Last weeek, a group of Tiddlies traveled to Seattle to attend the 2010 Safety at Sea seminar. They all played hard (some more than others!) and worked hard to complete the two day event. All passed their exams with flying colors!

Timed to coincide with the biannual Vic Maui and Pacific Cup sailboat races, the Sailing Foundation conducts a two-day seminar on safe boating practices and safety equipment.

The seminar, designed and conducted by sailors, all experts in their fields, provides novice and experienced mariners with information and skills required to prepare for sailing offshore, boat preparation, handling heavy weather, recommended safety equipment, and emergencies at sea.

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For our January 21st Meeting at the Maritime Museum we are pleased to announce that the presentation will be by: Dr.Douw Steyn Professor of Atmospheric Science Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, UBC

Dr. Steyn's topic is "Wind for Sailing" • Scales of atmospheric dynamical phenomena and resultant wind patterns. • Wind patterns associated with synoptic scale weather features (airmasses, fronts, cyclones, anticyclones and ridges; typical BC inner coast conditions). • Local wind patterns encountered along coastlines, and around islands (how to exploit local wind patterns to your advantage.

This is a great way to start off our speaker's series and prepare for the sailing season.

The meeting will commence around 7:30PM with the presentation at 8:00 PM. Guests welcome. Entrance at south side door.

Check out what I found on on SailingX.

Glow-in-the-dark draft stripes. The same company, Glowfast, also makes sail tape, rope clutch labels, general purpose tape, safety signs etc etc.

Seems useful both for (a) safety (b) seeing your sail when racing in the dark. Mind you, as Tyler said, glow-in-dark tell-tails would be better :-)

I am a big fan of long distance ocean sailing - by myself - so this race suits my temperament very well. Also it is, quite simply, a great excuse to get in a little 'boat time' over the summer.

In this particular case, "a little boat time" means single-handing a Spencer 35 from Vancouver, to California, to Hawaii and back. Nuts! Think there would be some interesting stories from that trip? How about from his previous two TransPacs, in 2002 and 2004? Or a single-handed circumnavigation?

Meet Jim and Hear his Stories

This Thursday, March 19th, at 7:30.
TCYC's monthly get-together and lecture series at the Maritime Museum.

Profile

• PHRF rating: 201
• Yacht Club: none
• Homeport: Port Roberts, WA
• Occupation: Crane Operator, self-dumping log barge, Seaspan International
• Age: 49 - turning 50 during the race
• Jim singlehanded from his home near Vancouver B.C. to Hawaii and back with his previous boat in 1999. A fun time was had by all; particularly considering that he won every argument and was the hero of every story; life doesn't get any better than that. For this crossing he has a new boat, purchased a little over a year ago, which was promptly hauled out for an 8-month stem-to-stern, top-to-bottom re-fit. For the race Jim has outfitted Haulback with a new full batten main, roller furling headsail, asymetrical kites and twin headsails for heavy air downwind.
  He and Haulback are sponsored for the race by the management and employees of Washington Marine Group . They couldn't spare a towboat for the event so they're sending Jim instead!
• Special thanks: Washington Marine Group; Kyle, Lyle, the whole of the Log Barge Division, the Towboaters and other employees who were all so generous in their support. Thanks to my crew for trading weeks with me so I can have enough time off for the race. Barry, for his ideas and encouragement; Dave Miller at North Sails; Gary at DBC Marine Safety Systems; and everyone else who gave freely of their advice, even when they were wrong. Last but not least, my family, for living with an obsessed boat-nut for the last year or so.

It's the third Thursday of the Month already, TCYC monthly get-together time. With Spring around the corner, we figured you'd want to dust off your cruising skills. So we 'll have our very own in-house Canadian Power Squadron instructor, Rob the-prolific-forum-posting-commander Murray presenting on...

Coastal Navigation, Long Range Weather Forecasting / Cruise Planning

Usual place and time:
Thursday evening, February 19th at the Maritime Museum,
7PM for social (i.e. beer!), 8PM for presentation.

Guests are welcome

Well, here is something you don't see every day: a 70-ft ocean racer with storm jib and tripple reef.

Did you read "When the Going gets Tough" a few days ago? Well, it turns out that druing the attrocious storm in the Luzon Straights every single Volvo 70 ended up taking refuge behind the Philippines. A number of boats sustained serious damage actually - three have retired from the leg and even the ones still racing are "limping" with various broken bits - like their booms! or their forestays etc..

One exception: Telefonica Blue. Bouwe Bekking is my new hero. When every other boat was running for cover, these guys reefed down, de-canted their keel and plowed on.. amazing.. two nights of the worst conditions ever, 40+ knots against the Kuro Siwo current, whipping up 10 meter breaking waves.

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The Maritime Museum and Pacific Yachting Magazine are once again presenting their Ocean Cruising Adventure Lectures. Local sailors share their experiences and practical advice about sailing the world in small boats.

The five lectures will be held in the H R MacMillan Space Centre Auditorium, 1100 Chestnut Street, Vancouver. Single lecture costs $13 or $60 for five-lecture series. Seniors, Museum members and Pacific Yachting Magazine subscribers cost $11 per lecture or $50 for series (prices include GST). Tickets available after December 1. Lectures start at 8 pm on January 30, February 6, 13, 20, and February 27. Tickets may be purchased in advance by phone 604 257-8300, at the Museum, or on the evening of each lecture (doors open at 7 pm).

* January 30 - Glenn Wakefield set off to sail upwind around the world from Victoria and north of the Falkland Islands was picked up by the Argentinean Coast Guard.

* February 6 - Malcolm and Jackie Holt visited 25 countries between Canada and Thailand and share memories of people and land experiences.

* February 13 - Urs Boxler talks about a cruise along the central BC Coast.

* February 20 - Biologists, Barry and Amanda Glickman's trace Darwin's voyage, backwards. Galapagos Islands, Easter Island, Chilean fjords, Straits of Magellan, Cape Horn, Antarctica and more.

* February 27 - Anne Brevig and Martin Vennesland, authors of 9 Years on the 7 Seas, share experiences and favourite destinations on 61,000 NM circumnavigation 81 countries and island nations.

click on the link to download the poster for the series (PDF file)

Under the tree this Christmas was a "SPOT Satellite Messenger". This handheld device is able to communicate your position (determined by a built in GPS chip) via a Global Star communications satellite. The communication satellite then forwards your position and pre-programmed message to pre-defined recipients. Marketed towards emergency use the unit has 4 buttons; "Help","ON/OFF","OK", & "911".

The 911 button is emergency only (no cancellation once activated), the Help button is intended for non life threatening situations, the OK button sends your position. When the OK button is pressed for over 5 seconds this activates "tracking mode" and your position is sent out every 10 minutes. The tracking mode is probably of most interest to the sailing/racing community. The unit can be purchased on sale for around $120 Canadian, and then different levels of service can be licensed on an annual basis. Basic service is around $US 99 and the tracking option is extra, and then they also offer "rescue insurance". The full deal (with fries) came to $US 157/year.

You set up your account profile online and you can specify email or cell phone accounts to receive your message and position, the message includes a link to Google Earth. There is also a feature currently being beta tested which has a "Share Page". This may be the best option as interested people can look up the yacht's location at their convenience rather than being bombarded with emails every 10 minutes. Fancy Free's web page has been linked to show the yacht's current position

It should be possible to have multiple units using the same "share page", this would provide a great opportunity for near real time tracking of distance yacht racing. On the SPOT web page you can set up multiple profiles, you may want a different profile if you are backcountry skiing than if you were offshore yacht racing. Our profile includes the information "35 foot sailing yacht, crew of 9, no life raft", so hopefully if we press the 911 button they will send a big helicopter and we don't have to draw straws while treading water. You can also customize the "OK" and "HELP" messages. Since the HELP button does not activate emergency services you could program a message such "rounded the mark". The unit itself just has the 4 buttons and 4 lights, so any messages must be set up in advance. It is difficult (impossible?) to tell from the idiot lights when you are in tracking mode or OK mode. Manual is not great, so it is worth experimenting a bit first. We were pleased to test it out inside the boat with the unit situated on the chart table and the signals passed through the cabin top without any apparent issues.

Check out the jib "tracks" on this photo (some 40ft euro racer class). I 've seen this done on some old IOR boats. I 've been assuming that the idea had been out-evolved by the standard jib track/car setup we all seem to use today.

Yet those euro-racers seem to be going back to it. Why??

Fancy Free, the writer's Schock 35 recently added an AIS receiver to complement her radar system. It is rare to find a product that exceeds ones expectations and is of great value, AIS fits this category. A ship equipped with an AIS transponder can broadcast a great deal of information, getting as detailed as their draft and rate of turn. Of primary interest to sailors, and overnight racers in particular are the position, speed, and type of vessel.

AIS was implemented by the US Department of Homeland Security/Coast Guard, their website lists which vessels must broadcast information, they include self propelled vessels over 65' in commercial service, towing vessels over 26' with 600hp or more, all tankers, passenger vessels of 150 gross tons, other vessels over 300 gross tonnage. Fishing and pleasure boats are excluded.

To receive the signals your yacht will need a VHF antennae, you can either have a dedicated AIS antennae or use your existing VHF one with a splitter (and suffer some degradation to both signals), the receiver itself, and software that will interpret the information.

On the Schock we went with a dedicated antennae, a receiver ($189) purchased online from Milltech Marine (you can find more expensive receivers with prettier colours elsewhere, try the boat shows), and Coastal Explorer navigation software.

A bundled package of hardware and software is available from Milltech for $500. Adding antennae and a serial to USB converter and taxes would be around $600. Ship it to the Letter Carrier in Point Roberts, pay the taxes at the border and you're done.

Coastal Explorer also has a 10 minute demo version available which can be downloaded, however in the middle of the night when a cruise ship is bearing down, 10 minutes seems very short and $369 very cheap.

A really nice feature of Coastal Explorer is its ability to search the computer ports (I guess you need a laptop too) and identify devices such as GPS, AIS & Magnetic Heading. With your own position and heading the software can then compute "closest point of approach" (CPA) and "time to CPA" allowing you to see if there is a risk of collision when you select a vessel of interest.

You can also project a time vector (assuming constant speed) from your vessel to see if you are going to pass ahead or astern and provide you with an idea of how tight the crossing will be.

Range is dependent on VHF reception, however moored near Granville Island we can pick up and identify all of the transmitting vessels in Burrard Inlet and as far south as Roberts Bank Coal Port. Obviously radar would never come close. I long to get rid of the weight and windage of the radar, but will keep it for the occasional fish boat in the fog.

Check out the following gem I ran into, on the Shannon Yachts website:

Walt Schulz from Shannon has never been short on strong opinions, but what do you think?

What the guys from Ocean think?

(by Capt. Pat, submitted by Roy)

Everyone knows that renaming your boat will bring nothing but bad luck and make your boating experience something that you will want to forget. But what happens when, after months of searching, you find your dreamboat with a name that you just cannot live with. For example, my first love was a 28-foot Alden with the most beautiful lines I'd ever seen. She was named Perfidious. How could anything this graceful be named betrayer of trust? Well, I never bought her, but I often thought that if I had, I would have renamed her Magic, after my wife.

Renaming a boat is, of course, not something to be done lightly. Since the beginning of time, sailors have sworn that there are unlucky ships and the unluckiest ships of all are those who have defied the gods and changed their names. So, is there a way to change a name and not incur the wrath of those deities that rule the elements? Yes, Virginia, there is.

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