Category Archives: Beginner’s Topics

Beginners Guide to ….Sail Numbers in Radio Sailing

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One of the things that immediately strikes the new entrant to Radio Sailing is the sail numbers. It’s not like big boat sailing at all !! By the way, the size, spacing and gaps of the numbers and country characters are quite carefully controlled in the International Racing Rules – see the radio sailing appendix.

Very quickly you will see that restricted by space on the sail, and as a general rule, we only use the last two digits of the hull number which should also be clearly shown on the boat…. so we all hope within 100 numbers we shall not to have any duplicates at an Event or in Club Racing. Of course, duplicates can arise in a race and on entry the PRO might ask one competitor to add an extra digit, by convention a “1”…. so that competitors can be easily told apart. A “1” is relatively easy to fit in to the space available. Remember this requirement though when you prepare to attach your sail numbers to the sail – leave a bit of space!!

If you think about it, a very small group of number combinations can be ambiguous when viewed through either side of the sail. I must admit, I’ve been caught out as a finish-line judge on a bright sunny day by this. By convention, skippers with such numbers can consider whether they also should pop a “1” in front of their number.

So if you have just one boat, one class … as most of us Club Racers do… then all that’s sensible and fine. Even if you have two or more boats, no problem really.

For multi-boat owners, there’s also another option – personal sail numbers. Each MYA district keeps a district register of 100 numbers and if there is one available you get to keep a two digit number for several years in exchange for a fee. All your boats can then bear that number on their sails. There are some things to think about:-

  • Is the number you are allocated already in use in your Club Fleet or in the Open Meeting Fleet in which you race? (Availability is rare, so in all likelihood you simply take the number that is offered. ) It might determine if you wish to go this way or not.
  • Realistically, and for re-sale purposes, you are going to want to go with stick-on sail numbers. SailboatRC say that using indelible ink is the only sensible option, but I must say that is not my experience so far. In addition to indelible pen based numbers, I also have stick-on numbers from K7yachts. No problem with those so far.

Is that it?? Not quite…..

If you are going to race Marbleheads and Ten Raters, they can share the smaller rigs. As most of the cost lies in the rigs, lots will have this on their minds. So obviously having the same number on each boat is going to help life a lot. At a club like Datchet which races both Marbleheads and Tens, this is a pretty topical idea – after all the excitement about the hulls, most of the money is in the rigs.

You can imagine that as the sport grows, the demand for personal sail numbers soon outstrips supply. Below, I attach a recent announcement for Metropolitan and Southern District that they are going to introduce another bank of 0-99 numbers to help meet demand. We had some chatter at the Club about why there’s no “1” on the front (or similar idea), but we have policy and practice to help with duplicates in any event, so it’s good to see MYA innovating its way forward on the subject.

Personal Sail Number Announcement- Met & Southern District

Beginner’s Guide to… Mainsheet Posts..!!

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There’s enough to get your mind around when you start radio sailing, isn’t there?! You take some pieces of kit for granted naturally (!).

Probably within one or two outings, you’ll have adjusted, or simply fiddled with, your mainsheet post and perhaps wondered, “What’s down there?”…. “can you adjust the friction?” etc

Probably most of us (UK) are using Sailsetc mainsheet posts. Both mine are made of a kind of slippery PTFE type material and the crucial thing above deck are the entry and exit holes.

https://www.sailsetc2.com/index.php/sheet-post.html

On my IOM, the post is at a racy angle,… and on the Marbleheads it is simply vertical.

The post slides snugly into a tube below deck. What’s underneath?? Well, carefully slide it out and let’s take a look at what you will see…..

The most crucial thing is that you will immediately see how to adjust the sliding friction. Your post might feel just right and hold its position. You probably know that the general idea is (1) adjust the post as high as is feasible on sailing day so that your mainsheet run to the boom is near horizontal (2) on a gusty day, consider sliding the post down little to make the rig slightly more springy.

There are three components down there:-

A nylon bolt (white in this example) which screws into a pre-tapped hole in the bottom of the post. On this one, you just need a flat head screwdriver or a weeny spanner.

There’s your first adjustment right there. The limit of how far you can push the post down the tube is set by that screw head which will sit at the bottom of the tube in its furthest down position. The further you screw it in, the lower your post can sit.

On the post is an adjuster nut (black in this example) then a little rubber washer on the end. There’s your second adjuster. The tighter that nut screws the rubber washer to the bottom of the post, the more the rubber washer bulges…. the more it presses on the wall of the tube… the stiffer your height adjustment gets.

That’s it !! Pull your post out and take a look!! Clever in its simplicity.

A story of a third adjustment:

We may be wrong, but yesterday it looked on my Marblehead B and C rigs as if my mainsheet post did not quite want to go down low enough. It was catching the boom on both rigs as they travelled across, and I couldn’t quite deploy enough kicker to close the leech enough… so I had a free leech kind of sailing day.

I was hoping to simply screw the adjuster in a couple of mm’s to get the minimum post height down a bit. No such luck…. the screw was right in. So in a fleet conference (!) we resolved that I should instead take 5mm off the post.

See that little black mark on the post casing above?

You don’t want to go lower than the exit eye clearing the deck (see top photo), but there’s essentially lots of adjustment available in the tube once you get the limits right.

In a gentle vice, I found it reasonably easy to cut with a very fine hacksaw and cleaned up with a file. Taking 1-2mm off would have been tricky, but 5mm was fine.

Then, as you’d guess (Murphy’s law applies), the screw hole wasn’t quite deep enough to get the adjuster screw in. I didn’t fancy making the hole deeper and re-tapping the thread. There was a generous amount of thread showing on the bolt, so I resolved to take 5mm off the end – a Stanley knife and a snipper did the job rather nicely.

Should be OK – we need another 15mph gusting 30mph day to give it a trial run.

Transmitter Type and Snug-Cover, Best Fit…..!!

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We had something of an “ah ha” moment here the other day when the Domestic Steering Committee (a seamstress of note), reminded me that transmitters and snugs are a 3-dimensional design challenge not easily thought of or seen in 2D…

We went back to the snug and transmitter inventory and tried all combinations of transmitters and snugs to see if basically it really is “choose anything you want”. If you’re a Flysky or Futaba user, you might get an “ah ha” moment too.

First up, when I use my Radiomaster Pocket I realise now I’ve always tended to use it without a cover. The transmitter is so ridiculously robust I suppose it felt best to use it in the open air. It was anyway so small it is lost inside a snug.

The second really important thing is that my fabulous Catsails snug is a terrific cover and will basically take anything you want to pop in there with ease – with a Spektrum it can easily accommodate the stubby aerial at any angle you prefer.

It’ll be interesting to see what SailboatRC come up with in their forthcoming snug design.

What’s the Thing About a 3D Snug Design?

It’s in the implementation….

The Steering Committee’s head seamstress pointed out there are differing approaches here to creating a 3D space for the transmitter. Catsails are basically using what a dressmaker thinks of as “darts”… apparently… there’s a single seam with different material sizes each side of the seam causing a ‘compartment’ effect.

The Rooster…

That brings us to the Rooster…. with a different approach to creating a 3D shape based upon multiple seams. They are creating the 3D space more by design with seams along the edges of the 3D space. (see photo at the top of this article)

Can you see there are four seams on the Rooster?? Taped flat on the outside (the Catsails outside seam is “piped”) and also miraculously also flat on the inside for comfort maybe…

In sewing, this is apparently called “flat felling” or “flat locking”. Just so you know…

Given the two people that will have had a big hand (sic) in designing the Rooster snug, it suddenly comes as no surprise to me now that the Rooster 3D space is a really great fit on Flysky and Futaba, like it was designed for them. Like a glove….. My lovely Spektrum is a better fit in the Catsails snug. The antenna stem is something of a compromise inside the Rooster. Enjoy choosing!