Swinging in Miami

Miami OCR Dispatch #2—January 24, 2009

Swinging in Miami

It’s not what you think it is.

Bob Carlen, Peter Henrichsen, and Fred Nicholson ran 19 boats through the process in the sailing center garage before the regatta. The USAFA charged each boat $50 for the re-certification. They were able to do this because Andy Casey and Forrest Gay brought the rig to and fro California, and yours truly volunteered to collect the money, schedule appointments, and keep records.

Devoti is charging nearly $600 for the same program in Europe—they are batching boats and trucking them to Poland to their factory to do the work. Needless to say, the internationals here were the first in line to get their boats re-certed by the USAFA.

Several installed the digital compass while several left their plastimos in. There’s some benefits to the digital, some suppose; the drawbacks include the lag time between the change of course and when it shows on the digital screen, and the fact that you can’t sight anything but your course of direction. A nice feature of the standard compass is that you can read all the points off the dial, say if you want to know the compass direction of that dark cloud heading toward the water from the city, and so on.

It took four hours to assemble and calibrate the rig and get the first boat done. After that, the measurers evolved the process, done for the first time, to these steps—

 Pay the fee
 Dry the boat
 Choose which compass and install the digital if wanted
 Weigh the boat
 Swing it on the lamboley
 Calculate two factors in a formula to determine where to re-place weight to keep a legal lamboley
 Remove lead as directed by the measurer. This will take claw hammers, a butane torch to heat a putty knife, and up to an hour. Take care not to put a hole in the hull with the claw hammer. Ed Wright, Rafal Szukiel and Pitr Mohr tied for the most efficient weight removal times.
 Install but do not yet glue new weight to correct the swing as directed by the measurer; sikkaflex works well for this.
 Re-weigh under the direction of the measurer
 Re-lamboley under the direction of the measurer. Then, glue the weight in.
 Collect amended certificate.

Minimum weight is 116 K, so some take out the back hiking straps, remove the pussy pads and use sikkaflex and sticky-back to secure the risers, or go naked on the deck all-together. Some even disavow continuous lines.

Several anecdotal reports claim that the boats feel different with the lower weight. The consensus seems to be that the lower weight is a good thing while there is a concern among people who respect the rules that there is an unattended opening for people to modify and then sail non-certificated boats. About 40 pounds of lead weight will soon become the property of the USAFA Chief Measurer.