Designer

Great trip Peter. Back in the late sixties Lake Cootharaba for Easter was my favourite place in the world. For those that do not know about it. It is only about 6 miles long and 3 miles wide and 4 feet deep. There is only a huge sand dune between it and the Pacific Ocean. I see on Google Earth that there is now a town there. I remember just a camp ground with minimal facilities. After parking and launching your boat there were no cars, only lots of sailors and boats. It was a four day party with lots of good racing. It looks like you are training a great crew.

Tom, You know what I think about ballast in a powerboat. I am looking forward to seeing the Old Codger. Alan asked me last week how I thought she would float, I answered " by the stern" and he said "I think so too". Of course I had prior info, Chick told me that he was going to steer with the tiller. Maybe we can talk him into some sort of bulkhead steering system. It would be more agreeable when he does the Great Loop. She is so light that her moment to trim would be small, maybe a few cans of vienna sausages and a couple of Linda Ronstadt tapes stowed in the bow will trim her out and leave the stones ashore.

Ken, I thought that it would be cool to make a wooden latch to hold the door open. Here is my first draft. It would latch automatically, and to release, you reach to just below the seat and bend it to starboard. I would make it out of a springy tough wood like ash. I would put on a thin stainless striker plate on the door so that it would not wear your varnish.

I talked to Tom on the phone the other day. They went inland for the storm. He was heading home and the most pressing issue on his mind was cleaning out rotting food from the fridge. His house is high and well built but his shop goes under water. He has a scheme that lifts all of his machines above flood water but I am sure that like us, there will be a layer of mud and lots of flotsum to clean up and there always seems to some stuff that is missed during preparation. How did you fare Oyster?

Hi Foxwedge, You have been given good advice so far. I just recalculated the displacement at the datum water line for fresh water and got 1507 lbs. It takes another 405 lbs to push the boat down the next 1" evenly. I think that you could put 10 kids on her and she would carry them safely but you might not feel the same. Amos has two kids and I am sure that he has some good cruises planned.

Hey Amos, Love your color scheme, congratulations. Look forward to seeing the boat and family at the messabout. Fred, That is exciting news but a little stealthy, how about some details of the launch?

Steve, If it will work out better for you, fly into Newbern. One of us can pick you up and return you to the airport. If you want to bring your sleeping bag, you can sleep on Chick's old OB20.

Dale, I have not talked to Alan about the date but I think that it will start Friday October 19. We used to have it on the last weekend in October but with winter approaching we tended to have worse weather than the week before plus it often clashed with halloween. Unless Alan feels that the date clashes with something more important, the 19th of October it will be.

Tom and Dave have given you good advice with the sheeting of the sails. Pinching is definitely not the way to go but so is sailing too full. There is another important adjustment and that is draft control which is adjusted by the snotter. I see a lot of skippers with way too much draft and pinching, complaining that their boats won't go to weather. The picture you posted of Paul's boat is close to what you want. As Wasserboot said you have to play with your adjustments to see what works best for the conditions. I would start in a moderate breeze and sheet the mizzen as Tom suggests and set it flatter than you have done before and sheet in the main also set pretty flat until the mizzen starts to backwind. Sail like this for a while and do a few tacks sailing as close as you can without pinching and see what speed your speed and tacking angle is. Then ease your snotters to draft up the sails in small increments to see what speed versus tacking angle is and then ease your sheets. You should now be on your way to figuring what your best settings will be for that condition. Lighter or choppier conditions will require you to sail a bit fuller. This is done by easing the sheets slightly and adding a little bit more draft. The other thing I want is to dial in about three or four degrees of weather helm. If the main has too much draft you can get lee helm and too flat will create weather helm as well as sheeting the main in too much. It will be the reverse for the mizzen. A bit of weather helm generates more lift than drag and it also encourages you to sail close to the wind as you will see the main start to luff when you lose concentration. Lee helm causes you to sag off to leeward which is not fast if you want to get to windward. Properly sailed, the cat ketch should be competitive around a course.

Randy, It has been a long time since I did stability calculations for the Belhaven. I was thinking recently that I need to see if I can even find them and revisit the calculations and bring them up to date. I recall that the 80 degrees was a very conservative number because I was considering a worse case situation like crew falling into the mizzen sail etc.. With feedback and experience I know that you have a greater point of vanishing stability than the mk3's.

Steve, I like to mill the tops of the coamings 1/8" below the the underside of the hatch and use 1/4" gasket material as Chick says. Alan and I have debated at length on how to handle this and decided that 1/8" is about as close a tolerance as we could expect a home builder to consistently achieve. I like to set my trim router with a straight bit using it as an end mill and trim the coaming tops precisely 1/8" below grade. I do not have any deck to support the the inboard side so using a chisel and block plane work it down to grade. If the cockpit coaming is already installed you have to work the back coaming as you do for the front. It is only 6mm okume so it is not that hard to do. You can round over the top edges and it will look good and it will be a little easier to compress the gasket. When I lift up my hatches I can see a perfect indent all of the way around the gasket. I know that blind hinge mount would be nicer but I have not figured how to do it. After a while I do not even see the flat piano hinge in the big picture.

Ken is exactly right. I have the black rollers and the yellow ones and one of solid starboard that I made and all of them as well as some of the brackets show some signs of distortion, not to mention the ones that I have replaced. It is clear that I am putting more weight on the rollers than they can handle. Doubling them up must surely be an improvement.

Tfrie, When sailing a CS17 solo in light air I am always in front of the mizzen mast and to leeward going upwind. This reduces transom drag and reduces wetted surface. Hoist the sails as high as you can. Make sure that you trim the boat to have some weather helm when sailing upwind. Do not sheet the sails in too tight. Try to steer the boat through the tack. Not too much helm at first but increasing as you go rather than just slamming the helm over. If you blow the tack, you need to grab the main sprit and back the main which will pull the bow around to the new tack. This makes for a slow tack but is quicker than any other way to get you back on to the next tack. If you over tack, ease out the main so that it is drawing properly and and start bringing the boat back to close hauled sheeting in the main as you come up to course. I will sometimes ease out the main when I tack and bring it in as the boat accelerates ad comes up to course. When I go off the wind I increase the draft of the sails to increase power. Sailing down wind I am going wing and wing with the mainsail on the windward side and flatten out the sails. The reason for flattening the sails is to present as much projected sail area as you can as the sails are stalled and draft does not provide lift. I could go on but this is a start.

I am with Ken, I do not find this subject a downer at all. I have a lot of miles under me in the CS17 and 20 and have never capsized one unintended. The picture of me sitting on the centerboard of my CS17 at the beginning of this string was taken before I went in the EC. It pays to find out if there will be any issues and to solve them before you commit yourself. Instead of depressing me, it made me feel more comfortable when running hard through the night way offshore in the Gulf and very alone, that if something went wrong I could get myself out of it. My first boat was an 11' moth. I weighed less than 100 # and was totally ignorant. I was lucky that it was totally decked over and was easy to right. I capsized so many times that it became a family joke. With all of that practice I became very good at the art of the capsize and would be over the top and onto the board and back over the rail as the boat came back up, barely getting wet. On a blustery day on the river, a good samaritan saw me capsize a few times and called the police. I do not know how they knew where I lived but when the officer told my mother that I had capsized 5 times, her response was "only 5 times"!

Chick, In an ideal world, most of what you say is true. Carlita's trailer layout is similar to the one that Steve has just bought, there is a roller on each frame and one forward on the fore and aft centerline member. Carlita has criss crossed the country up and down, sideways and diagonally with around 16 - 18 k road miles under her by now. I cannot find any issues with her hull. I can find all sorts of issues with her rollers and brackets, none of them roll very well and I am having to dunk most of the trailer to launch the boat. I prefer to not to dunk the trailer at all. How can it hurt the boat by doubling the number of rollers so that each roller will not be as heavily loaded. While not evenly spaced, they will be about 6" apart which does cut down the unsupported span and reduces the point loading.

Steve, You almost cannot have too many rollers. I find that if you do not have enough rollers, they distort and get out of round and then the difficulty begins. I am wondering if you cannot put two rollers on each frame, one bracket and roller on the forward side and another set on the aft side with the bolts through both sets of brackets. While they will not be evenly spaced, if properly adjusted it will share the load over a lot more rollers.

Dale, I wish that I had an easy answer for you. I, like you loved the simplicity of Lively's rig. If only we could find an efficient way to reliably to reef Lively's rig. Because I also like to sail a well performing boat I just can't give away all of that sail area and because I am silly enough to put myself into harms way I need to reef often. I will just have to tolerate the extra time it takes to rig. I am getting it done quicker with practice and gradual refinement. I am sure that we can figure out how to make the masts rotate but the tabernacles will have to be chunkier. I am working on a latch that automatically holds the mast up while you spin on the wing nut.

Dale, On a CS17 there is not enough volume in the masts, even if perfectly sealed to prevent inversion. If the crew makes sure that the sheets are free and that the board is down and immediately gets around or over the boat to the tip of the board and starts to right the boat, they do not need a mast float. The problem is, if something gets fouled or goes wrong or the crew is slow, the boat goes upside down or the mast tips get stuck in the mud, then they need outside assistance which may not be available or might damage the boat trying to help. There is also the rare event when a major front passes through with winds so strong that the safest strategy is to stay in the water until the wind eases up enough to right the boat. Tom described such an event that he was in when most of the very large fleet capsized. I have been caught i such weather myself but fortunately I did not end up in the water. It is times like these when things can go wrong which is why we wanted to do this so that we can get an idea of what to do.

Amos, I cannot tell a lie, I have been using lifts on Carlita. Rather than rig special topping lifts, I already have enough clutter, I have been using the mizzen staysail halyard for the mizzen lift. On the main I am using about 4' of 5/32" line with a small S-hook at the bottom attached to the forward side of the mizzen mast at the right height so that I can slip the S-hook thru an eye at the aft end of the main sprit. The main lift tends to be self centering and stays put when I tighten the main sheet. If the mizzen starts to dance around at anchor I run a line thru the spinnaker block on top of the coaming aft over to the sprit. This triangulates with the lift and mizzen sheet and the system is rock solid. If it got bad enough to bother the main sprit I could do something like I do with the mizzen. For a quiet night at anchor I make sure that the centerboard is hauled up tight and all halyards are tied away from the mast.

Beacher, Back in the day, all we had was wood for battens.They worked, and we had the advantage that we could plane them down to get the shape that we wanted. The down side was that they often broke and had to be replaced. I use glass battens exclusively now because they are permanent. The popular woods for battens were cane, oak and ash. You need wood with good bending properties. To make sure that I do not lose my leech battens I sew them in with a stitch across pocket opening at the leech. To remove the batten I snip the stitch and out they come. I use a sail makers needle with waxed sail makers thread. To fold the battened sail into a small stowable package I do what I call a leech fold. Instead of folding the sail perpendicular to the luff and flaking the sail parallel to the foot, I fold the sail perpendicular to the leech, flaking the sail parallel to the battens. This stacks the battens on top of each of each other so that you can fold the stack around the battens, the folded sail should then fit in the sail bag. On the CS17 and 20 mk3's we use a sausage bag with a zipper and flake the sail right into the bag and zip it up.

Joe, That is it.

Beth and I had the pleasure of Joe and Sally's company for a couple days at Mystic as well as Joes famous clam chowder for lunch. We discussed this problem in Joes mind about the boom being too low and now that I see the pictures I see the problem, there is no clew car! The bottom picture shows only an outhaul at the clew and about a 2-3" gap between the clew and the top of the boom. If the boom was lifted to the sail in that picture it would only gain him a couple of inches of boom height but there is no mainsheet tension. In a breeze with normal mainsheet tension there could easily be 6 - 10 inches of boom gap to the sail, not to mention that the lower third of the sail is setting like crap because the clew load coming from main sheet tension flattens the bottom of the sail regardless of the outhaul setting. The outhaul's job is only to haul the sail in and out, not to support boom. Obviously you do not need a real clew car for such a small rig. I use two wraps of 1/8" line tied around the boom and through the clew cringle so that it brings the boom close to the sail while allowing the clew to slide fore and aft along the boom for a few inches. I consider the clew line to be the most important line in the rig and it seems to be the most misunderstood.

Oyster, That is a great picture. The babies look almost a big as the parents.

Just to add a little more confusion. Captain Bones is building the CS17 mk3.2. We have totally redrawn the mk3 17 and 20. The lower hull shape has not changed and the bulkhead positions have not changed but there have been a lot of subtle changes in much of the rest of the boat. This is why they are freshly written instructions as we try to keep them as up to date as the plans. We continually try to optimise our boats and I will try to find the time to explain all of the changes in a new string.

Amos, The Gulf Stream crossing was very easy. We sat at Bimini for a few days waiting for a norther to pass. By lunch time on the day before we expected to cross, the forecast said the wind had shifted east and the swell was dropping so we were underway by 1:00 pm. It turned out fine and we were anchored up in West Palm Beach before dark. Of course we were running at 10 knots and the stream gave us another 3 knots. We can cruise at an easy 15 knots but 10 suited the conditions. You cover a lot of ground at 13 knots. I pushed for turning up the axis of the stream and be home in a couple of days but the owner nixed it. In retrospect I enjoyed the trip up the waterway. Watches meant pushing the left or right buttons on the auto pilot every couple of minutes and watch the world go by. I never saw any conditions that Carlita could not handle easily. We just need a good weather window to make up for our lower speed.