in for the dude.

Your trusty companion,

Calypso Finn.

Time to feed the pig.

I’m leaving tomorrow to bring a 90′ cruising yacht to Morocco.  This is to help fund living in France.  The Breymaier family made the contact for me.  They are such a fine people.

This should take a week and then I launch Myrna and go sailing.  Tifenn and I moved her downtown on Friday after doing some work at Technologie Marine.  I had pictures, but apparently someone stole my camera from the car, along with Myriam’s bicycle, while parked at Myriam’s house.  Could be a good time for Negativland to kick up “Myriam’s purse fund” again.  I’ll have my secretary send them an e-mail.

This means no pictures until I get a camera.  I think I have one in Louisiana.  I’ll call my secretary in Louisiana to see if it’s around.

Also my Dad came to visit.  He is on mega world tour and it was great to see him.  He seemed to have a really good time and we both gained weight.

I leave for Concarneau tomorrow morning to meet the boat.  All I know is it’s a new 90′ boat and there are four of us.  Besides the money it’s nice to meet new people, and by going to Morocco I renew my tourist visa for the EU.  All good.

-R

P.S. I don’t really have a satelite secretaries.

Pig has been fed, for now…

Just returned fr0m Morocco today.  I flew in to Paris last night and immediately went to the cheapest expensive hotel I could find to catch up on sleep.  In the morning I had coffee, which is considered breakfast here, and then got in a fight with a homeless guy, or mime, I can’t tell, but I think it was about leaving him staggering space on the side walk.  Then I was off on a whole day long train swapping extravaganza to get to La Trinitie s/Mer.  It’s nice to be back. 

  The trip to Morocco was very easy, and the boat very nice.  The owner and his pros, Gary and Kirstin, were similarly very pleasant.  They have a boat in the Azores and have cruised extensively, including the Arctic and Antarctic(http://www.wanderingalbatross.org/).  They should be on their way to the Azores right now, which is about 800 miles or so off the Portuguese coast.

This was my first passage on a luxury yacht, and I have to say is was more like being on a small island condo than what I’m used to, so “pleasant” is a word that keeps popping up when thinking about it. 

Here we are entering Rabat, Morocco. 

And here’s the old town of Rabat.

I would comment more on Morocco, but I was only there for a couple of hours, and doing so would make me sound enormously ignorant.  You know what, that’s never stopped me before!  I’m going for it. 

3…2…1… Morocco is to Europe what Mexico is to the U.S, and Canada.  The only difference in the beans and rice there is the presence of Allah.  Even the airport is familiar with lots of sun burned white people in designer shorts, and racoon eyes from wearing sunglasses without sunscreen.  They even have the essential dead cow/donkey off the highway as you drive to the airport.  I think they watch more satellite TV in Morocco though.  The roofs of apartment complexes bristle with dishes which seem to grow out of them like small plants.  If they represent the number of families in each building, you are looking at some pretty cramped quarters.   

I would have liked to stay longer, but had to get back to reality.  Yes, these observations were limited to a car ride to the airport, which is the worst way to see any place.  When I was a kid I used to read about M.C.Escher’s facination with Moorish 2D design, and later read a lot abot Matisse’s visits to Morocco.  I was only able to catch glimpses of these things from the road.  I have to explore beyond the highway next time. 

Speaking of reality, bye.

-R

P.S. I found the camera, of course.  Everytime I’ve had something stolen it’s popped up in a bag or in my pocket or in my hand…  Of course that means that Myriam’s bike also showed up.  A neighbor “borrowed” it and put it back on the other side of the house.  That’s crime in France for ya.

Rudders on boat.

See how shiny.  That’s why I didn’t use anti fouling paint.  They kick up, so I’m kosher at the dock.  I’ll see how they do after a few days of sailing, and decide if I want to keep it this way for next season.

I mentioned before about having newer, smaller rudders made.

A.  It wasn’t in the budget.

B. When I sailed Myrna again, she was happy with the original rudders.  So I just concentrated on making them a little faster.  They are not perfectly fair by Olympic standards or anything, but they are a vast improvement over what they used to be.  I can tell these rudders didn’t come out of the mold perfectly, and making them perfect would have required covering the entire blade with fairing compound and starting from scratch.  There is no time for that.  However, the keel for this boat is solid carbon and pretty much came out perfectly.  I took it all the way back to bare carbon, primed it and painted it.  That’s all.  Much more time in the rudders.

And here’s a picture of me doing something on the boat.

I want to include this because this is a fake picture.  I’m pretending to do something in this picture.  I’m actually holding onto the bobstay and pinching the boat cradle.  This is when Tif and I brought the boat downtown and she thought it was important to have a picture of me and the boat on this occasion, and I don’t like posing for pictures.  So there you go.  I fake doing stuff for pictures all the time, to avoid fake smiling.  I can’t be only person that does that.

And finally, here is a nerdy rudder story.   I went AMCO (Jedi Master mini builders in town)  with a friend on a random trip, and they had a top prototype in the shed who was replacing his new generation rudders with an older design from Finot.  By older design I mean 1985!  He tested the rudders with the new design on one side and the older, much larger, design on the other side.  And well, all I know is he’s putting the 1985 vintage Finot rudders on his boat for this year’s Mini Transat.  My guess is that although small rudders mean less wetted surface and less drag, they also stall earlier, and require more helm to control the boat in real sailing conditions, so in the end they may be as draggy, or more, and less effective.  It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the Mini Transat.

I launch Myrna tomorrow.

-R

Spent the last 3 days sorting out Autopilot stuff.

This included removing the entire system, bringing it home with a battery and troubleshooting it in my bedroom.  Then I removed the Rudder Reference Unit and smashed it with a hammer to see what was inside (encapsulated in an epoxy block).  Figured out which wires were what, found some corrosion, and jury rigged another brand’s RRU to make sure that was the problem.  Then today, I went to Lorient and went on a hunt for a part that is no longer in production, AND I FOUND IT!  Came back to the boat, replaced all of the wiring, hooked it all up and presto, it’s all better.  So I’m looking to go sailing tomorrow.  I have a bunch of little things to do first to prepare for my trip to Port Medoc, which is where the race starts from.  There is apparently nothing there, so I have to bring pretty much everything to make sure I can fix stuff.

That be all.

-R

I leave tonight for Port Medoc.

I’m taking the long way to get some training in, but I’ll be there by the 23rd.  That’s all for now.

-R

Ryan Starts Port Medoc Race 280nm

Ryan Passes His Final Paper Work Inspection 2 minutes before the race start.

After spending the last month preparing Mryna for measurement.. Myrna passed inspection!!!. Ryan had a few last minute paperwork details and one tiny hurdle it will be more fun for Ryan to tell first hand. BOTTOM LINE Ryan and Myrna started the Port Medoc Race in wind and sunshine @ 10AM French time. After sorting last minute items and crossing the line last Ryan quickly maneuvered Myrna up to third place befor racing down the French Coast. Details to follow.

Headed to Start Line

Vont Ryan !

Cool!

We won the Port Medoc race.  I’m sitting outside on a sidewalk, it’s sunny, and I can barely see the screen, so I’ll do an update later with more info.  Just wanted to let everyone know.

-R

BAM!

A small explosion in cyber space.  People are actually looking at this blog.  What could it be?  Check Sailing Anarchy…  Okay that makes sense.  Now I have to produce a story.  Unfortunately because of SA it now has to be ”extremely entertaining”.  How does one come up with an entertaining story about sailing a 280 mile race on a mini that is mostly upwind in 15- 20 knots?  If any of you have done it, you’ll understand there is nothing “entertaining” about sailing minis upwind, and with the confused sea state along the Aquitaine coast, it’s nothing short of absurd.  Maybe that’s the angle then.  I’ll write this today and get it to the ever lurking and sometimes dangerous Editor of Sailing Anarchy.