Strong winds

The forecast was for strong[ish] winds of 16 knots. Unfortunately, at least for me, James was not available as he is having sailing lessons. Anyhow I decided to try sailing the wayfarer alone. I had made change to the rig, adding a temporary outhaul line, the thinking being I could tighten the outhaul to depower the sail if needed. However... this temporary rig slipped, doing the opposite to what I wanted, while I was sailing off the shore and the boat shot out from the sailing club with me having great difficulty in controlling her.

So I hove to and fixed that problem, but the wind was still building so I furled the genoa. It was still building. This would have been quite exciting with a crew, especially a crew with a little more weight than James. Anyhow I decided to sail into the shore and furl the main. Yuk, boom roller furling is a mess. This winter I will have to get slab reefing put in. Not only is it very difficult to do, but it leaves the main sheet unclipped and running from the stern as end sheeting. But the biggest problem is that the rolling of the sail tends to push the boom off the goose neck of the mast. Messy.

Anyway... had a bit of a blow around the bay and then went in as James had finished his lesson to see if he wanted to come out with me. The wind strength was still building and he was tired from sailing his Optimist in this wind, so we both decided enough for the day.

3 November 2007

James, my normal crew, was away camping with his parents this weekend as it is half term in Cyprus for his school. John, a friend from our Friday evening group, came out and we had a wonderful time.

Just as I was packing up the boat last weekend, the main halyard jumped off the sheave at the top of the mast, so the first thing John and I had to do was bring the mast down and fix the halyard. The sheave is really too narrow, hence why the halyard jumps off. Neil had given me a couple of alternatives, but these were each too wide, so I am stuck with the old one and will replace it sometime this winter.

We also took the opportunity to add a highfield tensioner for the genoa halyard from an old scrap mast at the sailing club. This has mad a huge difference to the rig - its a lot more stable and just feels much better to sail.

I decided that we would sail in the opposite direction to normal, with an aim of having lunch somewhere down near Makenzie beach. We tacked off the beach, avoiding the two ships that were unloading gas and petrol to the storage tanks here. We went about 50 metres off one of the mooring buoys as there were some interesting sea birds - cormorants or something like that, but 50 metres was obviously too close for them and they flew off.

We then had a long tack all the way down to the fishing village and started looking around for a suitable place to stop. It looked like I could get in to the beach just beyond the last of the blocks of flats from there, but suddenly saw there were rocks just below the surface and in fact just breaking the surface, so tacked out and came round the rocks giving them a wide berth.

The way back was basically just a couple of broad reaches, which rather than gybing between I went about as I was just having a very nice gentle sail and the gap between the kicking strap and the main sheet is closer than I would like so thought I would not give John a very quick duck and dive as the boom came across!

Just about 300 metres from the club the wind died totally, John starts paddling and then after a few minutes picks up one last breath to sail us up to the beach. It was a good job we didn't stay longer at Mackenzie or we would have been paddling the whole way back.

The wind was such that most of the time we were sailing at between 2 and 4 knots, but we did get up to 5.5 knots on the way back [sometimes surfing the waves on the broad reach] and down to about 1 knot at other times.

All in all a very pleasant, very gentle and very enjoyable sail. What was nice to see was a number of yachts out sailing, which is unusual. However, we were the only sailing dinghy we saw out on the water today.

The distance sailed was just under 10.5 nautical miles. The yellow track is the morning sail and the light blue track is the afternoon run back to the club. The image quality for Larnaca on Google Earth has improved as you will see.

Blue sails again

Back in Cyprus, I couldn't wait to get out on the water again.

Neil and Paula had repaired Blue from the capsize on 26 August.

They had taken the top section from an old albacore mast and an old albacore sail, plus manufactured a rudder and tiller from educated guesswork. There are no plans they could find for a Laser 16 rudder.

Anyone have any plans for one they would love to have them.

They told me that making the albacore top section fit the laser16 bottom section was a little more of an engineering feat than they originally expected, but looking at the mast it seems that it will keep Blue sailing for many more years.

The wind was very light and so I offered James the helm. He normally sails an optimist, and he said he found helming the Wayfarer very different, she was much less responsive. If you look carefully in the photo you can see James' parents sailing Blue coming up astern.

We had a very very enjoyable day sailing. The wind picked up somewhat in the afternoon, making for a more interesting sail. Because I haven't sailed the wayfarer for a couple of months the mainsheet block was a little stiff and the mainsheet didn't run through as well as it might. With the wind light in the morning we ended up pushing the boom out by hand!

Sue [my wife] had given me a pair of Icom M34 handheld radios for my birthday and these worked very well for boat to boat communications. Had we had them when Blue capsized then they could have called for help. Actually this is the first part of my safety upgrade for our sailing. I also want to buy a masthead buoyancy unit.

Cat on the South China Sea

Being away from Cyprus for almost two months is stressful... at least from a sailing point of view, but great otherwise.

We ended up in Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia. Wonderful place. Nearly as nice as Cyprus. Rated my second best place to live in the world.

You can see how stressful the place looks! [British irony for those not getting it]

We went to one of the islands just off the coast. The sea was amazingly clear. I am used to the Med which is pretty clear, but this was something else. Considering how much rubbish we had seen in the South China Sea on the trip from Hong Kong to KK, it is amazing the sea is not dirty grey. The fish around the jetty were in greater numbers than I had seen anywhere else in the world... then I saw that you could buy food to feed the fish and understood why there were so many!

The trip to and from the island was my motor launch. A fibre-glass construction boat with an outboard at the rear that takes about 8-10 passengers. The outward journey was calm, with the launch following the designated channel out of the harbour.

When they collected us at 3pm it looked like a storm was brewing [there were often thunder storms in the late afternoon] and so the Malaysian person helming the launch opened the throttle and we shot back to KK at about 30 knots, bouncing over the waves. You could feel the waves bounding under the fibreglass of the hull as there was no decking on the launch, just the fibreglass skin.


Anyhow, Borneo being an island in the South China Sea I expected there would be many options for sailing. With loads of islands off Borneo to sail round it looked a sailor's paradise. Sadly it was very difficult to find a sailing boat to rent.

I had made friends with Paul, a doctor from South Carolina who owns a Peirson 26, and we were looking for a day boat we could rent and go out for a day sailing. Something like my Wayfarer would have been good or up to 20-21 feet ideal. However, there seemed to be almost nothing available.

Eventually we found that the Shangri-la Resort in KK offered sail boats to rent, with options of a Hobie-14, Hobie 16, Laser Funboats and Laser Picos. Sounded great. Maybe we would take out the Hobie 16 or a couple of Picos. We went down to the restort only to find that the only serviceable boat was the Hobie 14. OK, that cut the choice down, but we took it.

It was sad to see all these boats with minor or major damage just left to die when a small amount of TLC would have made them all available. The Hobie 16, had been blown over on the hard and its mast broken. Otherwise it was fine. Difficult to tell with the other boats, they all looked like minor problems that should have been easy to fix.

I'd not sailed a catamaran before so it was interesting to try it. Very similar to to a mono-hull dinghy except you could not point so well and had to have enough speed to go about.

We had a wonderful couple of hours sailing around the bay - Paul and I were oggling Gandalf [the yacht in the background of this picture] but nevertheless ecstatic to be out on the water and sailing. The two hours passed way too quickly.

Daniel [my olderst son] proved a natural sailor. He helms one of the lifeboats on the ship that he is crew on, so he is used to tiller steering, but could feel the wind and control the main-sheet like he was born to it. I really look forward to him coming back here for a couple of months next year when hopefully we can sail together regularly.

1 September 2007

Last weekend we went up to Dhekelia Sailing Club to pick up Neil and Paula's boat and we were invited up, so I thought we would sail up and see the club this weekend. There was a second reason. The local church youth group were using the scout campsite just behind the club and were supposed to be out kayaking over the weekend, so thought we might get some photos of my son and James [my normal crew] kayaking. The light blue line is the sail in the morning up to the club and the yellow line the sail back from the club.

My crew this weekend was Richard: Richard has a RYA Day Skipper on yachts, which he claims is rusty and previous to that he sailed dinghys. Looking at the line from my sailing, I think maybe we were having too much fun chatting and I wasn't concentrating on my sailing! We did get off from the shore easily today, so maybe my percentage of problems is decreasing as I get more experience.

We had a very gentle sail up the coast, since the wind was quite light. One thing I had changed was the outhaul on the mainsail. I don't have a block/cleat system, its just tied to the end of the boom, and I had left it as rigged when I bought it. Today I tightened the outhaul which made her less susceptible to backwinding off the genoa, but less power on a broad reach, so I will definitely add a block/cleat system this winter. The cunningham became more effective with a tightened outhaul too.

I want to rig her for 'cruising' so I am thinking of getting reefing points put into the main sail this winter, plus buying a mast-head buoyancy system. Richard said that some of the things would make her performance increase and some decrease, so its a bit strange... yes, I guess it is - compromising between saftey, performance and trying to keep the number of ropes in the boat to a minimum, while having those that I find make a significant difference.

I set the Dhekelia Sailing Club into my GPS from Google Earth and thought I would use that as my navigation waypoint. I had been somewhat concerned about coming into Dhekelia Sailing Club as there are rocks both sides of the main entrance, but one of the club members last weekend had told me that there was a trot line the other side of the club and so long as we stayed outside the swimming area that we could use that.

We sailed past a couple of times, tacking in closer and I was looking at the entrance from the sea, thinking about my approach. I decided the CESAC bay with the trot line was the easier option so I went about [yes, I know that would have been better as a gybe but I didn't want to mess it up with all those experienced sailors watching and I did do a gentle gybe coming round a few minutes later] We sailed in, furled the genoa and then rounded into the wind and picked up the trot line. Worked like a treat.

You can see from this enlarged Google Earth image why I was concerned. Actually looking at the line I took, I was a bit closer than maybe I should have been as there are shoals around the rock that you can see on this image. I do have a relatively shallow draft and the centreboard was partly up... so we didn't feel anything. You can see club boats on the trot line in the Google Earth image, so the satellite image must have been from a weekend.



The club members were just off for a race as today was a club regatta and we went in to eat our lunch and watch from the cub house. We watched and chatted with members and then when the others came back we met more... they were all very friendly and happy for us to join.

Richard seemed quite keen on Dhekelia Sailing Club as the people were so friendly and as there are club boats available to sail. I was interested because the club actually has courses. One of the members said that I sail at RYA level 2 at least... OK, but what does that mean? I would actually like to have some sort of qualification... but preferably what is called 'Certificate of Sailing Proficiency' as that would enable me to charter boats on holiday, but... thats a US certification. Or maybe get my RYA Day Skipper which would be even better...

Anyhow, when the club boats came back in I watched carefully as one of the Laser 2000's came in to the main harbour and then gybed round to the slipway/pontoons. Seeing the line they took would give me confidence to do that in the future.

Dhekelia Sailing Club is a very nice friendly club. We enjoyed their hospitality and then had a gentle sail back across the bay to the Larnaka Nautical Club. I was working off a waypoint on the GPS, partly I want to get used to sailing to waypoints and partly as it was hazy with the sun behind all the landmarks [we particuarly use a large globe gas tank as a landmark] and so the shoreline was unclear till we were about 1.5 nautical miles from the club.

Our club members are all off in Limassol at a race there, so the electric winch was not available. But I had an old warp of a yacht which we tied to the launching trolley and to the tow ball on my 4 wheel drive and pulled it out with that. It was easy, except because the warp was long I almost ran out of space in the car park. An alternative possibility would have been to have a block attached to where the winch normally attaches than I could pull diagonally across the car park.

26 August 2007

The day started off well enough, we had problems getting off from the shore [about 30% of the time we seem to have problems getting off the shore right now] and we were drifting back without real steerage way so James and I tried a roll tack [ie bouncing the boat] to go about in order to get steerage... which worked.

Then we sailed off and watched his parents launch their spinnaker, so thinking they were on a downwind run we goose-winged with a whisker pole, which worked well... only to discover that they were not on a downwind run and so going in different directions. so we dropped the whisker pole and chased them.

They did another run with the spinnaker and so we tried another thing that I had wanted to try... 'heaving to'. First attempt failed because James couldn't pull the genoa round, but then we tried other technique: Going about and keeping the genoa on the wrong side. Then lashed the tiller with the traveller rope [is this a guy, sheet or what?] and the boat heaved to beautifully. I had a drink and James reckoned that if there wasn't a thwart in the middle he could dance a jig!

Sailed off and did a photo shoot [Neil taking pictures of us] by which time the wind was picking up somewhat and it was glorious sailing weather. We then did a failed attempt to pick up a balloon somebody had let drift. Balloons [and plastic bags] are really bad for the turtle population as they chew at them and the back gets trapped in their throat and they die of asphyxiation.

At the end of that they suggested we make for a fishing harbour on the north coast of Larnaka Bay for lunch. I didn't know where this was and had forgotten our GPS so said we would follow them. In light winds we seem to do better than the Laser 16 but in stronger winds they do much better than us. So following [especially when they were flying the spinnaker] was somewhat at a distance.

The wind was picking up a lot and I felt we were really over-powered and so we furled the genoa and followed more slowly with just main. Somebody more experienced could have probably kept the genoa up, but for me it was too much. Discretion is better part of valour in sailing for me...

So we followed at a distance and then saw Neil and Paula coming back flying their spinnaker. I was pretty amazed I must admit, since I would have preferred a reef in the main. Choice time... our walkie talkies were not working... I would have preferred to turn back, but throught that maybe the fishing harbour would be calm and we could wait for the wind to die so we sailed on.

We found what we thought was the fishing harbour [later turned out we were wrong, this was another harbour] but it had rocks around and I was definitely not happy trying to get into that with the wind gusting and the waves as they were so I decided to turn back and although Niel and Paula were on pretty much a downwind run which would have taken them towards the beach at the entrance to Dhekelia I decided to broad reach across the bay back to the club and would turn to the beach if the conditions got worse.

The sailing was pretty nasty coming back across the bay - the waves choppy and seeming to come from different directions at times. I was glad that I had been out sailing with a Danish friend Torkild in the Mirror when the boat was rolling because it gave me confidence to sail through it with the boat rolling severely.

Then I remembered reading somewhere that if you raise the centreboard in these conditions, although it doesn't help your overall direction, the boat slides off the waves somewhat and doesn't roll as much, so we tried this and found it to be true. Trouble is, the centreboard is stiff and James has problems moving it at times. I had been thinking of adding 4:1 blocks for both up and down centreboard.

It was a slow sail back across the bay and tiring helming, not something either James or I particularly enjoyed, but I in retrospect it has given me more confidence on the boat... it can't all be plain sailing!

Getting close to the club we found the wind was squalling which James felt was probably the wind 'playing under the clouds'. Two claps of thunder and some rain. Yes... in August! Not much rain to speak of and then the wind dropped somewhat so we unfurled the genoa and the boat picked up speed again. I probably could have unfurled the genoa earlier actually, but the sea was so messy that I was happy just plodding on under main only.

When we arrived back at the club I expected to see Blue there before us, but it wasn't. I thought Neil and Paula, seeing the gusts had sailed to the beach and were waiting it out. James was very concerned and we tried to phone them - we often take mobile phones with us in halloumi cheese containers [which are waterproof and cheap containers, but some of the Cypriots find funny that we use for this]. No answer.

Just as we turn round we see Neil and Paula walking into the club... we rush over and find that they had had problems. They had capsized and been unable to right their boat. Apparently Laser 16's are reputed to be difficult to right. It had gone right over 180 degrees and the centre board doesn't have a rope/block to keep it down so 180 upside down the centreboard had dropped inside the hull. I had decided to add ropes and blocks for up up and down with cleats as one of my 'winter jobs' for our boat and now I am sure this is something to do!

Anyway, they had difficulties and eventually were rescued by someone in a motor boat who towed them to Dhekelia Sailing Club and club members helped them right the boat and then get it onto the shore. Tomorrow we will pick it up on a trailer. In the process they have lost the tiller and the top of the mast.

18 August 2007

The screws holding the pindle to the rudder stock had pulled out last week, so I took it home, drilled out the rotten wood around the screw holes, filled the screw holes with wood and glue and re-screwed the pindle to the rudder stock. This was the same problem I had with the wooden rudder stock for the Mirror I sailed before the Wayfarer.

This week, the screws pulled out again - the wood filling was not solid enough to hold them. So I chatted with Nicos who is the sailing coach at the club and he added two extra cross pieces of metal to the pindle with screws into new solid wood in the stock. Its not pretty but it will hold for a few more weeks till we travel [we are away for most of September and October] and then I will, over the winter, build a new rudder stock. I looked at the stock of the Laser 16 which my friends have - its made out of metal and wont rot. I looked online and saw a metal one advertised for the GP14 on ebay - looks better than the one for the Laser 16.

James, my regular crew, was sailing an optimist, so I had Paula [his mum] and Dan [a friend from the UK] as crew while Neil had other friends from church as his crew. We overhauled Neil [first time ever] and I found that one of the problems I had been experiencing was not what I had thought at all. What I had experienced were occasional times when the boat appeared to get into patches of no wind. In reality what was happening was that I was falling off the wind and was turning the wrong way and so was not picking up wind at all, but [slightly] running with the wind so it felt like no wind.

All in all a good day sailing. The picture is of Neil sailing Blue solo, taken by Paula from my boat.

11 August 2007

We sailed about 16 nautical miles on a day mainly practising tacking. We found that rigging on shore and just hoisting the main works much better after last weeks problems. James parents are practising with their spinnaker [Spinnaker is next season for us, I don't have all the blocks for the guys etc and I am not yet confident enough to fly a spinnaker]. The wiggles are where I got distracted watching the others with the spinnaker and forgot about helming!

According to the calculation the maximum hull speed is 5.36 knots [1.34 x square root of the lenght in feet], but on tacks we are seeing speeds of 6.5 up to 6.9 knots and running with the wind 5.5 knots. We are almost as fast as James parents now, but they are pointing much better than us. We discuss this over lunch with them and in the afternoon [cyan track] we try pulling the traveller to the centre of the boat in so that the sail twists more and it seems we can point better like that.

We have a whisker pole but just did training runs this week, maybe next week we shall try this. On the runs I did sit on the stern deck and James came right back to the stern to lift the front and try to get her to plane better. She planed very well on some of the waves which was good fun.

4 August 2007

James, my regular crew, is back from the UK and so we go out sailing [his parents have a Laser 16 which we sail alongside]. The wind was gusty and our regular method for rigging the boat is to attach kicking strap and main sheet etc to the boom when on the water [there is normally an onshore wind and reversing the boat down the slipway with the sail hoisted would be a problem]. Bad day today, as I was attaching the mainsheet a gust hit, the boom flew over suddenly hitting me in the face and knocking a chip off one of my front teeth. I lose a shackle pin over the side in another gust.

We decide when we get back to use a different method of rigging - attach all the ropes to the boom before getting into the water and then just hoist the sail when on the water. The main halyard is slightly too short [winter maintenance job] so the main sail is slightly blowing around... but better than losing a tooth!

On the water it is force 3 gusting 4, great sailing. but one gust rips the wipping off the kicking stap so we have to jury rig that and another gust pulls the car off the traveller system [the traveller endstop also goes overboard!]

But I am pleased with the sail back - holding the course worked well and was pretty straight.

27 July 2007

A beautiful calm cruise up the coast with two friends. Approx 7.5 nautical miles. Started off with very little wind. Then got becalmed, Nicos in the sailing club rescue boat came out and offered a tow back. We said we hoped for a little wind and so he said if we take the sails down he will know we need a tow back. Out came the iced coffee... almost no sooner said than we get wind and are sailing at 3-4 knots.

We look for a nice buoy to moor to, up near Dkelia Garison. Fist time I had pick up a buoy so enjoyed coming round into the wind as we approached to stop as we came alongside. Dave had a problem grabbing the buoy so during the week I bought a boat hook.

28 May 2007

A couple of weeks ago a Tornado hit the sailing club destroying my first boat. Because this was the beginning of the season I set about immediately looking for a replacement. Eventually I bought a Wayfarer dinghy. It's old but seaworthy and although it needs some maintenance work I sailed her the day after I bought her last weekend. This is a picture of my first minutes sailing her with Neil, a friend who is a good sailer and there to give guidance if needed. The Wayfarer is one and half times the size of the Mirror and develops much more power. After about 30 minutes we swapped crews to have his 11 year old son as my crew [which has become our normal crewing arrangement].

Oh and yes, the sails are filthy because the boat had not been sailed for a few years!

Last Saturday I took my youngest son and a couple of friends out sailing in her. We had a great time. Later in the day I did a minimal amount of the maintenance needed [changing the main sheet to original centre Wayfarer layout from a somewhat difficult to control end of boom main sheet arrangement for the sailors amongst you] ready for today...

This week in Larnaka is the celebration of Kataklismos, which is a rememberance of the flood when Noah, his sons and animals were saved. So logically I suppose, on the Monday of Kataklismos the sailing club has a regatta where we all sail round to the main Finikoudes sea front of Larnaka. Here's the club group picture I took. There are only two English families in the club, all the rest are Cypriot. The club is sponsored by McDonalds for this, so you can guess where we had lunch! You can probably see the McDonalds t-shirts on some of the members.

Among the flotilla we had three knock downs and a couple of capsizes on the mini-cruise, fortunately we were not one of them. I was sailing very conservatively, I had hurt my back slightly a day or so before and decided that I did not want to practice capsize drill today!

Sailing conservatively meant that there were only two other boats arriving after me on the outward leg and we were the last dinghy back on the return leg. Admittedly the club boats are 470s and Lasers so even if I was sailing hard I could not have caught them up. Anyway it was great fun.

This is the Google Earth map to show our route. The zig-zag at the top is sailing back and forth waiting for the rest of the flotilla. Somehow the GPS lost some of the track so there are gaps. Oh well... interesting anyhow. We sailed 11 nautical miles today.

12 May 2007

A couple of years back I bought a second hand Mirror dinghy very cheaply and have been learning to sail. And loving every minute of it!

Only last weekend I had a really great time with sailing around the bay here with the 11 year old son of a friend of ours as my crew. The weekend before I had this lad and my 11 year old nephew as crew. We had a really great time and I was looking forward to sailing again this weekend as the week has been very tiring... we have a couple of new staff members [one short term] and have been supervising them and remotely supervising development in Egypt and... yes it goes on at the normal pace of my life.

Friday morning I woke to see the curtain dragged out of the window and the windows rattling and storm around. It was louder and more violent than any storm I have experienced before. The rain was nothing like rain in the UK, it was kind of like opening a fire hydrant from the sky and letting it rip.

We have had heavy rain before and I was concerned about what was happening at the office as last time some water had come in through the office roof and though I had asked a builder to look at it, he had not yet had time to come. In God's provision one of the two staff members was staying in a guest room at the office and so he got up and moved some of the computers and boxes and boxes of software out of the water pouring down through the ceiling. Roads were flooded... this is what it looked like on one of the roads between the office and our home.

When I got to the office, the french windows from the balcony to my office had blown in and water had also come across the floor of my office. Attached to the balcony is a satellite dish which downloads material off satellite which we then re-encode to upload to the Internet. The dish was no longer pointing at the satellite but at a neighbouring tree. It took a while to re-point the satellite dish correctly and get the radio station re-broadcasting on the Internet.

While I was doing this I had a phone call from a friend of mine saying that a tornado had crashed through the sailing club and although their boat was fortunately undamaged, mine was not so lucky. They had put it back on the trailer, but I was not going to sail her this weekend. So after lunch I drove down to the sailing club with my wife. On the way we saw this caravan that had been about 50 metres away on the beach last weekend now wrecked alongside the road.

My dinghy had also been lifted and blown from one end of the sailing club to the other. My friends had put all the parts together and put it on the trailer, but closer inspection showed it was not going to sail again without extensive work.



The hull had been punctured in many places and almost all the panels would need replacing to sail her again. The number of holes was too extensive to look at just a patch here or there.

Because it had been bashed about so much the fibreglass stitching that holds the panels together had all come adrift and it would be almost impossible to get new fibreglass to take to the old wood even if it were repaired. The Bible has something to say about trying to patch old wine-skins with new. Fireglass to old marine ply is pretty similar!

I had spent the winter stripping down and re-varnishing the boom, gaff, mast, rudder and centreboard. Now the gaff [part of the mast] had been damaged and would need a new gaff. All the buoyancy tanks had been damaged, ripping pins and panels apart.

Some of the structural pieces were also damaged. The boat isn't matchwood, but I don't think it's ever going to sail again as it would be much quicker to build a new one [quicker, mind you, not quick] than trying to repair this one.