messing about in boats

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29783, 28 March 1962, Page 11

messing about in boats

Export Hopes of an export trade to Australia are held by Christchurch yachtsmen who have, in the last few weeks, been construct, ing fibreglass hulls for Olympic Finn boats. The first of the plastic boats will be seen on the water at the week-end in the Charteris Bay regatta. It belongs to D. Mander and will be tested during racing by his eldest brother, P. G, Mander, who is a member of the New Zealand yachting team which will compete in the interDominion championships at Sydney during Easter. Mander will use his own spar, sail, rudder and centreplate.

Except for its glassglossy hull, the boat will look little different from any other Finn on the water; but its fittings will show one major departure from practice. This will be in the manner, in which the main sheet is controlled. Normal practice is for the sheet to run from a traveller amidships through blocks rigged on boom and floor. The new arrangement is more complicated. For a start, the traveller is not the conventional straight piece of tube or

the top of the thwart. In the new Finn it is a hefty tube, arcing from gunwale to gunwale.

Drum System

From the traveller the main sheet runs through a pulley on the boom and along the boom around a vertical drum mounted on the faredeck. The drum shaft extends below the deck to a larger drum from which another sheet leads back to the floor block and to the helmsman's hand. The bottom drum is cone-shaped to allow varying purchase—from two to one when the boom is out to up to four when close-hauled and extra purchase is needed.

The arrangement is an original Mander design and only a workout on the water will tell if the experiment is likely to be successful.

There is a possibility that if the fibre-glass design proves successful, at least one of the models at present being moulded at Woolston by F. G. B. Simpson will be taken to Australia for competition and demonstration at Easter by P. Pritchett, of Charteris Bay. Pritchett is responsible for the woodwork inside the plastic hulls of the new boats.

Regatta Fleet The Charteris Bay regatta is expected to draw big fleets of all classes of yachts in Canterbury. The popularity of this club for

racing yachtmen—a club that is basically a social organisation founded on a holiday community—is due to good facilities, not the least of which is an efficient rescue launch service run by Messrs E. Sinclair, A. White, and J. Kaye.

Cat Titles

Among events at the regatta will be the Canterbury Catamaran Squadron’s class championships. The Charteris Bay judge and timekeeper, Mr H. Stanton, has donated a trophy for the 12ft kitty kat class of catamaran; and the open champion will receive a new trophy given by Mr S. G. Frost. These will be competed for for the first time. The squadron is not sending any representative to the national 12ft title at Auckland next month as it considers its standard of sailing too low, a candid assessment that might well be noted in other quarters. Two recent moves have been made in Canterbury with 12-footers’ design. The first move attempted to peg spinnakers for kitty-kats to 150 square feet, and the second was to abandon a mast restriction that some considered was strangling the class. The suggestions have been forwarded to Auckland for comment and will be put to squadron members for a survey of views before they are recognised as official in Canterbury.