Well the gusts got to 30 knots yesterday, so I pulled out one of "Landyacht" old 3.5 square meter "Flying pig" sails he gave me and set up.(Thanks Paul)

We had a hoot, hooning around our Pink Lake, although it is still pretty damp and you lose the back end on the snotty stuff. Had a lot of runs over 70kmh before I ran out of hard lake and got covered in crud.

I have been haunting the lake every time the wind is up and on Thursday we had 5 yachts out together and no camera. I've managed 167 kms in my yacht in the last 3 days.


This is another yacht I built. A mate from Melbourne was here and he had a broken leg, so I made him up a hand steering and we wrapped his leg in foam rubber and away he went with the Velcro leg straps that hold your legs so they can't be flung out of the yacht in a capsize. (not that he did)
The other yacht in the picture I built for "Mark",that has made the seats for me.


I used this big 6.9 square meter sail, in light winds on Friday and it worked really well. I thought with all the sail hanging out the back it would drag me sideways all the time. Even when the wind increased it didn't.
Why would that be the case?????

Is it because the front third of the sail does the work?
The boom on this sail is 2300mm long and the mast is 4850mm high.
Gets me going in quite light winds and really moves out. It is a roller cam racing sail.

Great suff Chook............ where is your pink lake ? I only know the

one near esperance wa..............

Chook2 said...

Very clever way to alternate from foot steer to hand steer.

Do you think it needs an extra support bracket (temp bolt in /out) behind the mast step or was that set up strong enough?

Yeh gibberjoe you are on the money!!!!
Esperance, this is where I am. Here are some of my logs from Pink Lake you can see where the battery went flat on the GPS out on the lake. It didn't record the other logs, only distance and speed details, as the track memory was full and it doesn't overwrite them. Bugger!!!! (An Etrex H GPS)

connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/141667895
connect.garmin.com/activity/141667929

If you click the map you can zoom in or out to see where I am.

Yes, Landyacht has made a first class mould for these seats beachball57, which we have copied.
If it's wet there is no need for a cushion even. Because I'm an old fart, I have made up a contoured foam cushion out of layers of red carpet underlay and a cotton cover, treated with sealant. (That you use to paint on canvas tents to seal the water out). I'll pop a photo on here of the construction.

cisco, I can't lay claim to this setup as I found a photo a while back on here, with a young lad sitting in a grey yacht. That sowed the seed.
The hand steering seems solid enough. The sloppy movement of the handle is very small as the steering shaft is running in plastic "Fallshaw 3/4" grey plastic bushes" (Fallshaw SPBSHWA34 bushes) that have been reamed to fit the 20mm shafting. (Fallshaw also have 20mm ones that are black and are part number SPBSHWA20 at $1.75 each, that are a great fit with the 20mm shaft as well).
I machine up a bit of heavy 32nb x 4 mm wall pipe, to fit these into.
"sn" who bought these to my attention, fits them into a piece of exhaust tube, but I havn't been able to get any the right size locally.
The square tube compression bent, around the mast is 30mm x 30mm x 1.6mm rhs and the rest is 20 nb xtra light (2mm wall) galv pipe. The 75mm long bit on to attach it with the bolts is 30 x 30 x 2mm rhs.

Big Scotty our local test pilot weighs about 130 kgs and he fitted under it and laid the yacht on its side 4 or 5 times while sailing and there was no bending.
To answer your question, no I think it's fine, as you are holding it anyway to stop the vibrations. I did find it a bit more trouble to sheet with this setup, as one hand was already being used to steer.

aus 230, no class 5 yet. but got enough on, using these afternoon sea breezes at the moment.

How true Stephen. 108 kg to be exact

Here are the Fallshaw bushes I mentioned. With a steering head made out of 32 nb heavy wall (4mm) water pipe.
The smaller step on these bushes, is a nice tap in fit into 31mm (1 1/4") inside diameter and the larger step taps into 34.9mm (1 3/8") really nicely and leaves the outer 3mm high (1/8") shoulder proud. They are 25.4mm long (1") over all.
The grey bush is 3/4' inside SPBSHWA34
The Black one is 20mm inside SPBSHWA20. No need to drill or ream this one, it is a perfect fit on 20mm shaft.
Both are $1.75 each and are made of quite hard plastic but are not brittle.