Easter Sunday sail

Fantabulous Sail

Today the weather and my activities finally coordinated and I got out for a sail. The wind was 10-15 knots from the North, which—apart from being chilly (12º C)—is ideal for here, since there's no build-up of waves. Being an off-shore wind, there were calm spots and there were nice gusts.

Overtook and passed this 24' Shark:

Mind you, they were well inshore and therefore didn't have the wind I did, but then again I encountered great turbulence as I went closer to Brotchie Ledge. But of course, I had three sails and no lead weight to drag around.

Oh! hafta mention: good weather helm was happening! I don't know why it wasn't before. Maybe it was me.

Next shot is from the Navionics app on my iPad. This was the first time I'd used it at sea and it gave me gold cups for max speed yet (6.8 knots—take off a couple for current, I'd say), duration (2 hours 47min), and distance (10.3 nautical miles). I forgot to start it until I was at the harbour limit, and I don't know why it put in a dashed line from across the way before the start. I added the orange direction arrows using Skitch. She went to windward pretty well (tacked into the harbour).

Funny thing is, the people at two Apple stores and the Telus store told me the iPad doesn't even have GPS. Navionics says "Wi-Fi + 3G models use Wi-Fi, GPS and cellular towers." This is called assisted GPS and as far as I can determine is better than just plain GPS. Thanks to my friend Vladi, who insisted his older iPad worked just fine with Navionics, I persisted.

You can find a Navionics chart for the above (without my route on it, of course) at http://webapp.navionics.com/?lang=en if you want to check out the details. That was the first time I'd sailed along that west shore toward Esquimalt Harbour.

A nice touch was seeing my friends Marian and Wayne waving to me from the trailer park as I came in.

Boards Done!

I did two things to the boards, so I'm not sure which took away the vibration, but I remember Phil Bolger saying that shaping them more hydrodynamically was key. The first thing I did was to cut off the rounded tips. Then I modified the after edge so that it came to a point:

The edge at the bottom in the photo is the trailing edge. I ground it to about an eighth of an inch thick at the edge, ran the fibreglass past it on the first side, filled in the triangle with goop after that first side had hardened, and glassed the second side out over the gooped part. The result is a point that doesn't have wood in it, so if it gets dinged it won't let water inside. The boards slide in and out of the boxes easily now, since I also made a third adjustment: I smoothed out some of the bumps.

I'm so glad to be done with that part (well, almost: I do plan to paint them). I'm feeling like I can focus on sailing her now.

New Boom Tent

Oh, one more thing: I made a new boom tent, as the first one was shedding plastic dandruff all over me whenever I touched it. This one is laminated instead of woven, and promises to have UV resistance:

It's translucent.