Everglades Challenge: To the Rack, Frankenscot!

Frankenscot -- our planned entry for the 2014 Everglades Challenge race -- continues to emerge from the primordial ooze. 

Aside from the occasional brainstorming session at a local watering hole, this boat-building project has been taking place in the back yard. Our boat-yard, as it were.  But when the Frankenscot needed to go visit the machine shop, Captain TwoBeers had to call in the troops. 

The Frankenscot trailer (Frankenwagon?) had a tenuous grasp of itself. By all estimates, it only had a few nail-biting miles left before imploding in a puff of rust-flakes, leaving the Frankenscot stranded road-side. 

A three-card Monte shuffle ensued, involving several cars and some very good friends. The Fisher-Silvernail Flying Scot and Ensign RumDown's (spoken with a note of panic, mind you) powerboat trailer and the Frankenwagon all played a sort of musical chairs game. But at the end of the long day, no one was bleeding, nothing sank, and the Frankenscot was sitting pretty on a good trailer at the machine shop. 

Sailing friend and metal maestro Derek Dudinsky has fabricated all sorts of odd bits and bobs out of aluminum and stainless for us over the years. Stanchions and chain-plates, centerboard control-boxs, a cooking-pan rack for the kitchen, cool trophies, a deluxe retractible pole for the birdhouse, miscellaneous things that have made Customs officers scratch their heads all over the Caribbean. He's got a big shop, JTR Enterprises, with all the metal-bending fixin's in Gulfport, FL. He hosted a Classic Moth Midwinters party at the shop one time: the science-crazy Moth-building enginerds still speak of the place in hushed and sentimental tones. 

For the Frankenscot, we asked Derek to bend some aluminum tubing into hiking racks.  By attaching these hiking racks, ideally, we will be able to sail pretty comfortably while keeping the boat "hiked down."

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In sailing, the term "hiking" describes the way sailors lean their weight against the pressure of wind on the sails. (Sidebar fact: in New Zealand, the term is "stacking.") 

Sailors on small boats are essentially levers. Projecting from the side of the boat, hiking racks extend that lever-arm. The picture over here -->
shows TwoBeers holding onto the hiking racks of an International Moth. 

A short physics lesson about hiking boils down to two more-or-less sailing truths: 

•       The harder you hike, the flatter the boat.
•       The flatter the boat, the faster the boat.

The photo over here --->
shows TwoBeers at work on the hiking racks on that same International Moth boat. He's perched on the very edge of the rack with his feet braced under a strap (a hiking strap, natch).


And yes, the boat does appear to be flying. The International Moth uses hydrofoils, which means it lifts out of the water and goes very fast indeed. 


So why not a foiling Frankenscot? Dream big and all that...
But foiling a Flying Scot is not very practicable, given the shallow water, range of conditions, and potential fragility of the foils.

The Frankenscot racks (shown in place but not yet nailed in) might look a little like the wayward child of a brushed metal safety-rail and a sturdy awning frame, but they make the boat a whopping ten feet and eleven inches wide. 

Next up, the fittings that will hold the racks firmly in place. 

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