Not Dead, But Somewhat Dismayed

One Year Post-Launch

Apologies to my loyal reader for the cliffhanger.  I am alive; the boat didn't sink, or break up, or otherwise fail completely.  I christened her Ihi, which I'm told means "power" or "respect" depending on whether you're speaking Maori or Hawai'ian.  I think the fact that this sort of craft is responsible for etymological similarities that span over 3500 nautical miles of nearly empty ocean is pretty deserving of respect.  I also wanted the name to indicate a respect for the power of the ocean, which is an integral part of Polynesian culture and traditional seamanship.

So yeah, we poured a bit of champagne over the bow and said a few words and launched without incident.

But I have had a lot of trouble with her.  That trouble, and my confusion as to its cause (and of course life getting in the way) is the reason I've been silent so long.

The Problem: Steering

Paddling, Ihi is a bit slower than a non-outrigger canoe.  She'd get there, but she's way slower than, say, a competently handled sea kayak.

Under sail in a stiff breeze, Ihi goes like a bat out of hell.  It's thrilling.

Unfortunately, in either case she seems to go pretty well wherever she pleases, with little regard for helm input.  In Colorado's smallish inland lakes, this results in a lot of brief, terrifying, frustrating darts from launch to the shore.  I never quite ran into anything, or ran aground even, but wow, I had some close calls.

Initial Theory: Hull Twist?

One reason I have been so quiet about my experiences is that I was initially convinced that the pull was always to port, and indicated that I'd built  a badly twisted hull.  There is some hull twist visible in her - I was hasty installing the aft thwart one day, with a bunch of epoxy curing before I could line things up right.  You can see it in this older photo from her build:

It is my intellectual style to ponder a problem quietly for a long time, until I have a plan.  Well, I spent much of the past year wondering if I would have to grind out all of her fillets and rebuild her completely.

This week, I launched Ihi for the first time this summer (shameful, I know), and I rigged her with the ama to starboard rather than to port for the first time ever.  And guess what?  She didn't pull to port anymore (paddling - I haven't gotten her sail up yet this year, due to a spar failure).

Well, that's not entirely true. She veers badly off the wind, whether it's coming from port or starboard.  I think she's misbehaving because she would prefer to be steered with the steering paddle while being paddled along - or because she needs ballast in the forefoot to keep her tracking straight.  I need to find some other Melanesia owners to talk to about this behavior.

It's entirely possible that the twist is a real thing, but my latest thinking on the issue is that it's likely nowhere near as big an effect as the tug of the ama in the water.  Which brings me to my second theory:

Second Theory: Poor Ama Performance?

I built two amas for Ihi.  My first was an undersized aspen trunk, and it's probably only about 60% the volume (and thus buoyancy) it's supposed to be.  It digs in pretty badly, and that can't be good for tracking.  Ihi definitely takes a little muscle to overcome the drag of the submarining ama.

My second ama, which is made from arid mountain pine, is at least twice as dense as the aspen.  It's plenty big, but not the right stuff to make an ama out of.  It barely floats by itself, so it's not able to lend the canoe much help.  And it's so massive that you can feel any acceleration vector averaging against the inertia of the ama, as if it were a giant sea anchor.  The small aspen ama is usable, at least; the heavy pine version is a definite mistake.

I'd like to find another, larger aspen trunk and try to fashion a larger ama that has that magically low density of aspen.  Failing that, I've considered a glass & foam ama, but that's going to be very expensive and time consuming.  I'm more likely to build one out of foam and construction lumber than to go the superlight glass/foam route.  Until I get a new and improved ama of some sort, I won't be able to speak authoritatively on whether the ama is/was a contributing factor.

Third Theory: Untrained Helmsman

One thing I know for certain: Ihi steers unlike anything I've ever sailed before.  She's frightfully sensitive to weight distribution, and her handling characteristics change dramatically with the wind speed.  In the trade winds of the South Pacific, that's probably not a big deal, but here in the capricious, swirling winds of Colorado's Front Range, it's mystifying.  I'm reminded of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's line about juggling in variable gravity.

The only answer here is experience.  I need to keep sailing her so that I can begin to understand how to sail her.  As time goes on, I'm sure there will be fewer and fewer near-calamities.  Who knows?  Maybe I'll eventually get good enough to take her out in some real water, like coastal cruising or that Watertribe North Carolina race I had my eye on.  Ten years ought to do it.... Watertribe 2023, here I come!

Fourth Theory: Poor Sail Trim Capability

I'm certain about this one, too.  As outlined in this post on sail handling the Melanesia, it's critical to be able to adjust the mast's tilt fore and aft, and port and starboard.  The fore-and-aft tilt affects whether she steers neutrally as load changes, and the lateral adjustment is necessary to correct for weather helm.

Well, I initially intended to achieve these adjustments using homemade deadeyes and toggles:

The problem is, there's just too much friction in the deadeyes.  There was no way to adjust the mast position with the sail under load - it wasn't even possible to adjust with the sail luffing, unless I had a helper guide the mast into position by hand.  In the end, every adjustment required returning to the beach, which isn't easy when you don't have helm control to begin with.  I kept having to drop the sail and paddle back to my launch site to try again.  You just can't squeeze very many iterations of that process into an afternoon sail.

To that end, I've purchased a handful of small Harken blocks to replace the deadeyes.  These should allow much more real-time adjustment capability, which will, in turn, give me the equivalent of several month's experience in just a few outings.

Other Things

Let's see, what else have I learned?  Not as much as I would have if I'd been sailing more, but there are a few lessons I can think of:

1. The Melanesia has really low freeboard.  She a wet boat when even my overloaded El Toro dinghy would be dry.  Though this would probably improve a little with a more buoyant ama, it's hard to imagine her working in the open ocean. I'd really want to build some bulkheads beneath the fore and aft decks for guaranteed flotation if I were going to try her in those conditions.
2. The pinned and lashed connections between the jaws and the spars doesn't seem to work for me.  Maybe I don't have the joinery skills, or maybe I'm using poor materials, or poor lashing execution.  Whatever the case, I'll take an epoxy & glass tape joint any day.  I hear of a new local source for bamboo - maybe I'll end up with a second bamboo spar soon, who knows?
3. Assembling Ihi takes a lot of time.  Even if I leave the tukis in the ama and lashed to each other where they cross, I still have 9 major lashings to complete every time I transport the boat.  In my experience, it takes me (by myself) about an hour and a quarter to get everything set up.  She's not a great boat to use in situations where you have to cart her to and fro - though she's very portable once she's disassembled. 

That's all I can think of for now.  I'm not sure how often I'll be posting in the future, but I'll try to report back as I resolve the issues I'm facing.  Questions or suggestions from fellow Melanesia sailors welcome!

<SARCASM>Oh, How I've Missed This</SARCASM>

It's been a really, really long time since I had anything to report on the boat building front.  I let a week of warm temperatures slip by without resuming the project, because I was finishing up a car project (not a Land Rover, but sort of close: a 1987 4Runner) during that time.  But the 4Runner is finally sorted & registered, and I seem to recall stating a spring 2012 launch goal for this canoe, so when the temperatures rose to epoxy-curing levels again, I knew it was time to put the excuses aside and get to work.

I lowered the hull, swept and vacuumed the dust out of it, and mixed a big batch of thick fillet epoxy to do the semi-vertical stern joint with.  Found that a cat had urinated in the boatbuilding supplies box, right on my dust mask, so I had to mix without a mask.... Had a little trouble getting the mixed epoxy into my ad-hoc applicator system (the Ziploc bag with a corner cut off).... Accidentally spilled epoxy on my table saw table.... And proceeded to make a fair mess of the work, to boot.

When the spills were cleaned up, and all the epoxy had been coaxed into its rightful place (more or less), I straightened up and surveyed the carnage.  To be fair, the stern looks better than the bow, really, and both of these places will be covered by the decks when the boat is done, so I should stop complaining.  Despite the hassle of filleting, it really is good to be back at work on this project.  As long as the weather holds, I'll be working to meet that launch goal, and I'll keep you posted.

The Infernal Device

I spent some time last night trying to join the two halves of my sail with my wife's 1980's-era Kenmore sewing machine.  First, I had to pin the sail together in the proper alignment.  I'm planning to use a flat-felled seam, and I want the stitching to pass through all four layers of fabric, so there's a lot of work necessary to get the sailcloth in the proper arrangement before you start sewing.

I tried pinning, but it would have taken dozens of pins to hold the entire seam in place, and then how do you sew it?  Then it occurred to me to use masking tape to hold the edges together correctly.  I can sew right through the masking tape, and the tape should just tear off as the sail is used.  After a bit of work, that job was done, and I had a rather stiff pre-assembled seam consisting of 4 layers of sailcloth and 4 layers of masking tape.  To the machine!

But the sewing machine kept binding, which would require undoing the stitches, cutting the thread, clearing the jam, rearranging everything, and trying again.  Over, and over again.  Once, I even broke a needle; another time, I accidentally disassembled the bobbin assembly while trying to clear it.  That took 15 minutes to sort out....  Somewhere along the way, the thread got routed wrong and the machine was no longer producing stitches. 

My wife was very patient as I clumsily abused her machine.  I eventually figured out that the jamming was due to my not holding the free ends of the thread taut as I started out.  Armed with that knowledge, I successfully produced several inches of pretty, zig-zag stitches before the thread frayed in the needle and I had to stop.  Sigh.....

I knew this process wouldn't be easy, but I was unprepared for the complexity and finicky nature of the sewing machine.  I'll try to pick up a heavier needle and try again tonight.

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Meanwhile, here's a neat write-up of outrigger canoes and small catamarans from a British sea kayaking web site.  For the record, I was seriously considering building a sea kayak before I decided on the Melanesia.  I like the mobility and versatility of the kayak, but I wanted something that could carry a flexible number of people, and sail effectively.  The link above touches on all of these points.

Filleting, Part 1 (or, "Dairy Queen Owes Me Big-Time")

I tried laying epoxy fillets along the stem post today.  It's my first-ever experience with filleting, and I was really trying for a strong start.  There are gaps between the panels, so I covered them with masking tape to keep the epoxy from falling through.  And a friend suggested using tape to simplify clean-up after the fillet's applied, so I surrounded the fillet area with more tape.

Then it was on to the instructions.  The epoxy here is not the pure, transparent fluid I've been coating panels with; here, it should be thickened with silica powder and miniscule glass bubbles.  Wharram recommends a consistency like "soft ice cream." Being American, I instantly thought "Dairy Queen" and went with it.  What a hassle!  You can't manipulate something like that, you can only pour it.  I poured, trying to get it to flow along the seam.  When it ran down the stem post to the bilge, I tried my hand at pushing a liquid uphill with a plastic knife.

As I fought that hopeless battle, it gradually became clear to me that my boat was leaking.  White fluid was dripping out the edges of the masking tape and pooling below.  I tried briefly to contain that mess, but soon realized there would be no Containment, the best I could hope for was Spill Mitigation.

Fortunately, I had had the foresight to lay plastic sheeting below my work.  Unfortunately, that had happened in a parallel universe inhabited by a slightly smarter version of me.  Here in this universe, there was no protective sheeting, only a growing puddle of epoxy directly on the concrete floor of our porch.  I wiped up the mess with some paper towels, grabbed some plastic, and spread it under the leaking hull. 

I then quickly mixed up another, smaller, much stiffer batch of epoxy and stirred it into the dwindling puddle of fluid in the bilge.  The result was a slightly more workable substance that I managed to push into some of the nooks and crannies of the bow.  Finally, I had done the best I could with what I had to work with, and cleaned up.  The score was clearly Epoxy Fillets 1, Rich 0.

Looking back on the debacle, it occurs to me that they may not have Dairy Queen in the UK.  Their standards of what constitutes "soft ice cream" would therefore be vastly different from my own.  Next time, I will try to use a firmer mix, and will post the story of the rematch here.

Steering Paddle A Complete Loss

Just a quick entry today to say that I've decided to scrap the steering paddle.  As explained in my previous post, my ill-conceived attempt at tapering the blade thickness with a circular saw went badly.  I attempted to clean it up last night, but soon decided it was a total loss - if there were only one cut that went too deep, I might salvage it by epoxying on some strips in the affected area. But with several irregularly-shaped intrusions, it's just too much work to recover the correct paddle form.

The good news is that the other paddle I attempted to shape with the circular saw came out okay, and is fully shaped and ready to sand smooth.  It's also nice that I have a 2x12 ready for a second attempt at a steering paddle without having to laminate pieces together.  I'll try to loft and cut out a paddle from that piece of wood with the jigsaw tonight, and this time, the shaping will be all belt-sander and block plane.