Thanks for the reminder Bruce!!

Bruce's post yesterday reminded me of a few extra spares that I had laying around the shed (pushrods, tube for tiller universal etc) , so I put them all in a pile ready to go with the "original Luka wand" and the "bent Luka wand". But how to transport the wands safely by air, especially when baggage handlers are renowned for reading "fragile" as "please throw me across the Tarmac and run over me with a plane tug".

Below was the solution,
3mm ply sheet with 42mm pine sides. At 3.4kg packed, turns out to be a secure way to transport wands, we'll see if I feel the same in Sydney. About to get on the plane in 15 minutes and will be in Belmont on Monday to put the boat together.

Can't wait to get there!

Almost Belmont Time

December is always a hectic month, closing the year out at work, preparing for christmas and getting ready for what the next year will bring, but this year has been particularly busy with preparations for the Moth Worlds thrown into the Mix.


I try where I can to subscribe to the 6P's (Prior Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance), so with that in mind I had my entry in within hours of the form being online, flights and accommodation booked in September and the campaign as I saw it planned out in Goalscape ready to check off tasks as completed.


All was going to plan until the usual last minute changes that is inevitable (and in any project its how you manage that change that is they key, regardless of the change), and new transport arrangements had to be made on short notice. John Ilett came through with the goods, but it meant that the boat had to leave about a week earlier than planned.


I have put the lost time on the water to some good use, repairing my wand from its small breakage on my last sail, and building a spare with a twist... the "Bent Luka Wand".

Just need to do the paddle for it and it should be good to go. Will try it on a few test sails before the nationals and see if it is better, worse or the same as the straight wand. With my skill level, probably won't make much of a difference!


The paddle will have to wait until this evening though. The forecast for today is for 40 degrees C in Perth, so I think the epoxy will go off in the pot too quickly, even with slow hardener!


Now less than 5 days before I get on the plane to Sydney, then taking a couple of days to make my way to Belmont. Should arrive on the 3rd and get the boat put together.


Can't wait to get there, very jealous of the guys who are already at the lake and sailing every day...


I can't sign off without making a comment on the Wing Saga. I think my e-mail response to Scott regarding the vote probably sums up my thoughts best:


"Scott:

I'm only new to the class, but have followed moths since the move to hydrofoils.

In my opinion if we ban wing sails before we can see what they can do in competition, we are doing the class, and sailing in general a disservice. Brett burvill showed what a moth on foils could do, even if the configuration wasn't quite legal.

Please accept my vote for option 1. Let them race (if it is determined that they are a legal sail with luff length and area)

Bora and George using wings won't affect my regatta as I'll be in the back of the fleet enjoying the show, but I guess others with a chance of winning will see this differently.

I hope you get the advice you need from the rest of IMCA Aus.

Rgds

Colin"

So Free The Wing and let's take Moth sailing to another level.

See you all in Belmont soon.

Black wing(s) for Belmont...

So the black wings are fitted... Nice change from the white, just hope then don't get too hot on light air days.

Apologies to everyone who thought this was another wingsail announcement, but I couldn't resist using the title to increase readership. It's not untrue, just misleading!

So the new tramps are on, will try and get out for a sail tomorrow. Not much time left before Belmont now, and I think the whole event will be one big training session!

Belmont entry numbers are looking good. On the current entry list I am one spot behind Tom Slingsby, elsewhere in the entry list are recognisable names from moths and lots of other classes of sailboat, very promising for the future of the class in Australia and worldwide.

It would be great to crack through 100 entries, showing that the moth is a legitimate player on the world stage.

Well, off to bed to dream of a foiling gybe, maybe i'll nail one tomorrow...

This weekend, The Good, The Bad and the Downright Ugly

The Good

Broke through another speed barrier. 20 knots now ticked off. Next stop, 25kts (then that'll do me...for now!)
Another six or seven hours closer to really knowing how to sail a Moth clocked up this weekend
KA MSL13 - Much less effort required to get foiling in the lighter stuff, will compare some more to the recut North V6 when it comes back from sail hospital
Point to Point sailing. If it doesn't involve a corner I can probably now get the boat from point A to Point B fairly reliably upwind or down... most of the time...

The Bad
Corners. Lowriding, foiling or anywhere in between (!) the corners still get me every time. I have mastered the lowriding tack to head to wind and resultant capsize to windward, and the foiling gybe nosedive and cannon ball into rig (see second to last blog entry) along with a long list of party tricks once I get a bit fatigued.
Getting to the point where this isn't a problem is just time on the water, but I am at the stage where I think a little on the water coaching may pay dividends to tell me where I should be positioning my body, instead of what I am doing now which is clearly wrong!

Body Maintenence

These boats are physically taxing to sail. I need to eat and drink more when spending a long time on the water, need to come up with a good system for Belmont. Anyone have experience with the Energy Gels cyclists use? These may be a lightwight and readily accessible solution. But I think you need to drink heaps of water to go with these.

The Downright Ugly
My FrankenTramp. The stitching one of my tramps let go where it wraps around the wingbar. Managed to stitch it up so I could keep sailing, but its an ugly job. Request for a new set of tramps has been sent off to the sailmakers. I am sure those guys are happy I chose to get a Moth, seems now every week I am sending them some extra work.

Strings. If there is a string to get caught up on my feet will find it at the worst possible time. I think my bungy system needs updating

Toestraps. If I can find the strings wrapped around my feet when I least need it, then why can't I find the toestraps when I most need them.... (I think they just need retightening again, but there is nothing worse than hiking out and keeping on going, or capsizing whilst trying to fit my feet under the straps.)

All in all another couple of days of very slow progress (except the 20 knots. I know its not fast at the pointy end of the fleet, but it was plenty fast enough for me today. How you top guys gybe at those speeds has me in awe!

Open Source Wingo Design?

Sitting out in the middle of the Timor Sea at work, 6 hours by air from the nearest hospital (not to self: don't break important human bits) gives one many opportunities to think about things they would rather be doing. For me, being back at home hanging out with my wife is top of the list, but all this talk of wings sails has prompted a flurry of internet searching, sketches, load assumptions and the like in my off time.

My only problem is, as I assume for the majority of moth sailors, I have an understanding of the concepts of what needs to go into the wing from a basic structure, shape and function point of view, but I can't afford the time to come up with a prototype and then continue to break it as I develop it.

So I was thinking that there must be others in the same boat. Brilliant fabricators who can build any shape from carbon but wouldn't know where to start with calulating the loads, aerodynamic gurus who know what the shape needs to be but can't envisage the controls to make that happen etc. And a bunch of Do It Yourselfers who for their different reasons would rather build than buy off the shelf.

So I propose the Moth Open Source Wingo Sail project. A collaboration of likeminded moth sailors developing a base wingsail design from which we can all further develop to suit our individual requirements, knowing that the chance that the majority of the potential flaws have been ironed out at the design stage and not discovered after the build is complete.

This concept has worked in the past (the Flying Tiger 10m project on Sailing Anarchy is a good example), but does it fit in with the "Reclusive Mad Scientist in the Basement" Moth culture. A a relatively new mothie I'll ask for your guidance on that!

Let me know your thought by leaving a comment below. Who knows, this might grow wings... and fly!

Technora is not an impervious membrane

Fantastic moth sailing weather today on the Swan River. I started sailing into a lightish northerly which after about 10 minutes had swung to the south-west and built to about 10 knots, perfect!

Sailed for about 15 minutes until I popped a couple of cams. Not enough cunningham will do that. Sailed into the beach to pop the cams back in and replace a couple of batteries on my ATC2k camera focussed on the main foil.

I had changed my main foil push rod length to have the flap at an approximately neutral position when the wand is about 30 degrees off vertical. Made a huge difference to the ride quality, especially with the new and improved  lower wand section. Video of the main foil only lasts 1m:30s, and doesn't show anything interesting, but will keep recording in future to try and find out more about my set up and maybe capture a fly out or something else interesting.

Went straight back out for another spin, and had more good breeze with nice foiling runs.

Big Congrats to John who launched his new boat this weekend. Foiled almost as soon as he came out of the channel, flew across the river and nailed a foiling gybe. They say its like riding a bike!

My day ended early with the below misfortune whilst trying to work on my foiling gybes. Apparently 6'2" 100kg Humans do not bounce off a V6 North Main...

Little Blue Pill Required

So after a serious brain fade when packing up the boat one day I broke the existing wand supplied with the boat, and made a replacement for the lower, telescoping section (a length of 5.5mm dia carbon tube did the trick nicely). This was an easier fix than I first thought, but perhaps wasn't executed ideally...

The replaced tube decided that it didn't enjoy life as a moth wand on Monday and as such, now requires a little assistance to remain, umm, for want of a better term, erect.

The cause is most likely the fact that this wand was made with an ability to extend beyond the length of the original wand Luka had on the boat. A mistake that caused more than enough crashes as the overlength wand drove the main foil to lift too hard and spectacular fly out / nosedive crashes were the result, usually after a fairly intense roller-coaster ride with the boat bouncing up and down due to a crazy overlength wand.

All this caused a lot of change in the bending moment (from +ve to -ve every time the bungy pulls the wand forward) on the wand where the outer tube meets the smaller tube, and the end result of this is usually a nasty failure. Especially in carbon, which doesn't yield, it just fails. Spectacularly!

So until this happened I was having a nice training sail working out the dial and how to read the water for lulls and shifts. I spent a bit of time working on the entry into a tack and had a couple of times where i was still on the foils as i reached head to wind, so a promising development there too (slowing down to 10 knots boatspeed helped here). Maybe, just maybe, foiling tacks and gybes could be accomplished before Belmont. We'll see!

So anyway, here's the busted wand, new one with paddle and revised spring mount on the way in the next couple of days.

The Doctor Arrives

The famous "Freo Doctor" finally showed up today for one of the first times this season, and made for some interesting sailing for a "L" plate moth sailor.

After spending a little time trying to get the feel of the boat in waves and a fairly serious bit of wind (www.seabreeze.com.au shows 18 - 22 kts about the time I decided to pack it in) compared to what I have been practicing in, the sailing gods started to give me some signals that it was time to take a pass on anymore sailing.

These included:

• A frustrating cut on my thumb from the trailing edge of my main foil (2nd time now, you'd think i'd learn). Tramps are now red polka dot in places
• Managing to skewer my tiller extension between the foot of the main and boom, and then through the sail. That took some thinking to untangle capsized (vang off was the trick...)
• Nicely developed waves, a first for me and the wand and foil settings were not ready to deal with this!
• An ability to keep missing the toestraps when I need them most. They are being tightened before tomorrows sailing...

So its a public holiday here tomorrow, try to go for a sail in the morning and get back on the slow road forward.

Yet another Moth sailing blog...

With the Moth Worlds (www.mothworlds.org/belmont) announced for Belmont in January 2011 and friends wedding to attend the week after, what more of an excuse did I need to buy a Moth and get involved in some of the most exciting racing going on the planet.

Step 1 was to find a boat, a process which was quickly completed when Luka Damic decided to offload his  just over a year old Prowler Zero (www.fastacraft.com) with a bunch of his special modifications (dial and wand primarily). It was the type of boat I needed, new enough to not be soft banged up or with broken parts, but not at the premium price of a brand new boat (plus it had some nice CST high mod wingbars and a skinny single piece mast)

Collecting "Gobbles" from the Transport Depot

Now renamed "Gobbles" Moth AUS 3573 is my first foray into boat ownership, skiff sailing, foiling and sailing damn fast. Well that was the plan.

Out of the Box

Step 2 was supposed to be Rig Boat, go for a quick sail, get on up on foils and enjoy. But Moths teach you one thing, and thats humility and patience. What I though would take a few days took weeks of learning how the boat works, how I need to move and the unique motions of a boat that is most stable at over 10 knots half a metre above the water, or on its side.

One of the First times out

Over the last 6 months I have progressed from "swimming" the boat around to being able to foil in a straight line with some nice speed (16kts + at times). The corners elude me at the moment but thats the next project. Foiling Gybes first, the tacks will come with more time!

I am based at south of Perth Yacht Club in WA, and out fleet has slowly grown over the recent months, with up to 7 known boats ready to sail now or in the near future, and 5 possibly attending the worlds. Hopefully a resurgence of the Moth fleet at the home of foiling is well underway!