Hurricane Irene

Awning furled, deck chairs lashed down, guy lines on the live oak tree and four moth boats stashed in the garage. I had already broken down Try-Foil to remove the tramps so I could get them repaired so it was the easiest to store. Try-Umph is to the left, Shadowfax (a Magnum 2) is to the right, and Susan's Aftermath (a modified Shelly) is on the dolly.

This time tomorrow we should have 65+ mph sustained winds and up to 12 inches of rainfall.

Oh joy.

Input needed

Okay, to all the M2 owners out there...

My push-rod wand mechanism is different from the Mach2. A couple of pix are below and the relevant dimensions +/- are as follows:

Rod attaches 30 mm from the pivot point and results in a 34 degree swing in the wand to achieve the 24 mm horizontal throw at the bell crank.


Wand length is 92cm fully extended (vertical distance below the bottom of the hull when vertical) and 74cm when shortened up (as it was this past weekend)


The ride height adjustment simply lengthens or shortens the push rod and will cause the max flap up wand position to occur either with the wand vertical (high height) or at a bout a 45 degree angle (low ride height.)

Am I in the ballpark???

Managing off wind sailing

At the Ware River regatta we were presented with lots of breeze and some short steep chop. The downwind legs were interesting. If flying too high the rudder would occasionally ventilate or stall and result in a crash. My approach was to shorten up the wand and to drop the ride height. I'm not sure that's the best approach, so more experimentation is needed in those conditions. At any rate, I complied another video of the weekend's sailing. The battery died before things got really extreme so I didn't get the pitchpole on video.

Ware River Regatta

With apologies to Zallinger's "March of Progress" and the WRYC T-shirt artist, I offer the next step:

August 6th and 7th saw five moths meet for the annual Ware River Governor's cup regatta. It was the largest gathering of moths in the middle Atlantic area to date.

While rigging up we were visited by Ted Causey, who won the moth world championship at Ware River in 1976. Pic by Lin McCarthy.

The breeze was up on Saturday (topping off in the mid 20s with big waves) and we only got in 2 races with some attendant carnage. I won and Bill Beaver took second. Gui Vernieres, John Zseleczky and Mike Parsons rounded out the fleet.

John, Mike, Bill, me and Gui. Pic by Lin McCarthy

After Saturday's second race Bill heard a crack on his strut during a capsize and decided to end-for-end the strut hoping to save the foil. The top (or then the bottom) still decided to part ways while sailing back in. Needless to say he didn't sail Sunday but will surely add to the carnage album.

With Saturday's big breeze, Mike launched and shortly returned to shore figuring that discretion is better than having to repair various bits and pieces. Gui was pleased having a fairly long session in some wind and having nothing break. Neither John nor I had equipment problems, except for the loose nuts at the end of the tillers. We all agreed that whoever managed the offwind legs the best would end up on top. Gui, having his sailboard to play on after Saturday's racing, estimated the puffs in the upper twenties (he was using his 6.5 sqm sail.) The waves on the 2nd race were larger than anything I experienced at Weymouth or at the Gorge -- maybe 2.5-3 ft max. We figured the southeast wind had a fetch of about 20 miles rolling in from the mouth of the Chesapeake.

Me at speed on Saturday. pic by Lin McCarthy

Sunday dawned with still some breeze left over but it had veered to provide flat water. But by the time we got to the starting area it had dropped to sometimes marginal foiling conditions. Lin McCarthy on the RC boat got a nice shot of Gui during one flyby.

Since there were nine classes to grind through the sausage making starting sequence, we decided to bail out and just have some self-started races up to a mark and back. Sunday's sailing was fun even if it didn't count. We got lots of comments, especially from the junior Opti sailors.

I edited a video of the first race and am working on the second tonight. Still pics as I get them. The full set from Lin McCarthy is on the Yahoo! site