21 Oct 22:
The weather forecast held, so we took Skipper's 1965 ALCORT Sunfish WAVE out to the James River for the first time. Plenty of sunshine, or Sunfishshine on the water. Winds 6-8 knots with a light swell.
One of Skipper's favorite things to do while I'm taking pictures is to sail straight at me and see if I move. WAVE's favorite too.
After Skipper sailed by she said "Catch me" as in get to the beach to help her land the boat. There was no way I was going to catch her, and she beached just fine.
I took WAVE out for about 20 minutes, did a few tacks and rounded one of the channel markers, Green 5. Then, as tradition holds, we did a few jibes on the way back to the beach.
We always say WAVE is a 1965 ALCORT, but the truth is she has several newer bits. Her rudder assembly is the "new style" pop up that has been standard since 1971, we did that conversion around 2013 or so. She has a late 70s - early 80s swivel cam cleat for the mainsheet, a 1980s era Barrington daggerboard, a 1994 lower boom and the sail is a circa 1984 Riviera. Most significantly, 1/3 of her bow is transplanted from a 1980 AMF Sunfish named SALLY. Captain Jack painted the deck Interlux Brightside Medium Blue, and to confuse people he added the double wide stripe scheme on the bow that was introduced in 1968, the first year that Sunfish had stripes. To confuse them even more, he put stripes on the stern too, stern stripes did not appear until 1971. So WAVE is a Double-Double.
Our Ford Edge ST SUPER SANDY was the tow vehicle of the day, and WAVE had the smoothest ride that she has ever had, cushioned by the dolly tires. The 6x12 trailer only weighs 700 pounds empty, but that is enough weight to keep the trailer from bouncing over every little bump in the road.
We are really enjoying the convenience of the Roll On Roll Off (RORO) system, keeping the Sunfish on their Dynamic dollies from storage all the way to and from the water, I don't have to lift them once. Or drop them.
Tie downs and straps, there are a few, but not many. I try to find the Goldilocks number, and this setup below is pretty close, 3 straps and 4 tie downs.
For a short haul we roll the sail up on itself next to the spars. Then we take the halyard and work it forward with a marlin hitch, capturing the sail and spars along the way. The excess line can be tied off to the bow handle or the dolly or the trailer. I say bow handle because we know that the internal backer block for the fasteners on our boat is new, and the bow handle is new. If any of those components are of undetermined vintage, I would consider them to be ornamental, and certainly not lift the boat with an old bow handle. We also like bow lines, so on this lash up we tied the bow line aft to the trailer frame, to keel the trailer and dolly from sliding forward during deceleration.
The blue line is not really needed, but it is a ceremonial remnant of WAVE's bow line that held fast to that bow handle during Hurricane Sally....and not much else, as 2 feet of the deck was ripped off by the storm surge. Capn Jack should be proud, that stainless metal plate was part of a system that he devised to cover old holes where a previous bow handle had ripped off. The old wooden backer block was gone inside, so he wrangled a similar size metal strip inside the hull through the hole on the deck, then glued and screwed the strips together to make a deck sandwich, That's not just any metal plate either, it is chemical plant quality stainless, he got his metal shop buddies on the night shift at his old job to fabricate them for him. Jack would call that "Hell for stout."
We keep old towels in the tow vehicles just for this reason, the padding here is more for the sail than anything else. The halyard is marlin hitched around it. Seen below is also one of three straps that we use, this on is captured by the halyard cleat and angled forward, to keep the boat and dolly from rolling backwards during acceleration. A note on straps, they should be snug, but not tight-tight. Ratchet straps especially can exert thousands of pounds of force, enough to break a deck edge or force a roller up through the keel.
Strap 2 of 3 is captured by the swivel cam cleat and angled backwards, to keep the boat and dolly from (fill in the blanks) rolling __________ during ________ . We can also see where the white mainsheet is starting its marlin hitchery and will head aft to the stern.
INTERMISSION: Eeeeeeyew! We were spoiled with soft white Appalachian quartz sand down in NW Florida. Here at the Mid Atlantic station the river sand is a coarser grain and contains among other things, blue quartz from the Blue Ridge Mountains, good old, brick bits from centuries old coastal settlements, mud and iron from all the ships that the explorers abandoned here. And clay, lots of clay :)
BACK TO OUR PROGRAM: The mainsheet marlin hitches the towel around the spars, and we use a few wraps around the bridle to take up excess sheet and secure the spars. Strap 3 of 3 holds the stern down
So to recap, WAVE has now sailed the Pacific during her time in Hawaii, tacked and gybed in the brackish waters of the Gulf of Mexico and now can add an Atlantic estuary to her resume. Probably appropriate that Skipper wore her GANNET hat for the sail today, a gift from our friend Webb Chiles, a serial circumnavigator and his Moore 24 GANNET.
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