I had the chance to carry out further “sea trials” at the Southwater Dabblers home lake last Friday afternoon (I am lucky enough to finish work at 1.00 p.m. on Fridays). I was in general very pleased with the boat, conditions were fine and the sun was shinning. The wind was fair, any more would have been a problem, and I don’t think I would have liked any larger waves when sailing such a small boat. I sailed the boat for around an hour on and off, and found I was able to navigate a course around a small section of the lake OK. This is only the second outing for “Lucia” and I have not sailed any other boat before so I was reasonably pleased. I did find that I had to watch carefully for any tendency for the bows to dip down to much and ship water onto the deck. I found that once on the deck water did not flow away, but this was fairly predictable as I should have cut some ports in the 3mm high gunwales. I did find at the end of play that I had a small amount of water in the boat, say about a teaspoon full, and have not really worked out how this happened yet. I don’t think it got in through the hatch. The mainsail sheet is fishing line feed through a very small diameter brass tube, which seems unlikely to let much water in. The rudder linkage may be the main suspect but I thought I put enough grease on this to solve this. All in all, a mystery at this stage, but I will monitor this in the future. I meant to take some photos on the water, but am not up to sailing and taking photos at the same time yet!
I was very pleased with the comments that I received from the handful of club members at the lake last Friday, the look of the boat (if not my sailing) seemed to be admired!
So what have I learnt during the build of this boat:-
1) I should not slavishly follow plans, but have more faith in my own engineering judgement. I am in particular thinking of the rudder linkage problems I experienced on this build. I will in future try to slightly “over engineer” rudder linkages and try to keep everything as simple as is possible.
2) I do not think a solid radio deck is a good idea. I will next time make sure I can see to the lowest part of the hull so that I can easily see, and hence remove any water that gets into the bottom of the boat.
3) I will make sure that sail control sheets are routed as simply as possible to reduce friction in the lines.
4) Assume that water will get onto the deck, and make sure that there is a route for it to get off again.
So what next then ? It has to be another Footy. On the Footy web site,
www.footy.rcsailing.net , on the plans page are downloadable plans for the Cobra Mk 1 hull designed by Bill Hagerup. So this is the next project then, I will use this hull design and build a semi scale Gaff rigged footy to sail with “Lucia”. The plans state a displacement of 450gms, I have no hope of building as light as this, but will try to aim for approximately half the weight of “Lucia” say 700 to 750 gms. But more details perhaps for another day.
BJH.