Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Beaufort Wind Force Scale Terminology

For the newbie sailor he has a lot of homework to complete in order to learn the vast amount of sailing terms. There are tons of new words in my vocabulary now, like apparent wind, broad reach, healing, Jib, Genoa, etc, the list is long. If you are new to sailing and you are reading any sailing stories where there is some technical information you would have to use your imagination on a lot of these terms.

I currently read Cruising World and Multihulls World and I am also reading the book Catamarans, The Complete Guide for Cruising Sailors. In this book I am reading a section on sail trimming for increasing performance and there is repeated mention of wind conditions expressed like F1, F2, F3, etc. I suppose, had I taken sailing lessons I would know what they refer to, however this has not yet happened. The book doesn’t appear to explain what these mean either (At least I haven’t found it). The book appears to be geared toward the intermediate and up sailor. I am getting a lot out of it even though I am a newbie, however I will need to go back later to re-read things as they will make more sense now then they did when I read them as my knowledge and experience has increased.

I did some searching and finally found what I was looking for. I found a scale called the Beaufort Wind Force Scale that provides a chart of the various levels of force. Force 0 or F0 is Calm, and F1 is light air, just enough to give steerage way, etc. The complete table is shown below. Now I can read the book and get a lot more out of the section.

I may be going about this backwards. I suppose I should take sailing lessons and then start researching. I plan to take a serious look into sailing lessons at the Strictly Sail Boat show at Jack London Square in Oakland, Ca in April. Perhaps I will find a bargain there. Family obligations, camping and my own hobbies like playing in an adult soccer league on Sundays and fishing take up most of free time. At some point I will have to give up something to pursue my dream.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

New Catamaran Video's Cruising World Magazine

Just took a look on Cruising worlds website and noticed they have some new videos on 2008 model catamarans. After watching the Seawind Video I can see I need to take a second look at the Seawind 1160 mainly for its innovative features and performance minded sail plan. According to my CatStats, the 1160 is in the mid range for performance, but perhaps there are other performance related factors that deserve consideration. The draft is deeper then I would prefer and I may need to stick with a dagger board cat. What I like is that the boat was designed more for owner rather then a charter boat.

I ran across the Cats By The Numbers spreadsheet on the Cruising world web site. According to this list updated on Jun 19, 2006, the price per lb is $25.26 This is average compared to the rest of the Cats that are listed. The information is old. Price per lb is most likely higher now on all Cats.

Sorry so short, but I have to hit the road. Going fishing tomorrow. I will add more to this soon.

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