Autobailers- Part Two

Removal and replacement with a watertight plate

For a very long time, leaking autobailers had been my nemesis as I battled to keep all 12 of our high school sailing team’s well used 420’s fully functional. This year, it was time to abandon our duct tape solution (actually better tape than duct tape, but just tape nonetheless) and move on to a real solution. Several ideas occurred to us, but each seemed both expensive and flawed in one way or another.

• Replacing the autobailers would be expensive ($62 each x 12), and they would quickly fail again with the boats exposed to our very sandy environment and the care left in the hands of multiple, careless, high school students.
• Fiberglass work to plug the holes after removing the autobailers would be tricky and time consuming, especially given the very thin hulls on 420’s. A quality fiberglass repair of a 3” by 5” hole also takes expertise I don’t have.
• A friend offered to weld the old autobailers shut, but after discovering the gaskets inside, he determined they would melt into a gooey mess that was not compatible with welding.
• A stainless steel plate bolted to the hull with the same bolts used by the removed autobailer would seem to work nicely. I couldn’t find anything like this sold commercially, and I worried that having them made would get almost as expensive as buying new autobailers. When I examined an old bailer I had removed, discovering that the bottom of the bailer was not flat, but a pan shape, I became totally discouraged about the cost of having such a piece custom made.

What we (mostly a former sailing team member, now a college graduate) finally came up with was a way to reuse pieces of the old autobailer to make a waterproof plate. The 420 autobailers are constructed from three separate pieces of stainless steel and a couple of gaskets. The chute that drops to let out water is sandwiched between two frames. Our solution was to replace the chute and its gaskets with a solid piece of hardened West System epoxy resin that would span the hole and bond to both frames of stainless steel with a water-tight seal. We tried it out on our boats during the summer, and we have been sailing for six weeks this fall with no leaks.

Here is what the process looks like:

First, we remove the autobailers and separate the three pieces, the two frames and the chute. They are fastened together with six copper rivets that need to be drilled out.

Drilling Out the Autobailer Rivits

Autobailer with Rivits and Lever Removed

After the pieces are separated, the chute and its gaskets are discarded.

Next, the top and bottom frames are tightly bolted together. Then, they are temporarily bolted to a piece of wood that will serve as the bottom form when we pour in the resin later. Wax paper must be inserted between the wood and the frames to prevent adhesion of resin to the wood.

Frames Ready to Receive Fluid Resin

The resin is two part West System epoxy with High Density 404 Adhesive Filler mixed to a thick, but pour-able, consistency. It is just poured into the frames, making sure all the corners are filled. (We waited 24 hours before removing the assembly, but the resin sets up in about an hour.)

Pouring Resin into Metal Frames

The final step is removing the new pieces from the temporary molding board and inserting them into the boats to plug the holes where the autobailers were removed.

Finished Autobailer Replacement Plate

All the old silicone or 5200 needs to be removed from the fiberglass on the boat before installing the new piece, and this is the most time consuming and tedious part of the process. When installing the new piece, all the old nuts and bolts are used. Working simultaneously from both the top and the bottom of the boat takes two people and is a little awkward. Careful attention needs to be paid to craftsmanship when the new sealant is installed. (We screwed this up on a couple of boats and had to reseal them.) We used marine silicone sealant which lasts for a long time, but had we been 100% sure this whole approach was going to work, we might have used 5200 for a permanent bond.

View of 420 Hull with Autobailer Plug Installed

Has anyone else come up with another way to eliminate autobailers that they would like to share? Other comments on autobailers?

Yarg

Autobailers- Part One

Keeping it simple?

Autobailer side view - open

Some time ago, Paul Elevstrom came up with a simple solution for removing the water that accumulates in the cockpit when sailing small boats in big wind and waves. He used the fundamental Bernoulli principle (low pressure created by moving fluids – you remember) to invent the autobailer. In Lasers, 420’s, and other small boats I have seen, the autobailers all have the same basic design. A chute that can open and close is mounted at the lowest point of the hull and depends on suction caused when the boat is moving rapidly forward to remove water from the boat. It has “a wedge shaped venturi that closes automatically if the boat grounds or hits an obstruction, and a flap that acts as a non return valve to minimise water coming in if the boat is stationary or moving too slowly for the device to work.” (Description from Wikipedia, with British spelling of minimize.) Mr. Elevstrom’s autobailers have been bailing small racing boats for a long time now.

But wait! Autobailers have also been letting significant amounts of water leak into small boats for a long time now. Maybe cutting a hole in the bottom of a boat to let the water out is not such a simple solution. Isn’t that how boats sink?

I think many of us have had love/hate relationships with autobailers over the years. Sometimes they seem to work, and sometimes they cause annoying leaks. My experience is that they work well when they are installed, maintained, and used properly, but when those things are done poorly, the system breaks down quickly and the water flows the wrong way, sometimes in copious amounts. I suspect Paul Evelstrom was very good at care and maintenance. I certainly try to be good about those things with my Laser, but don’t always live up to his or my own standard. However, many small boat owners don’t believe in maintenance. They hate autobailers.

Among those who abhor maintenance are all of the sailors on the high school sailing team I coach. They not only abhor maintenance, they are inclined to practice abject neglect or worse on all of their equipment. Fighting these instincts in upper-middle class American teenagers is a tilting at windmills kind of exercise. Apparently, it is one of my callings.

We have a fleet of twelve old 420’s, no maintenance person or budget, and our boats, which are shared with the town recreation department, are heavily used. Despite ever improving preventative maintenance (done mostly by me), things still break – frequently. Although problems run the gamut in older boats, the overwhelmingly most frequent failure is leaking, nay, hemorrhaging autobailers. These devices depend on two different gaskets and a silicone or 3M5200 seal - three opportunities for water infiltration. For two years now, our favorite solution has been to tape over bailers with a 4” wide, waterproof tape which obviously also eliminates any possible benefit from autobailers. For several reasons, this approach has had various degrees of success, but it seems the “coach, my boat leaks” complaints never stop.

In fairness to the kids, some of the boats had seriously flawed autobailers by the time we got them. On top of that, we launch from a beach. Raising the main and putting on the rudders while standing in the shallow water stirs up the bottom enough to create an insidious slurry cloud that exposes all underwater parts to as much sand as water. Sand on the sailors’ boots also gets deposited inside the boat when they hop in. Rubber gasketed autobailers are just no match for sand that can penetrate the smallest of crevices. I can’t imagine the perfection in care and maintenance required to keep a bailer opening freely and closing tightly in these conditions.

With all due respect and deference to Paul Elevstrom, autobailers demand a high level of care and maintenance that is just not possible for us (and many others I suspect). A device that uses simple mechanics and physics turns out to be not so simple when operated by teenagers in a sandy environment. For us, a hole in the bottom of the boat is just a leak.

We won’t miss having working autobailers. They really don’t work well in the 420 anyway until the boat is going fast. Our courses are always short and don’t offer long fast straight-aways where the self-bailers work best.

The solution for us is a bleach bottle bailer and no hole in the bottom of the boat. Since all our boats came with an autobailer, the problem became how to remove them and plug the holes (twelve times) with a minimum of cost and effort. Necessity being the mother of invention, we came up with a way.

I haven’t heard a leaking boat complaint in six weeks, so I’m cautiously optimistic we may have found a relatively simple and definitely cheap solution for the hole in our boats.

Part Two will attempt to explain and illustrate our approach.

Yarg

10 Suggestions For Managing Multi-fleet Regattas

The last three regattas I have attended have had two, three, and four different fleets starting on the same starting line. Sometimes the fleets have different numbers of races, different lengths of courses, and sometimes even different course configurations. It can be quite a juggling act for the Race Committee. Although nobody has asked me, I want to offer my two cents about techniques that can be used to make race management more efficient in these highly challenging conditions. I’m not an expert, but I have been to enough races to see a lot of good ideas and endorse them as if they were my own. The terrific regatta I wrote about a month ago used several, but not all of these suggestions. I think each item makes an incremental improvement, but each also requires some resources, so there is always a trade-off between the two. I’m sure my list is not comprehensive, so please feel free to add your thoughts.

The overriding principle here is to maximize the PRO’s options. In a multi-fleet regatta, the PRO is constantly making judgments about minimizing inter-fleet interference and getting the next fleet started. He needs all the tools he can get to be flexible and agile, and he can’t have his hands tied by unnecessary constraints in the Sailing Instructions. He needs the best committee members or crew that he can find, he needs plenty of mark and rescue boats, he needs to be able to move marks quickly and easily, he needs the capacity to change courses, shorten courses, and have a separate finish boat when required.

1. Get a skilled PRO and a crew who enjoy doing all this.  Some people actually have fun meeting the challenges managing this kind of regatta brings. Some also enjoy sailing as a spectator sport. And who doesn’t like riding around in power boats talking on the radio?

2. Keep the start and finish lines outside the course.  This keeps all those not starting or finishing away from these areas. Lines in the middle of the course or even at marks are subject to traffic from any of the fleets.

3. Use separate start and finish lines.  Having to delay the start of a whole fleet for a couple of stragglers at the end of another fleet wastes a lot of time. A separate finish line solves this problem. One line on each side of the committee boat is the easiest way to do this. A finish line completely separate from the starting area goes even further by allowing simultaneously starts and finishes by different fleets. But it also takes a boat and a skilled crew to set a good finish line and record finishes.

4. Use a short starting sequence.  It is always tricky to determine if there is enough time to get off a start without running the starting fleet into a fleet already racing. The shorter the starting sequence the easier it is to make that judgment. The three minute dinghy start works well.

5. Get enough marks.  Having different marks for different fleets is the ultimate in flexibility. They do need to be very clearly different, like yellow and orange. They can be tied together whenever the same location can be used for multiple fleets. A change of course mark is also good to have so that the new mark can be placed immediately, and the mark boat has more time to remove the old mark.

6. Make the marks easy to handle.  I like marks with a handle on top and a lightweight anchor (a short chain or a sash weight work great where I sail). As I was told in a US Sailing seminar, “You are only anchoring a bag of air.” If marks can be dragable – even better. Placing and moving marks can be relatively difficult or easy and relatively time consuming or quick.

7. Equip all mark boats with change of course and shorten course flags.  All boats also need to be able to anchor and record finishes if called upon. The crews need to clearly understand the procedures for all this. A rule book provides a handy reference for double checking the correct procedures. This gives the PRO tremendous flexibility to deal with radical changes in sailing conditions or weather.

8. Communicate well with the competitors.  The competitors need to understand the actions and intentions of the Race Committee, so the Sailing Instructions need to be very clear about how competitors will be notified of their starts, what marks are to be used for their fleets, and the schedule of races. If the Race Committee makes adjustments on the water, there needs to be a clear procedure (specified in the Sailing Instructions) for notifying the competitors of the changes.

9. Communicate well with all members of the Race Committee team.  This begins before the regatta with the PRO clarifying his expectations and defining roles and duties for all the members of the team. All variables should be anticipated and discussed in advance. Procedures should be reviewed. The language for discussing things should be clarified. Are wind direction and mark locations defined by compass direction, compass bearing, or simple right and left? Are right and left as viewed by the PRO or by who ever is speaking? Radios should be checked both on shore and on the water, and even then, back up radios or cell phones should be in each boat.

10. Practice, practice, practice.  It is great if the entire Race Committee team can work together at least once before the regatta, but any experience with any of the above techniques develops expertise, and every little bit helps.

Communication with the Race Committee

Last weekend I was at a regatta, and before the first race, I asked the Race Committee to confirm my understanding of the course. Their response was to point to a placard and say “course 6.” Well, that was helpful. If I had known what course 6 was, I wouldn’t have been asking the question. I realize I was a dolt for not having committed the 7 different courses in the sailing instructions to memory. I was even more foolish for deciding that there‘s no good way to carry reading material on a laser. And I was an irresponsible competitor to have tried to depend on the kindness of strangers to explain what had already been explained clearly enough in those sailing instructions next to the regatta tee shirt in my car. Clearly I deserved to be punished.

Needless to say, I was. The convergence of my reckless negligence with the unlikely good fortune to be leading the first race led to the inevitable tragedy of my snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. To finish the course, I managed to sail upwind back to the start line, while the competitors way behind me sailed to the real finish line which it turns out was not nearly so far upwind. While sailing to the “correct” side of the course, I succeeded in sailing around the real finish by so far that I didn’t even see it. Subsequently returning to the real finish, I recorded a 5 and was grateful for the small laser turnout for the regatta.

I get it - understanding all the sailing instructions is part of racing. But really! Is it too much to ask the race committee to explain their unique course designations to a visitor?

This all leads to the general question of how much the Race Committee should communicate with the sailors. At pre-race skippers’ meetings, it has been standard practice for years for the PRO to answer questions with the magic, unhelpful phrase “refer to the sailing instructions.” This has always impressed me as being unfriendly, if not arrogant. It suggests a tone of seriousness or gravity that is contrary to the expectations of most of the sailors I know. For most of us, this is supposed to be fun.
“Refer to the sailing instructions” sounds like homework, when we are looking for recess.

I realize that the thinking is that the PRO or Race Committee should be careful not say anything to contradict the carefully written sailing instructions. While there is some merit to this reasoning, it seems to me that it goes way overboard for any but the most serious high stakes regattas. The risk of offering explanations and clarifications to the instructions is that one could actually increase confusion or introduce contradictions that then could result in some disastrous consequence that in turn could cause a protest or even skew the results of the event. Does that seem likely? Are the explanations really likely to be so bad that they would do more harm than good? In a time when there is a need to attract more people to sailing, what is more important – covering for the remote possibility of an imperfect explanation by the Race Committee or establishing a friendly atmosphere where everyone enjoys the sailing experience?

One of the high school coaches I work with always tells the sailors “if you have any questions, ask; if you are confused about the course, ask the race committee – it’s not supposed to be a mystery.” I know that I would be happier if events were run with this philosophy. I admit that I was the stupid one last weekend, but who wants to win or lose because one of the sailors misunderstood the course?

Multi-Class Regatta with No Waiting Time

I have been to many multi-class regattas where three or more classes share the same starting line and the same course. The one common characteristic for almost all of them is that they have lots of waiting time - long, wasteful, and seemingly unnecessary waiting time. Last weekend I finally went to one that broke the mold. With four classes on the same course, the races for each class were started as promptly as if there was no one else on the course. Major kudos to Duxbury Yacht Club.

I have to admit that in the last few years I have become very impatient on this subject. Aside from personal psychological deficiencies, the blame goes to coaching high school sailing and laser sailing, especially frostbiting. High school sailing is always short course racing, and a good sailing day is filled with many races. (College sailing is similar in this respect.) The fleet race regatta we host typically has 12 races with sailors returning to shore to swap boats every two races. If the course to shore distance were less, we would do 16 races. I run an intramural regatta twice a year where there are 7 – 9 races in a two hour time frame. Laser frostbiting works the same way. Our high school head to head team race events have five races in the same two hour window.

The reasons for these efficiencies are fairly obvious. Frostbiters get far colder when waiting than racing, so nearly constant racing is the prescription for greater comfort. (I acknowledge that for most of the world frostbiting and comfort are antithetical.) Many places follow more or less the same format in summer racing because it is simply more fun to race than to wait – especially in a laser. In high school racing, the minimization of down time is related to the short, little attention spans of students culturally trained to have ADHD. If they aren’t focused on the coach-guided activity, they drift into never-never land, and they are hard to recapture.

Having experienced a piece of the sailing world with faster paced racing, I have very little interest in going back to the slower pace of larger boats. The fun of racing just seems to overshadow the relaxation (boredom) of milling around and waiting. It is even more interesting and challenging to be the race committee in these situations.

Despite my impatience, I can recognize that my enlightened opinion might not be the enlightened opinion of others. The majority of the sailing world seems to have little interest in the seeming hyperactivity of nearly hypothermic sailors and inattentive high school students. Last summer I wrote about A Three Race Regatta?! where the Flying Scot racers were satisfied while I was mystified – 3 races in 2 days? At the far end of that spectrum is the America’s Cup where one race a day after hours, maybe days of anticipation, is all the excitement anyone can handle

It’s certainly a good thing that sailing contains a multitude of options allowing people to enjoy the sport in very different ways. But occasionally there is a clash of the different worlds within the sport. In those instances, it is surprising how little we seem to understand each other. Last spring our team sailed in a regional regatta where teams qualified for nationals. It was hosted by a major yacht club that was unreasonably generous at making their very upscale facility available to questionably responsible high schoolers. However, when it came to the racing, their course was a mile from the club, sailors in the second fleet were stationed on a large float to wait in the wind and the rain, and the first attempt at a course set-up had a one-mile long windward leg that looked like it would yield 45 minute races. Can’t do many of them in one day! How could they fail to understand the courses used in high school sailing when they were the perfect host in every other way? How could the high school organizers fail to make their expectations clear? Different worlds.

Multi-class regattas where lasers are invited present a similar opportunity for a clash of different sailing worlds. Usually the world I live in is the loser in such a clash. But Duxbury was different. The differences in the class of boats were striking – quick little Lasers, comfortable but lumbering Flying Scots, Marshall 15 cat boats that are fiberglass re-makes of New England boats of the 19th century, and Pintail 25s that look a bit like a plasticized Herreshoff design. Yet with right length courses and the proper spacing between fleets, there was virtually non-stop racing and no interference between boats of different fleets. For the lasers, a few more races than five might have been desirable, but overall it was a great day of racing. Sailors from the other classes seemed to be similarly satisfied. If there were compromises, they were the right ones as the race committee expertly bridged the gaps among very different classes. Kudos again to Duxbury Yacht Club.

Walmart Lasers

Last week I picked up a paper copy of the APS (Annapolis Performance Sailing) catalogue, and in the Laser section, I found a “practice” Laser sail priced just under the price of the infamous “practice” Laser sail from Intensity. Undercutting Intensity by a dollar or two is not exciting, but to think that a Laser Performance dealer has joined in the game of low-priced non-legal Laser parts gives one a moment of pause. Although APS has always carried a practice sail, it never has had one priced at less than $200, so this is something new.

We have been all through the argument of using non-class legal sails before. Hard core one-design believers think the purity of the brand should always be preserved, and some rebels and cheapskates think that $550 is just too much to pay for something that can be had for less than $200. But since almost all rebels and cheapskates have been willing to compromise and use the legal sail at serious regattas, there really hasn’t been much of a ruckus.

It would seem that the undercutting Laser Performance / North Sails game is working so well for others that APS, and maybe some other dealers, are starting to want a piece of the action too. And the action does not stop at sails. The business of making and selling low-priced, non-legal Laser parts is growing faster than weeds in my garden. Just at APS, you can buy a “practice” daggerboard, rudder head, rudder blade, outhaul and Cunningham cleats, boom, lower mast (full, radial, or 4.7), and upper mast. Intensity sells all of that, in some different non-class legal non-one-design variations, and they also sell a “practice” auto-bailer and a “practice” mounting plate for the hiking strap.

I’m still looking for non-legal gudgeons, grab rails, and bow eyes so that I can strip a laser and build a “Walmart” Practice Laser with absolutely no genuine manufacturer approved parts except the hull! Nothing builds a champion so much as practicing in a boat with sails, blades, and spars different than the ones that must be used in real competition.

For those of us who just want to manage the annual operating cost of Laser sailing, it all just looks like the world has gone a little crazy. Sails are one thing. The sail is the most interchangeable part on the boat, the most expensive part on the boat, and the part that wears out the quickest. If, in a five year period, I buy five class legal sails, I spend about $2750. If, instead, I buy four practice sails and one class legal sail, I spend about $1350 while using a legal sail in every important regatta I attend.

How much would I save if I used a “practice” daggerboard? Stupid question because nobody uses a practice daggerboard. But just to play along, if I were an elite racer for whom the wear of the trunk on the daggerboard over, say a five year period caused me to replace it with a new one, I could save a whopping $50 by buying a practice one. If damage were the issue, assuming I managed to damage one daggerboard beyond repair every five years and thus needed two of them in a five year period, I could again save that $50, but if, and only if, I had the good sense to damage the practice one and not the competition one. I seldom exercise this kind of clever planning. The same logic applies to rudders and spars.

These parts are not “practice” parts, they are simply cheaper, non-legal, knock-off parts

Attached hardware gets even worse. Even self deception can’t go far enough to disguise the fact that the boat is illegal all the time! That’s a big compromise! And then there is the issue of quality. We all find the cost of marine hardware downright painful, but reliability and durability are paramount. High price and quality wins every time over low price, low performance and breakdowns. With hardware, less is almost always less..

So the non-class legal Laser part industry can offer us some minor savings in exchange for less reliability, less (or unknown) quality, and a thorough trashing of the one-design concept. No self-respecting Laser racer should want to convert his boat into a Walmart Laser. Even recreational users and underfunded community sailing programs might not be served if quality and reliability are compromised.

There has to be some common sense and some middle ground when it comes to this kind of thing. When is the world going to finally start behaving like I think it should? Outrageous!

Flip-flop Laser Centerboard Handle?

There are many ways to rig a Laser, but here is something that I don’t recall seeing before. I’ve been trying a “flip-flop” centerboard handle to help with access and organization of the three Laser sail shape control lines (vang, cunningham, and outhaul). The main idea is to keep the lines close to the gunnel for easy access while hiking. If it happens to be flipped to the wrong (leeward) side, it’s pretty easy to very briefly lean in to flip it to windward.

The flip-flop handle is easily made by folding over some 7 mm line twice so that the shaft is composed of three lines with a triangular cross section. Wrapping with several layers of plastic tape results in an appropriate degree of stiffness. One end of the handle is attached to the centerboard using a hole near the top aft corner. The three control lines are tied to the free end of the handle. It’s about 24 inches long. I believe it should be class-legal.

So far I’ve used it on a couple of race days at a great local club in Duxbury, Massachusetts. It seems to be working out pretty well. Besides the easy access while hiking, it tends to keep the excess line away from the main sheet block which otherwise can be easily jammed. If the control lines become tangled on the deck, a quick whip motion of the handle helps to free them up. When you are positioned aft while sailing downwind, access for the adjustments just before rounding the leeward mark is also improved by angling the handle a bit aft.

If you think it might be helpful, give it a try.

Eric