You’ll have the choice of three fleets [...]]]> The 21st annual Shipwrights’ Race is coming right up on Saturday, February 25th. Round up your hibernating crew or pick up some fresh crew here on this site or at the skippers’ meeting and get ready for a fun race with wacky trophies and valuables prizes.

You’ll have the choice of three fleets — Racing, Cruising, and Inshore (small boats). Download your entry form here (Shipwrights Registration Form 2012) or pick one up at the Chandlery at the Northwest Maritime Center. Entry fee is $20 per boat before Feb. 16th and $25 thereafter.

The skippers’ meeting will be at 9 am at the Maritime Center commons, and the race is scheduled to start at noon.

There will be chowder, libations, and an awards ceremony at the Maritime Center following the race.

For more information contact Ace Spragg at 360 379-2759 ext. 103 or Piper Dunlap at 360 774-0819.

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Needless to say, this is a joke. Don't do it.

]]> http://ptsail.org/2012/01/28/time-to-check-your-rig/feed/ 0 http://ptsail.org/2012/01/14/whats-missing-in-this-picture-of-martha/ http://ptsail.org/2012/01/14/whats-missing-in-this-picture-of-martha/#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:17:09 +0000 Kathy Grace http://ptsail.org/?p=4252 MARTHA's in the Boat Haven yard getting a new keel, rudder and foremast.

A lot!  But the biggest thing missing is the  keel, which was removed early in January. MARTHA is in the Shipwright’s Coop building across from Admiral Marine Supply undergoing restoration, the largest part of which is the rebuilding [...]]]>

MARTHA's in the Boat Haven yard getting a new keel, rudder and foremast.

A lot!  But the biggest thing missing is the  keel, which was removed early in January. MARTHA is in the Shipwright’s Coop building across from Admiral Marine Supply undergoing restoration, the largest part of which is the rebuilding of a new lead keel. Robert D’Arcy is leading the project with the help of numerous local marine tradesmen and volunteers. Meanwhile, over in the Northwest Maritime Center’s boat shop, a new foremast is being built for MARTHA under the guidance of Steve Chapin.  Both the keel and the mast are works of art, combining old world woodworking knowledge with modern CAD design tools and machinery.  These are arts that are practiced by very few tradesmen in this day and age. Port Townsend is one of the few locations in the world that can craft these  kinds of projects.

If you arfe interested in volunteering time, money, or a few hours of work, contact Holly at 360-385-2150. You can truly say that you were a part of historty by working on this project.

For more information and pictures of the project, go to schoonermartha.org.

In America, women became [...]]]> Ship launching ceremonies have been recorded as long ago as 3,000 B. C. Although modern ceremonies no longer include such ancient customs as animal sacrifice to the gods, the sentiment behind them is the same as in ages past: to officially name the ship and bless it on its voyages.

In America, women became the preferred sponsors of ships around the 1840s, charged with breaking a bottle of spirits over the bow. Champagne eventually became the libation of choice for its effervescence.

Local shipyards documented their ceremonies with photographs of the participants, leaving us a record not only of the massive machinery they produced, but also of the human ritual that made an appeal to forces beyond mere technology. A number of photographs of ship launchings can be found at the site Ladies Who Launch.

Miss Juliet Edith Greene, great-great granddaughter of William Bainbridge, sponsor, USS Bainbridge, June 12, 1920.

USS Bainbridge, 1920

Miss Juliet Edith Greene, great-great granddaughter of William Bainbridge, sponsor, USS Bainbridge, June 12, 1920. New York Shipbuilding Corporation, Camden, New Jersey.

This destroyer was named after William Bainbridge, a naval officer who commanded ships during the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812, and served as a commandant of the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the 1820s.

Independence Seaport Museum
New York Shipbuilding Corporation Collection
1967.310

SLIVER’s owner has said that he wants his boat built using the best, most cost-effective construction methods possible. For that reason, he chose [...]]]> From Pete Leenhouts, NorthWest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, www.nwboatschool.org, an update on the Perry designed 62′ day sailor now under construction at the new Jeff Hammond boat shop.

SLIVER’s owner has said that he wants his boat built using the best, most cost-effective construction methods possible. For that reason, he chose the School to build the hull using strip planking covered by fiberglass. We can teach our students these methods using his boat as the instructional vehicle.

Contemporary Instructor Bruce Blatchley is leading the hull and deck construction team at the Boat School.

SLIVER is 61 feet 11 inches long, and 55 feet 4 inches long at the design waterline. She is 9 feet 10 inches wide, and will have a 10 foot draft. She will carry 976 square feet of sails, and will be tiller steered. She is designed to have a basic suite of accomodations, and will be driven in calms by a 39 hp Yanmar diesel.

Turn Point Design, a local CNC fabrication shop owned by Brandon Davis, cut the molds for the hull and deck.  The hull was strip-planked with red cedar, edge-nailed with composite nails and glued with WEST System epoxy under Bruce’s leadership in the shop. The hull was faired by hand with long boards and WEST System epoxy and fillers.

The boat is being sheathed in 30-ounce tri-axial fiberglass cloth bonded to the hull with WEST System epoxy.   While you were in the shop the day I met you, Bruce and his staff were scrubbing off the amine blush from the epoxy covering the fiberglass cloth and preparing to further fair the hull.  I’ll include those pictures in the next e-mail.

The deck will be built of 18-ounce bi-axial cloth laminated over the deck’s foam core. The incoming class will begin this work in January (they’re in Basic Boatbuilding Projects now through Dec 21st). The 2012 class will also sheath and fair the inside of the hull and install the bulkheads and structure.

ICON's new rudder designed to prevent stalling.

This is ICON’s revised rudder. As you probably can guess the bumps on the leading edge are what was added to my original rudder shape. [...]]]> Bob Perry has a new blog and one of his first posts was on ICON’s new rudder designed by Paul Bieker.

ICON's new rudder designed to prevent stalling.

This is ICON’s revised rudder. As you probably can guess the bumps on the leading edge are what was added to my original rudder shape. These bumps are called “Tubercles” and can be found in nature on the leading edge of the fins Humpback whales. They can be seen as vortex generators. So, why were they added and did they work?

ICON’s original owner and skipper were Happy with the boat’s performance and I never heard any complaints about the rudder. But ICON sold to a new owner and he was campaigning the boat heavily and quite successfully. The new owner, Kevin, felt the rudder was stalling too quickly when the boat was being hard pressed. He asked Paul Bieker to take a look at the rudder and suggest a modification. I’ve known Paul for years. He was an intern in my office years ago and lived in my house while interning. Paul is one of the most clever and technically agile designers I know. Paul pulled out a technical paper,” HOW BUMPS ON WHALE FLIPPERS DELAY STALL, An Aerodynamic model.” by Ernst A. van Nierop, Silas Alben and Michael P. Brenner. This highly technical paper goes into the theory behind how the bumps can delay the stall angle of a fin. It’s full of complex formulas and to be honest a bit over my head. OK, way over my head but I can look at the pictures, the graphs and read the text and get a good understanding of what and why they were doing it.

Paul applied the theory in the paper and suggested three bumps on the leading edge of ICON’s rudder. The idea being that when ICON was heeled over and rudder was applied at high angles of attack the rudder would suck air down the leading edge leading to a stall and loss of rudder control. The bumps direct this downwash back across the rudder foil and delay stalling. Cool huh. And yes, according to Kevin, the bumps worked great. There is very little additional drag from the bumps but the effect on stall angle was dramatic.

On many modern high performance boats with broad transoms twin rudders are used so that the leeward rudder is well below the water’s surface. This prevents the leeward rudder from “ventilating” and stalling. But on ICON we had one rudder and changing to twin rudders would have been very expensive. Paul’s solution was a simple, quick and economical fix. Plus, it looks sexy.

You can follow Perry’s blog and read the entire post at Yacht Design According to Perry.

If you Googled this article because you think you’re having a heart attack — stop. Call 911. Then chew an aspirin.

Spending precious minutes searching for information about heart attack symptoms as you [...]]]>

One of the symptoms for a heart attack in women is pain in the shoulder blades. — Rosanne Olson/Getty Images

If you Googled this article because you think you’re having a heart attack — stop. Call 911. Then chew an aspirin.

Spending precious minutes searching for information about heart attack symptoms as you experience them is not wise, doctors say, because “time is heart muscle.”

Heart Attack Symptoms

One of the symptoms for a heart attack in women is pain in the shoulder blades. — Rosanne Olson/Getty Images

“If you think you’re having a heart attack, that’s not the time to try and figure out whether you’re right,” says Gordon Tomaselli, M.D., president-elect of the American Heart Association, who adds he has patients who have done exactly that.

And yet, among the most commonly searched subjects online is “heart attack signs,” according to the search engine Google. In fact, the number of searches for that term has increased by a whopping 90 percent in the last five years or so, according a company spokesperson. Searches for “Am I having a heart attack?” alone have risen by more than 35 percent since 2008, the company says.

One reason people are searching online for emergency information is that it’s not always easy to tell whether you’re having a heart attack — even doctors have a tough time knowing without tests. If you suspect you’re having a heart attack, call for an ambulance immediately. And don’t be embarrassed if it turns out you’re not.

“It’s not always straightforward,” says Tomaselli. “If you develop the classic symptoms — pressing chest pain, sweating, nausea — then you’re pretty clear that there’s a big problem that needs to be dealt with quickly.” But, he says, many people, especially women, may develop completely different symptoms when experiencing a heart attack.

Common symptoms in men and women:

You should pay particular attention to the following signs if — like more than half of all Americans — you are over 50, have high blood pressure, have high cholesterol, are a smoker or have a family history of heart disease. A heart attack occurs when the blood supply to the heart is blocked, damaging the muscle. Chewing aspirin (either one regular or two baby) helps the heart by thinning the blood.

* Chest pain — Most people do call 911 or get to the hospital if they feel like they’ve got an elephant sitting on their chest, but even this most common heart attack symptom may be hard to recognize. It may just feel like a squeezing that lasts more than a few minutes or goes away and comes back. “It may be a chest fullness that they don’t recognize as pain,” says Tomaselli, who is also chief of cardiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “Sometimes it doesn’t particularly hurt. It’s an uncomfortable sensation.” If chest pain lasts more than five minutes, go to the emergency room.
* Shortness of breath — You may feel that you can’t catch your breath, even when resting. This breathlessness often occurs before the chest pain.
* Dizziness or lightheadedness — You may feel as if you will pass out.
* Cold sweat — Sweating when you are cold or have a chill.

Symptoms more likely in women:

Women have a higher risk of dying from a heart attack than men do, partly because they often don’t realize they’re having a heart attack and partly because they delay getting help. Women are less likely than men to have the typical “Hollywood heart attack,” says Sharonne Hayes, M.D., cardiologist and director of the Mayo Clinic’s Women’s Heart Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Chest pain was not the main symptom in about 46 percent of women who had a heart attack, studies show.

* Pain in the arm (especially left arm), back, neck, abdomen or shoulder blades — When the nerves of the heart are irritated because the heart isn’t getting enough blood, discomfort or pain can radiate out to many places in the body. The pain often is described as an uncomfortable pressure, tightness or ache. “If you can put a finger on it and say, ‘It hurts right here,’ that’s much less likely to be a heart attack,” says Pamela Ouyang, a cardiologist with the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.
* Jaw pain — Jaw and throat pain are quite common, says Ouyang. She says the feeling can start in the chest and move to the throat — as if someone is choking you — and then to the jaw. But again, it’s not always obvious. Sometimes people “go to the dentist, because they think it’s a toothache,” when they actually had a heart attack.
* Nausea and vomiting — Women are more likely than men to have this symptom, and they may think they have a stomach flu rather than a heart attack.
* Overwhelming and unusual fatigue — Fatigue is generally a symptom of 21st-century life, so it’s often overlooked as a heart attack sign, but it’s extremely common, so beware if you’re unusually exhausted.

Which is it?

* Heart attack vs. heartburn — If you typically have heartburn, and you’ve just eaten a large or spicy meal, you may want to take an antacid to see whether the pain goes away, advises Ouyang. “If you’ve never had anything like this before, and particularly if it’s quite severe or you have a sweat with it … then it might be a heart attack.”
* Heart attack vs. panic attack — If you have a history of panic attacks — racing heart or feelings of impending doom — the symptoms may be another panic attack. But if you’ve never had a panic attack, Hayes says you should be checked out because you don’t want to wind up ignoring a real heart attack.
* Heart attack vs. stable angina — Angina — the pain that comes from insufficient blood flow to the heart — feels similar to a heart attack, but tends to come and go as you exert yourself. “If there is some kind of activity that brings on these symptoms and then you rest and it goes away, that is a classic symptom of angina,” Ouyang says. Sweating and shortness of breath are more likely to accompany a heart attack. Angina is often a precursor to a heart attack, so people need to see a doctor and get diagnosed quickly.

Dinner Can Wait

Heart experts say one reason so many women die is that they often don’t heed their symptoms. They may attribute their symptoms to hot flashes, flu, something they ate or their age. When they do realize something might be wrong, they delay getting treatment.

“Women don’t call 911,” says Sharonne Hayes, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic.

In fact, a 2009 American Heart Association survey found that only half of women say they would call 911 if they thought they might be having a heart attack. “They worry, ‘What will the neighbors think?’ or ‘I’ve got to finish fixing dinner for my husband,’ ” Hayes says.

And women are more likely to consult with friends or call the family doctor, which Hayes says can cause a dangerous delay.

Studies also show that women who are diagnosed with a heart attack are more likely to have come to the hospital in a private car.

When people arrive at a hospital by ambulance, they usually get faster treatment, Hayes says.

“Patients should not be sitting at home trying to diagnose a heart attack,” Hayes says. “They could die doing that.”

Cardiologist Gordon Tomaselli says that often after people have a heart attack, they realize in retrospect they had symptoms days or weeks earlier that they didn’t recognize — such as extreme fatigue or throat pain.

But as many as a quarter of all heart attack victims have a heart attack as a first symptom of heart disease.

Article from the AARP Bulletin