Sail, boat setup and rig tuning. Primarily for traditional type rigs. Lug, sprit, Lateen
In the Philippines imported boat parts look extremely expensive compared to local incomes. So we have worked hard to eliminate them as much as possible or replace them. What is easy, cheap and good for racing performance? The result is a big way to save money.
A great article from the Open Goose website on setting up and tuning lug rigs of all types.
Getting rid of a familiar crease in many lugsails.
How to reef a Balance Lugsail. A neat trick of using shock cord (bungee) for the intermediate ties makes it much faster to tie in a reef as well as remove the reef after. it also minimises the risk of damaging the sail if something major breaks elsewhere.
ReallySimpleSails.com saves $300 or more on your Goat Island Skiff, Oz Goose or Oz Racer.
Custom sails for other boats are also available and will represent a cost saving on your boatbuilding project.
These are full quality sails that we all have worked hard to keep the price down on without reducing quality.
So how does a lug rig boat go in club racing? My designs won’t be outclassed in club racing. I’m really keen to find out how the yardstick (handicap) changes as George and crew get used to the realities of course racing making the boat sail faster. We end up with an estimate of PY – Portsmouth Yardstick for the Goat Island Skiff.
BETH sailing canoe – The designer has lots of fine things to say about the sailing performance of BETH – but Andrew Barclay has been racing his against mixed fleets in British Columbia where she sails equal with Laser Radials in light wind and gradually outclasses them in stronger.
I provide some tips about getting a bit more from the boat.
OK … it IS a rant. But it was prompted by the very legitimate question about why have a mizzen sail.
But sadly I descend into a rant about how expense is a really poor predictor of performance.
In general I don’t like most sailing books and most sailing lessons.
I think that a learner doesn’t need to learn many new words. Also because they don’t explain the correct principles in the beginning their explanations become really complicated.
If you understand how to use a sail to get power – when it is at maximum power and when it isn’t it all becomes very logical.
This is an article about how bias in thinking produces weird results in terms of boat designs.
I compare a silly boat design trend of 100 years ago with modern canting keel maxi yachts.
Personally I don’t think they should be allowed to use engines to run the keels and the various systems – if they do then they should be disqualified from the event results. The conventional human powered boats should be listed as the winners of events.
The first New Zealand Goat Island Skiff has been launched by Ian Howeth.
He has taken a year to build it as spare time became available.
It was launched during the Xmas break
Golfballs go further because of those dimples on the surface. Would it make sense to have those dimples on a boat hull?
It is not quite that simple as this little article attempts to explain.
John Goodman and I sailed the immaculate Goat Island Skiff he built from my plan in the Texas 200.
The boat showed itself to be one of the faster in the fleet despite loading up such a short boat with food, water and camping gear for six days with little outside support.
We played with sailing the boat by the lee – a method used by racing boats to gain both speed and control.
I document the method here including a video showing how the angle of heel can be controlled using the mainsheet.
More videos of John Goodman’s Yawl Rigged Goat Island Skiff.
He is trying out some rigging variations to see if we can simplify the building of the yawl rig version.
At the moment this is inconclusive, but wow, he got some good videos
One of the most important things as a designer or sailor is to keep an open mind, but also to be able to analyze things in light of real experience and prior knowledge. These are online and paper resources that force thinking in different ways.
This article, after a bit of a spiel, goes on to give some great resources that “opened my eyes” at different times in my life.
They focus on areas of structural design, sailing, sail aerodynamics and touch on a bit more.
The conservative viewpoint is that traditional rigs are not very efficient. However allied to efficient hulls and set up correctly, lug and sprit rigs can be very efficient indeed – not too much slower than “modern” rigs, particularly when the same lessons are applied to trad sails and way cheaper.
This is a WIKI drawn from the group on the Storerboats forum discussions on setting up lug and sprit rigs for best performance building on the information in my webpage.
John Goodman who recently spent 5 days semi racing a Goat Island Skiff in the Texas200 event got back to me with some observations and even some pictures of aspects of the boat and the sailing.
I have responded with suggestions to make some further improvements. Between John and me there are some useful tips about setting up a boat for more speed.
However the standard setup of the Goat is fine for most – it is still pretty quick in standard form.
There is advice for both lug and sprit traditional rigs here.
This podcast/mp3 talks about why Australian (and New Zealand) wooden boatbuilding is different from the rest of the world..
Click to listen to the talk. This is the third of three.
This is the second of my talks in the USA. It focuses a bit more on construction and some of the methods that can be used to keep a boat light and simple, but very strong and stiff.
It also discusses how there is a “creep” in boatbuilding and design that increases the weight of boats way over what is really needed for a strong structure.
This talk is the first hour of my exposition on boat building and design. There are two more parts to come. This covers some of the background and design issues. The second is more on the building side and the last is a bit more about why the Australian (and New Zealand) wooden boat tradition is different from the Northern Hemisphere.
You can stream the talks over your internet connection or download them as a podcast.