Surgical Tubing instead of Bungee for self steering

From: Ken Preston (preston@gencc.com)
Date: Mon Apr 10 2000 - 09:18:58 PDT


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Sunday afternoon in breezes from calm (is "calm" a breeze?) to maybe six or
eight knots I ran the "many ways of Pottering" self steering system, this
time using surgical tubing instead of bungee (which had not worked well in
light conditions before). The surgical tubing will not work in my plastic
clam cleats (on the underside of the tiller) so I simply used a foot or so
of tubing spliced to a couple of feet of 1/4" nylon line. . .which works
fine in the cleats and gave enough of the stretch apparently. On courses
from wind abeam to close hauled the system held course relative to the wind
very well as long as I kept the boat on the same angle of heel (ergo, i
could read a book or whatever and sit still and we stayed on course for 20
minutes at a time) but. . .if I shifted to the opposite side of the boat and
changed heel angle she would either point up or fall off (depending on
whether I increased or decreased angle of heel) pretty radically. With the
wind aft of the beam a bit (broad reaching) she could still be made steer
fairly well, but only by sheeting in the main too much, though it didn't
seem to hurt her speed (the genoa was working very well).
 
Ken Preston
P-15 #1063, Bainbridge Is, WA



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