Wed
Jul
19
2006
the Maltese Falcon - super yacht - classic looking rig
Pointed out to me earlier this week – the Maltese Falcon has been launched, it is a massive (87.5 m) super yacht with a totally modern twist on tradtional clipper riggning (e.g. the Cutty Sark)
It has been designed and built for Tom Perkins (the VC) and made in Turkey.
It is supposed to be the largest and / or fastest private sailing yacht ever built and has a series of fibre optic sensors in the rigging to constantly adjust the angle of the mast / sails units to generate the maximum lift and thus speed for the yacht. Magic!
some links:
Tue
Jul
11
2006
Royal Sovereign Race (I and II)
This weekend was spend racing to Eastbourne via the Royal Sovereign platform on Saturday, and racing back directly to Shoreham on the Sunday.
here is one of us on the Saturday, a beautiful day with enough breeze to get us there on the cruising chute
we won the race down there, which was great and on Sunday we turned around and came back, racing from Eastbourne to Beachy Head and back to Shoreham.
the conditions were big, with 25-35 knots of wind and some fairly large waves. After some mistakes at the start we managed to pull it together and get back in good time, only just loosing out on first place.
overall we came 1st for the event as the race down counts for more points. This is one better than we did last year.
Tue
Jul
04
2006
the new sails - a picture
finally a picture of the new sails, they are very good, but so far untested in stronger winds. We are learning to pack them away after each race and look after them. What we need next is the sailmaker to come down for a day and help us tune our rig to match the new sails and see if we really can get the boat going.
(ps we are still not doing too well in light winds)!
Mon
Jun
19
2006
All about windguru.cz
windguru.cz /com (Shoreham page)
we have been using windguru for our sailing forcasts for a while now, it seems to be fairly accurate (although yesterday it was telling us there would be a touch more wind)!
there are plenty of sites out there offering weather and wind but windguru just seems to do it in a very good way.
In addition to their website they have put in a lot of consideration for their mobile users.
they have 2 mobile versions:
- wap.windguru.cz – for the traditional mobile phone in B&W and fast
- wap2.windguru.cz – for the more modern colour phones with GPRS / Edge / UMTS connections
the really nice thing is that navigation is fast, if you know your location id e.g. Shoreham – 104 then you can tap it in and get to the wind page very quickly, I thought this was very good application of sensible user interface desgin, (I tend to go to several pages on the site and now i know their location ids off by heart).
even better than this is the link generator here you can do a search, specify your units and hey presto they generate a link for you for on your phone, which means you can book mark it and always have it there (rather than tapping it in every time)!, post it to your delicious and you can access it from the phone very quickly. nice work fellas. So the only thing I would add to it is, ‘send it to my phone via sms’ they could charge 25p and I am sure most users would not worry about that at all!
other Maritime / Sailing forcast sites:
- The Shipping Forcast fromt the Met Office (the classic: DOGGER FISHER GERMAN BIGHT, South or southwest 4 or 5, occaisionally 6 later Showers.Moderate or Good … as any one listening to Test Match Special on Radio 4 might have been interupted with)!
These are read out on Radio 4 longwave (so can be heard in Cairo I am led to believe) as well as by the Coast Guard on VHF (Channel 86 for Wight).
(this page on the BBC’s site has a really good map of the shipping forcast metareas)
Mon
Jun
19
2006
New Sails / No wind !
In many ways it was a lovely weekend, sun / sea / sailing / friends etc … so I can not complain.
However it was also some of the most frustrating sailing we have done in a long while. We had our beautiful new sails all full of Kevlar and Pentex and other exciting sounding materials, complex battens and launching bags for the new headsails … and no wind …
More of a bob than a sail, we did manage to get a much higher than usual conversion of wind to velocity but still we did not test the new fellas at all. hrumpf.
