Sail and learn

2012-01-27 - Friday

Another foggy, overcast morning. It looks like is should burn off by noon or so. If there aren’t too many patches of fog floating around, I will go out for a short sail.

This morning’s question that floats around in my head is whether or not I am doing the most I can do to get the boat ready to go cruising. One of my friends from the Pearson Yacht Club (an online forum for owners of boats like Laelia) read my posting from yesterday and suggested that I am wasting my time fixing what ain’t broke (the steering system). He has a point and I might agree if time were the problem. But it is not.

The big sticking point at the moment is money. I have enough to get by on if I am very careful. To get enough money to go cruising, I need a decent paying job for 6 – 9 months. I spend several hours each day looking online for jobs and talking to recruiters who think they may have found a job for me. (Apparently, recruiting is another job that has gone offshore. Most of the people I talk to are obviously not US born. Most have heavy accents – Indian or Asian. It is hard to understand them and adds to the stress of job hunting.) I keep hearing that the Silicon Valley economy is booming. I get lots of calls from recruiters. I’ve gotten exactly one phone interview so far and no in-person interviews. I have one phone interview scheduled with Intel, Hillsboro, OR, for Monday. So far, all that tells me is that there are a lot of hungry recruiters out there.

OK – so I am looking for a job. What else can I be doing? I am picking away at little jobs that don’t require much money – things like leaky ports (windows), fixing up wiring, cleaning out the bilge (the basement) and the like. I am removing equipment that I don’t need or don’t want to have to maintain and I am trying to sell it on Craigslist. I am getting some responses but progress on that front is slow.

About the only other thing I can think of at the moment is to go out and practice sailing my boat. Yes, I know how to sail but every boat is different. I certainly can learn to make this one sail faster. I can learn how to handle the sails more efficiently when I maneuver – tack, gybe, etc. This part is fun so there must be something wrong with doing it, eh?

Evening

I did go out and sail the boat. It was a fine day for it. Too bad I didn’t start an hour or so sooner. I would have made it to Alcatraz. As it was,, I got within about a mile. Alcatraz is the darker chunk in the center of the picture.

I like having a tiller better than the wheel. It gives me a better feel for what the boat is doing, I can respond more quickly and precisely and I always know which the rudder’s position. The emergency tiller is not a very good tiller – it is too short, it is a cold, metal tube to hang on to, it is too short and it sticks up at an odd angle. But I can see that a proper tiller will be a fine setup. Hopefully, I will sell the pieces of the wheel steering soon so I can get the tiller installation in place.

I got a good workout in the first half hour or so. The wind was light and it was coming right down the channel that I was going out. I got in some practice tacking and grinding away on the winches. After that, it was easy going. The leg toward Alcatraz was just right to be able to make it on one long tack. When I turned around, I was headed pretty much down wind and I could kick back and relax.

I got back a little later than I intended, did the minimum tie down and clean up and headed over to Davis for a visit with Suzanne. I left here about 4 PM (beginning of rush hour) and it is Friday. It took 2.5 hours to make a trip that usually takes 1 hour, 15 minutes.

As always, it was a joy to talk to Suzanne, hear about her classes and the goings on at UCD. We had pizza and coffee. I dropped her at her apartment and drove home in the expected 1:15. I’m beat. Now off to bed.

2012-01-28 - Saturday

Mmmmm. Cold pizza for breakfast. Yum!

I've had the night to think about yesterday's sail. When I turned on the computer this morning, I also found some comments from other Pearson 365 owners. Between the two, I think I will just leave the wheel steering and forget the tiller idea.

When I was backing out of the slip, I had the rudder hard over to counteract the prop steering. When I shifted to neutral and tried to move the helm with the boat still coasting in reverse, it was all I could do to budge the tiller. I had to shift into forward and apply moderate throttle to get movement with reasonable exertion level. Given that I don't spend much time in reverse, I could probably live with it. But there is more.

My outing was in fairly light conditions of 5 - 10 kts with the boat moving at up to 4 kts (at least that's what the speedo showed). The helm was distinctly on the heavy side even with careful attention to balancing the sails. Some of that has to do with the short tiller and the rather awkward shoulder high grip on the tiller. But that is only part of the story. There's no getting around the fact that the boat has a big barn door rudder hanging off the skeg with no balancing portion. When the water is moving past it at a good clip, the steering pressures get high.

If yesterday's sail was as bad as it gets, I could live with it but one of the other owners commented that even with a wheel, the steering effort can get pretty high when the wind picks up. In the relatively minor gusts that I encountered and with the sails somewhat out of balance, the steering load got significant so its not hard to believe. All told, by the end of the sail, I had a sore shoulder.

So - that was an interesting exercise. I learned a lot. I have more respect for the robustness of the Edson steerer now that I've peered into the guts and looked carefully at what's under the cockpit sole. I will be putting it all back together. I noticed that the idler pullys are mounted on what appears to be a steel plate. The paint is flaking off and the base looks rusty. That will need some attention along with the rusty fuel tank top. It will help keep me busy until I get money for other projects.