This week in Shields 88ing

After what seems like forever, we finally got out to sail 88 in last wednesday's beercan race. There were no other Shields, it was pretty light, but it was great! I've really missed sailing that boat, and we did have another SnS to race against, trying to catch the Teboreks SS50 Challenge. They were definitley in jib/main cruise mode, but they had about 20' on us!

On the 29th we took a Shields 88 "field trip" and sailing our friend Aaron's Etchells for the memorial day regatta. It was really fun, although we didn't do great, we did get a good feel for the boat and improved, with a 5-5-2 scoreline.

Thoughts on the boats: the etchells feels similar to drive upwind, although the sails are a lot more developed so the boat has a super narrow groove upwind, where you're trying to seek out that angle where the inside tells are straight up, but not too high or the luff of the jib starts to go soft. Was kind of 70% on this, but got it pretty well in the last race. Downwind is a little more fun than the Shields in the light, as the boat accelerates better. Niki likes the Shields bow better. Both cool boats, if I lived somewhere where there was no Shields fleet an Etchells would probably fit our style of sailing.

The races were sailing in 4-10kts, light chop. We had this great plan to commit to the right side early, which meant in the first 2 reasons we kept finding reasons to go left! Got in some trouble figuring out the boathandling early, but still felt decent on speed, with one exception. Rick sailed 2 up, at probably around 290lbs crew weight, and was pretty much uncatchable downwind. We were a bit illegal on weight, being somewhere around around 730lbs, which did make us a bit pokey downwind. Still had fun in the last race leading a bit, and the 2nd felt good in that fleet our first time out.

Racing wednesday (I hope) followed by our first series race next sat (as last sat was cancelled due to fog/no wind)

Peanut's in the water!

It's been a tough spring for poor Peanut, as everyones been too busy to take care of the boat. Finally got her in the water yesterday, and can't wait to get out sailing!

If you have a Shields, you probably understand the sheer terror of driving one around, they just don't look like they should be on the road!

This is probably my least favorite part of boat ownership, and I'm lucky to have friends with trucks who will do it for me! Above is Skip Schink towing his gorgeous Defiance yesterday morning. After we launched Defiance I helped his crew rig and tune while he picked up Peanut.

They got stuck in traffic, which makes the whole thing a little more nervewracking as one pictures the boat lodged in the side of a CTA bus, falling off a bridge and other disastrous circumstances.

Once it got there it was pretty smooth to set the boat in the water and get the mast up. Had help from Katie, as well as the Defiance team, and it was pretty painless once the road-time was over.

When we pulled the boat last year, I weighed it on a load cell. This isn't for one design rule reasons, and was more just out of curiousity. In fact, we don't have a weight rule, the only info specs the hull weight at 4600 and the ballast at 3-something k. Adding to that, no one I've talked to is really sure what a Shields, rigged and with hardware, should actually weigh!

Last fall, the boat came in around 5015, which seemed like a lot until I started mentally adding up all the gear, like rig, sails, beercans etc. This spring, after (mostly) draining the deadwood, we were at 4920 in the same trim. I say mostly, because even though I drilled a drain hole last fall, there was still water trickling out this spring. It would be really nice to open up the deadwood and scoop out all that waterlogged poly foam. Perhaps a winter project? We also weighed Skip's boat, and was surprised to see 39 weigh in at 4940. We were both making guesses on the boats, and all figured 39 would be light, as it is a wicked fast light air boat, while 88 tends to go with a little more wind. Guess boat weights off the table for explaining that!

So happy to see the boat in its summer home, and planning to get out soon and test the little changes this winter. Niki and I sat on the boat a bit last night and picked out all the modifications. For a winter in which I planned to not do anything to do the boat, I was surprised to find that I had actually done 16 or so things. Ah well, they're all small!

The rest of the Peanut team has been really busy this spring! Really excited to see members of the crew going out and kicking ass in other venues.

Jacob bought his own boat this spring, a V15, and has really been on fire racing it. I went out the other week to get photos and videos while he won the Vlad regatta.

Jacob and crew Jamie getting one of their many firsts at the Vlad

He may be even more OCD about blogging his sailing than me, and has a great website at www.condorsailing.com Go the Vivondor!

If you've read this blog from the beginning you'll know that Niki started doing bow for 88 2 years ago, and I think she's gotten pretty good. Apparently others agree, as she's been doing bow for Jen Wilsons match racing team in practice this spring. The practice has payed off, as they sailed fantastically at this weekends Chicago Open Invitation match race!

Here's a great shot from Eric Schneider showing the team: Jen Wilson, Sally Barkow, Tod Reynolds, Krista Paxton and Niki up front. They sailed a bunch of great races to make it into the finals, where they faced Jens brother Don! Don prevailed in the end, but it was a great ride to follow via twitter and at the Chicago Match Race Center site. I've known the CMRC team from work, as Chicago Yacht Rigging does their line and hardware, but this summer we'll all be sailing there in addition to the Shields season. Can't wait to get better at starts and rules issues. Heres some more of Eric's pics from the weekend.It was apparently lumpy and kinda cold on the water

Heres the finals, with Don's team of Bill Hardesty (past 88 crew) Hans Pusch and Matt Cassidy. Great job guys!

More updates to come: we're tuning up wed night, and will hopefully get out sailing before Saturdays A series race. It's on!

Proof there is a Shields 88...

But why is it up on blocks???

Niki's out racing in the Chicago Open match race this weekend, which can be followed at CMRC's website. I'll be working all weekend, which is less fun.

Yes, there is a Shields 88...

Sorry! I've been busy at work, busy sailing, and just plain busy, and have let this page slide a bit.

First off, yes we will be sailing the Shields this year. The boats almost ready to go in, but the problem is finding time to launch. It looks like we'll miss the first race, but should be good after that. No huge changes to the boat this year, but will be trying some new tuning and crew setups.

What I (and much of the Peanut team) have been sailing on is the Tom28's at Chicago Match Race Center. I've probably been out 12 times, and all this before the regular sailing season starts! It's been a blast, and is sure to help with Shields sailing, as match racing builds on all the weakness we've got as a team. More later!

The ultimate in high performance low stretch shelving...

I felt out organizational performance was somewhat lacking last year, particularly our sail locker which turned into a giant pile of sailbags, hardware, foul weather gear, a vacuum, a giant pile of dust (the vacuum broke open) rum, Niki's wardrobe, beercans, empty beercans and random other junk. The only logical way to resolve this problem was with a really expensive piece of rope, hence our PBO hanging shelf!

The support on this shelf is 6.3mm PBO, which gives that part of our shelf a 17500lb break, which I think gives us a nice safety margin for beers. We _could_theoretically go with a "heavier" beer than Coors Light, but I'm not sure we should push it.

Seriously though, I had a PBO F40 jib halyard that was essentially useless, as the cover was torn in a couple spots exposing the core. If you haven't used PBO rope before, it's a very strong, very low stretch fiber, but breaks down when exposed to light or water (great thing to have on a boat right?) Well, after cutting up samples for rigging clinics and destructive testing, I was still left with a 20' piece of PBO that couldn't be used in any critical situation, so naturally it became a shelf.

Also updated 88's jib sheets. The sheets we had last year were nice, but a little bit too short for poling out the jib downwind, so I wanted to add about 10' . This was naturally a good time to try out some new 2010 ropes and I cut a piece of Alpha Ropes K-Mix for these sheets. Got to say, I love this rope! It's a very grippy cover over a very tight core. Takes a little bit of extra time to taper and splice, but the finished product is very nice to handle and runs well through blocks. The latter characteristic was pretty important, since the Harken 29mm blocks top out at 8mm line, so the tapers have to be perfect or your jib sheets will hang up in tacks. You can also see the final setup for the jib cleat, the clew blocks and shackle and the jib car.

88 winter update

Compared to previous years, I'm doing very little to 88 this winter, but we still have a couple new ideas to try. I'm making new angled risers for the jib sheet cleats. The stock Harken ones work fine, but with the addition of the extreme angle fairlead, the cleats overhang the risers by quite a bit. It seems like the hard edge would be a line catcher, so I wanted something that kept lines out from beneath the cleat assembly. This are just chunks of teak, at an 18" angle, and beveled so a line should slide up and over the cleat. The angled cut visible on the right one is to line up with the front of our control console.

Someone asked me recently about the legality of this system (above), as they counted 3 blocks per side and figured it meant 6:1 Well, it's definitely 2:1. The line goes up from the car, through tbe block on the clew and back to the car. This makes 2:1 advantage, as when the line is pulled it moves the clew closer to the car at a rate of 1" for every 2" pulled. After that is where it gets confused, as even though it goes through the car block, then sideways to the ratchet block, there is no extra mechanical advantage as both of those objects are fixed. I'd be happy to sit down with a ruler if anyone wants to test this ! The whole thing was added to the class rules years ago, allowing for 2:1 sheeting:

8:21 Jib Sheets
The jib sheets may be rigged with either one or two parts using one or both tracks. (See Specifications 8.7, 8.19, 8.20, 8.22, 8.23) and for the additional cleat 8.6 Cleats
There shall be bow and stern mooring cleats. The type, number and location of all other cleats are optional. However, cleats shall not be of a type or in a location that will alter the lead of the main, jib or spinnaker sheets. The additional about changing the lead is a tricky one, as you couldn't go straight from the jib car to an inboard cleat, as that cleat would then alter the lead of the sheet by pulling the car inboard. The rules require an outboard block to avoid changing the lead, which works out fine as the ratchet is most effective when turning the line 90deg as shown. Luckily this is one of those class rules that got added on after half the Newport fleet just did it anyway!
Niki took advantage of a touchscreen computer at Costco to add yet another mark of Peanut. I think we accidentally set the drawing as the background image, screensaver etc so whoever buys the display model will be quite confused...

Our 2009 jib sheet setup (above) worked great, but took a bit of time to rig before sailing, as we have to run the jib sheet all the way through the car, sail and ratchet blocks. Originally we kept it rigged, and used a large keypin shackle to unhook the 40mm blocks from the sail, but the big shackle meant we ended up 2 blocking the sheet sometimes. See below for the 2 blocked sheet. This was our first daysail, and we had no tack height but the sheet 2 blocked even with a 4" strop at the tack.

To fix this this problem, i got rid of the big shackle, and lashed 2 29mm Ti Lites to each jibs clew, as seen in the first picture. This worked fine, but required running the line through all the blocks (including running the line through the ratchet, practiaclly guaranteed to be be backwards) so I wanted to go back to the original easily rigged blocks-on-shackle approach, but without the 2 blocking problem. It took some work, but theres a Harken shackle that fits over the giant clew grommet (no idea why we don't get a simple ring instead..) but is still really low profile to avoid 2 blocking. Should work great, and means we can leave the sheet rigged. Easy rigging=more likely to daysail!

Partner shims:

Wooden box partner jig

Our old system for shimming the partners fit well and looked great, but was kind of a bear to change between races. More often than not we'd think about moving shims, but wouldn't have the time or the inclination to pound the shims out of place. This year we'll be doing something different, with permanent side shims to keep the mast centered, and smaller, looser fore/aft shims. The sideshims are held in place with 2 screws tapped into the partner box, and fore and aft shims have a notch on top, which should make it easier to make it past the vang bail, which interefered with adding shims behind the mast. I'd also like to try sailing with no shims, and see how the mast floats or pumps. Got to keep trying new things or it gets boring!

Chicago's strictly sail was last weekend, and Fleet 3 had #126 on display. She's for sale, so if anyone wants to buy into a great 1d racing fleet let me know!

Shie... er Etchells1279?

The Jaguar Cup series is where Etchells sailors play in winter.  It's a 4 weekend series, where the boats stay rigged and mast up ready to go so that after flying in you can launch and go.  Much is said about the world class competition, but my main motivation for begging a ride this time around was that it was sailing in Miami in winter!  

Flying down, I took it as a very very bad omen that the inflight movie was "Love Happens."  I finished my magazine, couldn't sleep and ended up watching the whole damn thing.  Terrible movie.   

We were staying at a hotel on a couple minutes walk from the boat, which is very cool.  Random midnight fire alarms aside, this was pretty sweet.  

Morning of the first race was a bit disturbing, as it was not the Miami I had signed up for.  15-20kts out of the northwest and temps in the 40's made it seem like frostbiting in Chicago.  Frosbiting on one of those days we all blow of sailing and play foosball. We sailed out of the harbor straight downwind for about 5 miles, and did not get a chance to put up a chute.  I was a bit nervous about this, as I was theortetically doing bow, which is a job thats come my way about all of 4 times.  Add to that the nuking wind and really unfamiliar boat, and it was looking a bit hairy.  

We pooched the first start a bit, and ended up on the wrong side of the course 

putting us deep in the 30's (54 boats total.)   Add to that we were coming in overstood on the port tack layline, with a ton of very fast (and mostly out of control) boats with spinnakers bearing down on us.  Somewhat more alarming is that I looked down and saw the spinnaker pole trailing along beside the boat.  In the "more terrifying category than the last thing" column was the fact that our lee upper shroud was attached to the spinnaker pole, and therefore not to the boat! Until we could fix this Aaron couldn't tack or luff up, so we were just going to have to risk it with the big line of starboard tackers.

How does an upper shroud come loose like that?   The boat we were on was using hitch pins (shown below) instead of cotter pins or rings to hold their shroud clevis pins to the chainplates. One of our pins worked it's way loose, the clevis pin fell out and voila!, no stbd upper.  Why would you use such a temporary and unsecure way to hold your rig up?  Etchells supposedly switch the postion on the shrouds on the chainplate in very high wind, moving the upper behind the lower in order to stablize the mast by adding bend.  However,  everyone I talked to (including Bill H who won the regatta) said that they never do this. Sometimes just because you _can_ do a thing doesn't mean you should do it, and definitely doesn't mean you should have hitch pins to do it with. 

After clearing the wall of stbd tackers and such, we started tearing around the boat looking for a spare pin.  No luck whatsoever on the pin front, and no gear on the boat had a large enough pin to support the upper with.  We finally pulled a 3/16" shackle off a block, used that to hold the lower shroud in place and swapped the lowers pin to the upper.  This marred up the shackle pin a bit, but less us get in where we could repin the entire rig and retune it for the next day.  So, here's my day one report:

Race 1:  40ish before windward mark, sailed past it in general direction of mainland, retired.  Settings were:  3/4 pins, sheer terror.

Race 3: Drinking at yacht club to returns feeling to numb feelings in body and soul. 

Race 3: Lunch at Chili's. Quesadilla's were pretty iffy. Walk in rain.

As far as gear goes, it was the most I've ever had on for sailing and I was still wicked cold.  Harken shoes were good, Musto pants awesome, 4 layers of fleece good, but my f#%king Harken spray top was either chafing bloody spots on my neck from the velcro, or wide open letting water pour down my torso.  No good!

Day 2 started colder (how? Why?!) and windier than day 1 but at least it wasn't raining.  That morning was probably the least I've wanted to sail ever, but Fred was gung ho and Aaron was determined to get me to race an Etchells at least once, as this was the 3rd time we'd tried to sail one together! My record with Aaron is spotty, Farr40 regatta-no air, etchells regatta-no air, harbor springs regatta-1 nice day and then way too much air...  Very very fast jib and main run out to the course, with water over the bow, and I still hadn't put up a chute!  The first day 2 photo on the www.johnpaynephoto.com site is of us experiencing a jib and main gybe.  

We got a decent start, and were in the low teens around the first windward mark, when we were hit from behind just after rounding.  The other boat made a lot of noise and we'd started circling before realized it was their foul not ours.   Although we tacked well inside the 3 boat length circle, we were well around the mark and couldn't have fouled them.  Ah well!  We clawed back a bit to get 18th.  I did bow with no giant mistakes, just a lot of small embarassments!  A couple notes on how the Etchells differs from the Shields in the front:

-the pole is larger, and since the Etchells has a smaller rig, its kind of funky swinging it around up there. 

-they are so much easier to hike

-this boat had the old style end fittings, not the fancy jam-in angled jaw type, which sucks

-the jib sheets system should in theory be a lot better than ours.  We both have 2:1, but the Etchells adds a fine tune under the deck for about 10:1 purchase, as well as having a jib thats about 75% the size of the Shields jib.  However, this boat had a bunch of odd leads and friction from plain bearing (!) Ronstan blocks, so it was actually significantly harder than the Shields.  If I had an Etchells it would be a bit different.  

-The bow has lots of neat controls to play with: Jib sheet gross, jib sheet fine, tack height, lead car and halyard fine and gross tune.  I would ditch the lead car adjustment, as this boat had the 2 sides tied together, which meant you couldn't adjust them independently for different sea states on different tacks.  It was nice playing the tack and hal fine tune though.

-The spin halyard comes through a hole in the deck, with a cleat, and is tiny little 5mm something or other rope, which slips like crazy.  I made an ass out of myself by taking forever to get the halyard up, and it's probably 90% technique, but I really hate this system for the halyard. 

-Drivingwise the Etchells and Shields are very similar, with the Etchells having more helm but a freer rudder, making it kind of a wash.  You have to steer the Etchells more in tacks, but it seems like it would go upwind with less helm motion, and more of a constant rudder angle.  Very interested to try this again soon.  

Second race we did well on the start, and worked really well together to get to the top mark in good company.  We were 4th at one point, but lost a bit of speed to get passed downwind by a couple boats and ended up 8th, which was a good way to go out for the weekend.  It was cool being next to a world champ this race, and fun to check our progress vs the other great boats.  

Overall it was a bit of a disaster, and miserable sailing weather, but I still had fun.  Really the best part was racing with Aaron and Fred, who are both very experienced, patient with my bow antics and generally great fun to sail with.  I would do these events again happily, and hope to sail with these guys again some time in the future.  

Edit: Naturally, since it's me, I made friends with the BBYC fat orange cat.  Below is  the only photo I have from a weekends sailing in Miami.