2014 June Cruise - St. Michaels MD

We drove to St. Michaels, Maryland in mid June for a five day cruise.  The weather forecast was for temperatures in the low 60's and lots of rain so I rented a slip at the Harbor Inn.  Other than a few large power yachts, we appeared to be the only transients.  It was nice to have hot showers, breakfast and other amenities.  This was our first cruise in our Core Sound 20 Mark II, newly renamed Wren.  It was also training for the 2014 Watertribe North Carolina Challenge scheduled in late September so we didn't bring a motor, relying exclusively on our new oars and sail.

Heading out - viewed through two of our fellow transients

On the first day it rained most of the time but we were able to get out for three or four hours in the afternoon.  The new oars worked well and we had an exhilarating 16 mile sail to the Wye river and back under a single reef.  As we approached the harbor, the wind picked up so we anchored and put in a second reef.   Under two reefs, we tacked into the harber and then rowed to our protected slip.  A hot shower and meal at the hotel bar finished up a great day.

Heading out - (the mainsail foot should be lower)

It rained so much the next day that roads were flooded all over the town.  We bought umbrellas and took the opportunity to do some walking and see a movie.

A dodger made from a tarp keeps the rain out

Commercial Oyster Drege

The weather outlook was slightly better the next day so we abandoned our posh slip and sailed out for a night or two on the bay.  Our plan was to make it through the Kent Island Narrows at slack tide and anchor north of there, but we got a late start and by the time we made it to the bridge a ominous storm front moved in from the west and we scooted into a small creek south of our target at about 3:30 in the afternoon.  We were comfy in our tiny cabin by the time the storm hit and after an hour or so, the wind eased up and the rain stopped and we were able to cook a hot meal and spend a relaxing evening in the cockpit.  We read to each each other from "The Code of the Woosters", by P.G. Wodehouse.

Wing and Wing on the Chesapeake Bay

The next day came bright, cold and windy with few clouds and winds at 15 to 20 mph.  We were able to put our new boat through its paces.

We started out in the morning with two reefs and water ballast. According to the nearby weather buoy winds were gusting to 27 mph (http://www.ndbc.noaa...p?station=44062).  Beating close hauled to windward for about two hours, we made five miles up to Kent Narrows and then floated downwind into the bay.  We always had a hand on the mainsheet but never had to pop it in a gust.  It was a bit wet at times.

In the open bay the wind moderated to 18-22 mph so I shook out a reef on a close reach, still with water ballast.  On a boad reach with ballast we were making 7-8 mph.  I put down the anderson bailer and in about 15 minutes all of the ballast water had been drained from the tank.  We started surfing and gained about 1 to 2 mph.  Our max speed was 11mph with one reef tied in and still a very comfortable ride.

Self Steering on a Broad Reach

Julie at the helm

After about 41 miles of adventure we dropped anchor in a little creek off the Wye river, close to a ghostly sunken tree and an osprey nest.  After dinner, we watched in amazement as the Osprey parents taught their chick how to fly.  We first noticed a fuss when the chick was in the air, furiously beating its wings and making lots of noise.  It was working much harder to stay aloft than the parents that were circling nearby.  The chick tried to seek refuge in a nearby tree but every time it got close one of the parents would swoop down and drive it back into the air.  This went on for at least five minutes until finally the parents showed some mercy and let the chick land.  They didn't give it much chance to rest though - after only a few minutes they were back at it again.

Anchorage in the Wye River

Drying out after a wet day

Oars at the ready

Final day of the cruise - 41 miles

Summary
This cruise was our third sail on the boat and I felt we got a good start at understanding how she works.  A few observations:

• The new oars worked out very well (we didn't bring a motor).  I added some weights (zing shaft annodes) near the handles to give them a counter balance.
• I love the way the boat heaves-to.  Just sheet in the mizzen, free the main, release the tiller and she drifts gently downwind with her bow pointed 45 degrees - stable and quiet.
• We had a lot of rain on this cruise and it was great having a cabin but I found myself wishing for a cockpit tent. 
• I love the anchor pulpit.  My anchor can be muddy and I don't have to worry too much.
• I was very impressed to see her self-steering on a reach in fairly confused seas.  I found that I sometimes need to let the mizzen luff a bit in order to get her self-steering.  

Building Oars and Oarlocks

Having decided on Tulip Poplar for my oars, I drove down to Hearne hardwoods and found a straight plank 12' long x 2" thick.  I had them joint one edge.  I cut the two looms to 1 3/4" square and then used my jointer to make them eight sided.

Make the loops eight sided 

I marked off 10" by 1 1/8" diameter handles and then cut them out.

Cut out the handles

Make the handles eight sided

 I used a rasp, plane, chisel and sand paper to get everything mostly round.  As with most of my projects, I was able to justify the purchase of a new tool.  In this case it was a saw rasp from duckworks.

Round with a rasp and sand paper

I should have cut out the curved flats where the blades meet the looms before I rounded the looms - it would have been so much easier.  Ah well.  Then I glued on the blades.  I didn't have any marine plywood handy so I used AC Fir.  I put a fillet of thickened epoxy and embedded five or ten strands of linear fiberglass into the fillet.

Glue the blades

I tapered the loom with a drawknife and gave everything a coat of epoxy.  Then I put on three coats of spar varnish on the looms and a few coats of white rust-oleum enamel on the blades.

Taper the looms

Coat with epoxy, then varnish

10' 3" - that is a long oar

I made buttons (or stops) out of 1/4" nylon braid.  I tied a turks head as tight as I could get it but it was still loose enough to slide when subjected to a lot of force.  I varnished them in place - hopefully it will be good enough to keep them in place.

Turks Head Buttons

 After a trial row I found the oars needed counter weights.  I chose 1 3/4" propeller shaft zincs, each weighing 2.5 lbs each.  I think they are just right.

Couterweights

The cockpit coaming is about four or five inches inboard of where the oarlocks are normally mounted on a Core Sound 20 so I created outriggers out of ash and cherry.  The geometry isn't ideal - I have to sit on four or more inches of foam cushions to be comfortable.  

Outriggers for oar locks

Outriggers mounted on the coaming

Stowed under the coaming

Oars at the ready

Tulip Poplar for Oars?

Our new Core Sound 20, Summer Breeze, needs a set of oars.   After researching various oar designs on the web and comparing the mechanical and subjective qualities of various woods, I've decided to make them out of Tulip Poplar which is cheap and plentiful here in south eastern Pennsylvania.  People are surprised when I tell them of my choice so I'm posting my analysis here.

Table 1 shows a few select woods that I wanted to compare.  Most of the mechanical properties are taken directly from the Wood Database, a fantastic resource for investigating boat building woods.

Table 1. Properties of woods for making oars

The table provides Density (how heavy the oars will be), Modulus of Rupture which denotes strength against bending force, Modulus of Elasticity which denotes bendyness, and price per board-foot.  FAS is code for furniture grade wood.

I want a wood that is light, strong and bendy.  It should look good but not cost too much.  Typical woods for oars and other spars include Sitka Spruce, Ash, Pine and Fir.  I am lucky to be 30 minutes drive from one of the best hardwood suppliers in the country, Hearne Hardwoods. The large yard is piled high with flitch cut logs air drying or waiting to be milled.

Flitch log at Hearne Hardwoods

They have great prices on Ash, Cherry, Pine, Tulip Poplar and lots of other exotics.  Most of the prices in Table 1 come from Hearne.  I've ranked my selection based on weight (density), elasticity, strength (modulus of rupture), quality (FAS, common, select, clear) and price:

• Sitka Spruce is very expensive ($15/BF Chesapeake Light Craft).  It has a good strength to weight ratio and is very elastic.  Too expensive around here.
• Eastern White Pine is the lightest in my list but also the weakest and most brittle (least elastic).  Hearne has some very clear white pine, but it is expensive.  
• Spanish Cedar is great to work with and beautiful to look at but it is brittle, a bit heavy and on the expensive side.
• White Ash is the strongest (modulus of rupture) and most elastic but also the heaviest.  Many great paddles and oars are made from White Ash and it is inexpensive but too heavy for my taste.
• I included Black Cherry just out of curiosity.  I think it might make fine oars.  It is more rot resistant than Ash but also less strong and elastic and costs more.  It is prettier, easier to work but not as tough.  There is a lot of locally grown cherry in PA so it is relatively cheap here.
• Western Hemlock (Hem-Fir) 2x stock from Lowes is cheap and has great mechanical properties.  Because it is only available around here as construction lumber (common grade), even the best planks will have some small knots.  
• Tulip Poplar has great mechanical properties, is fun to work with and looks good.  Hearne has great pricing on FAS grade (furniture grade) stock in many dimensions.

Grahame Byrnes of B&B Yacht Designs told me that Hem-fir is a great alternative to sitka spruce.  The wood database confirms this (Table 2).  Tulip Poplar appears to be another great alternative.  Robb White, a well known boat builder and writer used Tulip Poplar for many of his beautiful custom boats. Compared to hem-fir it is much prettier, easier to work with, just as light, about as strong and elastic and not much more expensive.

Table 2.  Hem-Fir and Tulip Poplar vs Sitka Spruce

Tulip Poplar is the wood for me.

Our new Core Sound 20 Mark II, B&B Messabout 2013, Righting Test

CS 20 mkII under sail

During the Watertribe North Carolina Challenge (see previous post), we visited with Tony on his beautiful Princess 26, designed by Grahame Byrnes of B&B Yacht Designs.  As we socialized in the cabin talking about life and boats I mentioned that I was planning to build a Core Sound 20, Mk II and he responded that the prototype boat was for sale.  I was thrilled to hear it since I had followed the construction of this boat since the first plank was cut.  I immediately called Chick, the owner/builder, and arranged for a visit the next day.

In Chick's shop

Julie and I had a good look at the boat, Summer Breeze, and liked what we saw.  Chick is a fine boat builder and his skill was evident in the quality of this boat.  He was selling because he and his family were moving from the coast to the mountains.  On the 10 hour drive back home from North Carolina we decided to buy it. 

We planned the pickup of the boat to coincide with the anual B&B Messabout, an even that is attended by builders of B&B boats from all over.  There were visitors from Michigan, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania.  Boats included a Princesss 22, Princess 26, Core Sound 17, several Core Sound 20's.

Core Sound 20 Dawn Patrol 

Sun sets on the B&B Messabout

Beautifully crafted Core Sound 17.  All controls led to the aft cockpit.

Before we left we had a chance to perform a test of the waterballast.  It took three adults pulling on halyards and masts to get her over on her side.

It takes a lot of force to pull her over

Once down, it took about 5lbs force at the tip of the main mast to keep her down.

All the way over, still self-righting

popping back up

When we released the mast, the boat popped up like a cork, the mainsheet whipping through the air with a snap.

Small Boat Reefing

After recently spending a week in the unpredictable weather of the Core Sound of North Carolina's outer banks I've been thinking a lot about reefing.  Here is an updated version of an article I wrote for Duckworks Magazine 12 years ago (in 2000).  If you've read it before, most of my updates are near the end.

I've sailed small boats all of my life, but it was a long time before I started to think of reefing as an every day sail handling skill rather than an emergency tactic. When I finally did start setting my sails to match the wind conditions, it came as a revelation that heavy weather sailing doesn't have to involve acrobatic hiking on the windward rail or raw hands from gripping the sheet. In fact, I discovered that with good sail management, heavy weather sailing can be fun, fast and safe. 

Of all the small boats I've sailed, my two favorites are:
Drascombe Longboat - A very seaworthy 21' open boat (doesn't point well). When my dad first got her, we didn't take advantage of the features of the sail plan and so we wound up hiking and heeling and burning our hands holding onto the sheets. I borrowed the boat from my dad for about 13 years and it was during this period that I really learned how to match the boat to the wind. I've done some silly things with this boat and sailed in some terrible weather in the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake, but she has always brought me home, largely because of her sail rig. Side note: this boat is ample proof that an open, unballasted boat can be very seaworthy.

AF3 - an able little 16' sharpie skiff with a cuddy cabin designed by Jim Michalak (My current Boat). It has one sail with two rows of reef points. It took me about 170 hours to build the boat and sew the sail. We've had her out in 20 to 30 mph winds and had a wonderful time with no worries. On one windy trip in Nebraska with steady 25 mph winds, we had one reef tied in the whole time, sailing beam reaches or broad reaches. We would have had to tie a second reef in if we had needed to head upwind. It was nice to know we could get home even if the wind shifted.

Why reef:
Jim Michalak has mentioned in his excellent essays that force on a sail is proportional to the square of the wind velocity. If the wind doubles from 5 to 10 knots, the force on the sail will increase by four times. This is the reason why reefing is so important. I found a description of a Scotland "Fifie" in John Leather's "Spritsails and Lugsails." It was used for fishing along the North Sea coast of Scotland around 1905 and had eight lines of reef points on the main and five on the mizzen. 


           Scotish Fife

Other similar craft carried complete sets of smaller heavy weather sails for the same purpose. Howard Chapelle, in his "American Small Sailing Craft," describes how oyster and crabbing sharpies carried two masts with three mast steps. In light winds, both masts were stepped fore and aft. In heavier winds, a single mast was stepped in the middle mast step. Bluewater cruising literature is full of heavy weather sail handling information that, while not aimed at the small boater, is still relevant. For instance, cruisers seem to prefer cutters and ketches because their sail shortening options are better than with other rigs.

There are as many different reefing schemes as there are sail plans. To my mind, there are two important measures of a reefing system: 

1) Does it work when you really need it to work. 
It seems to me every other emergency at sea story involves some sort of problem with reefing - either the furling drum has jammed, or sail doesn't come down etc. For this reason, I consider reliability more important than convenience when it comes to reefing. In the engineering world, "Mean Time Between Failure" is used as one measure of reliability. I would love to know the average MTBF for roller furling jibs at any given marina in the US. I bet it is a terribly low number. Among blue water cruisers, whose life depends on such gear, I am sure the number is much better.

In most aspects of sailing, and particularly in reefing, the probability of failure is highest at the moment where the consequences are the worst (unlike my car, where the probability of failure is greatest when I go to start it). Generally, mechanical systems with fewer parts are more reliable than systems with more parts, so my personal bias is toward simple reefing systems. Complex systems can be reliable, but they are more expensive than simple systems and usually require more recurring attention in order to achieve that reliability. This is one reason why I like the old fashioned rigs like the sprit-boom and the loose footed main.

2) Does the boat sail well when reefed. 
I think a rig that is unbalanced or can't point under reefed sails is not much better than one with no reefing options. The whole point of reefing is to manage the boat so that you can get to where you are going in various wind conditions. Besides being inconvenient, sailing an unbalanced boat in heavy weather is unsafe.

When to reef:
The saying goes: "reef early and reef often." I find that above 10 knots, I adjust my sail area for every 5 knot increase in wind, depending on point of sail. A small boat, especially an unballasted one, is more sensitive to sail area when going upwind, so I am more likely to reef if I have any upwind work ahead. I also think it is crucial to be able to reef while underway, even in a small boat. This may not be important for someone who will always be sailing within site of the dock, but I like exploring and going from place to place, so I need to know that I can get back home, even if the wind changes or picks up.

How I reef:
"Swallows and Amazons," by Arthur Ransome talks about reefing: Mum quizzes her sons John and Roger on reefing the lugsail of the Swallow. Roger explains that you first tie the pendant nearest to the mast, then the one at the end of the boom, followed by the reef points in between. So far, after 26 years, that has been my only instruction!

The Drascombe Longboat, which Phil Bolger would call a Jib Headed Gunter Yawl (see his book "103 sailing rigs, straight talk") has a roller furling jib, a loose footed main with two sets of reef points and a small balancing mizzen aft of the tiller. When reefing the main, I always lower the main completely. She is very well balanced under jib and mizzen alone, so if I have a crew, we keep going underway while reefing. If I am single handing, then I heave-to, drop the sail, free the mainsheet, free the downhaul and clip it to the first reef tack tie the reef points, clip the mainsheet to the reef clew, then raise the sail and continue on (I have stainless carbiner clips on both the mainsheet and the downhaul to make reefing easier). 


            Reefing parts of a sail

To heave-to, I back-wind the jib (sheet it in on the windward side), let the main sail fly loose or lower it, haul in the mizzen and put the tiller hard to lee. The result of all this is that the boat very gently drifts to leeward, keeping her bow about 30 or 40 degrees to the wind.


  Heaving-to in the drascombe

As the wind increases my order of sail shortening usually goes like this:

1. full sail 
2. single reef main 
3. furl jib 20% 
4. double reef main 
5. furl jib 50% 
6. drop main OR furl jib and mizzen 
7. mizzen only (downwind only). 

     Drascombe Sail Sets


Sometimes I heave-to to wait out squalls instead of running with the wind or heading in to shelter.


My AF3 is a cat rigged sprit-boomed sharpie skiff. Chapelle indicates that early sharpies of the 1870's had vertical reefing, the sail being drawn up to the mast with brails. Later boats used horizontal reef points. Jim Michalak has tried vertical reefing on his sails, but was unhappy with the results. I put horizontal reefs into my AF3 sail and so far, they have worked out very well. Some people do not rig a halyard on this type of rig. They simply leave the sail tied to the mast and roll it up when not in use. I have a halyard. On some sharpie designs, owners reef by removing the sprit boom and roll the main around the mast. I haven't tried this on the AF3 but I suspect the upwind sail performance would suffer greatly because the absence of the sprit boom would ruin the sail shape. Since there is only one sail, there is no possibility of heaving-to or staying underway while reefing. There is, however a very nice cuddy cabin that gives the sail plenty of protection from the wind while I am tying the reef points.

  

      AF3 mainsail with one reef tied in

To reef, I lower the sail completely, remove the sprit boom, free the downhaul and re-lace it to the first reef tack. Then I the tie the reef points starting with the one farthest from the ends going inward, refasten the sprit boom and raise the sail. I haven't had boat for very long, so I don't have much practice, but so far the whole operation takes five to ten minutes - about two to three times as long as on the Drascombe.  The main reasons are:

• I tie on my downhaul rather than using a hook 
• The laced on sail interferes with the snotter.  I have to completely free the snotter from the sprit boom and thread it through the lacings before I can re-attach it to the boom.

I have some ideas about improving the reefing time, but I think that reefing my AF3 will never be as easy as on the Drascombe.  Graham Byrnes, designer of the Core Sound 20, which has cat-ketch sharpie sprit rig, told me that he can reef both sails in a few minutes.  

He attributed the ease of reefing to the inherent qualities of the cat-ketch configuration (similar to the Drascombe, the mizzen keeps things stable while you rig the main) and the fact that he uses sail track instead of lacing.

Conclusion
I think the ability to effectively manage sail area, regardless of rig type, is a fundamental part of sailing and seamanship. For small boats, sail rigs with few moving parts and simple reefing schemes are safe, efficient and reliable.