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Emerging from Her Summer Den, Spawn Makes Her Way Back to the Water

11/17/2019

David Attenborough narrates: "The first cold front rumbles through the subtropical morning, pushing rain and a chill wind across Tampa Bay in November. At long last, winter has returned.

"Solitary and wary, Spawn emerges slowly from her summer den. She occupies the apex of sailing predators, but caution can be seen in every move as her protective coverings fall away. It has been a long six months of shelter away from daylight and water.

"Once she is in the open, Spawn must quickly make her way into the sea. The accoutrements of speed are complex yet remarkably delicate, and each outing she makes entails a frenzy of preparation and grooming activity.

"A single forgotten shackle or mis-run halyard can mean the difference between success and failure as she embarks in one of her highly anticipated adventures.

"Making the ungainly transition from land to water, she begins to bob and sidle with imatience. Having gained her preferred element, her purpose in the world becomes clear. She will sail, and quickly."

Of course someone has already coopted Sir David's style to narrate their part of the natural world; still, thank you!

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In Sailing News Elsewhere

11/14/2019

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My mumsie used to call it "burbling," the sort of cheerful, not-terribly-important chatter that doesn't –– strictly speaking –– require an audience. As nice a term as any, and onomatopoeic to boot.

A propensity to burble was perhaps one of the reasons she sent me to kindergarten a little early. I've always had a lot to say.

I've tacked away from sailing as a topic to burble about (about which to burble?) for the past couple of months here on the blog, but it doesn't mean that I haven't been writing about sailing.

A start of the Lightning Pan Am Trials at Davis Island YC.

So for those sweet readers who tell me they enjoy this sort of thing, here are a couple of links to the Flying Scot webpage.

I've been doing an occasional column about boat names there for my Bar Harbor buddy Ned Johnston (Hi Ned!), who edits the class newsletter.

"Sing a Song of Sixpence" Page 18 of https://www.fssa.com/files/scots_63_4.pdf

"From Another Shore" page 16 of https://www.fssa.com/files/scots_63_3_web.pdf

"THAT Name" page 12 of https://www.fssa.com/files/scots_63_2.pdf

"What's in a Name" tag 11 of https://www.fssa.com/files/scots_63_1.pdf

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Transpac –– Oh! Ho! Ho! It's Magic.

7/29/2019

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Oh, Oh...Never believe it's not so. This is truly not one of the better tunes to have playing on repeat in the gooey jukebox between a person's ears, but alas.

Plus, since Pilot included two former Bay City Rollers, this song is extra Velcro®ish.

Wait, seriously, how can I resist posting a YouTube of those classic Bay City Rollers tunes?

I can't...but later in the post. It will be a special treat and possible ear-worm infestation.

But back to this particular song.

Pilot's soaring and incessant declaration ("Oh! Ho! Ho! It's magic!") played in counterpoint to the couple of weeks of prep and racing of the 2019 Transpacific ocean Race –– the Transpac. Because of course, my favorite skipper sailed this 2250-mile-long offshore race aboard the famous Bill-Lee-designed Merlin*.

*Quick word about Merlin: this is the Merlin that set the course record in 1977.

It's the Merlin after which the Merlin Trophy is named.

The current owner is named Chip Merlin –– you can recognize him by his enormous white grin in every picture of him on the boat.

He acquired the boat about a year and a half ago...I think if there's a famous boat with your name on it, you might just have to get it.

The boat could hardly have been better prepared for the trip from Long Beach, California to Honolulu, Hawaii: the crew included two fire-fighters among her experienced and talented team; new sails; higher degrees in engineering, MacGyvering, and meterology; a redesigned physical plant and dozens of Pacific passages under her keel; extra duct tape and A & D ointment; and the latest in safety gear and information technology

And yet.

It's not a safe world and we all need some good luck to get us along. Sailors especially.

So while playing brave little toaster on shore, I wasn't about to ignore the encouraging messages of a magical world.

Just because it's magical thinking doesn't mean it's not true, right? Like the song says. Oh! Ho! Ho!

In a mere 8 days, Merlin's race was run.

Several Transpac boats retired because of technical difficulties. One of the catamarans ran into a mysterious nighttime something and tore a hole in her bow. Another boat actually sank (the sailors were rescued by their competitors, naturally, because, well –– sailors). Nobody, thank goodness, was lost at sea.

Merlin finished a quite respectable third; their stories range from the sublime (rainbows around the moon) to the ridiculous (anything to do with using the head, also, two people beaned by flying fish). They shredded some sail and lost their electronics for a bit, but it worked out safely in the end.

Here's the link to the Transpac YC's amazing images of Merlin.

And a brace of BCR for your listening enjoyment:

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Transpac––Modern Technology

7/14/2019

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When Spawn takes to the water and swims to Key Largo, I –– and some others we know –– feverishly tap the "refresh" button again and again to track the boat's progress.

After a couple of days of this kind of behavior, shore-crew feels as worn-out and raspy as the boys look at the end of the Everglades Challenge.

But that's only a couple of hundred miles ("only"! Listen to me, cool as a cucumber! Ha ha ha.) while the Transpac race runs for a couple of thousand miles. So with the 68-foot Merlin setting sail this afternoon...

Interested parties need to pace themselves. Seven days, ten days? Jeesh. That's a lot of click-click-clicking. That's potentially a lot of sleep-deprived calendar days –– even days set near Hollywood or Waikiki.

But I am happy to say there's a super-cool tracking site that shows all the boats in the several fleets.
Okay, super-cool –– but with a 4-hour delay, and the updates seem to come only every hour or so. So perhaps medium-cool.

Anyway. It allows those of us watching the race to follow the track and to guess at the weather. Plus, the class leaders get a little crown over their name. Which is nice.

Here's the link.

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Disappear Mah Beard, Why Doncha*?

7/10/2019

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For 100 years, sailors have been racing to Hawaii from Southern California. Okay, probably ages longer, competitive spirit being what it is, but the 2019 Transpac marks the 50th anniversary of the 2250-mile sailboat race.

Little did I know, this big race is one of Jeff's lifetime sailing ambitions.

Enter the wizard: Merlin is a 68-foot-long sled designed by Bill Lee. The boat was built in 1977, and promptly set a record** in that year's Transpac that stood for 20 years. Tampa-based attorney Chip Merlin*** purchased the sweet sloop a year and a half ago and set about updating her and now, just like that! It's showtime.

There's been more than a year's worth of preparation, rebuilding, outfitting, refitting, and organizing logistics. I haven't documented it because –– in a parallel to nie moje malpy, nie moj cyrk –– the fiberglass dust, punch lists, invoices, and files of safety documentation have been a few states away from me.

The intrepid crew includes Chip Merlin, Brian Malone, Kat Malone, Mackenzie Cook, Keahi Ho, Mike Pentecost, James Clappier, Chris Watts, Adrienne Cahalan, variously from Florida, California, Hawaii, and Sydney, Australia.

The Transpac website will be tracking the fleet –– keep in mind, instant-gratification junkies, that the updates appear with a 4-hour lead-time. That is, the updates are NOT in real-time.

Boats are expected to finish in a week or two, depending on weather and what-not. Here's the link to the Transpac race site.

Here's the link to Merlin Racing (find a treasure-trove of videos on YouTube too!). And here's the Merlin Facebook page.

Crossing fingers and knocking wood, next stop Honolulu. Laki maika'i, all y'all.

*Identify the literary reference, win a prize.
**8 days, 11 hours.
***If your family name is Merlin, I think you are more or less obliged live up to it.

4 Comments

On the Water For a Bit

3/27/2019

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Fewer words, more photos.

March is a busy racing month at our house.

Back soon.

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Ever. Challenge. Glades. 2019. Finished.

3/6/2019

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It's an unconscious thing, a tick. A habit. Take a phrase, parse it, divide it, recombine it, look for entertaining results.

As I beetle around trying to restore order to the large pile of salty gear, slightly used batteries, marine electronics, and ziplock bags of snacks, I find myself turning over the wordy options: The Everchallenge Glide. The Everyglades chalice. The Challenger Everglading.

I think it's the word "glide" that keeps snagging my attention.

Because for the first few days of the 2019 Everglades Challenge, the weather was very still.

It was hot and windless.

The sun was bright and the water flat.

There were an extraordinary number of selfies coming in off the water from the nearly 100 teams of WaterTribesfolk.

The fastest paddlers were handily beating nearly all of the sailboats.

Andyman and NateDog under the hot hot sun.

The boys on Spawn –– my favorite skipper and his pal Jahn –– are never-say-diers. They keep swinging for the fences. Always aiming higher.

All sporty metaphors apply.

The additions and refinements they make to the boat are all designed to eke a bit more speed, a touch more performance, a sliver more of whatever it will take for them to get to the finish line faster.

They've said more than once that they'd like to get to Key Largo before the second sunset. Tie up the boat and sleep Sunday night in a real bed. Stay awake for only the one night.

This was not that year.

The super-fast paddlers had a near-record run, but the wind-powered frontrunners? Let's say 300 miles has rarely seemed farther.

Of course this is an adventure race, and the boats are not limited in the way of typical races. For instance, rowing will get you ejected from most of the races we attend.

But in the Everglades Challenge, it's all part of the adventure.

Mr. Linton installed a system of long sweeps, racing oarlocks, and a nifty sculling seat on the original boat, and has continued to refine it as time passes.

The oars are a boon when the boat is bucking the current and needs a little extra oomph. It's also handy when navigable waters get too narrow for actual sailing.

Experimentation has shown that a steady rowing pace produces a reliable 3 knots or so of speed for the Spawn.

Sidebar: Why knots vs miles per hour? I know, confusing –– maybe even rocket science, but it's the way watery folk measure speed.
3 knots = about 3.3 miles per hour = about medium walking speed.

So when Spawn slows to the equivalent of a stroll, out come the sweeps. Cue the Volga oarsmen song.

With possible rose-tinted shades of memory, the Spawnsters estimate that they rowed perhaps a tenth of the distance between Fort DeSoto to Key Largo. Say 30 miles.

But when recounting each leg, the hours add up.

At the start, the rowing seat was in place, but Spawn ghosted across the mouth of Tampa Bay. They stayed in breeze down the white sand beaches past Sarasota and Venice.

They rowed into Cape Haze marina (Checkpoint 1) around sunset on Saturday. They rowed from Checkpoint 1 to Gasparilla Pass at night, under brilliant stars. Moresailesed (Jahn Tihansky) said that he saw the Southern Cross low low on the dark horizon.

In the dark, they rowed into a snoozing pod of manatees –– the special collective noun for the mammals is a "aggregation of manatee" –– and startled them into an enormous roiling mass of white-water.

Everyone had a moment of holding flipper to heart and gasping for breath.

Rowing kept Spawn out of the fog that socked in some racers farther north.

From Sanibel to Cape Romano, they'd row a mile to reach a puff, sail for a bit, and then row through another lull. Chasing zephyrs, balancing patience with strategy in connecting one patch of wind with another.

They had to row and sail through Blind Pass (the one by Caxambas) to get into Chokoloskee on Sunday afternoon..

They rowed into and then out of Checkpoint 3 –– Flamingo –– early on Monday morning, but then had a decent breeze across Florida Bay to finish at 8:54 a.m. on Monday.

Just under 50 hours.

They arrived raspy and salty. Three days later, we are still catching up on sleep.

Spawn arrives in Key Largo!

With help from the awesome Jim Signor, the boys packed Spawn onto the trailer, stowed things for highway travel, and we made our ways North. Moresailesed had a pressing engagement with the US Naval Academy, where he coaches sailing.

The Linton-mobile cantered home across Aligator Alley, meeting up with the nasty line of weather that Spawn had managed to outrun, but which lambasted the majority of the fleet.

We dodged the inexplicable traffic that plagues I75 between Fort Meyers and Sarasota and as always were grateful to arrive alive at our house. We parked and hustled bag after bag up the stairs and then stood looking at one another. Jeff spoke the immortal words, "Is it over already?"

Well, for now it is.

Until next time, Key Largo.

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From the Middle of the Challenge

3/3/2019

20 Comments

The middle of the state. The middle of the night. The middle of a large pile of gear.

From the middle, ground-control for my Everglades Challenge team seems like a way of life.

It's probably sleep deprivation (I write this at midnight, over a bowl of dairy-free frozen dessert, in between reloading various tracking pages and checking the social media), but here I go again, blearily worrying, along with a clan of like-minded folks as we follow the progress of the 100 or so boats as they paddle, sail, and row down the left side of the Florida peninsula.

For those who haven't been following, here's the overview: The Everglades Challenge is a 300-mile unsupported expedition race put on by a gang called the WaterTribe. Competitors get a WaterTribe name. My favorite skipper –– AKA TwoBeers –– is racing with his childhood pal, the offshore sailing coach for the Naval Academy, Jahn Tihansky (tribe name Moresailesed). They set sail on the first Saturday in March at dawn from Fort Desoto in St. Pete, aboard a boat called Spawn designed by OH Rodgers (Ninjee).

As expected, the WaterTribe tracking site is experiencing some kind of technological version of the vapors.

Raceowl.com is doing better, but it means translating four-digit numbers back into familiar names. Spawn of Frankenscot is 3092, Safety Dance is 2969, Spongebob is 3072, the German guy, Schappi, is 3068, Jarhead is 3154, Puma is 3134, SeadogRocket and BermudaBoy are 3104, Ccock 3043. Et cetera.

Yesterday started for the Spawn team at o'dark thirty, when Jeff and Jahn and I piled into Charlie Clifton's van with yet more piles of gear, and made our way to the beach at Fort Desoto. Where we were met with a whole tribe of people wearing head-lamps and lycra-enhanced fitness clothing toting bales of stuff out to their various watercraft.

The Challenge begins, fiendishly enough, with the competitors needing to push their boats from the high-tide line into the water at the signal at 7 am. Some folks have wallowed in the sand for seemingly hours. Not my fellas!

The launching of the fleet was relatively slow this year –– not much breeze. Still, the moment passes in a twinkling of the eye.

At seven, the beach is packed, by a quarter after, only a lonesome boat or two and spectators are left on the beach.

I don't know what other ground-control people do, but given that Moresailesed was shedding virus and coughing like a consumptive, I cleaned up with a vengeance. Seven loads of laundry, autoclaving the dishes, a possibly unhealthy number of Clorox wipes, followed by a quick nip around to the non-dairy frozen dessert section of my local grocery and a nice cat-nap.

My phone is buzzing more than usual: Spawn has a following, and even with the light wind there's an element of nail-biting suspense. Moresailesed send along a photo from onboard –– roughly, I am thinking, from the spot where they spent some time last year recovering from a bit of excitement.

Evidently the mosquitoes are making an appearance on board Spawn –– last year, the poor devils couldn't make headway agains the wind. Each Challenge is different, I suppose, and a new test of the competitors' varying skills.

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Everglades Challenging –– Spawn Update

2/26/2019

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Headline: Nearly There.
Sunrise on the first Saturday in March is less than a week away.
We've started checking the weather.

The Spawn of Frankenscot team of my favorite skipper, Jeff Linton (WaterTribe name: TwoBeers) and his childhood pal, the offshore coach for the Navy sailing team in Annapolis, Jahn Tihansky (aka Moresailhesaid) are just about ready for the 2019 Everglades Challenge.

The OH Rodgers-designed adventure boat (OH's WaterTribe handle is Ninjee) has had some nice new modifications and seems positively panting to go...

Okay, maybe one more last-minute rush order of something to arrive –– we hope –– before the start on Saturday morning.

Gathering of the Tribe for the 2018 WaterTribe Everglades Challenge.

And alright, perhaps a skosh more work on the centerboard gasket.

Aaannnnd those shrouds can be refabricated. Again. Gahh.

Thank goodness for the support of Leslie and Paulie at Masthead Enterprises in St. Pete, Brian Malone at North Sails, and Derek Dudinsky at JTR Industries for helping with last-minute fixes!

Ooh, yeah, plus some food. I (WaterTribe name: BookWorm) will Betty-Jo Crocker a batch of toothsome morsels for the heroes.

....And Bookworm needs to apply a fresh bit of Sharpie-marker for the eyes of Horus* so they can keep a sharp lookout.

*The protective Eyes of Horus (or, exactly, an eye of Thoth and an eye of Rah) look ahead and behind in Egyptian mythology.

For the sake of aerodynamics, our Eyes look port and starboard from mast float. Same diff, right?

Updates? Why yes, absolutely!

Click on one of the map images below (from past years' events) for either the Spot individual tracker for Spawn, or for the WaterTribe competitors tracking map.

On the latter, our team appears as the familiar green Frankie logo.

Click for the individual track of Spawn.

Click here to link to the track of all WaterTribe racers.

As in past years during the Challenge, I will be pacing about and clicking "refresh" way too often. I'll attempt to report progress and adventure and photos in as timely a fashion as possible here and on the Spawn facebook page.

Hoping for a speedy and not too adventuresome a Challenge for the entire fleet of intrepid Watertribers.

Knock wood.

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Spawn: Countdown to the Challenge

2/12/2019

8 Comments

Just when I think my favorite skipper is finished with his boat-building, he comes up with one more cool refinement.

Aaaannnd then one more...

Well, and this additional thing...

Here's a round-up of some of these latest little refinements.

The water wings (here's the longer story) are hard.

Instead of sitting on a canvas trampoline-style rack, it's more a wooden kitchen stool situation.

Solution? How about fancy closed-cell foam designed for boats?

Cushy for the tushies. Also windsurfing style foot-straps to keep sailors connected to the boat.

Not the inexpensive solution, but Hydroturf sure looks sharp. The ocean blue might be a little warm in the sun, but it's cushy and –– so we hear –– UV resistant.

Then there's a nifty water-take-up contraption. Since the water wings act as water ballast tanks, of course, it's important to be able to fill and empty them rapidly.

There's a pair of whale-tail pumps in the cockpit, but how to convey water from the briny deep into those tanks?

It would be counterproductive for speed and safety if TwoBeers and Moresailhesaid had to throw a tube over the side of the boat or hoist buckets of water over the side.

This year's innovation involves a set of PVC pipe, plumber's clamps, and some bungee at the transom. A visual appears below. The inner tube is spring-loaded, retracting into itself at rest.

Water pump for ballast.

When one of the Spawnsters gives the little line on the right of the tube a tug, the inner section telescopes into the water, allowing for rapid water take-up.

Stowage is a universal question. It's all well and good to pack what you need, but what if you can't find it when you need it?

In the original boat (Frankenscot, a highly modified Flying Scot), Masthead Sailing Gear fabricated some big, roomy zip bags. In combination with plastic tubs and netting hammocks, it worked pretty well.

But after last year's watery portion of the trip (Short story: they flipped and stuff floated away. Longer version: here.), one of the goals was to have more secure storage for gear. Hence, new tailored Masthead Enterprise custom bags are tucked and snapped into place between bulkheads.

Storage solutions.

With luck the snacks and electronics will not become separated from the boat. Knock wood, knock wood.

And at Moresailesaid's specific request, TwoBeers installed a special Masthead-made splash guard. Made of Mylar sailcloth, the guard is meant to deflect spray for a drier ride with better visibility.

Splash guard installed!

Did I mention knock wood?

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Emerging from Her Summer Den, Spawn Makes Her Way Back to the Water

In Sailing News Elsewhere

Transpac –– Oh! Ho! Ho! It's Magic.

Transpac––Modern Technology

Disappear Mah Beard, Why Doncha*?

On the Water For a Bit

Ever. Challenge. Glades. 2019. Finished.

From the Middle of the Challenge

Everglades Challenging –– Spawn Update

Spawn: Countdown to the Challenge

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