Back In Mexico again!

I made it back to Mexico, and to my beloved Aquila again.  I came down about two weeks ago now, and spent the first few days trying to get the boat ready to leave the marina.  Its so gosh darned hot in the marina and it just burns me up to be there, spending money and roasting in boat hell.  I also think its better for the boat to be cooler.  So I got the sails on and lines on and water tanks filled and bottom cleaned, and...  Well, let me tell you about the bottom cleaning!  I haven't had a new coat of bottom paint in a quite a while now, so something like 4 years for the boat, so there were gobs of gigantic barnacles and oysters on the bottom.  It was quite a task to get them liberated.  I spent a bit of time in the marina working on it, and then took off to get out in clearer water.  Also, after working for a few hours in the marina on the bottom, the very next day I was preparing to leave and I noticed a crocodile floating around in the waters.  Hello!  And a worker who cleans bottoms had been brushed by the very same croc.  I think it was attacking his bubbles or something, but still, it is 9 ft long and very scary.  So I wanted to finish the cleaning out in deeper and clearer water.  So that's what I was doing for a little while, also surfing, but then there was a hurricane and I went back to the marina for two days to hide from it.  The winds were pretty strong, I recorded 46 kts, and there were waves breaking over the breakwater, but I was safe and snug inside.  It also rained a huge amount.  So I tied the boat up like this:

In order to get the most out of the docks and not to bounce around.

Also, while I was at the dock, my "cheap" version of a very expensive sail arrived.  I had a genius plan to get the most expensive kind of sail (and the best kind) but get it used, so it would be less.  The material the sail is made of feels a bit like paper or cardboard, but its made of very fancy carbon and dyneema (spectra) fibers that are very strong.  The way its made is a "table" of sorts that is very adjustable is shaped to the shape the sail will be in, then a machine passes around on the table and lays down fibers in "tapes" of unidirectional fibers and they are all perfectly set where the strength of the sail will need to be.  Then they heat this up and there is a glue that is already in the fibers, making them like cloth soaked in honey, and that glue sticks everything together and bonds it forever.  Its really just like making a fiberglass boat, except the glue is not hard, like the epoxy or resins that they use for that.   Instead it is soft and flexible.

So here is a picture that I found on the internet of the sail that I got.  I got the sail used from a warehouse in florida, and a boat called Decision, a Carkeek 40, had made the sail new and then raced with it for a while, and then for some reason decided to sell the sail.  The Florida warehouse then sold the sail to me.  It cost $2800, plus shipping and tax, so about $3100.  

Then I had it sent to San Diego, to the North Sails sail loft there and they worked on it all summer to make it fit my boat.  The loft cut a bit off the bottom to make it fit the boom angle, and since they had built the previous mainsail for Aquila, they knew the dimensions to make it to.  You will notice that the boom on this Carkeek 40 is higher than on Aquila, because it is for a fully crewed boat (see all the people?)  Also the boom is flat to the water, whereas on Aquila the boom angles up from the mast, and so it needed to be re-cut.  

Here's another shot of it being worked on.  

So during this whole process, I'd been up in Alaska and working away, and in limited communication, and also I'm buying a fairly expensive sail and I haven't yet seen the thing.  So a bit of pressure on me to just relax and throw money.  This is something I'm not good at.  So the sail is "done" and ready to get shipped, and they say the bill is $3600 bucks.  So now I've doubled the amount of investment so far, at about $6700.  I could have bought a brand new sail made of dacron (the white cloth) from china with this kind of money so far.  Now I have to ship it down to mexico.  This is the scary part, because things always just go missing along this kind of a trip.  But with my limited communication, it began and I didn't know how much it would cost or much about the system of how it was going, but finally it arrived!  The day I was leaving the marina it came and I picked it up and motored out to Punta Mita.  The shipping cost me $750.  Then I spent the next few days sewing the some things on the sail.  you will notice in the photo above there is a smooth white line along the left side of the sail, that is the "luff" and it is designed to slide up a slot in the mast for this sail.  Trouble is, I don't have a slot in the mast.  I have a mast track with little cars that slide up and down and they need little connectors sewed to the sail.  So I hand stitched them on while on the boat in the sun and wind and did a kinda crappy job of it, but I think it will work out.  You can see them in the photo below with black patches where I reenforced the sail before stitching it.

So yesterday I finished the sewing and cleaned the bottom really nicely, with the help of a friend of mine, Laura, who has come down to stay for a few days.  So we raised the sail up and set off to see how she performed!   

I did a harbor burn of a friend's boat and he got this picture for me.  Thanks Shane!  And you can see it is a square top sail, but smaller on the top than the old one.  You might also note that the jib is the same kind of sail.  So I now have matching sails, the Jib and the main.  The old mainsail was an older technology called 3DL (as opposed to 3DI) and with the L part of it it means they have the same table and fibers but the fibers are stuck to mylar films, so its like laying fibers down and then putting scotch tape on top of them.  The only problem is the scotch tape falls apart quickly and the sail then becomes the wrong shape and in many pieces.  It "blows up".  Some folks call 3DL as 3 day lifespan.  

So the 3DI product is much much better.  Also the sail is very light.  
I looked into the cost of buying a new 3DI sail, but it would be about 25,000 bucks.  So this one, at $7450 is a bit of a bargain.  

Now, how does it sail?  Because its so light it performs very well, and because its a 3D sail it doesn't stretch in funny ways, so as the wind increases, the sail stays the same shape.  I've noticed this with the jib at least that it works very well in strong or light winds and I don't need to adjust things to keep one side of it from flapping.  On a dacron sail I usually have to adjust the leech line as the wind gets stronger, because the sail stretches differently in different directions and that causes distortion.  

I've only had it out for one run, but we went 11 kts in not a lot of wind and I had a lot of water in the ballast tanks and the anchor on and the dinghy.  So I was very heavy, but the boat was zooming along.  

So this video is taken by laura as we headed out to sea.

This next one was taken by Corey who was on his boat when we sailed by, and so its a bit calmer.  But look at the sail shape I have!  

Sail twist is important and I'm still learning a lot about it, but if you look at a propeller on a airplane or boat, or even the wing of a jet, and you will see the root (the part closest to the hub of the prop or the part closest to the body of the jet) has a more aggressive "angle of attack" than the tip of the wing.  So the root generates more lift than the tip.  In a propeller the tip is also moving faster, so you need to reduce the drag on the tip as well, making it have a flatter angle.  In sailing, its important to take the wind that flows over the sail and turn it, to change the direction of the wind, which you could call accelerating the wind, which makes for an equal and opposite reaction of accelerating the boat.  To do this, the top of the sail sees more wind, so needs less angle, but also it is important to try to "bring the wind down" the sail so the top of the sail is catching the wind a little bit, but then that pulls the wind downwards and the root (or bottom of the sail) is powered up as well.  This is what sail twist does.  To get it right is an art form and I'm working on that.  But you can see it in the video above that I have some twist.  also some in the jib.