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.
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