Centreboard and leeboard position on small sailing boats. Looking at design factors and how they lead to factors to be considered when sailing. How a lee helm feeling might not actually be lee helm as a truly balanced boat behaves a bit differently.
Ok, what are the main lessons we have learned about boat trim and boat speed from racing geese for three years? How to find speed, how to point the boat in the right direction, how to sail in big waves. This is a summary of our boatspeed “secrets”.
he background thinking of this is that building boats in the Philippines means that many parts are not available.
This has forced us to eliminate fittings – it is unlikely that you will find another racing class with as sparse a list as this. And remember … we still want to win races, so this very small list has to work.
A nice video on step by step rigging from our 10 boat build in Cebu last year. It applies to many small boat lug and lateen rigs.
Is bamboo a good choice for small boat spars? As a professional designer I can’t specify bamboo because of a huge variation in density, wall thickness and diameter. However I can recommend some guidelines for bamboo for the Oz Goose to help with experiments.
Order sails for your Goose or OzRacer or PDRacer if you don’t want to make them. Available “off the shelf” from Duckworks USA – delivered promptly worldwide.
The cheapest rigging for a a lug rigged OzGoose no performance sacrifice. Poor availability of fittings in Asia means low cost innovation and fleet testing works for any lug rigged boats learned by sailing and racing the sixteen (now 27 as of last weekend) Oz Geese in the Philippines. Some money saving simplifications and some tweaks that will give a lot more performance to most lug rigged (and other boats). There is nothing unusual in these methods, just a translation of regular racing practice in more conventional boats. Don’t scoff – you can say “I’m a cruiser” – but there are times when everyone wants or needs to get upwind 10 or 20 percent faster.
The plans for the various Goose versions show timber spars, butwhat about Aluminium tubing for spars. Here are sizings in Imperial and Metric below. Here is Brad Hickman practicing on Lake Eufala. Video below. I do like the timber spars because they look nice. But you can save a bit of weight on the yard …