Tag Archives: rig selection

What’s The Wind Doing at The Club?? Do You Wear an Apple Watch ??

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Wondering what rig you should use today ?? There is simply no better option than looking at the windsock and figuring it out. Do you carry an anemometer in the car?? It’ll sound mad, I know, but I’ve kept one in the car for about 20 years. It cost about a tenner, so it doesn’t owe me anything! The windsock plus an anemometer is great !!

Then I discovered this, on my three year old Apple Watch.

I don’t know how many of us wear an Apple Watch. Quite a few…. Probably at least Apple and Samsung watches can do this trick.

In the photo above, that’s the wind speed and direction at our Club (Datchet) right now. Gust speeds when I check them are usually double the stated number, so easy to remember. So right now it’s 17mph gusting 30-35mph. Quite a lot!

If you have an Apple Watch and this is news to you, like it is to me, then this is how you do it:-

  1. Go to your main Apple weather app which is on the phone when you buy it by default. The icon is a weather cloud with the sun peeping out behind it.
  2. Make sure your Club is a chosen, selected and stored location.
  3. Now go to the Apple Watch app and do two steps

Go to the Weather app that is INSIDE the Apple Watch app. Select your club location from the list. At Datchet for example, I use “Heathrow” – see above.

Ok – now the weather app is set, all you have to do is display it on the watch.

  1. Most watch faces have little gadgets or widgets, but for the watches they call them “complications”. Obviously the tech people created the name before the marketing people could stop them. Probably whatever design of watch face that you have selected in “my watch” will have two or more complications available. In my example above, I am using the California type watch face. You can see at the bottom that two complications are available. I’ve decided to use the “sub-dial bottom” complication for weather.

If you click on that sub-dial field, you get offered a huge choice but page through to “weather”.

There’s a good few options even for “weather” and select “wind”.

And you get the watch face you see at the top.

The Rigs is The Expensive Bit? Well, …Start with Fewer Rigs Maybe??

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In One Metres we have three rigs – big, medium and small. Easy to get your head around ! In Marbleheads, there seem to be …loads of them. If you are buying a used boat, simply take what’s on offer and get going. If you are buying a new boat, what do you do?

Wise people in the Fleet say:-

  • for Club racing, have three rigs (A, B and C) and that will be fine
  • For racing Open Meetings maybe four
  • For National and International, maybe five

In the current times, the fashion seems to be that A is a swing rig (just starting with the class? don’t worry…), and then B and C’ smaller rigs are conventional rigs. So really …big, medium, small just like the IOMs…. What else is there?

Well, you can get C2 and C3, which are based on the C rig geometry and C2 and C3 have progressively lower rig heights for windier days. You can, from some sail makers, also get B2, B3 which are based on the B rig but with progressively lower rig heights. Plus I’m told that B2 is even smaller than C3…. At least, I think that’s it!! Head spinning???!! Don’t worry!!

There is quite a good explanation here:-

http://www.docplayer.net/21859555-Choosing-Rigs-for-Marblehead-Class-Yachts.html

Hilariously, I always tell people that our club has 80-90% of its race days at 12mph breeze and below. So a sail wardrobe of A,B & C will be fine.

As I write (July 2023), the last four sundays have had enough breeze to blow your head off. Probably C3 days… all of them… Terribly exciting with Marbleheads. Anyway, you can only be wrong!! For myself, I’ve decided to start on A,B,C.

For the F6, we get our rigs from here, Red Ant Yachts. They supply A,B,C,C2,C3 :-

http://www.redantradioyachts.com/sails-and-rigs

If you are in UK, there is a UK Red Ant distributor in the shape of the fabulous K7yachts.