Tag Archives: London radio sailing

Beginners Guide to Installing a New Transmitter for Your Boat ….!!

It’s quite hard as a Beginner to deal with some of the barriers-to-entry of radio sailing and especially anything to do with the radio control kit. Most likely in life, you will not have encountered it before!

The first quite likely thing to happen, is that you buy a nice second hand boat and the radio kit does not come with it. You’re “out there” feeling exposed straight away !! However, you can come to the same first-timer problem from quite a few start points.

It’s not all that difficult to do, but the first time it will not feel all that easy either. Whenever you pick up the transmitter manuals, for radio sailing first timers they are no use at all.

There are a multiple of ways to do this, and essentially it is the same process for all brands of transmitter. The most common transmitter brand at our club is Futaba, and this is what I used for the two methods described in this document.

If you are experienced and have some suggestions or amendments to make, please DO send them in so we can include them in a future revision.

Click to access sailing-beginners-guide-pdf-version-to-installing-a-new-transmitter-v1-aug-2024.pdf

Beginner Topic : How Does Your Swing Rig Swing…??!!

If you entered a class with Swing rigs, have you taken a moment to figure out how the swing rig swings ??

I’d thought about the deck level bearing for the simple reason one can see it. But have you considered how the load below deck is handled? I hadn’t until I found a rather smart ring bearing lying on the concrete beneath my boat stand last Sunday. See photo above. That little circular bearing is a press fit (note to self : or “press and glue fit”) into the end of the carbon tube. That goes down the hole through the deck and engages on a little vertical cone at the hog. Then your mast swivels like a merry-go-round !!

Race Report – Sunday 18th August, Marbleheads

We had a hugely sociable time racing on Sunday morning. Six or so club mates turned up to race. We ran it as a single session plus early lunch. Chilly and breezy at first then roasting hot it was….

RU went home again – not sure why. RW put in a couple of races, but then had to leave for family reasons. For the main morning, four of us raced.

The main thing about results was that DA was in. a class of his own on the day. Honestly, in just about every race, one blink and he was gone – a proper horizon job. His boat was beautifully set up and David claimed the boat was winning on its own without him touching the joysticks – well upwind anyway! Very impressive though.

At the start we had a bit of humming and hahing about A rig or B rig. Rohan got his new yellow wind gauge out, proclaimed it was swing rigs, and off we all went. It was fine.

In race three we had a bit of al pile up when RJ picked up a gust astern and ploughed straight over GH’s transom. This led to three of us washing up on the shingle shore and it seemed only reasonable that RJ paddled in to sort out the tangle. Water turned out to be quite warm!!

Divers are in doing maintenance on the pumps so they aim to have 10 metres of water let out to enable that to happen. Allegedly 9.5 metres of that had been removed by Sunday. We still had plenty of water to race, our buoys were still afloat. The plan was to launch and recover from the main FF Pontoon – this was also fine, but stepping on and off the thing, no hands, with an armful of A rigged Marblehead flapping in your ear was not as easy as it looked.

RJ’s journey down the steps to the beach to untangle the F6’s was also fine, but there seemed to be more steps going back up than coming down.