Posts

Shooting the Sun

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  I held another “Survival cel nav” course acquainting people with the sextant and the basic principles of celestial navigation.  These classes are conducted at Seward Park because at the southeastern edge of the park you can look true south across Lake Washington and have a usable and fairly accurate horizon.   Here is a link to the pro forma worksheet for conducting a mer pass observation of the sun: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12y-bh2OyomiDxWt09dvt6y7_IrhQU0rtEqHsPrq5HWU/edit This is the lesson plan I use: Intro to the sextant and celestial navigation With the ubiquity of GPS, this is becoming a lost art of navigation and I really enjoy introducing it to another generation.  If your boat’s electrical system fails or the GPS signal gets jammed or turned off, it would be nice to have a way to determine your position when offshore.  This meridian passage observation of the sun is very useful and quite unique; it allows a good estimation of both latitude and longitude from one se
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Tackling Tensioning

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  << Trying to Build a Better Deadeye >> When the hinged mast is raised on Zephelios , it will be self-supporting while undressed.  When hoisting the square sail, the head loads will be transmitted to the yard and normally absorbed by the braces.  As a safety backup, I will attach two running backstays to support the mast should the braces fail or be inadvertently released. To tension these stays, I plan on using a 3:1 block-and-tackle arrangement.   Block and tackle with 3:1 mechanical advantage I used a similar system on Sqoop (for details, click HERE  ) which was simple and reliable.  The downside was the need to attach and feed the 1/4” lashing line (aka “lanyard”) through the thimble and D-ring each time I wanted to install each running backstay, and reverse the process to uninstall; this eventually became a tad tedious.  I decided to do a bit of innovating and see if I could find a better way.   During the Age of Sail, deadeye tackles were used to tension the shrouds
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Dinghy Dreaming

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  Since my boat search had stalled, I moved on to finding a dinghy, which is admittedly a backwards, unconventional and even heretical way of thinking; putting the cart before the horse, you might say. I love the idea of a RIB with its hard-shell bottom and reassuring periphery of air flotation, but even the smallest RIB just isn’t practical on a vessel under 25 feet in length, due mainly to lack of storage space.  I have an inflatable kayak that I happily paddle around Lake Washington and it deflates & collapses down to a manageable size to store belowdecks, but it wouldn’t last long when dragged over the rocky beaches we have here. My ideal dinghy would be a two-chamber inflatable kayak with just the very bottom of the hull made of fiberglass; the safety of air buoyancy and the durability of a hard-shell where it matters.  I couldn’t find such a beast for sale, so I set about wondering how to modify my existing kayak. This is a fairly cheap but well-designed kayak made of PVC vin
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The Search

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  Trolling through Craigslist, I spotted this ad: The Aquarius 23 in many ways is a typical trailer sailer: lightweight, tender, with a swing keel.  The unique thing about this boat is that it has a fixed six inch keel running the length of the boat containing 650 pounds of lead ballast in addition to the 165 pound swing keel; this makes her self-righting even with the keel up which is unique in the world of trailerable sailboats. When I made the long drive over, things were as expected: both boats were dirty & decrepit with lots of work to do, the owner didn’t have a title or current registration for either boat, and the trailers were in suspect condition with wheel bearings of questionable integrity.  While parts of the cabin top and deck were soft, spongy and delaminated in places, the hulls seemed to be solid, though deformed where resting on the trailer’s bunks/rollers Besides lacking title and registration, one of the boats didn’t even have a hull identification number, at l
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The Genesis

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A friend came to visit and we drove over to Port Townsend for the Pocket Yacht Palooza.  I felt right at home among these maritime tinkerers and craftsman whose motto seems to be “small is beautiful, simple is elegant”.  I was particularly interested in how the various boats were configured to step a free-standing mast, and I got some great ideas; it gave me the confidence that an 18 foot hinged, keel-stepped mast can be supported adequately without shrouds or stays when raised & lowered; and that two running backstays will provide sufficient support to fly a square sail downwind.   Later that evening, as I was mulling over ways to configure an old beat up sailboat to fly a square sail and mount both an outboard combustion engine and an outboard electric motor, a name for the boat came to me: Zephelios .  Naming a boat before you’ve actually bought the boat, or are even sure which boat you’ll buy, is another unusual way to approach things in the maritime world, but there’s freedom
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