On 29 Oct 2008 03:53:52 GMT, Larry wrote:

If Roger's research vessel had these balls.....he'd be home by now....(c;

Except that Roger's boat doesn't have a mast tall enough to create
that much heeling moment and the boat wasn't designed to run heeled
over.

It turns out that you need 36 degrees of heel to get an 80 ft stick
under a 65 ft bridge: 80 x cosine(36 degrees) = 64.72

You can set everything up however without having an accurate
inclinometer or doing any trig. The critical dimension is from the
bottom of the lowest bag to the highest point of the mast. As long
as the halyard is adjusted to less than that length, the boat will go
under the bridge.