I think the content of one’s post is the best filter. It doesn’t take great skill to spot a fake, fraud, pretender, poseur, or identify an f’ing moron by what they write.
I can accept stupid, I can accept ignorance, but I refuse to accept ignorant morons arguing shit like enclosing empty water bottles (weightless ones at that) inside the hull increases freeboard and load capacity.
Sometimes they offer a little entertainment value so maybe we should have a new home for them, call it WAFI Laffy or something like that and move their posts there.
We used to break out this pointy stick thing to jab, run through and impale the well deserving, but we’ve been asked to cease and desist. Oh but those were the days. This is a kinder, gentler forum. I guess that’s why the unwashed flotsam drifts on in.
PS…I’m friends on social media with a few people here including John. If he wants to vet me, he can have my ref. number but surely the pics I have posted and the mutual friends in the industry can vouch for themselves.
Dear gCaptain forum WAFI section. My neighbor says that if it were up to him, he would yank those useless water bottles out of the spaces and stuff them with brick to make the boat sit lower in the water. The water line length would increase and the teacher in his OUPV class mentioned that a longer waterline means a higher speed through the water .
I’m thinking of filling my fishing skiff with river rocks so I can get to the fish quicker.
Do you think I should?
Tried it with our International 14 dinghy but it didn’t help. We think there were two problems: first, the waterline length didn’t increase because of the plumb stem and transom. And second, the fourteen absolutely loves to plane, so it goes a lot faster than hull speed anyway. Also, it already had enough buoyancy chambers in the right places to make it self-rescuing and the rocks did interfere with that to a noticeable extent.
Dang, we never thought of that! Might be a problem though – Fourteens go up instead of out: fourteen foot boat with twenty four foot mast and no bowsprit. They’ll fall over at the mooring if you leave centerboard or rudder down.
Back in the '40s they did use centerboards with considerable lead weights at the bottom; but that was long gone by the time we were doing it in the late sixties. The class had just recently allowed trapezes when we were doing it – the “hiking sticks” rapidly went away in favor of trapezes. Since my time it’s become a one-design class; but then the class was in active development and high-level competitors (we weren’t) needed a new hull every year or two.
They were an absolute blast, and great sea boats! If you capsized you could have it back up in seconds, about a third full – and could be back on the wind after two or three minutes reaching off with the suction bailers working. Not a boat you’d take on a picnic, though. We used a Merry Mac for that.
This clip is before trapezes and apparently before suction bailers as well. This would have been the era where the crew was likely wearing two or three sopping sweatshirts to get more weight on the rail. My dad sailed them at the Naval Academy in the early '40s, and he found out the hard way that it’s best to get those sweatshirts off before stepping into a hot shower, 'cause they’re just as hard to get off when they’re scalding you.
We had two – a cold-molded plywood Uffa Fox design and a newer GRP one that was a bit more competitive. Dad got a fancy mast for the GRP one that only weighed twelve pounds in 24 feet.
They’re lots less work if you’re the skipper. You don’t have to come in off the trapeze, face aft while you try to get between the vang and the centerboard without busting your nuts and get out on the other trapeze, all while pulling through forty feet of jib sheet.
Don’t know about those. My brush with the insanity of small boat sailing included hanging upside down on a trapeze off a Prindle cat screaming along at 20 knots on one hull headed west off Topanga Canyon Beach. Real trust is knowing that the guy with the tiller and mainsheet in this hands is not going to f*ck up because a face plant would be really really bad.
The Red Green Show was famous for that sort of thing. Like making a carburetor for a car out of a toilet, etc. Some pretty good engineering in some of them.
