salt and wood

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Along the Cooks River near Steel Park in Sydney’s inner west there is an abundance of litter available to engineer sailing craft to fit any brief. This simple skimmer was literally thrown together in 10 minutes and sailed happily out into the river and set of towards the airport and Botany Bay.

1 The bits

2 Stern

3 Starboard

4 Barenaked Lady

5 Accelerated turn

6 The wash

7 Great potential

8 To no place

9 A happy home

There was not going to be any tacking this day with an on shore wind into a horseshoe beach. But not worried about this minor detail and fighting off the sense of futility I commenced to put this tall ship together. I gave it a few test sail of the rocks. But not able to send it out I turned it over to these two fellas who seemed surprisingly interested to push it around while swimming.

The makings of

testing in the shallows

Bon Voyage

A ramshackle tub cobbled together from slim pickings along the beach next to the airport. The final design was the result of add hoc efforts to correct shortcomings. The name was the suggestion of a boy walking along the beach with his dad. The first test sail here in the shallows saw her topple over and a second bottle of sand was tied from the hull. As well as a little outrigger added to support the ‘left leaning.’ A sail was added to the outrigger to compensate for drag produced.  She was launched from the point to a great deal of commentary and technical input from the flock of fishermen sitting around the rocks. The outrigger sail worked a bit too well and had the effect of swinging the nose around to the starboard until the wind caught the nose sail. The overall effect was to align the timber tied below to about 3 o clock and cause her to tack across the wind and clear the runway point of the airport. The Coke can and red plastic spade were to provide a better visual contact from further out but also provided some additional sail surface.

This clunky tanker was thrown together very quickly. A low centre of gravity with mid mounted foam raising the deck. A bucket sail combination with a cylindrical mainsail and a side mounted directional sail on the bow. An additional flat sail was added to the main sail to pull this lug through the water. She sailed surprisingly well, albeit to an onshore breeze that meant launching her into the chop of the point, that was handled admirably and a short sail back to shore. And no it didn’t sail backwards.

All there is to say about this self-righting number is that the coloured plastic components made for great pictures against the sky and the decomposing concrete head wall at the end of Yarra Bay. The foam was tied over the hull instead of wedged between the hull and ballast bottle.  This resulted in a submarine sailing style. That seemed to stabilize the craft if only slowing her down a little. Overall she set of true and confidently cut out into Botany Bay.

As a result of recent extreme rainfalls great areas of parkland and streets adjoining the Cooks River of the Inner West of Sydney have been inundated to record levels. Flood Cat is an assemblage of detritus selected from the long flotsam lines that marked the extent of the high water.  One interesting component was parts of some sort of Chinese shrine that had been dislodged someplace by the flood and washed up here in the park. I employed a skimmer design for lack of keel material on hand. This was a spontaneous effort so I did not even have a knife to work with. A crude and fast operation. The most interesting outcome was that the tidal flow was running down stream but the breeze was pushing upstream. So it sailed well cutting a noticeable directional wake and covered allot of water but little actual ground. A bigger sail would have cancelled this out and seen it sail upstream successfully.