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New Boat 4 Sled

PRO Emeritus Jan Brewer was here yesterday for a short visit enroute to her home in AZ. She had me in stitches with her stories of this year's 3 Bridge Fiasco, the biggest sailboat race in the U.S. For pure fun/dollar/person, the 3BF shines brightly.

For anyone who thinks SSS races just "happen," the opportunity to serve on Race Deck should not be missed. Good luck to BobJ, SSS Race Chairman for '13.
 
sleddog said:
PRO Emeritus Jan Brewer was here yesterday for a short visit enroute to her home in AZ. She had me in stitches with her stories of this year's 3 Bridge Fiasco, the biggest sailboat race in the U.S. For pure fun/dollar/person, the 3BF shines brightly.

For anyone who thinks SSS races just "happen," the opportunity to serve on Race Deck should not be missed. Good luck to BobJ, SSS Race Chairman for '13.
Click to expand...

Thanks for stepping up to the plate, Bob!
 
Our town is in mourning for the loss of two police officers in the line of duty, first ever in the history of Santa Cruz. The gun battle could be heard a mile away here at the harbor. The killer was known to us harbor rats, as he worked at the coffee shop by the Crows Nest.
RIP
 
Huge kudos to Parker Diving Services for pulling the stolen Oyster 82, DARLING, off Rockaway Beach late last night. It could not have been easy rigging a bridle and towline in the dark, with surf breaking against the hull. Those guys are pros, and it's good to see pros in action.

WILDFLOWER was moored astern of DARLING in Friday Harbor for three days last summer. DARLING defines the word "yacht." http://www.interpacyachtcharters.com/yachts-for-charter/darling-2 At the time, she had three paid crew aboard. Things were spotless.

The question is how did the "senior citizen" perps get DARLING out of Sausalito Yacht Harbor and out the Gate at oh dark thirty?

DARLING was hauled this morning at Bay Marine in Richmond. Underwater damage is uncertain. But the rudder and prop are history. Looks like the "ship has come in" for Kim and crew at Bay Marine. ;-)
 
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While Kim had North Coast Yachts in Alameda (go back in this thread for some stories) I bought a faded, international orange-colored O'Day Daysailer that had been t-boned hard in a race. The cuddy was cracked in two on the centerline and there was another big crack through the sheer where it had been hit. I sailed it for awhile as-is but enjoyed the boat and decided to cherry it out. North Coast/Kim did the work and it came out of his shop looking flawless. He charged me less than he should have - the boat wasn't worth much to begin with and he "adjusted" for that. I also had a Banshee he probably built.

Kim moved on to become a yard manager at KKMI and when I bought the J/33, I tracked him down. TROUBADOUR had been raced hard and my first two yard bills were killers. Kim was patient with me despite my whining. It wasn't in his best interest but he advised me to consider down-sizing, even to a boat that could live on a trailer. I ultimately did, storing RAGTIME! on a trailer for several years. Kim also talked me out of buying a J/125 I really wanted, with the simple statement that my yard bills would easily quadruple.

I'm happy to see Kim (now at Bay Marine in Richmond) get a good-sized project, and I wish him well.
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Seeing DARLING in the surf reminded me of two beachings when I was a kid. In S.Cal it almost always pays to short tack the beach. My Dad was skippering Rhodes 33 #20, RUTH, off Balboa when they got in too close. A wave broke outside, and they were physically launched onto the beach. There's a classic photo of my Dad wading ashore with the spare battens. He could never tell me what was in his mind with that.

That afternoon, South Coast Shipyard's little black tug WALRUS pulled RUTH off the beach. She immediately sank. No problem, they just towed RUTH underwater, dragging her on the sand bottom for two miles back to Newport Harbor Entrance. Once in the breakwater, she was raised with a crane, pumped out, rerigged, some broken frames sistered, and racing a week later.

A similar thing happened as few years later. As a kid, I had a love affair with Starboats. I mean, they were so pretty. And fast. With dozens of things to adjust. Our fleet had two world champions in Ficker and Edler. Because I only weighed 120 pounds, only another kid named Tom Blackaller would take me as crew. And then only in the Bay, not in the ocean.

So I was left on the beach alot. I would walk along the ocean beach during regattas, following the Starboats just offshore, dreaming of the day I could skipper one.

During one of my reveries, Star #3497, MENEHUNE, came along and tacked out onto starboard. Just then, the set of the day from a distant Mexican Hurricane broke outside.
MENEHUNE was picked up, went vertical, and thrown backwards by the breaking wave. Her skipper bailed. Her crew took refuge under the deck.

To my amazement, MENEHUNE, her bow to the sky, landed on her transom at my feet. Her skipper swam ashore. Her crew appeared, wide eyed, out from under the foredeck.

MENEHUNE's transom was crushed. But the rudder and rest of the boat, except for the broken mast, was undamaged.

It didn't take long for a cherry picker A-frame truck to appear on the beach, pick up MENEHUNE, and take her across Balboa Blvd to her trailer.

My father bought MENEHUNE from the insurance company, and had Driscoll put a new (wood) transom on the boat. I have good memories of racing Star #3497 with my father as crew. We always gave the beach where both RUTH and MENEHUNE went ashore a little extra distance.
 
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I love these two stories, Skip, and I didn't know either of them (even though I'm Skip's sister). I guess being 9 years younger, I still need to catch up on some old lore. . . what Skip isn't telling you is that he was 12 or 13 when he got Star #3497. And he beat the tar off even folks a decade or 2 older than he was. I think he paced some of the practices for the World Stars in #3497 but was too young to race in the actual regatta, per the rules. Something like that. I was 4 or 5, so I don't know all the facts, for sure. He later graduated to #4497 (Shadow, a beautiful blue Star with gleaming wood/teak deck) and campaigned it all over the country, once he got his driver's license ;-).

Back to Darling - kudos to Kim and his yard!! I want to see pictures and hear stories. The boat went aground right where our daughter did a lot of surfing. Good thing the waves were not up yesterday.
 
And how about the "perps" in the Darling episode putting the boat in some nice sand at Linda Mar. Instead of on the rocks at Pt San Pedro. And they picked a day with relativly small surf. There's a story here that is not being covered in the Chronicle.
And this story winds to Kim Desenberg....since the thread mentions his North Coast Yachts shop on Clement I remember that shop when I was sailing Madman Across the Water out of Alameda Marina. I thought it a great event when the Alameda Beltline would run trains right down the middle of Clement.
 
Crossing Clement (like into Svend's) has always been like playing "Frogger" - even more so when switch engines w/boxcars were trundling along there. But I do miss the industrial side of things we used to live around. Now Alameda is all beemers and smartphones.
 
The stolen and beached Oyster 82, DARLING, is gonna need some work. When I saw her yesterday at Bay Ship in Richmond, the floorboards were reportedly floating in a mixture of saltwater and diesel. The rudder and prop were extensively damaged, and the keel was loose. Nothing a million bucks can't fix. But the smell of diesel below is not going to be easy to remove.

Next door at KKMI there were five Bird Boats in various stages of restoration at the "Bird Nest." CURLEW, ORIOLE, and WIDGEON looked beautiful. I believe CURLEW is 91 years young, the second Bird Boat built

Down the way, the Volvo 70 MASERATI was hauled and parked next to a Folk Boat and SPIRIT. Interesting contrast in hull shapes.
 

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Out of those three I'd take SPIRIT. MASERATI looks like a Cal-Trans project run amok.

Does anyone know who would have owned ORIOLE say, 40 years ago? There's a memory there but I can't piece it together.
 
RAGTIME! has a way with words. I concur wholeheartedly that the Volvo 70 MASERATI looks suspiciously like she was designed by CalTrans. When MASERATI is on her keel on the hard, you need a freeway overpass to get up to her deck, 20 plus feet off the ground. Nosebleed anyone? You won't be seeing MASERATI tied up at Sam's for lunch.

Equally unlikely is seeing a Bird Boat reefed.

I am no Bird Boat historian. I believe Jock McLean's father, Scotty, once owned ORIOLE, his third Bird. It is likely Jock who is restoring ORIOLE at KKMI.

Did we know the first Bird, OSPREY may have assisted an escape from Alcatraz? And that Bird Boat owners call their deck sweeping main booms, "Brooms?"

http://www.birdboat.com/Terry Norton.htm
 
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Sailing is first of all a visual reward - there is no place in it for ugly boats, no matter how fast they may be.
 
ugly boats?

BobJ said:
Sailing is first of all a visual reward - there is no place in it for ugly boats, no matter how fast they may be.
Click to expand...

Agreed; The visual rewards of sailing are very important, but the pickle dishes often go to the less than elegant racing machines.
Having said that, I must admit that racing must not be the most important part of the sailing experience.
 
Off topic. Bear with me. I grew up sailing in S.Cal. It wasn't until 1962 I first got to sail SF Bay, in the Blue Stars (West Coast Championships). Being a kid, I didn't find it unusual short tacking up the Alcatraz cone for tide relief, getting close up under the Island. What was unusual, seeing as how I missed reading the big warning sign on the NE side of Alcatraz, was the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire coming from an overlooking guard tower. Evidently the bored or trigger happy prison guard was warning us off. The top of our main was perforated. But didn't come down.

According to my sailing friends over at SFYC in Belvedere, there wasn't much going on Friday nights back in those days (early 60's). At the time, the Golden Gate Bridge cost a quarter to cross, and had toll booths at both ends.

One of the Bridge toll collectors was Clem Mathis, the singer Johnny Mathis' brother. Clem was a handsome and friendly dude. On Friday nights, the dateless high school girls would pile into a car and drive across the GG Bridge, in order to give Clem a quarter and touch his hand. It was evidently quite a thrill, as the girls would turn around to drive back across the Bridge. And do it all over again, vowing to not wash their hands for a week.

Clem Mathis was a big revenue maker for the Golden Gate Bridge. Now, 50 years on, the GG Bridge toll takers are about to fade into history as automated license plate cameras take over.
 
The S.Cal ocean racing community is reeling with the loss of the Columbia Carbon 32 UNCONTROLABLE URGE and one of its crew. The CG helo did another heroic rescue, and pulled the six (one deceased) from a rocky and inhospitable NW (lee) shore of San Clemente Island, where they had drifted, after losing their rudder in the Islands Race. Conditions were 22-26 knots of wind, 8 foot seas and a dark night.

Facts are not yet clear. We do know the newly built UU initially refused offers of assistance from other race boats and the CG after radioing either a May Day or Pan Pan. Reportedly, they elected to seek a private towing firm. We also know from the tracker that UU was about 2-3 miles off the lee shore when the rudder broke and incident began to unfold.

Reportedly, the crew of UU were unable to deploy their liferaft, and their anchor would not hold near shore. Judging from the night vision video on YouTube, the boat likely rolled, near or in the surfline. And was dismasted and de-keeled. Whether the deceased crew drowned, or was entrapped in the wreckage is not clear. http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/mar/09/one-dead-five-injured-in-sailboat-wreck/

A sad day indeed.

Not the only incident in the Islands Race. At least two other boats received timely Coast Guard assistance for their own problems. One was the F-10 sportboat MILE HIGH KLUB, with an injured crew and who subsequently lost its rudder. Reportedly, MHK's friends organized a replacement rudder, and the CG delivered it, as well as putting a medic aboard. That's service.
 
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It is troubling that our sport has shown the ability to kill it's participants, ironically for me, because I gave up motorcycle racing to pursue sailing because motorcycles were becoming too painful!
Sled's report of broken rudders has also impacted my thinking, so I am going to make myself a long sweep oar for an emergency steering devise and to skull my little cruising cat.
I also have a friend who has recently experienced a broken rudder, and has a sculling oar hanging over the door of his garage. I am going to encourage him to take it down to his boat.
I also know that there are race committees that require emergency steering devices to be on board.
 
Yes, we do for the Singlehanded TransPac. We've approved sweeps in a couple cases where they were shown to be effective, but they can be hard to store.

I know Greg used to carry STARBUCK's e-rudder for the local ocean races. I think I'll put RAGTIME!'s back aboard. It's carbon fiber so it doesn't weight that much. I can even attach my tiller pilots to it.

I'm very sorry about the loss of another sailor, and a family man at that. I don't know what to say except we can try to learn from these things.
 
Hi all y'all, twice now I've tried to type something and it goes away so I'll make this really, really brief.
I too am saddened by the tragic events of UU and hopefully we do learn from these events.

Remember too, just like in LSC, there's the snowball effect that seems to have taken place in these accidents. It seems to be that it's never just one thing, but at least several things combined that ends up with these tragic results.
 
Re the Bird boat "Oriole", she was raced by the Rumsey brothers, John and Jerry, in mid 60's while I was at CMA, and racing on another Bird.
The Rumseys on Oriole won every race in those days, 1964-1966 (?) John Rumsey became a famous sailmaker & skipper on Ticonderoga, and Windward Passage. The Oriole had their Bird insignia updide down on mainsail, looked like a moustache !!
The Bird boat owned by EZ Davies family was first boat I crewed on in SF Bay 1964, when starting at Cal Maritime Academy.
Good memories from Belvedere and SFYC in those days...Capt Bob
 
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