Quote:
Originally Posted by hasse_A
Are you serious ?
We are mostly 1 person on watch. How in the world could you expect that person to do that manoeuvre in the middle of the night on a cruising boat where everything is set up going down wind with genua poled out ?
If you are forced to head up into the wind you can of course do that but that is
not a routine manoeuvre putting excessive force on your equipment.
/Hans |
You are fortunate in that your
keel and your primary
rudder will self shed the weeds, many boats do not have such long
keel configuration and are prone to fouling their bottoms. Sailing in reverse is the common procedure as their undersides are hard or impossible to clear without going into the
water and
diving to untangle. Sailing in reverse is a very handy procedure to maneuver in a marina or a
mooring field [say to pickup a ball] or to make a rapid /
emergency stop or to pickup a object or person that has fallen over. I have had to go under boats to remove fouling when at sea, not a lot of fun if the conditions are anything other than calm, e.g., crab trap lines, and seaweed. Cold swimming off the northern
California coast.
As to your present configuration, I would recommend just put a kick up
rudder on your exposed, off center
hydrovane, either one that will trigger by itself with an adjustable amount of force [weighted or spring biased] or one that you simply rise manually. Loads of designs for such on the
internet both custom and production models. Alternatively to using a kick up version It seems one could modify a vane so that it rises vertically and the rudder is caused to be brought straight up and out of the
water.
A steep rake angle forward of the rudder may aid but I suspect the buoyancy of the weeds will counter the downward drag to a considerable extent and such straight in line device will counter the
steering of the vanes rudder and even your primary rudder
My mid-sized sailboat has a swing keel and a swing rudder. I should put an
electric winch on the keel so as to ease its lifting as it is physically a hard go to raise with the manual friction
winch and even the long, heavy rudder takes considerable effort to raise to be parallel or above the surface of the water. But swinging the keel and the rudder up readily avails untangling and also avails ungrounding, and or purposefully beaching and of course navigating into the shallows.
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