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By Oliver Shaw
Autumn 2006 and Easter 2007
Early Autumn Break
This was a mid-week break at the end of September, inspired by the Indian Summer and by the opportunity to meet up with Rob Helyar, the Wayfarer sailor and retired airline pilot & navigator who is now becoming well known within our own Class for developing reefing kits, and who had supplied the kit for this boat.
It was an opportunity both to have a sail together and meet socially, and to try out his latest headsail reefing development. This uses his well-established flexible reefing spar but without cutting a slot along its length to insert the sail; instead the flexible spar is sewn permanently into the sail in a larger than usual luff pocket, and the luff wire is passed down the centre of the spar. At the time this was still an experimental rig, and was set up on a new sail that his sailmaker just happened to have lying around which was of approximately the right dimensions, rather than making a sail to measure, and it is cut a little higher and shorter in the foot than a standard GP14 genoa, so it is a midi sail rather than a full-sized genoa, and when reefed the sheeting angle is rather better.
Certainly it sets superbly well, with probably less disturbance to the airflow at the luff than with an external reefing spar, and it looks better, and with no slot cut in the flexible spar it is significantly stiffer. And even in the light winds that we experienced, this slightly smaller sail still gave ample drive for cruising
The day we met we were greeted by millpond conditions in the morning, so we set up the experimental sail and tried out various ideas, then went for a pub lunch and a walk round Tarn Hows. By the time we had completed that the wind had arrived, so we had a good sail in the second half of the afternoon, and then a very convivial dinner in the evening.
Plus some totally legitimate, albeit unauthorised, Land Rover fun as well. We were to dine at their holiday cottage, but I had first to go via Ambleside to pick up some dog food and some torch batteries, so we travelled separately, and Rob had given me directions and warned me that the final turn-off was “only a track, really”. I duly found what was indeed only a track, going in the right direction, in almost exactly the right place, and with a National Trust name plate that agreed exactly with the name I was looking for, and it had clearly had occasional vehicle use, so in all innocence I took it. By about half a mile later, by which time I was using not merely the four wheel drive that is a permanent feature of the vehicle but also both low ratio and diff lock, and when even so the car was starting to find the going difficult, I decided that this couldn’t be the right track after all, since Rob’s family routinely had access to their cottage with just ordinary cars. My excuse for taking the wrong track was that, unlike my host, I am only an amateur navigator … ... When I eventually met up with them, via their “track” which in the event turned out to be a decently gravelled road, it transpired that Rob had forgotten all about the existence of the previous one, which I had taken, but that it must have been the track over the moor!
This was also an opportunity to try out the boom tent, and sleeping aboard, for the first time in this boat. Although sleeping on the bottom of the boat proved to be not really viable in a Series 2, although it is just about viable in a Series 1 (which has a lower floor), it was nonetheless a very useful evaluation, and I came home with several specific ideas how to arrange matters for future seasons. What seems to be the best of these will involve creating some sort of temporary sleeping surface, possibly a canvas base stretched across the boat at the height of the side benches.
Easter Week - 3-day Break, Windermere
