pretty OT: boats...

[Ricketty C]

On Saturday, September 12, 2020 at 12:13:35 AM UTC-4, Mark wrote:

On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 3:12:44 PM UTC-7, Ricketty C wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 2:58:09 PM UTC-4, Edward Lee wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 11:50:01 AM UTC-7, Bill Martin wrote:
On 9/9/20 10:59 AM, John Larkin wrote:

Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.



You do know that the classic definition of \"boat\" is a hole in the water
which you pour money into...

Or a Tesla on water. Status symbol.

I only wish Tesla would make a boat. That would be awesome to be able to break 50 on the water with hardly a sound.

I think it\'s funny that you think Teslas are status symbols. I guess they are... to you. Most people who drive them just think they are nice cars.

--

Rick C.

+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
https://www.purewatercraft.com/

I\'ve been told it\'s eerie going flat out without the (2 cycle) outboard noise.

I\'ve never been on an electric boat, but I have been on boats with 4 stroke engines which are quieter than 2 stroke. It\'s probably a lot like in a car, while the engine doesn\'t make so much noise, there are other noise sources. My car has foam inserts in the tires reducing road noise so they don\'t spoil the quiet at highway speeds. I\'ve been on highways where the composition changes and the abrupt noise level change is dramatic.

I have an old Master Craft. I wonder if I could get what is needed to convert that? It presently has a Ford 351 Cleveland somewhere around 250 to 300 HP. That\'s about one Tesla motor. Then it\'s a matter of stuffing some battery packs in there and cooling it all.

--

Rick C.

-+- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-09-11 12:26, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:

On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k
Used for fishing andd beer drinking with the boys.
(no girls allowed. :^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for decades.
My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for $1200 and 29 when I
sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a swoopy new trailer for $750 and a
new trampoline for $150, so my TCO was about $120 per year not counting
boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once cartwheeled a
Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously hard,
155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the trampoline astern at
the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords \'requesting\' he slack off the
main or luff up a bit, when a wee bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried
the lee bow, the boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted
me skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html

Righting the beast in the blow and chop was a bear and we had to do it
over and over, as we\'d no sooner get righted than knocked down again
(it took the skipper several tries to grok pointing into the weather
long enough for us to re-board).

(Also, there was that first delay during the time I needed to stop laughing
hysterically, then convince the first-outing skipper that we weren\'t actually
going to die.)

In the end we got the boat up and had a great deal more fun that day before
sailing in, sunburned and smiling.

Good times!

Cheers,
James Arthur

I bet that was a good few moons ago.

My guys never got the bug--in retrospect I should have got a Laser or a
Sunfish or even a Flying Junior to start them off on. Pivoted
centreboards are pretty bulletproof, and they\'re not hard to repair even
if you really screw them up, as long as you don\'t crack the case.
_That_ can be a bear to fix.

The lower Hudson is really good for sailing--it\'s wide, there\'s always
wind, and in the summer it\'s as warm as bath water.

I also really liked sailing in Indian Lake in the Adirondacks, where we
used to camp on a small island all by ourselves. (The kids missed car
camping, where they could always find other kids to play with, but we
occasionally brought some of their friends with us.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[Flyguy]

On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 10:59:46 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc trk

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.
\"Bunter\", he said, \"I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason\"

If you drive around you will also see A LOT of cars parked in driveways, because that is WHERE they are parked when not in use. How many boats do you see in driveways that ARE in use? Answer: NONE.

Boats aren\'t used as often as cars - that is the nature of boats. That DOESN\'T mean they are NEVER used. I have an aircraft that spends MOST of its time on the ground; this year, do to COVID, it only spent 125 hours actually in the air (out of about 6,000). But if you drive by my airport you will see it tied down, day after day.

 

[server]

On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 18:53:34 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
<ggherold@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 7:35:14 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:27:18 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
ggherold@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 12:27:00 PM UTC-4, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k
Used for fishing andd beer drinking with the boys.
(no girls allowed. :^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for decades.
My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for $1200 and 29 when I
sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a swoopy new trailer for $750 and a
new trampoline for $150, so my TCO was about $120 per year not counting
boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once cartwheeled a
Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously hard,
155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the trampoline astern at
the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords \'requesting\' he slack off the
main or luff up a bit, when a wee bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried
the lee bow, the boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted
me skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html
Yikes, fun as long as you don\'t get banged by the boom.
The only ~sunfish* mishap I recall vividly is when we planted
the front half in a wave... boat on a broad reach. For a moment
I thought the boat was going to pop up backwards, but after coming
to a dead stop it mangled to shrug off the wave and continue on.
(slightly different tack afterwards :^)

George H.


*it was a bit bigger than a sunfish and no cockpit.

Righting the beast in the blow and chop was a bear and we had to do it
over and over, as we\'d no sooner get righted than knocked down again
(it took the skipper several tries to grok pointing into the weather
long enough for us to re-board).

(Also, there was that first delay during the time I needed to stop laughing
hysterically, then convince the first-outing skipper that we weren\'t actually
going to die.)

In the end we got the boat up and had a great deal more fun that day before
sailing in, sunburned and smiling.

Good times!

Cheers,
James Arthur

In Lake Pontchartrain, if you flip a sunfish mid-lake, you can stick
the mast in the bottom. Makes it hard to flip it back over. Then you
have to clean the mud out of the rigging.

As they say, the lake is bottomless; it just gets thicker as you go
down.

And as they say, it\'s a good place to be from.
Grin, Well \'round here if you can swim down and touch the plants
or mud on the bottom we call it a pond, or wet lands if it drys
out in the summer. :^)

Did the shallow bottom lead to big waves?

No, Lake P was pretty placid, a huge 12-foot-deep saucer. The real
danger was a thunderstorm sneaking up on drunken sailors. Guy I know
killed a girl when a storm snuck up while they were swimming. His
anchor line was too short, it pulled out, and the boat took off and
left the swimmers behind.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[Bill Gill]

On 9/12/2020 9:20 PM, Flyguy wrote:

On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 10:59:46 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc trk

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.
\"Bunter\", he said, \"I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason\"

If you drive around you will also see A LOT of cars parked in driveways, because that is WHERE they are parked when not in use. How many boats do you see in driveways that ARE in use? Answer: NONE.

Boats aren\'t used as often as cars - that is the nature of boats. That DOESN\'T mean they are NEVER used. I have an aircraft that spends MOST of its time on the ground; this year, do to COVID, it only spent 125 hours actually in the air (out of about 6,000). But if you drive by my airport you will see it tied down, day after day.

I had a neighbor who bought a boat and never took it out. At
least I don\'t remember it doing anything but sitting in his yard.

Bill

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, September 13, 2020 at 12:20:17 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:

On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 10:59:46 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.

If you drive around you will also see A LOT of cars parked in driveways, because that is WHERE they are parked when not in use.

Apparently cars spend 95% of their time parked. This has lead to a tolerably serious proposal that batteries in parked electric cars could be used as back-storage for the power network, to help it cope with the non-dispatchable nature of wind- and solar-power.

Rick C doesn\'t think much of the idea, but it got aired back in 2008 in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot,_Flat,_and_Crowded

and hasn\'t been shot down since then.

How many boats do you see in driveways that ARE in use? Answer: NONE.

Boats aren\'t used as often as cars - that is the nature of boats. That DOESN\'T mean they are NEVER used. I have an aircraft that spends MOST of its time on the ground; this year, do to COVID, it only spent 125 hours actually in the air (out of about 6,000). But if you drive by my airport you will see it tied down, day after day.

Flyguy gets something right for once. I\'m amazed.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[server]

On Sat, 12 Sep 2020 19:20:12 -0700 (PDT), Flyguy
<soar2morrow@yahoo.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 10:59:46 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc trk

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.
\"Bunter\", he said, \"I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason\"

If you drive around you will also see A LOT of cars parked in driveways, because that is WHERE they are parked when not in use. How many boats do you see in driveways that ARE in use? Answer: NONE.

But I see a lot of cars on the road too. I see very few of those
anywhere but in the driveway.

I know one guy who had his power boat shrink-wrapped to protect it
from the elements and critters. It hasn\'t been moved in years. His
wife isn\'t happy about any of that.

I see a lot more off-road vehicles being towed than I see boats.
Yesterday on I80 we passed the biggest pickup truck I\'ve ever seen. In
the bed was the biggest off-road jeepy thing that I\'ve ever seen. The
tires were about as tall as my car.

Boats aren\'t used as often as cars - that is the nature of boats. That DOESN\'T mean they are NEVER used. I have an aircraft that spends MOST of its time on the ground; this year, do to COVID, it only spent 125 hours actually in the air (out of about 6,000). But if you drive by my airport you will see it tied down, day after day.

If you\'re going to get enthusiastic for something and then get tired
of it, make it something small. Like an oscilloscope maybe.

What kind of scope do you have?



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-09-12 22:20, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 18:53:34 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
ggherold@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 7:35:14 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:27:18 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
ggherold@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 12:27:00 PM UTC-4, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k
Used for fishing andd beer drinking with the boys.
(no girls allowed. :^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for decades.
My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for $1200 and 29 when I
sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a swoopy new trailer for $750 and a
new trampoline for $150, so my TCO was about $120 per year not counting
boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once cartwheeled a
Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously hard,
155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the trampoline astern at
the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords \'requesting\' he slack off the
main or luff up a bit, when a wee bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried
the lee bow, the boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted
me skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html
Yikes, fun as long as you don\'t get banged by the boom.
The only ~sunfish* mishap I recall vividly is when we planted
the front half in a wave... boat on a broad reach. For a moment
I thought the boat was going to pop up backwards, but after coming
to a dead stop it mangled to shrug off the wave and continue on.
(slightly different tack afterwards :^)

George H.


*it was a bit bigger than a sunfish and no cockpit.

Righting the beast in the blow and chop was a bear and we had to do it
over and over, as we\'d no sooner get righted than knocked down again
(it took the skipper several tries to grok pointing into the weather
long enough for us to re-board).

(Also, there was that first delay during the time I needed to stop laughing
hysterically, then convince the first-outing skipper that we weren\'t actually
going to die.)

In the end we got the boat up and had a great deal more fun that day before
sailing in, sunburned and smiling.

Good times!

Cheers,
James Arthur

In Lake Pontchartrain, if you flip a sunfish mid-lake, you can stick
the mast in the bottom. Makes it hard to flip it back over. Then you
have to clean the mud out of the rigging.

As they say, the lake is bottomless; it just gets thicker as you go
down.

And as they say, it\'s a good place to be from.
Grin, Well \'round here if you can swim down and touch the plants
or mud on the bottom we call it a pond, or wet lands if it drys
out in the summer. :^)

Did the shallow bottom lead to big waves?

No, Lake P was pretty placid, a huge 12-foot-deep saucer. The real
danger was a thunderstorm sneaking up on drunken sailors. Guy I know
killed a girl when a storm snuck up while they were swimming. His
anchor line was too short, it pulled out, and the boat took off and
left the swimmers behind.



Yikes, they left the sails up?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[Ricketty C]

On Sunday, September 13, 2020 at 10:25:43 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Sunday, September 13, 2020 at 12:20:17 PM UTC+10, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 10:59:46 AM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.

If you drive around you will also see A LOT of cars parked in driveways, because that is WHERE they are parked when not in use.

Apparently cars spend 95% of their time parked. This has lead to a tolerably serious proposal that batteries in parked electric cars could be used as back-storage for the power network, to help it cope with the non-dispatchable nature of wind- and solar-power.

Rick C doesn\'t think much of the idea, but it got aired back in 2008 in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot,_Flat,_and_Crowded

and hasn\'t been shot down since then.

You mischaracterize my opinion. I simply pointed out that the marginal cost of using auto batteries are quite high given that they are in autos, devices that are expensive without the battery. While in theory a battery can be replaced in an auto, the cost of that will not make the marginal cost of using the battery for not transportation uses significantly less since they are \"captive\" devices, only purchased from the automaker.

So if a fair market is establishes where informed sellers can offer their batteries to informed buyers, I think the high cost of auto batteries will make them much less useful (more expensive) than simply the utilities owning the batteries they use for grid peak supply and arbitrage.

I did concede that there might be a limited market for such a market which depends on the highest prices paid at peak times. I have seen marginal rates exceed 10x price of normal electricity. However that will be some time off since even that portion of the market would be profitable for wholly owned batteries as shown by the many installations that are designed to do just that.

The idea of a market selling electrical storage in the form of auto batteries requires there being a premium paid for the service at a price higher than the actual cost of the wear on the battery. Much like many market, there has to be a significant profit motive to the car owner (with the key word being \"significant\") and it would be more profitable for the utilities to simply own the capacity themselves.

But you failed to see that aspect of the issue claiming everything is for sale, in essence. I don\'t dispute the fact that this is true, I dispute the willingness of a auto owner to put wear on the most expensive part of the car without a sizable profit which the utility would be better off putting in their own pockets.

How many boats do you see in driveways that ARE in use? Answer: NONE.

Boats aren\'t used as often as cars - that is the nature of boats. That DOESN\'T mean they are NEVER used. I have an aircraft that spends MOST of its time on the ground; this year, do to COVID, it only spent 125 hours actually in the air (out of about 6,000). But if you drive by my airport you will see it tied down, day after day.

Flyguy gets something right for once. I\'m amazed.

Only because it is much like something he already has taken a position on, owning an airplane which gets relatively little use. Otherwise he would have a hard time seeing this much like Larkin.

I wish most boats were never used. They seem to be getting a lot of use this weekend for sure. 80° and sunny today with lots of boats out of the driveway here.

--

Rick C.

-++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[server]

On Sun, 13 Sep 2020 12:38:33 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-09-12 22:20, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 18:53:34 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
ggherold@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 7:35:14 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:27:18 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
ggherold@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 12:27:00 PM UTC-4, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k
Used for fishing andd beer drinking with the boys.
(no girls allowed. :^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for decades.
My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for $1200 and 29 when I
sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a swoopy new trailer for $750 and a
new trampoline for $150, so my TCO was about $120 per year not counting
boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once cartwheeled a
Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously hard,
155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the trampoline astern at
the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords \'requesting\' he slack off the
main or luff up a bit, when a wee bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried
the lee bow, the boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted
me skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html
Yikes, fun as long as you don\'t get banged by the boom.
The only ~sunfish* mishap I recall vividly is when we planted
the front half in a wave... boat on a broad reach. For a moment
I thought the boat was going to pop up backwards, but after coming
to a dead stop it mangled to shrug off the wave and continue on.
(slightly different tack afterwards :^)

George H.


*it was a bit bigger than a sunfish and no cockpit.

Righting the beast in the blow and chop was a bear and we had to do it
over and over, as we\'d no sooner get righted than knocked down again
(it took the skipper several tries to grok pointing into the weather
long enough for us to re-board).

(Also, there was that first delay during the time I needed to stop laughing
hysterically, then convince the first-outing skipper that we weren\'t actually
going to die.)

In the end we got the boat up and had a great deal more fun that day before
sailing in, sunburned and smiling.

Good times!

Cheers,
James Arthur

In Lake Pontchartrain, if you flip a sunfish mid-lake, you can stick
the mast in the bottom. Makes it hard to flip it back over. Then you
have to clean the mud out of the rigging.

As they say, the lake is bottomless; it just gets thicker as you go
down.

And as they say, it\'s a good place to be from.
Grin, Well \'round here if you can swim down and touch the plants
or mud on the bottom we call it a pond, or wet lands if it drys
out in the summer. :^)

Did the shallow bottom lead to big waves?

No, Lake P was pretty placid, a huge 12-foot-deep saucer. The real
danger was a thunderstorm sneaking up on drunken sailors. Guy I know
killed a girl when a storm snuck up while they were swimming. His
anchor line was too short, it pulled out, and the boat took off and
left the swimmers behind.



Yikes, they left the sails up?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Knowing Bill, probably so. He managed to catch onto the anchor line
and eventually pulled himself into the boat, got control, and motored
back. Too late for one girl.

We used to sit on the lake levee and watch thunderstorms sweep in, a
vertical wall of water and lightning. Then sit in the refreshing warm
rain. I miss thunderstorms; we don\'t get them here. But the skiing is
better, and a blizzard can be interesting too.

SF is cold and very foggy today. It doesn\'t smell smokey. Maybe a
little smoke makes nucleation centers for the fog.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ehra0oalj1jmgv1/Fog_9_13_2020.JPG?raw=1

Real smelly smoke on I80 yesterday:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8veqz9biaajn4r3/Smoke_Lincoin.jpg?raw=1

It was like that all the way from the mountains to the coast.
Interesting times.

Today\'s New York Times has a bunch of stuff about the west coast fires
and forest (mis)management. People are beginning to admit some things.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-09-13 14:23, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sun, 13 Sep 2020 12:38:33 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-09-12 22:20, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 18:53:34 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
ggherold@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 7:35:14 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:27:18 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
ggherold@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 12:27:00 PM UTC-4, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k
Used for fishing andd beer drinking with the boys.
(no girls allowed. :^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for decades.
My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for $1200 and 29 when I
sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a swoopy new trailer for $750 and a
new trampoline for $150, so my TCO was about $120 per year not counting
boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once cartwheeled a
Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously hard,
155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the trampoline astern at
the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords \'requesting\' he slack off the
main or luff up a bit, when a wee bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried
the lee bow, the boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted
me skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html
Yikes, fun as long as you don\'t get banged by the boom.
The only ~sunfish* mishap I recall vividly is when we planted
the front half in a wave... boat on a broad reach. For a moment
I thought the boat was going to pop up backwards, but after coming
to a dead stop it mangled to shrug off the wave and continue on.
(slightly different tack afterwards :^)

George H.


*it was a bit bigger than a sunfish and no cockpit.

Righting the beast in the blow and chop was a bear and we had to do it
over and over, as we\'d no sooner get righted than knocked down again
(it took the skipper several tries to grok pointing into the weather
long enough for us to re-board).

(Also, there was that first delay during the time I needed to stop laughing
hysterically, then convince the first-outing skipper that we weren\'t actually
going to die.)

In the end we got the boat up and had a great deal more fun that day before
sailing in, sunburned and smiling.

Good times!

Cheers,
James Arthur

In Lake Pontchartrain, if you flip a sunfish mid-lake, you can stick
the mast in the bottom. Makes it hard to flip it back over. Then you
have to clean the mud out of the rigging.

As they say, the lake is bottomless; it just gets thicker as you go
down.

And as they say, it\'s a good place to be from.
Grin, Well \'round here if you can swim down and touch the plants
or mud on the bottom we call it a pond, or wet lands if it drys
out in the summer. :^)

Did the shallow bottom lead to big waves?

No, Lake P was pretty placid, a huge 12-foot-deep saucer. The real
danger was a thunderstorm sneaking up on drunken sailors. Guy I know
killed a girl when a storm snuck up while they were swimming. His
anchor line was too short, it pulled out, and the boat took off and
left the swimmers behind.



Yikes, they left the sails up?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Knowing Bill, probably so. He managed to catch onto the anchor line
and eventually pulled himself into the boat, got control, and motored
back. Too late for one girl.

We used to sit on the lake levee and watch thunderstorms sweep in, a
vertical wall of water and lightning. Then sit in the refreshing warm
rain. I miss thunderstorms; we don\'t get them here. But the skiing is
better, and a blizzard can be interesting too.

SF is cold and very foggy today. It doesn\'t smell smokey. Maybe a
little smoke makes nucleation centers for the fog.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ehra0oalj1jmgv1/Fog_9_13_2020.JPG?raw=1

Real smelly smoke on I80 yesterday:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8veqz9biaajn4r3/Smoke_Lincoin.jpg?raw=1

It was like that all the way from the mountains to the coast.
Interesting times.

Today\'s New York Times has a bunch of stuff about the west coast fires
and forest (mis)management. People are beginning to admit some things.

Deflects attention from the systematic arson.

BTW my Vancouver relatives are really suffering from the smoke from
Washington and Oregon.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com]

On Saturday, September 12, 2020 at 2:32:33 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:

On 2020-09-11 12:26, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k
Used for fishing andd beer drinking with the boys.
(no girls allowed. :^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for decades.
My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for $1200 and 29 when I
sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a swoopy new trailer for $750 and a
new trampoline for $150, so my TCO was about $120 per year not counting
boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once cartwheeled a
Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously hard,
155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the trampoline astern at
the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords \'requesting\' he slack off the
main or luff up a bit, when a wee bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried
the lee bow, the boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted
me skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html

Righting the beast in the blow and chop was a bear and we had to do it
over and over, as we\'d no sooner get righted than knocked down again
(it took the skipper several tries to grok pointing into the weather
long enough for us to re-board).

(Also, there was that first delay during the time I needed to stop laughing
hysterically, then convince the first-outing skipper that we weren\'t actually
going to die.)

In the end we got the boat up and had a great deal more fun that day before
sailing in, sunburned and smiling.

Good times!

Cheers,
James Arthur

I bet that was a good few moons ago.

Indeed, I believe t\'was about the year George Orwell made famous.

My guys never got the bug--in retrospect I should have got a Laser or a
Sunfish or even a Flying Junior to start them off on.

Those are fun boats.

Dad sailed 505\'s and Aussie 18\'s; big brother and I sailed the 470, 420, and the
Moth (a single-hander mini Aussie 18). Moths came to the U.S. about contemporaneously
with the Laser, but neither was well-known or popular at the time time Dad ponied up for ours.

In the Aussie 18 tradition, the Moth class has shallow draft, unlimited sail, and it\'s unstable--it\'ll
fall over at the dock unless there\'s someone in it. And it screams.

We also chartered big sailboats on rare occasion, to sail to Catalina for family vacations.

Pivoted
centreboards are pretty bulletproof, and they\'re not hard to repair even
if you really screw them up, as long as you don\'t crack the case.
_That_ can be a bear to fix.

The lower Hudson is really good for sailing--it\'s wide, there\'s always
wind, and in the summer it\'s as warm as bath water.

That sounds like *great* fun. As I kid I was single-handing the Moth in salt
water a few miles off the San Pedro shore. Dodging cargo and big wake in the
shipping lane--and bobbing up and down in the sea swells--was, honestly,
a bit intense.

Flat water and a brisk breeze--that\'s what fun is made of.

I also really liked sailing in Indian Lake in the Adirondacks, where we
used to camp on a small island all by ourselves. (The kids missed car
camping, where they could always find other kids to play with, but we
occasionally brought some of their friends with us.)
Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Sounds like heaven. Thanks!

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-09-13 14:33, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:

On Saturday, September 12, 2020 at 2:32:33 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs
wrote:
On 2020-09-11 12:26, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs
wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John
Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked
in driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never
used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor
costs $1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a
serious speed freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k Used for
fishing andd beer drinking with the boys. (no girls allowed.
:^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for
decades. My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for
$1200 and 29 when I sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a
swoopy new trailer for $750 and a new trampoline for $150, so
my TCO was about $120 per year not counting boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once
cartwheeled a Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously
hard, 155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the
trampoline astern at the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords
\'requesting\' he slack off the main or luff up a bit, when a wee
bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried the lee bow, the
boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted me
skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html



Righting the beast in the blow and chop was a bear and we had to do it
over and over, as we\'d no sooner get righted than knocked down
again (it took the skipper several tries to grok pointing into
the weather long enough for us to re-board).

(Also, there was that first delay during the time I needed to
stop laughing hysterically, then convince the first-outing
skipper that we weren\'t actually going to die.)

In the end we got the boat up and had a great deal more fun that
day before sailing in, sunburned and smiling.

Good times!

Cheers, James Arthur

I bet that was a good few moons ago.

Indeed, I believe t\'was about the year George Orwell made famous.

My guys never got the bug--in retrospect I should have got a Laser
or a Sunfish or even a Flying Junior to start them off on.

Those are fun boats.

Dad sailed 505\'s and Aussie 18\'s; big brother and I sailed the 470,
420, and the Moth (a single-hander mini Aussie 18). Moths came to the
U.S. about contemporaneously with the Laser, but neither was
well-known or popular at the time time Dad ponied up for ours.

In the Aussie 18 tradition, the Moth class has shallow draft,
unlimited sail, and it\'s unstable--it\'ll fall over at the dock unless
there\'s someone in it. And it screams.

We also chartered big sailboats on rare occasion, to sail to Catalina
for family vacations.

The 470 is a nice boat--we had a one-class regatta series in Vancouver
when I was a teenager, so there were a good 25 of them at the club. I
don\'t know the others.

Pivoted centreboards are pretty bulletproof, and they\'re not hard
to repair even if you really screw them up, as long as you don\'t
crack the case. _That_ can be a bear to fix.

The lower Hudson is really good for sailing--it\'s wide, there\'s
always wind, and in the summer it\'s as warm as bath water.

That sounds like *great* fun. As I kid I was single-handing the Moth
in salt water a few miles off the San Pedro shore. Dodging cargo and
big wake in the shipping lane--and bobbing up and down in the sea
swells--was, honestly, a bit intense.

There\'s shipping in the Hudson as well, but it\'s super hard to get into
trouble.

Flat water and a brisk breeze--that\'s what fun is made of.

Particularly since the wind blows down the valley, so you can be on a
wide point of sail most of the time. A Hobie on a broad reach in a
stiff wind is an even better stupid-grin generator than a Mustang
convertible. It\'s even better with a pretty girl in the trapeze.

When I was a youngster in Vancouver, I used to tease girls by letting
out the main sheet on my Fireball and dunking their tushes in the drink.
(Fun, but don\'t do it when you\'re married.)

I also really liked sailing in Indian Lake in the Adirondacks,
where we used to camp on a small island all by ourselves. (The kids
missed car camping, where they could always find other kids to play
with, but we occasionally brought some of their friends with us.)
Cheers

Sounds like heaven. Thanks!

Yeah, one of my favourite vacations.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com]

On Sunday, September 13, 2020 at 2:23:29 PM UTC-4, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sun, 13 Sep 2020 12:38:33 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamM...@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-09-12 22:20, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 18:53:34 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gghe...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 7:35:14 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:27:18 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gghe...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 12:27:00 PM UTC-4, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k
Used for fishing andd beer drinking with the boys.
(no girls allowed. :^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for decades.
My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for $1200 and 29 when I
sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a swoopy new trailer for $750 and a
new trampoline for $150, so my TCO was about $120 per year not counting
boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once cartwheeled a
Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously hard,
155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the trampoline astern at
the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords \'requesting\' he slack off the
main or luff up a bit, when a wee bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried
the lee bow, the boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted
me skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html
Yikes, fun as long as you don\'t get banged by the boom.
The only ~sunfish* mishap I recall vividly is when we planted
the front half in a wave... boat on a broad reach. For a moment
I thought the boat was going to pop up backwards, but after coming
to a dead stop it mangled to shrug off the wave and continue on.
(slightly different tack afterwards :^)

George H.


*it was a bit bigger than a sunfish and no cockpit.

Righting the beast in the blow and chop was a bear and we had to do it
over and over, as we\'d no sooner get righted than knocked down again
(it took the skipper several tries to grok pointing into the weather
long enough for us to re-board).

(Also, there was that first delay during the time I needed to stop laughing
hysterically, then convince the first-outing skipper that we weren\'t actually
going to die.)

In the end we got the boat up and had a great deal more fun that day before
sailing in, sunburned and smiling.

Good times!

Cheers,
James Arthur

In Lake Pontchartrain, if you flip a sunfish mid-lake, you can stick
the mast in the bottom. Makes it hard to flip it back over. Then you
have to clean the mud out of the rigging.

As they say, the lake is bottomless; it just gets thicker as you go
down.

And as they say, it\'s a good place to be from.
Grin, Well \'round here if you can swim down and touch the plants
or mud on the bottom we call it a pond, or wet lands if it drys
out in the summer. :^)

Did the shallow bottom lead to big waves?

No, Lake P was pretty placid, a huge 12-foot-deep saucer. The real
danger was a thunderstorm sneaking up on drunken sailors. Guy I know
killed a girl when a storm snuck up while they were swimming. His
anchor line was too short, it pulled out, and the boat took off and
left the swimmers behind.



Yikes, they left the sails up?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs
Knowing Bill, probably so. He managed to catch onto the anchor line
and eventually pulled himself into the boat, got control, and motored
back. Too late for one girl.

We used to sit on the lake levee and watch thunderstorms sweep in, a
vertical wall of water and lightning. Then sit in the refreshing warm
rain. I miss thunderstorms; we don\'t get them here. But the skiing is
better, and a blizzard can be interesting too.

I\'ve sailed in open seas and for a while I raced (crewed) in a wooden boat on
Lake Ponchartrain. Silly as it sounds, you can get in big trouble pretty easily
out in the middle of a 26-mile lake that\'s only 16 feet deep.

We were in a thunderstorm once, close-hauled, racing to the windward mark, when
the boat started riding lower and lower, and then taking on water. That was fun(*),
and *very* exciting. Organizing an unsustainably furious bailing bucket-brigade
to keep us afloat, we barely managed to tack around, limped back home awash
to the gunwales, every man and woman in his life jacket--every single one.

(*) YTLMV (Your terror level may vary)

I\'ve seen tornadoes (waterspouts), lightning striking, and sudden squalls.

Talk about money pits!--wooden boats leak. They require constant maintenance.
I jogged down the 17th Street Canal levee to the marina one day and found
the boat almost fully submerged--the electric bilge pump had given up the
ghost--so I ran back and called owner Charlie pronto to report it.

SF is cold and very foggy today. It doesn\'t smell smokey. Maybe a
little smoke makes nucleation centers for the fog.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ehra0oalj1jmgv1/Fog_9_13_2020.JPG?raw=1

Real smelly smoke on I80 yesterday:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8veqz9biaajn4r3/Smoke_Lincoin.jpg?raw=1

It was like that all the way from the mountains to the coast.
Interesting times.

Today\'s New York Times has a bunch of stuff about the west coast fires
and forest (mis)management. People are beginning to admit some things.
--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

Cheers,
James

 

[Ricketty C]

On Sunday, September 13, 2020 at 2:23:29 PM UTC-4, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Today\'s New York Times has a bunch of stuff about the west coast fires
and forest (mis)management. People are beginning to admit some things.

Beginning? I recall learning of changes to the policy of fighting every forest fire when I was in school over 40 years ago. I think the issue has been common knowledge for decades. The problem is implementing it in a way that doesn\'t burn down homes and towns.

It is easy to see the problem. Not so easy to figure out what to do about it.

--

Rick C.

+-- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+-- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com]

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 7:27:24 PM UTC-4, George Herold wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 12:27:00 PM UTC-4, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k
Used for fishing andd beer drinking with the boys.
(no girls allowed. :^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for decades.
My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for $1200 and 29 when I
sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a swoopy new trailer for $750 and a
new trampoline for $150, so my TCO was about $120 per year not counting
boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once cartwheeled a
Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously hard,
155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the trampoline astern at
the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords \'requesting\' he slack off the
main or luff up a bit, when a wee bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried
the lee bow, the boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted
me skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html
Yikes, fun as long as you don\'t get banged by the boom.

I had the good sense to be launched well over the boom and land in the
middle of the mainsail.

It would\'ve been incredibly easy to get badly hurt but no one did, and it was all
good fun after that.

The only ~sunfish* mishap I recall vividly is when we planted
the front half in a wave... boat on a broad reach. For a moment
I thought the boat was going to pop up backwards, but after coming
to a dead stop it mangled to shrug off the wave and continue on.
(slightly different tack afterwards :^)

George H.


*it was a bit bigger than a sunfish and no cockpit.

Yep, that\'s the idea. (cats are a lot faster than the monohulls, so the
\'contrast\' (aka deceleration, aka d(1/2mv^2)/dt) was a bit more pronounced.)

It\'s amazing, humbling, & awe-inspiring how Nature, with a careless flick
or a sneeze, can upset all the grandiosely tiny plans of man.

Cheers,
James

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-09-13 14:23, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sun, 13 Sep 2020 12:38:33 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-09-12 22:20, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 18:53:34 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
ggherold@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 7:35:14 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:27:18 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
ggherold@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 12:27:00 PM UTC-4, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k
Used for fishing andd beer drinking with the boys.
(no girls allowed. :^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for decades.
My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for $1200 and 29 when I
sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a swoopy new trailer for $750 and a
new trampoline for $150, so my TCO was about $120 per year not counting
boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once cartwheeled a
Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously hard,
155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the trampoline astern at
the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords \'requesting\' he slack off the
main or luff up a bit, when a wee bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried
the lee bow, the boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted
me skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html
Yikes, fun as long as you don\'t get banged by the boom.
The only ~sunfish* mishap I recall vividly is when we planted
the front half in a wave... boat on a broad reach. For a moment
I thought the boat was going to pop up backwards, but after coming
to a dead stop it mangled to shrug off the wave and continue on.
(slightly different tack afterwards :^)

George H.


*it was a bit bigger than a sunfish and no cockpit.

Righting the beast in the blow and chop was a bear and we had to do it
over and over, as we\'d no sooner get righted than knocked down again
(it took the skipper several tries to grok pointing into the weather
long enough for us to re-board).

(Also, there was that first delay during the time I needed to stop laughing
hysterically, then convince the first-outing skipper that we weren\'t actually
going to die.)

In the end we got the boat up and had a great deal more fun that day before
sailing in, sunburned and smiling.

Good times!

Cheers,
James Arthur

In Lake Pontchartrain, if you flip a sunfish mid-lake, you can stick
the mast in the bottom. Makes it hard to flip it back over. Then you
have to clean the mud out of the rigging.

As they say, the lake is bottomless; it just gets thicker as you go
down.

And as they say, it\'s a good place to be from.
Grin, Well \'round here if you can swim down and touch the plants
or mud on the bottom we call it a pond, or wet lands if it drys
out in the summer. :^)

Did the shallow bottom lead to big waves?

No, Lake P was pretty placid, a huge 12-foot-deep saucer. The real
danger was a thunderstorm sneaking up on drunken sailors. Guy I know
killed a girl when a storm snuck up while they were swimming. His
anchor line was too short, it pulled out, and the boat took off and
left the swimmers behind.



Yikes, they left the sails up?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Knowing Bill, probably so. He managed to catch onto the anchor line
and eventually pulled himself into the boat, got control, and motored
back. Too late for one girl.

We used to sit on the lake levee and watch thunderstorms sweep in, a
vertical wall of water and lightning. Then sit in the refreshing warm
rain. I miss thunderstorms; we don\'t get them here.

I lived in San Mateo during the autumn of 1984, on account of a shortage
of married-student housing at the U. (We got back into student housing
at Christmas.)

In September that year, a really remarkable squall line came
through--the sky was full of lightning all night, on both sides of the
building. (We were on the north side, and had views east and west.) Mo
and I stayed up most of the night to watch it.

One of the two most impressive thunderstorm displays I\'ve ever seen.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-09-13 15:13, dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 7:27:24 PM UTC-4, George Herold wrote:
On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 12:27:00 PM UTC-4, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k
Used for fishing andd beer drinking with the boys.
(no girls allowed. :^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for decades.
My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for $1200 and 29 when I
sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a swoopy new trailer for $750 and a
new trampoline for $150, so my TCO was about $120 per year not counting
boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once cartwheeled a
Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously hard,
155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the trampoline astern at
the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords \'requesting\' he slack off the
main or luff up a bit, when a wee bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried
the lee bow, the boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted
me skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html
Yikes, fun as long as you don\'t get banged by the boom.

I had the good sense to be launched well over the boom and land in the
middle of the mainsail.

It would\'ve been incredibly easy to get badly hurt but no one did, and it was all
good fun after that.

The only ~sunfish* mishap I recall vividly is when we planted
the front half in a wave... boat on a broad reach. For a moment
I thought the boat was going to pop up backwards, but after coming
to a dead stop it mangled to shrug off the wave and continue on.
(slightly different tack afterwards :^)

George H.


*it was a bit bigger than a sunfish and no cockpit.

Yep, that\'s the idea. (cats are a lot faster than the monohulls, so the
\'contrast\' (aka deceleration, aka d(1/2mv^2)/dt) was a bit more pronounced.)

It\'s amazing, humbling, & awe-inspiring how Nature, with a careless flick
or a sneeze, can upset all the grandiosely tiny plans of man.

As the old saying goes, \"If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your
plans.\"

Cheers

Phil Hobbs
(who has doubtless made God laugh quite often. Good times though--He
doesn\'t mind at all.)


--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[server]

On Sun, 13 Sep 2020 12:04:56 -0700 (PDT), \"dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com\"
<dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com> wrote:

On Sunday, September 13, 2020 at 2:23:29 PM UTC-4, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 13 Sep 2020 12:38:33 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamM...@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-09-12 22:20, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 18:53:34 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gghe...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 7:35:14 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:27:18 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gghe...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 12:27:00 PM UTC-4, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k
Used for fishing andd beer drinking with the boys.
(no girls allowed. :^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for decades.
My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for $1200 and 29 when I
sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a swoopy new trailer for $750 and a
new trampoline for $150, so my TCO was about $120 per year not counting
boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once cartwheeled a
Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously hard,
155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the trampoline astern at
the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords \'requesting\' he slack off the
main or luff up a bit, when a wee bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried
the lee bow, the boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted
me skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html
Yikes, fun as long as you don\'t get banged by the boom.
The only ~sunfish* mishap I recall vividly is when we planted
the front half in a wave... boat on a broad reach. For a moment
I thought the boat was going to pop up backwards, but after coming
to a dead stop it mangled to shrug off the wave and continue on.
(slightly different tack afterwards :^)

George H.


*it was a bit bigger than a sunfish and no cockpit.

Righting the beast in the blow and chop was a bear and we had to do it
over and over, as we\'d no sooner get righted than knocked down again
(it took the skipper several tries to grok pointing into the weather
long enough for us to re-board).

(Also, there was that first delay during the time I needed to stop laughing
hysterically, then convince the first-outing skipper that we weren\'t actually
going to die.)

In the end we got the boat up and had a great deal more fun that day before
sailing in, sunburned and smiling.

Good times!

Cheers,
James Arthur

In Lake Pontchartrain, if you flip a sunfish mid-lake, you can stick
the mast in the bottom. Makes it hard to flip it back over. Then you
have to clean the mud out of the rigging.

As they say, the lake is bottomless; it just gets thicker as you go
down.

And as they say, it\'s a good place to be from.
Grin, Well \'round here if you can swim down and touch the plants
or mud on the bottom we call it a pond, or wet lands if it drys
out in the summer. :^)

Did the shallow bottom lead to big waves?

No, Lake P was pretty placid, a huge 12-foot-deep saucer. The real
danger was a thunderstorm sneaking up on drunken sailors. Guy I know
killed a girl when a storm snuck up while they were swimming. His
anchor line was too short, it pulled out, and the boat took off and
left the swimmers behind.



Yikes, they left the sails up?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs
Knowing Bill, probably so. He managed to catch onto the anchor line
and eventually pulled himself into the boat, got control, and motored
back. Too late for one girl.

We used to sit on the lake levee and watch thunderstorms sweep in, a
vertical wall of water and lightning. Then sit in the refreshing warm
rain. I miss thunderstorms; we don\'t get them here. But the skiing is
better, and a blizzard can be interesting too.

I\'ve sailed in open seas and for a while I raced (crewed) in a wooden boat on
Lake Ponchartrain. Silly as it sounds, you can get in big trouble pretty easily
out in the middle of a 26-mile lake that\'s only 16 feet deep.

We were in a thunderstorm once, close-hauled, racing to the windward mark, when
the boat started riding lower and lower, and then taking on water. That was fun(*),
and *very* exciting. Organizing an unsustainably furious bailing bucket-brigade
to keep us afloat, we barely managed to tack around, limped back home awash
to the gunwales, every man and woman in his life jacket--every single one.

(*) YTLMV (Your terror level may vary)

I\'ve seen tornadoes (waterspouts), lightning striking, and sudden squalls.

Talk about money pits!--wooden boats leak. They require constant maintenance.
I jogged down the 17th Street Canal levee to the marina one day and found
the boat almost fully submerged--the electric bilge pump had given up the
ghost--so I ran back and called owner Charlie pronto to report it.

The 17th Street Canal was one of the two man-made spears aimed at the
heart of New Orleans, the other being the Intracoastal waterway. They
both broke their pitiful levees in Katrina.

Blame Climate Change.

I solved my wooden boat expense problem when Bill (that same Bill)
smashed it into the seawall in the lake.




--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[server]

On Sun, 13 Sep 2020 15:28:58 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-09-13 14:23, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 13 Sep 2020 12:38:33 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-09-12 22:20, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 18:53:34 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
ggherold@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 7:35:14 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:27:18 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
ggherold@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, September 11, 2020 at 12:27:00 PM UTC-4, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 1:59:25 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-09-10 11:21, George Herold wrote:
On Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
Up here in the country, I see a lot of motor boats parked in
driveways. I suspect that most are seldom or never used.

I got curious about cost. Seems like a dinky outboard motor costs
$1000, and some are $8K or $25K or even $45K. And a serious speed
freak will hang three on the stern.

I can envision some domestic discord.
My brother bought a used 15\' motor boat for ~$2.5k
Used for fishing andd beer drinking with the boys.
(no girls allowed. :^)

Yeah, with a fibreglass boat you can keep it looking nice for decades.
My Hobie 16 was 20 years old when I bought it for $1200 and 29 when I
sold it on eBay for $1k. (I did buy a swoopy new trailer for $750 and a
new trampoline for $150, so my TCO was about $120 per year not counting
boatyard space.)

I\'m from a family of planing dinghy sailors, but I once cartwheeled a
Hobie-16 in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were screaming along on in a lively breeze, heeled dangerously hard,
155# sea salt me in trapeze and 200# noob owner on the trampoline astern at
the helm. I \'bout lost my vocal chords \'requesting\' he slack off the
main or luff up a bit, when a wee bitty puff heeled us a mite harder, we buried
the lee bow, the boat stopped instantaneously, and the wire catapulted
me skyward...jolly good fun!

It looked a bit like this:
https://southern-born-and-bred.blogspot.com/2011/06/wipeout-crew-sent-flying-as-new.html
Yikes, fun as long as you don\'t get banged by the boom.
The only ~sunfish* mishap I recall vividly is when we planted
the front half in a wave... boat on a broad reach. For a moment
I thought the boat was going to pop up backwards, but after coming
to a dead stop it mangled to shrug off the wave and continue on.
(slightly different tack afterwards :^)

George H.


*it was a bit bigger than a sunfish and no cockpit.

Righting the beast in the blow and chop was a bear and we had to do it
over and over, as we\'d no sooner get righted than knocked down again
(it took the skipper several tries to grok pointing into the weather
long enough for us to re-board).

(Also, there was that first delay during the time I needed to stop laughing
hysterically, then convince the first-outing skipper that we weren\'t actually
going to die.)

In the end we got the boat up and had a great deal more fun that day before
sailing in, sunburned and smiling.

Good times!

Cheers,
James Arthur

In Lake Pontchartrain, if you flip a sunfish mid-lake, you can stick
the mast in the bottom. Makes it hard to flip it back over. Then you
have to clean the mud out of the rigging.

As they say, the lake is bottomless; it just gets thicker as you go
down.

And as they say, it\'s a good place to be from.
Grin, Well \'round here if you can swim down and touch the plants
or mud on the bottom we call it a pond, or wet lands if it drys
out in the summer. :^)

Did the shallow bottom lead to big waves?

No, Lake P was pretty placid, a huge 12-foot-deep saucer. The real
danger was a thunderstorm sneaking up on drunken sailors. Guy I know
killed a girl when a storm snuck up while they were swimming. His
anchor line was too short, it pulled out, and the boat took off and
left the swimmers behind.



Yikes, they left the sails up?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Knowing Bill, probably so. He managed to catch onto the anchor line
and eventually pulled himself into the boat, got control, and motored
back. Too late for one girl.

We used to sit on the lake levee and watch thunderstorms sweep in, a
vertical wall of water and lightning. Then sit in the refreshing warm
rain. I miss thunderstorms; we don\'t get them here.

I lived in San Mateo during the autumn of 1984, on account of a shortage
of married-student housing at the U. (We got back into student housing
at Christmas.)

In September that year, a really remarkable squall line came
through--the sky was full of lightning all night, on both sides of the
building. (We were on the north side, and had views east and west.) Mo
and I stayed up most of the night to watch it.

One of the two most impressive thunderstorm displays I\'ve ever seen.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

A few weeks ago, we were awakened by a gigantic light show in the
southern sky. That cluster was reported as 12,000 ground strikes. That
was the start of the current mess.

We go for years here without seeing lightning.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard