Video of the week

Yea i saw it on the tasa site, awesome

As for my daggerboard I can only assume I hit the anchorage for the cardinal mark I was hoping to round.  Boats nearby had their blades in mud and appeared to be stuck.  We had slightly over stood and so had cracked our sheets and were heading for the mark at very high speed (it was windy).  The next thing we knew was the bow was underwater, I had hit the shroud and the crew was on the foredeck - then we capsized. As I hauled myself up onto the board I realised what had happened and also that the board would never again go up through the slot.

We had to retire and when we arrived back at the club we laid the boat on its side, cut the handle off the top and pulled the thing out of the bottom.  I don't know if you realise the board is reinforced with steel rods.  The tip was bent off at about 30 degrees.  Thankfully the hull was undamaged but then they are built rather solid.

Medway Maniac sent me this photo as a momento.

Originally posted by GK.LaserII Not fantastically exciting but it's the only L II video I could find apart from the stuff on the class website... Shame it's a class thats dying.

Laser 2 was the nicest boat I ever sailed on a three-sail reach, Fireball, 505 and asymmetrics included. Somehow very light and balanced - the video reflects that well. The kite was the nicest symmetric I ever used, set on just the right length pole.

Trouble was, everything bent where and when you didn't want it to! We used a 505 pole, but you couldn't so easily uprate the boom and that telegraph pole of a mast with its diamonds (why?!) and no pre-bend.

The 3000 addresses all those issues, but even though we've kept the kite size moderate and avoided the pitfalls of a lot of assys that can only sail windward-leeward, we've lost that unique feeling of lightness of the L2 on a three-sailer, even if the speed of the 3k is greater.

But would I go back to handling an L2 symmetric kite to get that feeling back? Probably not, but I'd like to try it on a sorted boat with a proper mast and boom. Maybe a project on an old Laser 3000 - add a D-ring to the mast, couple of clamcleats and fairleads to the gunwale, then an uphaul-downhaul on the mast - but the list is getting longer, and it'd be a shame to spoil an L3k - maybe not, then!

http://www.i14australia.org/Nationals0607.html

One hell of a vid

Originally posted by Medway Maniac its diamonds (why?!)

Diamonds have one very big advantage, especially on a shallow hulled boat like the L2 which isn't especially wonderful for vertical stiffness. A single spreader rig with spreaders pushing in relies on the windward shroud tension pushing in on the windward spreader to keep the mast straight.

When both crew are sitting out hard on toes straps then there's lots of tension in the windward shroud. When the crew gets out on the wire the majority of the righting moment comes off the shroud onto the trapeze wire. In fact it will even tension up the lee shroud.
So the result is that as you get out on the wire the windward spreader virtually stops pushing the mid mast to leeward, and the lee spreder starts pushing the mast to windward. The top mast promptly sags off to leeward, the leech goes slack, the power is gone and you have to get in off the wire again...

The conventional solution, it turned out, was to put suicidal rig tension on the boat so that the effect of the crew weight on the spreaders was minimal. The effects of this on the longevity of previously adequately built boats like 470s at the tail end of the seventies was somewhat marked.Arguably the class has never recovered...

The alternative is to use diamonds, which aren't affected by the crew weight on the wire, which means that the mast bend is much more linear and the boat doesn't have to have mayhem rig tension to stay powered up in marginal trapezing weather. It makes a lot of sense.

Also the Cherub that the L2 was based on was a diamonds rigged boat, albeit with a Tasar like wingmast.

Edited by JimC