On 13 November 2000, Meryl and I joined Denny in the cab of his truck and took Zygote for what Denny called ‘the last time she will do 40 miles an hour’ as we left Sam L Morse Co and headed for the water.
That was one of our few disappointments: we only got up to 38 mph.
Next morning at 08:28 in Long Beach Marina, I discovered one of the drawbacks of owning a BCC28: a stranger rapping on the hull, bursting to know from where such a beautiful boat had come.
We all know that most things in sailing are learned the hard way. And I admit to being a slow learner and doer. I took close on a year to realise that Forespar had rigged the outhaul control line on Zygote incorrectly (it was made with a swaged eye splice directly to the outhaul car). I’ve only just recently cut the wire rope and swaged a new eye splice that I shackle direct to the clew of the mainsail (and so change the angle of the turn, making the outhaul easier to adjust and stopping the wire rope from chewing into the outhaul track).
I’ve also learned heaps from this Owner’s Group - including learning just yesterday that the parasitic current drain from my iCOM SSB is probably keeping a crystal warm and happy.
As part of passing on lessons I’ve learned from you and others, I’ll cascade a series of attachments to this message. The attachments are chunks cut out of the Operating Manual I wrote for Zygote. I cut out those chunks to make the OpMan smaller and more manageable. And to have small booklets to indocrinate guests and new crew (such as friends and family who will join us for various legs of our next voyage to Singapore and then thru Indonesia to Australia, and then back to Penang again, should we live so long). You don’t have to read download or read them!
Attached is Zwatch.pdf (about 548 KB ) compressed ever so slightly as Zwatch.zip (about 522 KB ).
It’s Zygote’s “Watch-keeper’s Manual”, an attempt to raise the standard of the lookout on board (especially while I’m on watch). The shipspotting section keeps the 6 year olds amused.
Attached is Zpraxis.pdf, about 1.3MB. It’s an aid to memory for me, a teaching tool for new crew, and a workbook for recording some data while voyaging. My attempt to remember how to sail at least as well as I used to, and to get others to sail at about the same standard. You can probably do better.
To work around the Forum’s rules on max file size and file type, the file is presented as a 2-part zip file. And then one part has been renamed. So to join the parts together, you need an unZip client, such as WinZip, and then do the following:
Download Zpraxis2.zip and Zpraxis2a.zip (580 KB and 571 KB );
Rename Zpraxis2a.zip to Zpraxis2.Z01 (ie remove the terminal ‘a’ and rename the file extension ‘zed zero one’ or, for those of you who are challenged by dialect, zee zero one);
Point your unZip client at Zpraxis2.zip (not at *.Z01).
Attached is Zsib.pdf, about 475 KB, compressed as Zsib.zip, about 409 KB.
This is slightly updated from the version I had earlier posted on the yahoo.com group site (thank goodness we’re no longer with yahoo.com, so I don’t have to question the ethics of the treatment of Shi Tao by yahoo.com; on the other hand, I don’t remember any cases of censorship on the old yahoo.com site). I’ve added the heights of the centroids of the storm jib and the trysail (see Table 2 on page 3). I am still unable to calculate (or find by practical experiment) the angles of heel that would cause downflooding through the portlights etc (see Table 3 on page 4; if you have a slow knockdown, please note the angles of heel that cause downflooding and tell me!).