If you couldn’t tell, things are coming along swimmingly aboard Syzygy. I’m immensely proud. (Yes, that’s me on my banjo on my bike on my boat, drinking a beer, in black and white — how’s that for vainglory?)
I’m writing regularly about Syzygy — the work, the preparations, the doings in this new sailboat world — for Outside magazine’s blog — we have our own little Syzygy page, even.
I’m proud of these ramblings, too, and should have re-posted them here, but I hope you’ll understand that I was busy. I was probably cutting another hole in the boat. I’ve written about the hundreds times I’ve done that (cut holes in the boat, and also written about San Francisco’s notorious wind, about removing janky parts, about the modern history of metals, about the love/hate nature of sailing, about waging a war on stainless steel, about the cult of the Valiant, about inspiration from a sailing legend, and more. The pipelines are full, too.
A while back we came across these superb videos made by Chris Humann (edited thanks to comment below) during his single-handed TRANSPAC race, in which he suspends a video camera from a kite and flies it from his boat while sailing. As soon as I saw the video I had to do it too. It’s so difficult to get good footage while sailing, since you’re usually limited to the deck of the boat–but Chris’s perspective and the footage he captures is just incredible.
Extensive online research revealed that there is a whole hobby out there dedicated to “KAP” or “kite aerial photography”. My immediate question was: why doesn’t anyone talk about kite aerial video? Surely video is better than stills? Turns out that getting steady video is wicked hard!
Most people make their own rigs and build it piece by piece a bit at a time, playing with different kites, etc, until they feel competent enough in their gear to hang an expensive camera off of it. This is probably smart, but I was in the mood for immediate gratification, so I put intelligence aside to make room for recklessness and in an impulsive moment I ordered a kite and a picavet suspension rig from Brooks Leffler’s web site, brooxes.com.
Brooks is the man–he made it super easy to get started. He handled everything personally, and I had my gear in a day and a half. I highly recommend his excellent little company; he is a good guy with great products and great service, and he deserves our business.
Everyone suggests first practicing with just the kite, getting to know how it functions in different conditions, etc, but I was just too impatient for that sort of thing. So the day after my new toys arrived we went out to the grass next to the marina on a pretty windy day and just did it. Put it all together, started the kite flying, then hung my $400 video camera from the picavet suspension and just let out the entire 500ft of line. It was funny to watch my little video camera become a little speck way up there, hanging directly over the sailboats in the marina.
Here’s the basic setup: you launch the kite and let out a hundred feet of string, then you attach the picavet suspension rig to the string. The picavet is an elegant arrangement of lines that serve to keep the camera mounting bracket perfectly horizontal no matter what angle the kite is at. You mount your camera on the bracket at whatever angle you want it to be, and then it stays at that angle the whole time.
About the video camera: I love my sanyo xacti videocamera, because 1) it’s WATERPROOF and 2) no tapes–it holds over an hour of top quality footage on a little 8gb memory card. Plug it into the computer and download all the footage in a minute. We have used this trusty little camera to film underwater in the bay–just put it under the faucet afterwards to rinse it off the saltwater. If only sanyo would make an waterproof version of their HD videocamera!
That first trial run in the marina created very, very shaky footage. Check it out:
Pretty much unusable stuff. I get the feeling that this is pretty common with kite aerial video, which in hindsight explains why the online traffic is all about kite aerial photography. I think you need the wind to be extremely steady without any gusts to get decent footage. Conditions the day we first tried were less than ideal:
The most annoying aspect of the trial run was how long it took to wind up the line to bring the whole rig back in, so I built a new winder to which I could chuck our portable drill–this sped up the whole take-down process drastically.
Emboldened by our trial run, the next weekend we took it sailing. It was a bit more challenging to deal with the setup from the deck of a boat, but all in all totally doable. We sent it out when the wind was about 10-15 knots, I let out the kite and all 500ft of line, and then the wind picked up to 20 and then 25 and I thought the line was going to break and I was going to lose the whole thing, so I hooked up the drill and wound that sucker back in. The footage was super shaky again, which is a bummer but I guess to be expected in those conditions. Also, the angle of the camera (easily adjustable, from the ground!) wasn’t quite high enough, so the top of our mast is never quite in the shot. This is unfortunate, but no so bad for our first try. I’m very happy with all the gear and the setup–thanks to Brooks for a simple and excellent product. Now we just need to send it up in better conditions, and hopefully sometime soon we can get great aerial footage of Syzygy in action.
This past Monday we sailed on the bay with friends Kevin Tompsett and Liz Roberts. This was the second week in a row that we had partially dismantled the engine and then put it back together in time for a sail (and we’re going to try for a third time this weekend). The conditions were varied, and interesting enough that I’ll give some details. First, here is our track:
We left the marina at 10am, a good 3 hours earlier than our usual average departure–which explains why we had no wind for the first 3 hours:
Upon motoring out of the marina, we immediately discovered–via an unusual and alarming noise eminating from the engine room–that the drive belt of our engine was rubbing on the alternator belt, an unfortunate and potentially disastrous condition caused by my improper reassembly of the engine the previous day. We elected to motor very SLOWLY, thereby minimizing the bad sound, and in this hobbled and tenuous state we were able to make it out of the narrow channel and hoist the sails.
Upon hoisting the sails, nothing happened. A situation caused by a total lack of wind (refer to wind archive graph above). So we sat around with the sails up for a half hour, floating for a bit. When the wind finally picked up enough for some proper sailing, we headed for angel island, and promptly sailed directly into the wind shadow of angel island. Disdaining engine usage–for reasons already mentioned–we floated around in a state of no wind for another hour or so. We sailed away from angel island a few times to reach some wind, and then elected to turn around and sail right back into the wind shadow. These maneuvers, confusing though they might seem, are well documented in our gps track above. In our defense: these things happen when you don’t particularly care where you’re going or how long it takes to get there.
As we made our way up racoon strait (the section of water between angel island and tiburon on the mainland) the wind rapidly increased. By the time we hit the west end of racoon strait we were bowling along, way overpowered, under full jib and full main. Without fanfare, I took this opportunity to change into my foulies (there isn’t enough good raingear to go around, so I try not to flaunt my enviable ability to stay bone-dry). We started burying the leeward rail in the water, hefty splashes started coming over the bow. We partially furled the jib, which helped very little. Kevin had been playfully mouthing off about us not doing any “real” sailing earlier in the day, so I decided it was an ideal time to take him up to the bow to help me set up the staysail. Within half a minute seconds a big splash soaked him through. 🙂
Thus outfitted with main and staysail, we sped under the bridge. When we made it a mile and a half past the bridge, the wind slacked off some, at which point we checked the time, Liz and I chose beers, and we decided it was time to head for home. The way back involved some fun sail changes–we went wing-on-wing for a while and scooted DDW (dead-down-wind) along the headlands, taking advantage of the flood current starting to pour back into the bay (it happens along the edges first). Back in the bay, we went off towards angel island a bit to get some room on the wind, so that when we jibed we would be ability to come up into the wind enough to use both foresails. Then we unfurled the jib again, and with both jib and staysail drawing well, we sailed just about as fast as our boat will go. The wind was still blowing and it’s a bit of a task to jibe with both headsails at once, so we sailed right into the lee of alcatraz for the maneuver. The jibe accomplished, we jammed along on the port tack until it was time to douse the staysail and main and crawl back down the channel at a lazier pace.
Super light then quite heavy wind, and myriad sail combinations, all in one glorious day.
Matt, Jon and I went out on a rainy afternoon and caught up with Kanga, another Valiant 40 (built in 1989) owned by our new friends Jim and Jean. We’re sort of like family, our boats. Syzygy, of course, is the bolder, tougher big brother.
Jonny and I managed to get the stanchions reinstalled, and the water pump replaced, in time to sail for the weekend. It was a beautiful day and we had a large turnout, but no wind. After having to bleed the engine again (three times in three days–there’s an air leak somewhere, you think!) we motored out beyond the last channel markers, tried to sail, gave up in zero wind, and floated around in a lake of nearly still water. It was a balmy San Francisco winter day, and I didn’t hear a single person complaining about the lack of wind. After an extended period of non-sailing due to constant boat work, it felt really good to have Syzygy in sailing shape again. And maybe next time we’ll actually have to use our sails (they’re just up for show in the picture–or to be honest just because we were too lazy to put it away).
Jon flew out from denver last week to spend the holiday on his boat, and his parents flew in to join us (and get a look at the boat). We went out the day after thanksgiving, got a late start (1pm or so), and made incredible time out to and past the gate. On turning around to head for home, we discovered the cause for our great speed: a 4.5 knot ebb, reaching its peak just as we were trying to get back under the bridge. We spent a fair amount of time crossing back and forth trying to make headway against the river of current trying to push us out to sea. We discovered that the best place to be for a favorable current was right up against the shoreline, as close as we were willing to get–the catch-22 is that the wind fell off close to the shore, as we got in under the lee of the marin headlands. We spread some more canvas (the staysail) and that gave us a little bit of a boost. Once we reached the water along chrissy field (north shore of san francisco) we were home free–we were even helped along at that point by a couple knots of flood. We motored into the marina well after dark, ending another fantastic day on the bay. Here’s our funny looking track, although honestly I expected it to look a lot more ridiculously convoluted than it does:
It’s the nature of adventures for things not to go as planned, but that’s not much consolation when seasickness renders you as useless and immobile as a jellyfish and you’re out in the middle of the ocean and you’ve got miles to sail before reaching the comfort of terra firma. Only in hindsight, and only reluctantly — once you’ve got your wits about you again — can you call such an experience an adventure. Really, it’s much easier to call it what it was: a miserable, queasy, painful, wretched, torturous journey.
Matt, Karen, and I had decided it was finally time to take Syzygy out in the ocean, so we decided to sail from San Francisco 20 miles south to Half Moon Bay. It’s worth noting, now, that the Coast Guard had issued a small-craft advisory for the weekend, and that the forecast, which included an official “gale warning,” predicted 30 knot winds and 18-foot seas on Sunday, and 25 knot winds and 9-foot seas on Monday.
