Elise

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Pulling the boat out

Early morning ritual - cafe latte and boat out of the water.

Nat arriving to the scene on her commuter bike, laptop and work clothes ready to be deployed later in the office and in the bags.

Serge positioning the boat for lift off.

Hilarious Olympic commentary!!

Thanks James for sharing!

http://www.funnyadvocate.com/2012/08/video-irish-olympic-sailing-commentary.html

Monday, August 6, 2012

Full report on Low Speed Chase

http://www.norcalsailing.com/entries/2012/08/06/lowspeedchase/report.html#.UCCaKbRSR5Y

Quoting from the article, a few notable points

Some onboard had inadequate PFDs, including one wearing a dinghy vest, and the skipper wearing just a belt-type inflatable.
None were clipped in, although jack lines were installed.
We already know they went too close to the island and inside the 10-fathom line, but they saw breaking waves before the ones that hit them.
Low Speed Chase bore away at the first point before Maintop Bay into the four-fathom line instead of staying high around the shoal. Two other boats also went into the same area during the race.
Low Speed Chase's EPIRB was activated, but [...] its registration was outdated.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Cross- training

Among other news, I did bike 14 miles (from Bernal Heights to Twin Peaks, then to the Ocean then back to Bernal Heights) on Saturday...Thigh is feeling strong.

Evening Reward Sail

After two days of laboring on the boat, it was high time to go out and play.

Walking to the boat so that it is head to wind, allowing us to hoist the main sail at the dock.

Heading out!

Getting the jib sheet ready around the winch trying out the new cross-sheeting arrangement

Hoisting the jib by pulling on the jib halyard

Trimming the jib for a loose upwind

And off to the gate

Deciding to go on a reach in the direction of Sausalito, so trimming the jib to bear away. We didn't have the instruments on, but it was probably blowing 17-21 knots or so, typical of this time of year.

and off we go!

Serge is a happy bunny and found something to keep him busy while Nat practiced some single-handed of the boat.

What a beautiful evening

We did take a reef in just so that we could try these reefing lines that gave us some much trouble.

Waiting for the sunset on San Francisco Bay

Reaching back in the direction of the Club

Solar Panel Project

When the sun came out we figured that it would be a great time to install the 40 W solar panel to supplement the teeny one when running the autopilot during a day sail.

First we unpacked the beast

Then we pushed the wires through a little sealed hole (with rubber) -

Nat did most of the crawling below, stripping the wires and cramping on a heatshrink ring terminal

Serge was the surgeon aid, passing on tools so that Nat could breathe (the other solution would have been to bring all the tools at once or go back and forth for them...given that the workshop was space challenged, tag teaming sounded best) - here with the heat gun that we use to heatshrink the terminals.

A knife that was used to remove initial cable ties that were holding the terminal block (see below)

Nat screwed on the terminal block with the connections from the solar panel to the charge controller to the wooden backing plate for the spare rudder.

Back up on deck, we secured the solar panel

And we moved the teeny one to the other side so both can have sun at the same time and push more amps through to the batteries.

Cross-sheeting project

We tried about a million ways to cross-sheet without having the line rub against the deck. We have not yet found the solution...And springing up the turning block may be part of that solution, however, it doesn't seem to be the full one!

Jib Car Project

The jib lines kept getting hung up on a non flush set screw. We bought a shorter screw which should help with this problem and we drilled the set hole a little wider to allow the screw to go all the way down...

Backstay Block Project

This is the block that Nat replaced - and a view of the rear bilge pump...It isn't every day that we spend time crawling at the back of the boat.

The new block! Shiny!

Autopilot Project

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3.

We connected Elise's autopilot so we could test it again and so that Nat could play around with it for a bit.

On the left the sensor that tells the autopilot where it is...and on the right the hydraulic ram that actually does the steering

This is Ray's connection (the spare autopilot) which we also tested.

A day in the life of Elise

Nat had planned to go sailing around the Farallones. However, in the process of setting the boat up, and toward the last couple of todos to get this done, a small incident hapened (and, just to make Serge happy - 'Serge broke the boat by letting the tag lines loose inside the boom without the reefing lines attached to them') -

Elise has two tag lines inside her boom so that we can easily run reefing lines in the morning of offshore races and then remove the reefing lines for Bay races. They are a little heavy and they do take up some space on deck. On days that we know for sure we won't need them, no point in carrying them up with us.

Unfortunately, that meant that we would then have to un the reefing lines though an enclosed tube of alumimum. We missed the planned start time of the race (but then since Nat had missed the registration deadline, it wasn't a big deal) - going out to the Farallones without any means to reef the main easily on a single-handed trip when things could be fixed at the dock was probably not the best way to go. There are always ways you can tie a line in a hurry just to the back of the boom or even to the outhaul (like a flattener basically) if your reefing system has broken and you need to jury rig something, but typically a jury rig isn't for before the start.

Elise does not have any rigger tool or any kind for this kind of job, so it required taking the boom apart so gravity could do its job...

We also did spend some time to install small cable ties on the reefing lines so that with a tiny tag line tied with a simple knot to the cable tie we can easily pull the lines through. It should make future jobs really easy.

In the end Elise got her reefing lines ready to go. We will leave those in place for the next couple of weeks and Nat will take the boat out on single-handed practices a few times.

Since the day got to a late start, we decided to repurpose it a little bit.

First, Nat tested the autopilot (worked great, tried at gain 1, 4 and 9) and measured the power consumption.

Unfortunately, even with the big battery and the teeny solar panel, the autopilot could really be used only for a couple of minutes at a time, basically, this means that on a day sail, you can not use it upwind and you can use it on gybes and potentially some sets for the pole and that's it, 30 seconds at a time, and then it takes a while for the battery to get recharged in-between. It is ok for a Farallones race but even hard for a Bay race when you need to potentially gybe many times. So we decided to install the 40W solar panel on the following day to give plenty of humpf.

We also installed an easily removable sheet bag to help take up some of the lines that are lying around in the cockpit. We will look to do something similar on the other side. When single-handed (or short-handed), we run the downhaul symmetrically so we can be pulled/released from either side and it is fairly long. Nice to have it out of the way. Also halyards may have to be stored above deck on ocean races as we need to be able to seal the boat closed. Slightly different use-case compared to the Bay.

Nat also changed a block for the backstay that was very corroded, so correded that it required hammer action to get the pin out. This required crawling to the back of the boat.

We also started to look at the wireless Tacktick.

Nat is looking up the users's manual to check which lines would bring the NMEA signal to the wireless trannsmitter.

We screwed on the wireless terminal and brought power to it right where the rest of the autopilot and instrument panel is screwed on, in one of the dryest parts of the boat.

We also displayed the E27 polars outside in the cockpit to assist with racing and we taped up

the heavy equipment diagram inside the boat.

So overall, a fairly productive day.