Slider

I should be finishing up Slipper, my little 14′ cartop cat, but lately I’ve been spending too much time doodling up a new boat for the next project.  I’m scratching away at a design for a 23.5 foot microcruiser, a trailerable cat with a 16 foot sailing beam and lots of sail.  My first two catamaran designs compromised speed to a large extent.  I gave up speed for comfort, with Slider, and with Slipper I’m giving up speed for simplicity.  Naturally, the idea of a fast cruiser has a great deal of appeal, as long as it’s safe and comfortable.

Here’s a cartoon of the boat in profile, showing a split rig with bowsprit and sprit main and mizzen.

I doubt this will be the final configuration, but it would have its advantages.  The masts would be easy to raise at the ramp, compared to a conventional single-stick rig.  The spread-out sail plan would contribute to course stability, and consequently, self-steering, an important consideration for cruising boats.  The rig would be under far less stress than would a tall Marconi rig, and be much less expensive.  With so much beam, longitudinal stability becomes more of a concern than transverse stability, and the divided rig would help in that regard.

One concern I have is with the esthetic effect of the large cabin.  It doesn’t look terminally ungainly to me, but I may be overly influenced by the ergonomic aspects of the design.  I can’t get any more freeboard out of three sheets of ply; the topside panels take maximum advantage of a ply sheet’s 4 foot width… even though more freeboard would make the cabin look a little lower, by comparison.  The cabin needs to be about that tall to give sitting headroom on the double berth, which for reasons I don’t want to explain just yet, must be raised to gunwale level.  Unfortunately the cabin height does not quite give standing headroom to a tall person, but a tall cook will be able to stand in the galley with the top of his head out the hatch.

Okay.  In my next post, I’m going to have to report that my lashings for Slipper did not work well enough, and I had to go back to the drawing board.  But now they work really well, are very quick to lash, and are remarkably strong and tight.  I’m also putting together a removable table for the cockpits, with a built-in fixture for a single burner propane stove.  I’ll be able to use it both for cooking and for the little netbook I recently bought in order to have the ability to write while cruising.  Last fall when I was cruising to the west, I had to write down the pieces later published here in little notebooks, and then they had to be transcribed.  Of course, the new netbook has a pretty high toy factor, I must admit.  On the advice of Chuck Leinweber of Duckworks fame, I ordered an inexpensive GPS receiver to plug into the netbook.  If it ever gets here, I’ll have a chart plotter.  I’ll be able to watch movies and play Go.  Whenever I find an open wireless network, I’ll be able to update this blog, get my email, and browse the web.

I can’t wait to take it sailing.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been a little unwell lately, but I’m getting better, and it’s way past time to get back to work on Slipper, my ultrasimple little cartop cat.

The beams are largely complete, except for the stuff needed to connect the beams to the hulls, and here is where I’ve been floundering in a morass of indecision for the last month or so. Being feeble, I had a good excuse for not making up my mind, but sooner or later I knew I’d have to pick a strategy and go with it. Or anyway, I would if I ever expected to finish the boat. When I started, I thought I’d be mostly done by now. Continue reading →

I’ve been a little under the weather for the last several weeks, which may explain my putting off writing this blog piece.

I had a bout with pneumonia a couple weeks before the Cedar Key weekend, and really wasn’t feeling so hot when it was time to go. But my excellent wife Nancy scurried about and found a room a little out of town, so we wouldn’t have to sleep in the deck tent. I decided I could handle a day on the water and the drive to and from Cedar Key. This may have been a mistake, from a health viewpoint.

Photo courtesy of Glen Maxwell

The drive down went okay, with Nancy doing a lot of the driving. I slept and coughed. Halfway down, at a rest stop, I noticed that one of my trailer hubs was running hot. Not smoking hot, but a lot warmer than the other one. But… I decided to drive on.

We reached Cedar Key, driving through miles of marshland and little islands, a waterscape that fascinated us. It looked like prime territory for a little shallow draft boat, which is why, I suppose, that the small boat get-together is held here. Once in town, we picked up the key to our suite, and were heading back to it when Nancy noticed a sign on the side of a building, offering auto and trailer parts and repairs. We decided to see if they could do something about my hot hub. I stopped and dashed in, because it was almost 5 in the afternoon. As I’d feared, they were getting ready to close, but I told them about my troubles and they said they’d take a look. I backed the trailer into the bay, for once backing in on the first try. The mechanic checked it, said he’d take a stab at it if the parts store next door had the hub in stock. The guy at the parts store found a new hub, and charged me a reasonable price for it, and the mechanic spent a half hour of his own time replacing the bad one. I was amazed at the reasonable price he charged me for labor, and soon we were back at our suite, trailer fixed. Continue reading →

I finally rigged the reefing lines for my nice new mainsail. It’s a pretty sail, seems to set very well, and looks good even when reefed. It’s great to have a reef. The prototype sail that I made from a white polytarp did not have any provision for reefing in the conventional manner, so when the wind piped up, I dropped the jib and sailed with just the full main. When it got too hairy for the full main, I scandalized the sail and wrapped the peak line around the mast and back to a cleat at the end of the boom. This cut the area almost in half, and though it sounds sloppy, the sail still set well enough to get us to windward in a 30 knot breeze.

But… reefing by dropping the jib is also a little sloppy. It tends to increase the weather helm, for one thing. Slider never develops a crippling amount of weather helm– a big gust would never make her round up uncontrollably, as some boats do. But in heavy air, the effort of hauling the tillers up to windward increases enough that it becomes a little tiring after a while. It cuts our speed a bit too. The other day when my daughter and I went out fishing and we were reaching down the Destin shoreline at 7.5 knots under full main, we could probably have hit 8 or 9 knots under reefed main and jib.

The sail came from Chuck and Sandra Leinweber of Duckworks Boat Builder’s Supply, and they are very good people to do business with. Continue reading →

I love to fish. I love to sail. I’m astonished that more sailors don’t do both.

Last spring we sailed Slider down to Navarre Beach for an overnighter and anchored off the beach near a Pennsylvania couple who were sailing their Farrier tri on their annual vacation to the area. The husband noticed the fishing rods set into holders on Slider’s rudder stocks, and told me that he liked to fish, but it was just too much trouble to sail and fish at the same time.

I don’t get it. If you’re going to be out there anyway, why not trail a line and see what you get? It doesn’t have to be an elaborate effort, but it adds an element of anticipation to the sailing, and if you get lucky, a fine meal too.

Yesterday my daughter April and I got up before dawn, because I wanted to catch some Spanish mackerel. It’s the right season of the year, when this migratory fish returns to the Northern Gulf in great numbers. There was a time not many years ago when this species was in trouble. But since the controversial net ban legislation, the fish has made a big comeback, and is now one of the easier species to catch. In the bay, it’s best to try for the fish on an incoming tide, and since high tide was at mid-morning, we had to crawl out of bed at an impolite hour to have a chance at getting across the bay before the slack.

NOAA weather claimed that we’d have NW winds at 10 and that the bay would be smooth. Imagine my surprise when we exited the bayou and found the winds out on the bay blowing from the north at 20 with gusts to 25. We reached across the bay at 6 to 7 knots under full mainsail only, and it was really too much sail. It wasn’t so much that we were in any danger, but at that speed in the big chop that had developed overnight, we got wet. The air temperature was in the 60s, so we got cold as well as wet. April, being the clever girl that she is, huddled down in the cockpit and put her chair over her body, so she didn’t get quite as wet as I did. But occasionally she had to emerge from her nest, as she did when we hooked a bluefish off Destin Point. The poor guy was skipping from wavetop to wavetop, making the rod jerk in a really odd manner. He was just big enough to be legal, so we put him in the box and broad-reached down the Destin shoreline, several times hitting 7.5 knots. When we reached the bridge, we sailed along it and then west through the Coast Guard channel. The bay was ugly. The wind was blowing the tops off the chop into long windrows of dirty foam and the wind in the rigging had a slightly scary note. Later that day I stopped at a local tackle shop to buy some new lures and complain about my outing. A fishing guide who was there referred bitterly to Choctawhatchee Bay as Chocolatehatchee Bay– the water was still very dirty from the recent flooding rains.

In less vigorous conditions, we’d have trolled back around the Crab Island flats, and probably hooked a few more fish, but we were both cold and wet and we had a 5 mile beat through that fierce chop to look forward to. So we headed for home. Besides, mackerel are sight predators who like clear water. I didn’t think we were going to catch any that day. I was wrong.

Once back out in the bay we hooked a good-sized Spanish and managed to get him in the boat before he flipped off the hook. One of Slider’s great virtues is that she is so well-behaved when you release the steering line. She comes up into the wind and sits there quietly while you tussle with the fish, and this is a very reassuring trait in a sailboat. There will always be panicky moments aboard and it’s really nice to have a boat that takes care of herself when you’re too distracted to do so.

I put the rod holders on the rudder stocks, because Slider has a long boom.

The stocks were the only place I could put holders where the rods would not foul the boom. When fishing is good and I want to catch a fair amount of fish, I troll a lure from each holder, and the separation keeps the lines from tangling, except when tacking or gybing. If I plan to do a lot of tacking, I usually only run one line, so I don’t have to worry about tangles.

The most productive trolling setup for mackerel and bluefish in this area is a mackerel tree with a 00 Clark spoon clipped to the end. The mackerel tree is just a length of heavy monofilament with 4 lures made from short lengths of colored plastic tubing and single hooks. On days when the bluefish are hitting, I’ve sometimes landed 2 or 3 bluefish at a time with this rig. I usually rig this with a 3 ounce trolling weight, to keep the rig from skipping along the surface at speed, and this is also a good idea for another reason. Folks don’t seem to grasp the idea that people can be trolling from sailboats, and I’ve been cut off by oblivious power boaters on many occasions. With the trolling weight, I don’t have to let out as much line as I do an unweighted rig, and so the rig is less vulnerable.

Here along the northern Gulf Coast, we’re so spoiled by good fishing that a lot of local fishermen think bluefish are only good for shark bait, but they’ve never had my smoked bluefish dip.

Most everyone likes Spanish mackerel, but as pelagic predators, they do suffer from elevated mercury levels and the EPA recommends no more than a couple meals of mackerel a month. I smoked both the bluefish and the mackerel we caught yesterday, and if someone doesn’t take it away from me soon, I’m going to get half my allowance for this month pretty quick.

The little 2-3 pound bluefish we get here in the bay in spring and summer are usually less than a year old and haven’t had time to accumulate too much mercury, I’m told, so smoked bluefish dip is frequently on the menu around our house. Neither mackerel nor bluefish freeze well raw, but once smoked, they stand up to freezing a lot better, so the bounty can be stretched over the leaner times of the year.

To sum up: It’s not much trouble to stream a fishing line when you’re out sailing, if you happen to go sailing where there are fish that can be caught trolling. Remember– the cardinal rule for catching fish is that the folks who catch the most are the ones who put in the most time fishing. And it’s a lot of fun, even if you don’t catch anything. It’s a great thing to do to interest your family in the pleasures of being on the water. I’ve got a couple of enthusiastically sullen teenage boys, who if forced to go sailing with me, may actually enjoy it if we can catch a fish or two. I always let them reel the fish in; my attitude is that any fish caught on my boat are, in a very real and legally binding sense, fish that I caught, no matter who hauls them out of the water.

My wife is an enthusiastic fisherwoman, too. While Slider was building, and the only boat we had was an 11 foot dinghy with a crappy home-made lug sail, she’d still go out on the bay with me and have a fine time murdering bluefish.

And my daughter has always liked fishing with me, from the time she was big enough to hold a rod. Here she is almost 20 years ago.

I think the look on her little face says it better than any words could.