BYYB Forums

The wind FINALLY started to pick up in Oak Ridge, after months of dead calm. Friday I took the Mini-Cup out on Melton Hill Lake at the area renowned for excellent rowing. The NCAA Women's Rowing Championships were held there during the summer. But Friday had some nice 7 knot winds with gusts to 14, and what's good for sailors is bad weather for rowing! So, it was just me out there. I've never sailed in winds this high before, and all I could say was WHEEEEE! This little boat really pops up and goes. I learned more about balancing a boat in the first five minutes of sailing than from years of reading about sailing technique. If the sail, the rudder and your butt are not all in the right place, she wiggles like a snake and turns into the wind. If I wanted to make it all the way through a tack, I found that gingerly turning the rudder in the right direction just wasn't working. You've got to throw the rudder all the way over like your a bit mad at it, then scoot under the boom and catch the breeze on a close reach going the other way. The nice thing is, the rudder stays where you put it. So, it's possible to let it turn the boat while you get settled and ready for the next tack.

I had another great sail today, but there were rowers out. So, I got lots of practice heaving to. One problem I discovered was that I need a tiller extension and some kind of hiking straps. By the time I hiked out enough to balance the boat (basically parallel to the water ) I could barely get my fingertips on the tiller, and I had to let out the sail when the wind seemed to be getting just right. Do you think that I could fit some loops to the Panel Joiner piece on each side of the boat?

You may want to consider putting a rope loop at the bottom of the cockpit fore and aft bulkheads into the stringers there. Then you could attach a strap to it.

With my 16 stone of weight sitting on the cockpit side of the MiniCup, I rarely found a need for a tiller extension. One thought that I had for it though was to just put a rope through a hole on the end of tiller. It depends of course if you went with the stock designed tiller which pivots up to release the rudder - if so, no kind of tiller extension would work. Personally I re-engineered my rudder so that the tiller was fixed and the rudder was held down with a bungee cord afixed to the forward part of the rudder that ran up to a cleat at the rudder head.

Rope loops sound like a good idea. I ended up connecting a piece of oak, actually an offcut from making the original tiller, to the end of the tiller with two eyebolts for a tiller extension. I connected the two eyebolts using the same method that the plans suggest in attaching the rudder to the tiller, just smaller eyebolts. I tried to take a picture, but the batteries were dead in my camera. I'll post one later.

I only make it to about 10 stone (that's 4.5 slugs according to online conversion.com) and that's if I fell in the lake and got a lot of silt caught in my shorts. So, when the wind picks up, it's pretty squirrely out there. I've thought about pouring a lead weight enclosed in brass to affix to the end of the daggerboard, for ballast and to guard against those sharp rocks that always seem to find me.

I used to get annoyed at how the dagger board would float up in light winds and ended up putting a cleat on the forward bulkhead and hole in the aft part of the head of the dagger-board. I'd then tie the board down.

There ARE instances when you want the board to be up - in shallow water, and when running down-wind. I also used the dagger-board as a paddle (not a very good one) so for the way I used the boat, a weighted board would not have been a good idea.

Rope loops are something that I've used in a lot of places - mainly to have something to tie a line to. I learned that everything in the boat needs to be tied to the boat in some fashion, especially things like a paddle and bailing bucket.

As promised, pictures of my tiller extension. It's not very long, I didn't lack much reaching the tiller. With my daggerboard, I had just the opposite problem, if I shoved it down too vigorously, I couldn't get it back out. I've sanded some around the top and got it to where it doesn't do that, but because it's oak, it still tends to sink rather than float.