Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Pine Lake Video

Here is some wacky video from the recent sailing session.


Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Trials with More Ballast


I finally have arranged for more a trial with more ballast. Fantasma now sports about 220 lbs. of steel plate as ballast. The plate are fashioned into 6 removable planks held in by hardwood strips.

For this daysail in light to moderate winds, I also added 2 x ~ 80 lb sandbags at the mast. That brings gross up to the 800 - 900 lb range, which is in the ball park for what Matt recommends.

Also on board for part of the session were 2 passengers (plenty of room for 3) and this brought total weight up over 1000 lbs. She handled that fine, more than fine, as I think she liked it even better.

All-in-all she was well behaved and fairly stiff with this amount of ballast.

This jibing photo is singlehanded (8-900 lbs) and shows her level and getting down to DWL.







These close reach and close hauled photos show her slightly heeled and the chine digging in.



























There is still a bit of lee helm upwind in lighter breezes, but the additional ballast has helped.