Thread: Texas 200 - John Goodman and Michael Storer in the GIS Yawl

Hope John doesn't mind, but here is our most relevant planning conversation to give you a feeling of what is happening and some of the things being discussed.
___________________________________________

Hi John,

Good to hear from you too.

My replies are through your text. Anything I put down is a suggestion only.

On 8/06/2011 4:18 PM, John Goodman wrote:

Good to hear from you!

I have been trying to get a lot of small and large loose ends tied up out here in California. I travel back to Houston Wed morning, work on the boat, then back to more meetings on Thursday and Friday mornings. Then drive down on Saturday.


Goat Island Skiff - John's yawl version in Texas - a set on Flickr


Please expect me to be very tired on Saturday afternoon when we meet, but I hope the excitement of being around a bunch of crazy sailors knocks the edge of my jet lag and a 600 mile drive. If I have to pull off the road and take a nap, I will. Which means I may be later than my scheduled 2pm arrival at the motel.

I think this needs to be included in risk management for the trip. For me too. My sleep patterns have been all over the place since arriving in the USA. I've been getting between 2 and 5 hours sleep a night so I am pretty tired most of the time.
The two risks that should be obvious to both of us are

1/ Chance of making some bad decisions in the early part of the event. Whether packing or navigation or forgetting something. So we should start off pretty conservatively and take some time to settle in. Maybe not try to head off particularly early on the first day but plan to leave after about half the fleet has headed off and make use of the Goat's speed to not turn up too late at the end of day 1.

2/ Chance of personal friction - we haven't sailed together, I don't know the way you manage the boat. As we discussed before - you are the boss. I'm not the argumentative type at any rate. But I think we need to cut ourselves some extra slack in the setting up of the boat and the first day in particular. Realise the chance of misunderstanding through fatigue and uncertainty.

I don't expect big probs - just mentioning it to be part of the background of our thinking.

I intend to pack most of the gear into our motel room and launch the boat with the rig down inside the boat since we are going to be under a shed. When I am shuttling the van up to Seadrift I will be leaving GIR in your capable hands.The idea is you can play with the rig and rummage thru all the gear and food to see what we have and store it on/in the boat. I am a minimalist when it comes to gear, food & clothing. Refer to: Ray Jardine's Adventure Page to see where I learned some of my habits.

I had a look at Ray's website - great! He camps the way I design boats!

Happy with that. Love the look of his gear.

One caution though .. I won't be seen DEAD in his insulated hat. If you want me to wear one of those the whole trip is off! ) (that's a joke!)



I am assuming that you will bring all the camping and sailing gear. I will borrow dry bags and dry containers from Chuck - enough to be self sufficient in clothing and food.

Food I am just bringing granola bars and dried fruit.

Having Chuck carry some of the water will work great. We only carried 6 gallons of water on the boat last year because we had someplace to resupply water mid-trip last year. Another thing is I plan to bring all the water we need from Houston since it can be of better quality then some of the coastal towns. It's just a little bit safer to drink from one water source if you have a delicate stomach. I don't, but my son does. Also we planned to be away from the fleet for at least 1 night just incase we had to beach the boat for safety or gear failures. It was part of our safety plan based on some of the veterans comments.

We will be able to resupply water when we meet your parents. Plus Chuck and Sandra will put up with a reasonable amount of stuff from me because they are my hosts and will want to take care of me (so nice aren't they!).

Don't get too carried away with clothing. We had sleeping clothes and sailing clothes last year with nothing in between. Sleeping clothes consisted of light weight shorts and another light weight long sleeve shirt to keep the bugs off. You will have to have camp clothing that allows your butt and feet to dry out at night. Tennis shoes for sailing and sandals for when we get to camp. I don't like the idea of sailing in sandals because of getting ones feet sunburned and if we have to walk the boat off a oyster reef tennis shoes are much better than sandals. I have for you most of the sun protection clothing and eye protection. I have some sunglasses that fit over prescription glasses, which I think you wear.

Thanks for the tennis shoes hint. I bought some wet shoes for $7 which seem OK with quite heavy soles, but might put my tennis shoes/runners with Chuck and sandra as a backup if the wet shoes prove unsuitable. I am hoping the wet shoes will allow my feet to dry out during the day too.

On thought about dry feet. Will you have a sponge or two in the boat. As crew I really like to keep the boat dead dry as far as possible - getting rid of that last drop of water if possible makes life much more comfortable. At the same time I know if the weather gets rough we might end up with a bit of water inside - I am a realist! Or I think I am a realist (but doesn't everybody?)

Plan to pack a set of clothing to put in my van, I don't know if we will make it to Seadrift before Chuck , but if we do, it would be nice to change into some cleaner clothes for the Shrimp Boil. If you are a drinker of adult beverages we can put a few drinks in the van for toasting our suceesful completion of the 2001 Texas 200.

Good idea about putting clothes in your van. if I put with Chuck and Sandra, they might not be around when we finish. However if we can't meet up effectively before you take the car up to Magnolia Beach I will put some clean dry clothes with chuck and Sandra.

I don't drink adult beverages at all. I get hangovers that last three days with even a few sips.

Another odd item is my parents, both in their 80's, want to meet us somewhere along the trip. There is only one place to meet that i see and that is at north Padre Island at Snoopy's. Chuck knows the place. We might get a free lunch, but it would require a 1-2 hour pit stop to socialize and eat.

I think that sounds like fun. Chuck is doing some side trips as well - in the way of exploring - so it will help make the trip feel different. Good fun.

I have programmed a lot of the waypoints in my little GPS. We will need to get with Chuck and find the way points for some of the trickier routes, but the basic way points are now in my GPS. It's a Magellen eXplorist 200. It's old small and pretty simple. I have lost the manual, but my youngest figured it out as we sailed. So we can do that too, right?

I am sure I have forgotten something, but I am tired and going to bed.
I need to get up at 4am to get to my plane flight, so goodnight.

Best Wishes

JDG

Here is a link to a public blog for those that want to pass it along. We will be carrying 2 waterproof cameras and a laptop computer for posting. If we can get a connection each night we will try to post then. I will carry an extra laptop battery for additional working time plus extra batteries for the cameras.

200 Mile Texas Coast Adventure: Preperation for the Texas 200

For those worried about the laptop, it's a real old one and if it takes a swim I won't cry over it.

Tres cool!

I hope your trip up the Texas coast goes swimmingly...

...maybe that's not the right word.

Mik and I have safely returned from the Texas 200. What a great event and so much fun. Mik and I both were suffering from jet lag so we took it easy and just really enjoyed a fun trip.


Here are a few videos:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDBfrgDzEqI]YouTube - ‪D2-thisissailing.AVI‬‏[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2BHZKH6r4o]YouTube - ‪D2-smooth.AVI‬‏[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvHRLRKrBrQ]YouTube - ‪Day 1, TX 200‬‏[/ame]

The incredible performance of the Goat is evident throughout those videos. I hope the whole race went as well but I'm thinking there may have been a few moments of sheer terror somewhere along the way. I hope you caught some video of THAT, too.

Thanks for sharing and I look forward to more.

Totally awesome.

How did you guys keep the bottom of the boat so dry? Or was evaporation throughout the day and you minimized water coming over the side?

I'd have salt sores on my butt after 5 days sitting on the bottom like that, I can never seem to keep my boat so dry.

That looks like fun

Looks really fantastic!
I like this also:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phkWN0ezvdk"]YouTube - ‪D3-3reef.AVI‬‏[/ame]

I have a question about the fenders you lashed to each side visible in the videos.

I've always considered it lubberly to leave your fenders out when underway, sail or power, but you obviously have good reason for yours and their placement along the gunwale. The more I study this the more I think I'd like to rig them that way on my Goat.

It appears yours are tied in such a way that they will stay under the rub rail under any foreseen "normal" conditions. As long as they stay in position it seems they are affording you some additional resistance to a capsize, and/or, will ease recovery from a capsize.

Is that the way you see it, Mr. Goodman?

Regarding their attachment method: since the 6mm ply comes between the inner spacers and the attachment points for the fenders it appears you must have drilled angled holes from the outside to the clear inner space between a pair of inwale spacers. Is that what you did? A hole for every attachment point, probably four per side for the set of three fenders?

If I do this on my Goat I'm thinking of finding some tiny SS saddles and securing them near the juncture of the rub rail and the topsides (rather than drill those holes). A set of three fenders would require four saddles, one forward, one at each fender-pair, and one aft. I'm pretty sure saddles small enough to "hide" in the corner of the topsides and rub rail are available. I wouldn't want anything large enough to protrude and possibly snag around a dock.

Answered MiddleAgedMan's fender question over on the Texas GIS thread.

There is a video that shows GIR's boom touching the water during a slight roll while surfing. I was surprised when the boom touched. After looking at the video there are a few reasons why we touched. Here is the video:


YouTube - ‪daddio1233's Channel‬‏

What the attached pictures shows is maybe one reason why the boom tip hit the water. Look at the black chafe protection on the boom near the tack. Typically the downhaul pulls down in the middle of this chafe gear. The picture shows that we let the boom slide forward during the reefing process. This in turn lets the clew area of the boom drop some. If you are using #3 reef chances are the waves will be larger so keeping the boom tip up is important.

So if using the #3 reef make sure the boom does not slide back. My guess it, that the clew would be about 3"-6" higher if we had the downhaul in the correct location. With the waves we had, the boom would clear the wave crests better.

About reef points. I added new reef grommets close to the clew and tack of the sail and located them in at least 2 layers of reinforcing cloth. These were added to help keep the sail bundled up and out of the water and prevent flogging of the sail. As you can see we missed the front one because the diamond patch has no tie and the sail is dropping down. Notice how neatly the clew end of the sail looks.

Body placement. Mik taught me a few dingy sailing tricks that I had never tried. In these surfing conditions Mik and I are spread out, fore and aft, and on opposite sides of the boat. This really helped stabilize the GIS and allowed for a comfortable ride which allowed us to sail more aggressively.

Main Sheet: I modified my main sheet to trim straight below the boom and not have a rear traveler. I used the typical turning block bridle tied to the bulkhead limber holes on the middle seat. We very seldom used the last pully turn on the main sheet. In the picture you can see Mik has the last fall of the sheet in his hand as it comes off the forward boom block. Mik did it this way for quicker sheeting response mostly and because there is just so little tension on the main sheet even in these very windy conditions.

Sailing-by-the-lee. This was new to me and it works GREAT on a GIS. (Mik is full of good ideas) In the picture we are sailing-by-the-lee while the in the video we are not. Sailing-by-the-lee allowis one to control the attitude of the boat so easily that you can tilt the mast from side to side just by adjusting the main sheet. This can change how much lee or weather helm you want or need. It's does work nice on a GIS.

Don't be so modest John. THIS is the video you should be sharing:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc4Z5OAkZUM&feature=player_profilepage]YouTube - ‪2011 Texas 200 Goat Island Skiff 1‬‏[/ame]

Wing-and-wing, blue waters, speedy boat...

Hi John & Mik
I have been looking fwd to your post texas sharing.
Now its "by-the-lee", weathers too unpleasant to try it out here just now so Ive been googlesailing. Check it out...
Downwind sailing - the 4th Dimension
Wayne
Fremantle