Here I am ready-set to go a sailing upon the waters and I'm so under the weather that I'm land lubbed. Good stiff 8 knot breeze from the south east -- regular like , not gusty -- and all I demand of my patch is a tide low enough so that I can get out and push rather than have to get out and swim...or drown.
Clear waters too.
This endeavour is supposed to be The Trial Launch to see if anything comes unhinged and pulls apart or that there's too much sail for the hull to support.
Since the wind may ease a tad this afternoon as the tide goes out maybe then I'll be all at sea...
You'll note in the accompanying image that the new rig is in its folded/transit mode. I can also quickly remove both the mast and the rear rudder housing completely from the plastic craft so that it is only a paddling paddleski rather than bi-marine sailing one.
Since I've engineered optimal sail cover I'm suspecting that for every-other-out-and-aboutness maybe I need to deploy a shorter mast with a smaller sail area for those days I'm paddling and want to wind up as an option to dragging the blade through the water. A smaller rig would stow away easier perhaps?
I'm wondring how much of an inconvenience this sail -- or a smaller one -- would be either upright diagonally or collapsed -- during normal paddling.
I can still paddle with it collapsed like in the pic. The mast can be pivoted to one side and hangs off the back.
I'm thinking-- musing as is my imaginative want -- that if I was to head off 'canoe camping' -- like spending a few days exploring the Pumicestone Passage , would sailing as required be the way to go -- rather than simply trying to muscle it?
My favorite canoeing stories -- ones I've read a few times -- Three Men in a Boat and Voyage of the Paper Canoe are about simply messing about voyaging.
The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style, or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys, as in its simple truthfulness. Its pages form the record of events that really happened. All that has been done is to colour them; and, for this, no extra charge has been made. George and Harris and Montmorency are not poetic ideals, but things of flesh and blood—especially George, who weighs about twelve stone. Other works may excel this in dept of thought and knowledge of human nature: other books may rival it in originality and size; but, for hopeless and incurable veracity, nothing yet discovered can surpass it. This,more than all its other charms, will, it is felt, make the volume precious in the eye of the earnest reader; and will lend additional weight to the lesson that the story teaches. --- Jerome K Jerome: Three Men in a Boat ( London, August, 1889)
As it is writ:
Ah! Says Toad:`Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING--absolute nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,' he went on dreamily: `messing--about--in--boats; messing----'
