Update : Lots of members are away (Easter and all that) so I was expecting the Club to be quiet. Not so!!
It was a cracking blue sky day with bags of top end A rig breezes around. Out on the water, the Proteus design work-up was well under way. Craig and Nigel had Proteus N and Proteus N+1 out there, and Phil H was driving Craig’s original Vanilla IOM design as a benchmark.
I’m ‘off games’ so was delighted to find Hugh and Rob V measuring up Rob’s new F6 Marblehead which Rob hopes to campaign to the Worlds.
I’d seen some IOM measuring previously but it was really interesting to see Hugh getting the rigs registered for the Marblehead. Learned a whole lot from both of them, I can tell you.
After a jolly sociable lunch, Craig and Nigel continued the Proteus calibrate-and-practice routine on the north course. To my eye, Proteus N and N+1 were performing very similarly indeed as the gusts swept through the course. Nigel was especially happy with the rig pre-bend now. I shall not reveal what “N” has reached, but it’s pretty amazing!!
You may have read that the Marblehead Rankings at Datchet last weekend had a few wilder moments weather-wise. My goodness, Nigel B had his share of issue management on the Sunday !!
For Nigel, it turned out to be damp in the receiver pot. I shall shortly put a “Beginner’s Guide” article on the website about how Nigel went about diagnosing this particular type of “lost radio contact with the boat” occasion. It was really quick and only one race was lost – very impressive!
Before I do that, I thought you might like to see Nigel’s highly ordered approach to the interior of the radio pot itself.
If you take a look at the photo above, note:-
Both battery and receiver attached to the upper side of the pot with velcro to keep them away from washing moisture in the bilge. The receiver sockets are uppermost as far away from trouble as you’d expect to get. Can you see that both battery and receiver are about as close to the lid as possible?
Vapex LIFE battery I believe, which last time I looked means the XT30 connector is a special order item!
Relaxed approach to antenna management – ha !! Looks neat though.
Nigel has two great additional tips:-
1/ Fit a breather pipe so that plunging a “warm” hull into cold water doesn’t suck in water through some weeny hole as it cools. GH says it can also help the hull to stop pumping the air pressure through waves. Try flexing the sides of a modern Marblehead and you’ll see what he means. The general idea of both members is that this is a great way of keeping the hull dry inside. By the way, I noted at the weekend that around half the fleet had breather pipes fitted. Many had a special little Sails-etc breather post (very smart looking sort of shark fin thing !), but on Henning Faas (spectacular) new Niou Niou it was a simple pipe buried in the deck patch. This approach is also favoured by PH and k7yachts here at Datchet.
2/ The standard pot comes with a thin plastic shim which sadly does not prevent water ingress. NB says that Tony Edwards had recommended getting a sheet of 2mm foam off amazon and putting that inside the pot lid as a seal. Highly recommended as a near to perfect closure. You can see it in the photo above.
3/ I must say too that it can be a good idea to keep a little vaseline in the tool box to smear around the pot lid thread for water proofing.
The Clubhouse was very busy owing to a large number of eager Optimist Sailors being held ashore on their training event!! Galley revenues were up!!
It was a misty 1 gusting 2mph kind of day… cold too.
Five of us at the club today. Buddies are forgiven for staying under the duvet – it was minus one…. We’re having a bit of a run with adverse weather, but unexpectedly it turned into an extremely interesting day.
You may have read a week or so ago about Craig’s new IOM designs named Proteus and Nimbus sweeping the podium at the Hampton Court on January 5th. (Nigel won it). They brought two of the design iterations of Proteus for us to see – both Proteus, but several slight differences between the two. They are 3D printed in four sections and immensely strong. I won’t put up all the photos here for the sake of Craig’s confidentiality, but you’ll be interested to see the long distance shots.
The blue boat (54) is Nigel, currently out of camera shot.
Note that as is the 2024/2025 trend, the booms positively hug the deck for improved aero-dynamics. You won’t be able to see it, but they are actually each printed using different material…. part of the experiments. There are also some tests on these of different thickness to establish whether thicker means stiffer, faster etc.
Datchet Radio Sailing - Making It All Much Easier !! 