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Sailing AUKLET

~ Small sailboat cruising and related thoughts

Sailing AUKLET

Monthly Archives: March 2015

Yuloh Plans

26 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by shemaya in the boat

≈ 6 Comments

yuloh top view and long section

~

yuloh1

Here’s how we did the scarfs for the bend (I would recommend using epoxy rather than TB III for this joint, now. It has worked, with the seizing, but another high-strain place where we used TB III has since failed – it’s really not meant for that.): EPSON MFP image

It has taken much too long to get these drawings posted here – but finally! If what we have done is useful to people for building or designing their own yuloh, that’s great, and these plans are freely offered for that purpose. If somebody were to choose to publish these drawings, or to print anything that is for sale that uses them, then an appropriate agreement would need to be worked out so that Theo, who drew them, would be compensated for those efforts. If you have something like that in mind, please contact myself and Theo through this website…

All that out of the way, it’s a pleasure to share what we did. In the interest of lightest yuloh weight possible, the loom (long skinny part of the yuloh, between the blade and the handle) is thinner than what appears in most yuloh plans. This works fine for me, in propelling AUKLET, which weighs about 2 1/2 tons on the truck scale, loaded… If somebody wants to really put their weight into their yuloh operation, thicker would likely be better.

If I were to build another yuloh and pin/socket arrangement, I would make one change. Rather than the angled bicycle tow hitch described in the previous AUKLET yuloh article (http://sailingauklet.com/2013/10/13/the-yuloh/) I would use a rounded vertical rod at the top of the post on the transom. The wood piece for the socket, added to a spot left flat on the yuloh loom, has worked out well; using a vertical rounded rod on the transom post would mean that the socket in that wood piece would be drilled at a 45° angle. I would also slope the sides of that socket at something like 30° to 45°, port and starboard, to help prevent the yuloh from jumping off the pin. This is much like the description for Easy Go (http://www.junkrigassociation.org/Resources/Documents/Easy%20Go%20Yuloh.pdf by Bob Groves). After significant use of the bicycle hitch version, I think that the Easy Go version might very well be better on the jumping issue. I’m looking forward to trying it one of these days. Of course, now that I’m used to what I have, it’s working pretty well, so that could be a while…

Since that original auklet blog post, Dave Zeiger has done another article on yuloh design, found here: http://triloboats.blogspot.com/2014/04/yuloh-20-and-beyond.html, working from the design by Slieve McGalliard. Slieve’s original article can be found here: http://www.junkrigassociation.org/slieve (go to this link and click on the title “Yuloh efficiency.pdf”) This original “recipe” is what Theo and I worked from to make the yuloh design for AUKLET, whose waterline length is about 19 feet.

Socket details are in the following drawings:

yuloh3

yuloh4

We made three sockets, since it was easy and allowed for using different positions to see which one would work best. I’m glad for that – the one nearest the handle works well, while the other two jump off the pin badly. All are 5/8 inch deep, and are a rounded 1/2 inch across at the inside end of the socket, flared toward the outer edges to 3/4 inch. The socket that works the best has worn away with use, on the port and starboard sides, to produce a little more slope; this has seemed helpful. Because of the sloping pedestal on the trailer hitch ball (see photo below), when the yuloh rocks far to one side or the other, it is levered off the ball. This is not good! I expect that a machinist (or maybe just somebody with a file) could alter that sloping pedestal on the trailer hitch, but it seems like just rounding off a 1/2 inch bronze rod would be simpler, if it doesn’t cause the same problem.

IMGP4566

The removable part that we call the “yuloh post,” which brings the pin to the correct height on the transom, puts the top of the pin at 33 inches above the waterline at the stern of AUKLET. It is my feeling that getting the correct pin height above the waterline is an important part of making a yuloh design work properly, so that it requires the least effort in use; guidelines for determining pin height are included in the above articles.

I think that’s everything that wasn’t covered in the previous post. I remain enormously happy with the yuloh. Since I have spent a lot of time in the guilty activity of sculling with the rudder (which can be quite hard on the equipment), there’s a pretty good base for comparison as far as efficiency. The same amount of effort applied to the yuloh makes the boat move along very well, while the rudder version, though it also works, requires a lot more effort to cover the same distance.

Yuloh operation takes a little getting used to. After initial frustrations while actually underway, I practiced a lot at anchor, which helped, and it is now a smooth process that makes a real difference when the wind quits. An extra half-mile in or out of harbor is quite doable, and with average strength, as other people have demonstrated, it’s possible to really cover some distance in a cruising sailboat, with quite a bit of ease.

Blog programs provide statistics to do with readership, and the yuloh material on this blog receives by far the most attention of any individual post here. It’s fantastic to see so much interest in this elegant, traditional way of moving one’s boat. It would be great fun to see yulohs become commonplace here in the west!

~~~~~~~~~~~

[As always, I am not receiving anything for links or equipment mentions in this or any other post on this blog.]

Update, March 2016

Since this writing, we did indeed modify the socket on the yuloh that receives the bicycle hitch pin. We modified the middle socket, seen in the following photo, sloping the edges of the port and starboard sides. The yuloh responded very well to that, doing a much better job of staying on its pin.

IMGP8277

There are also two more videos:

Carol Hasse, sailboat propelled by yuloh

Carol Hasse, tour of her folkboat. Some ways into this video there is a detailed, close-up, view of her yuloh and its mounting hardware. Extremely well done.

Just Because You Don’t Remember…

19 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by shemaya in Why Go Sailing

≈ 8 Comments

New Salt just launched, May, 2002
A number of years ago, when I was sailing the Falmouth cutter, one night I ended up in the drink. It was about two in the morning and I had been anchored in back of the breakwater at Duck Island, on the south coast of Connecticut. The weather deteriorated and it wasn’t so nice out there, so I decided to go in to my regular slip in the nearby marina.

It was raining, with a fairly stiff wind that wanted to blow the boat away from the float that I needed to tie up to in my short slip. (The photo above is that very boat and marina, but a slightly different slip.) Alone, and the docks of course deserted at that time, I made the tight turn to port, into the space between my float and the adjacent boat, and with dock line in hand took a rather long step from the starboard rail to the end of the float. Normally this would have worked, but the wooden float was slick in the rain, my foot slipped, and down I went, presumably with a splash.

I say “presumably,” because I have a clear memory of coming up to the slip, stepping across, the grip under my foot letting go, and the very beginning of falling backwards toward the water. Then there’s a big blank spot, and my memory begins again when I am in the water, floating easily because of all the air trapped in my warm clothes and foulies. I had apparently had the presence of mind to keep holding onto the dock line, because it was, thankfully, in my hand.

The docks at that marina are somewhat high, and I floated beside mine for a couple of moments, considering what to do next. It was obvious that I wasn’t going to be climbing right out of the water, so after a little thought along the lines of, “if there is ever a time when I really ought to inflate this lifejacket, that would be now, at two in the morning, in the dark and the wind, in the water.” The lifejacket inflated as it was supposed to, and before the boat could drift too far back I swam close enough to a cleat up on the float to be able to reach up and tie the line I’d been holding. As things went on, the boat drifted back to hang on that bow line, almost touching the boats on the dock across the way.

Meanwhile, I was focused on the matter of how to get out of the water. For some reason it did not occur to me to try to use the emergency rope ladder on the boat (regularly used for swimming), so we still don’t know if, in a tremendous amount of rather wet clothing, it would have worked to climb that. It also didn’t occur to me to swim the fairly short distance from my slip over to the rocky shore, between the lines of boats. From there I could, at that time, have walked around back to the dock and the boat. I’m a good swimmer, and after all had the lifejacket inflated, but swimming to the shore simply didn’t cross my mind as an option. There’s some current that runs through there, so perhaps that was for the best.

What I did think about was that the marina was full of people on their boats, probably sleeping. I was going to need help to get back up on that dock, and knew that at least some of the people I knew were within range. So I took out the little orange ACR whistle stashed in the lifejacket and gave it a try, with quite a number of pretty energetic toots. No response.

All the safety training materials I’ve seen, from backwoods, to kayaks, to generic boating, say that whistles are far more easily heard than people’s voices. I was thinking about that information, there in the water, with no response to the whistle, but decided that voice was worth a try regardless. Things weren’t desperate – I was floating, I was warm, and I wasn’t even particularly wet, with the foul weather gear taking time to allow the water to get in. So I started hollering the names of two friends who I was pretty sure were sleeping in their boat just a couple of boats away on the other side of the dock. That went on for a bit, with no response, and then it finally occurred to me that I should actually be calling for help. So instead of just the friends names, I yelled out “I’m in the water – I need help!”

That was all it took. Seconds later several friendly people were on the float, reaching to give me a hand. Together we figured out the best way to manage, and shortly I was out of the water. While that was happening somebody meanwhile had pulled the boat in and secured it to the proper cleats.

As we all collected ourselves, I asked them if they had heard the whistle, and they said no, not at all. They had heard me hollering the names of my friends (who, sleeping in their cabin, never heard a thing), but attributed the yelling to the kind of rowdiness that sometimes goes with life in marinas. But the folks who heard these calls were awake, and dressed, and as soon as they understood the situation they were there in a flash.

Nowadays I have “storm whistles” stashed all over the place, as well as the knowledge that in this sort of situation it’s not only okay, but crucial, to say very clearly that you need help. I hope to not land in the drink again – after that event I changed my docking system, to make stepping across unnecessary – but I sure did learn a lot from the experience, and the “basic facts” are just the beginning.

The most remarkable thing is that it’s now about 12 years later, and I still have no memory of the actual time when I was falling. What I do remember is feeling terribly banged up afterwards. When you fall accidentally off a boat, particularly near docks, it’s not necessarily the ending up in the water that’s the problem. Rather, the biggest issue comes from what you hit on the way down. I was fortunate not to hit my head, but based on the pattern of bruises, I think that my left arm must have come down on something pretty hard. And I had that overall thrashed feeling, which I’ve only otherwise experienced after a major car accident.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not particularly important that I don’t remember that second or two of my life; the surrounding memories, and evidence, make what passed in those moments pretty clear. I’d like to know what I bashed on the way down, but the injuries are long healed, and it doesn’t really matter. What is more than relevant, however, is the illustration provided by this experience.

As I’ve said before on this blog, I’m a survivor of quite severe childhood abuse. Most of this abuse I know about because of an odd kind of “shadow memory,” and because of the repercussions of those childhood experiences in my adult life. Just like those 1 to 2 seconds of falling from the boat, I have no regular, clear memory of many of the things that I know took place. And very much like being in the water after that fall, the outcomes of my childhood experience – the physical and emotional challenges of my adult life – point to how things got that way. The only difference is that a person floating in the water is so clear and unequivocal.

As somebody pointed out to me (thank you, Lori) after the post from some time back titled “Thoughts on Rescue,” there is no lying in ocean rescue. Nobody thinks, “oh, the person I see in the water might be lying about it,” while the rescuer tries to decide whether or not they should fish them out; there is no evaluation of motives, or memories, or stories, nor is that question even relevant to the situation. Whether the person who needs help is in a life raft, or crawling through smoke in a burning building, the appropriate response is unequivocal. If it is physically possible, they are rescued. Even if the person doesn’t remember falling, it’s obvious that they are in the water, and people reach to help them back to dry ground.

These days, I am fascinated, and comforted, by the relationship between memory, history, and the here-and-now. When I ask myself, “oh, did that old stuff really happen?”, all I have to do is look around at the surrounding present. When the surrounding present is just as incontrovertible as floating in that harbor, dock line in hand, you know that it’s true.

I’d prefer not to have fallen off that boat, but gosh what a gift it was. I learned a lot, lived to tell about it, and gained a model for better understanding of the entire arc of my life. Can’t ask for much more than that…

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