Rosalie B. wrote in
:

He says I'm chicken.

Nothing is "chicken" about being smart.

Now he's talking about singlehanding, and that's crazy.

His IS crazy....you may quote me.

We do have all roller furling so that we can handle all the sails from
the cockpit and don't need to go on deck except to anchor or come in
to a dock.



I never works that way....and shouldn't be PLANNED to work that way.
Lionheart's roller furling takes place at the bottom of the mast, not aft
in the cockpit. I don't think I'd want to do it any other way because
from the cockpit you can't see it's all going wrong before the damned
thing is jammed, which I can see from right under the roller before it
becomes a problem and can roll it back out to clear it.

Planning on worst case scenario, you must be setup to go forward in heavy
weather to clear the inevitable crash of these systems.

Rosalie is the smart one aboard....STAND Your ground, girl! You got it
right and SAFE!



Larry
--
VIRUS ALERT! VISTA has been released!
NOONE will be spared!

Larry wrote:

Rosalie B. wrote in
:

He says I'm chicken.

Nothing is "chicken" about being smart.

Now he's talking about singlehanding, and that's crazy.

His IS crazy....you may quote me.

We do have all roller furling so that we can handle all the sails from
the cockpit and don't need to go on deck except to anchor or come in
to a dock.

I never works that way....and shouldn't be PLANNED to work that way.
Lionheart's roller furling takes place at the bottom of the mast, not aft

The actual roller part of the main (it is behind the mast furling) is
right in front of the companionway to the forward cabin, so it is not
only in view, but Bob can reach the reel that winds up the line from
the cockpit. So it is almost in the cockpit.

Now the staysail and jib both have lines led back to the cockpit and
are farther forward.

in the cockpit. I don't think I'd want to do it any other way because
from the cockpit you can't see it's all going wrong before the damned
thing is jammed, which I can see from right under the roller before it
becomes a problem and can roll it back out to clear it.

Your roller must be placed differently than ours. We can see.

Planning on worst case scenario, you must be setup to go forward in heavy
weather to clear the inevitable crash of these systems.

We do have harnesses and jacklines, and we wear PFDs all the time when
underway (unless we are off watch asleep, when it is quite easy to
hand). That is Bob's rule for anyone on our boat. (He also makes me
wear shoes on deck.) Bob always clips onto the jacklines whenever the
weather is at all bumpy.

Rosalie is the smart one aboard....STAND Your ground, girl! You got it
right and SAFE!

Larry

Well as I said before - most of the times we've gotten in trouble have
been when Bob persuaded me to go against my better judgment. But
let's face it - I can be as cautious as you like and still be wrong
about the weather or whatever the problem turns out to be. I use as
much information as I have available, but sometimes even that and
experience doesn't fully work to keep us out of trouble

We've just been fortunate in that when we've guessed wrong or made
mistakes that it didn't have a serious bad result. Mostly just some
paint scraped off the keel or something like that.

Rosalie B. wrote in
:

Your roller must be placed differently than ours. We can see.


Yes, ours is only 15' from the bow as the Amel is a ketch. The deck-
stepped mizzen base is the aft bulkhead of the cockpit.


http://www.selfsteer.com/boats/photo...melSharki39-4-
2.jpg
This an actual picture of "Lionheart" back in the late 80's when she was
Xanareva in San Francisco. She was very primative back then in
instrumentation and electronics. If you look through her windscreen,
which is no longer fixed mounted plexiglass Geoffrey replaced with
openable Lexan windscreens for the South, you can see the deck-stepped
mast base forward of her main cabin skylight hatch. Furling is on the
forward side of that mast about 2' off the deck. There are 5 winches out
of the picture for all the various lines on her mast used to haul up more
rags. That awful Amel helmsman's seat that will kill your back and hiney
after an hour on it, has been replaced with a custom closed-cell foam
helmsman seat of my captain's design. Cockpit seating uses the same
closed cell foam custom soft seating with NO miserable sunbrella covers
to scrub. The surface of the foam has Lionheart's logo and blue
pinstripe trim. It wipes off very easily, usually with the ever-handy
tea towel, and is unaffected by stepping on it with shoes on.

That horrible-looking self steerer this webpage shows with its line or
chain to the port coaming I've never seen. Amel's analog autopilot was
chain driven behind the wheel over the galley sink. The cupboard behind
the wheel on the bulkhead is where lots of my electronic network toys and
main electrical DC panel is located...useless to the galley but it has
TONS of storage elsewhere so we don't miss it. Our Raymarine RL70CRC
color chart plotter-radar is where that big compass shows with an old
Garmin GPSmap 185 plotter/gps/sonar charter to the right under the bell.
The compass was moved behind the radar and up above it with a custom-made
binnacle in Cap'n Geoffrey's woodshop in Atlanta.

http://www.yachtsoffshore.com/images/amel.jpg
Here's an Amel Sharki undeway on a reach under 4 sails, including my
captain's beloved mizzen staysail. I think the picture's a fake. She's
too slow to make that much wake under these sails unless the picture was
taken in a full gale....hee hee. That's an awful small jib they have
there...storm jib? We leave a 150 Genoa on her roller furler, but don't
be impressed. It's so close from the mast to the bow a 150 Genoa isn't a
very big sail on this boat. You can see some of the many winches on the
mainmast. This is my favorite cruising boat of all I've been to sea on.
She's no race boat but you sit so deep in the cockpit you can just see
over the coaming and the ride is great in 6-8' seas with her hauling ass
as others are shortening up to weather it out. She's a real ocean
vessel.

http://www.moeck-yachtagentur.de/img...sharki_1_g.jpg
Here's one with our usual Genoa hanked on. The big, crank-adjustable-
jack mainmast backstay you see here is our HF antenna. I added another
cable to it and put two insulators in the triattic stay up top fed in the
middle of the triattic for a capacitor hat, which really improves
radiation below 7 Mhz, the backstay's natural resonant frequency. The
Icom AT-130 tuner for the M802 is bolted to the top of the aft deckhouse
just aft of the mizzen step and Cap'n Geoffrey and I compromised by
building a whiteboard table over it to hold the drinks of the folks in
folding seats sitting on the deckhouse on either side of the mizzen step
to put their bloody mary's into...(c; He tolerates my stainless feed
wire and the ground strap running down to the Perkins block under the
cockpit sole, the whole thing of which is a huge hatch to get into the
engine room.

Hey, we even made the list in the 2006 Gulfstreamer from Daytona Beach to
Charleston!....:
http://www.halifaxsailing.org/gulfstreamer.htm
That IS unusual....(c;

We usually come lumbering in after they've all packed up and gone
home.....sometimes on MONDAY!....(c; We pray it's ROUGH so we'll have
some POWER!

Larry
--
VIRUS ALERT! VISTA has been released!
NOONE will be spared!

Rosalie B. wrote in
:

We do have harnesses and jacklines, and we wear PFDs all the time when
underway (unless we are off watch asleep, when it is quite easy to
hand). That is Bob's rule for anyone on our boat. (He also makes me
wear shoes on deck.) Bob always clips onto the jacklines whenever the
weather is at all bumpy.



Us, too. Sospenders anchored to the jacklines at all times.

Larry
--
VIRUS ALERT! VISTA has been released!
NOONE will be spared!