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Core Sound 17 keel maintenance


greendane

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10 hours ago, Walt S. said:

DOne is better than perfect as I'm finding out.  

 

 

Funny you shoujld say this. I have one rather perfectionistic child and as we're wrapping up the school year I've had to instill an old mantra that was passed on to me: "Done is good." It's so true. 

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On 6/1/2017 at 8:44 AM, greendane said:

Funny you shoujld say this. I have one rather perfectionistic child and as we're wrapping up the school year I've had to instill an old mantra that was passed on to me: "Done is good." It's so true. 

 

Also, it keeps these projects from ending in some sort of gruesome hara kiri. 

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  • 1 year later...

What would be the benefit from skegs? My experience owning two B&B boats and following this forum for years is that everyone would generally be better off sticking to the plans, especially below the water line.  Seems to me skegs would get you more surface area drag while offering little in lateral resistance. 

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Hi David,

 

Are you asking about huge skegs that would keep the boat upright at low tide?  I have seen dinghy cruising stories from the UK that involve sailing up a river on the tide, drying out overnight and then sailing out on the next high tide.  Looks like fun.

 

Here's my philosophy.  The purpose of the boat is to give you joy.  It follows that the best boat design is the one that gives you the most joy.  If you want to explore gravely beaches, and if fear of hull damage is taking the joy out of it, then go ahead and add skegs.  You'll give up a little speed, but much joy are you getting out of that fraction of a knot?

 

Are there other ways to solve the problem, say with fenders wedged between the keel and the beach?  If you do decide on skegs, permanent, tough and durable?  Cheap and replaceable? 

 

Cheers,

Bob

 

 

 

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I have carried a piece of scrap carpet to lay on the beach where i bull up. But I hafta stop just before touching bottom, get out to lay out the carpet, then pull the boat up.

 

I totally agree with meester. The boat that gives you the most pleasure is the boat for you.

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"I have carried a piece of scrap carpet to lay on the beach."

Cool idea for the gravely beaches, Chick.  I'm going to use it.  

One of my favorite rowing/fishing/sailing spots has the opposite problem...mud beaches.  The kind of mud that sucks your shoes off and needs to be coaxed off the bottom of your boat (and everything else) when you get home.  And, as summer wears on and the agricultural use of the water continues, the shoreline recedes and the mud follows it.  I've thought of deploying a bit of chainlink fencing (or carpet) to create a launch pad, but haven't tried it yet.  

Any thoughts on making boat launch from a mud beach more pleasant?

 

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MUD! YUCK!!!! All I can say is "high top rubber boots!" Try to climb in leaving your feet hanging over the gunnel. Then pull the boots off and stuff them in a heave plastic bag until time to reload the boat. Easy to say, but harder to do. I hate that nasty, stinky, sticky mud all over the boat. Especially in the non-skid. We have red clay mud here in the Appalachian area. You could paint your house with it. Actually, the Indigenous people here used it to make paint for "body art" and petroglyphs. You can still find  traces of it on rocks all around the south.

 

How do you get the boat from the trailer down to the water? Do you back it down on the trailer? Sounds like you drop it from the trailer and drag it to the water. Those big blow-up rollers seem like a solution....maybe. I dunno. I avoid launching from muddy shores. I had enough of that growing up on Tampa Bay as a kid. Nothing like the smell of the mud flats at low tide on Old Tampa Bay.

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Snowshoes in the mud?  I'm pretty gullible, but I'd need to see that one.  If you had said Graham used pontoon shoes, then I'd believe you.  Conceptually, snowshoes and my chain link fence fabric launch ramp are pretty close cousins, though. 

 

The bank dries out all the way down to within a few feet of the water, so the tricky part is getting the boat in and out of the water and me in and out of the boat.  I don't see snowshoes making things any easier and would almost certainly cost me any dignity I have left.  

 

This muddy beach story makes the place seem awful.  Actually, it's beautiful, full of trout and infrequently visited; probably on account of it's defensive perimeter.

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I sailed with a guy who had a carpeted perpendicular bunk fitted to the shape of his hull with a couple of straps that went up to stern cleats on both sides of his boat. He dried out nice while I stayed in deep water.

 

As for perfection being the enemy of good, I once read  an article that said: When you say you are done you have confidence. The low confidence person never finishes because if they do they think they have declared that the result is their best. Often a compliment will illicit an excuse for something that isn't 100% instead of a thank you. 

 

I think of this often when I'm obsessing.

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Okay Ken, I did not want to hijack this string but you goaded me into it.

 

The story is indeed true, on my first crossing of Florida Bay in the Everglades Challenge in my CS17 I ran out of water. No problem, I will just jump overboard into the 6” of water and spin the boat around and head back to deeper water. Wrong! I instantly sank down to my knees in mud. I struggled back on board humiliated and had breakfast. Having time to think, it was obvious that I needed to improve my pounds per square inch of force on the bottom, snowshoes would be great.


 

As snow shoes were not in my standard kit, in fact I don’t believe that I had ever seen them in real life. I did have a pair of slatted floor boards used for sleeping. I put one overboard and stepped on it. It was a miracle, I could walk back and forth as easily as walking around Vandemere during a flood, except that I only had 3’ of travel. No problem I had a second one and by leap frogging them we easily worked the boat back to deeper water.


 

The snow shoes idea stayed in my mind and I took a pair with me on a later EC on my EC22. When I arrived at the Chocolosky checkpoint to sign in, it was low tide and is famous for it’s nasty mud, here was my chance to see if the snowshoes work. As I struggled ashore wearing the shoes someone said “man are you lost”. They were hard to use without any experience but they were better than nothing.


 

After leaving the last checkpoint at Flamingo we got into the difficult east Florida Bay crossing. As fate would have it there was a honking east wind blowing. Not only is this a head wind, making tacking in the very narrow passes almost impossible, it lowers the water level by blowing the water out into the Gulf which cannot be replenished quickly enough by the few passes between the keys. We made it to Tin Can Pass and ran out of water. I put on the snowshoes and climbed down from the bow. I had my arm over the bowsprit to hold the boat. The wind was shearing the boat back and forth. The boat started to blow me to port so I naturally tried to take a step to port to keep my balance. Wrong! While I had not sunk deep into the mud, it had a firm grip on the shoes and I could not lift my feet. As my CG went way past my support I had no alternative but to fall into the foot of water. As I fell there was a huge splash as I landed on a 4’ shark who was just as surprised as I was and thankfully his immediate need was to escape.


 

I could see that I wold have to improve my technique. I eventually found that if I could keep about half of my weight on the bowsprit, keep my feet moving like in a slow jog and do it pigeon toed to stop walking on my other shoe. I could make forward progress. It soon failed when the pain in my heels brought back on board to see what the problem was. There is grit in the mud that got into my wading shoes and had rubbed my heels raw.


 

They sort of worked but they were no panacea.

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The pontoon shoes reference was a joke, but then I thought the snow shoe story was too.  Actually, when I was a kid, I was pretty sure I could strap some foam slabs to my feet and walk on water...pontoon shoes.

 

I have a lot more experience snowshoeing than I do boat launching.  Like everything else, technology has changed snowshoes a lot over the years.  Modern snowshoes are much smaller, lighter and easier to use.  The older ones were built way too big and designed for much lighter and deeper snow than most people ever encountered. 

 

Maybe I'll take a pair to my muddy beach spot after all.

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