Published by the Open Canoe Sailing Group

perform a penalty manoeuvre, and his chance was gone. Once everyone had reached shore, and Jan had been rescued from the doldrums in the middle of the lake, prizes in the form of Devon delicacies were handed out, thanks given, and departures made. Needless to say at this point the wind picked up to a respectable breeze!

My thanks to everyone who attended and made it such an enjoyable weekend. We had too much wind last year, too little this, maybe we'll get it right next year.

P.S. The OCSG web-site is working well. Ian and Paula found out about the meet on it, as did SteveH from Totnes who came along on Sunday to discuss aspects of the latest canoe he is building, and Rosemary and PaulT from Cheddar.

Tale Of Robert The Redeemable (RobertB)

Bright was the day and wet the water when Robert the Redeemable embarked on his quest for the adequate boat, facing insufficient consumer choice for sailing nerds, the spirit of origami, complete bankers, and even the spirits of the vasty deep: the manifestation, in this world of mortals, of rail privatisation....

Being slightly sailing fixated in my youth, the passion faded for a while. Then, in 1995, I decided I wanted to start up again. But the sailing had to be possible without a car. Seeing that I would soon finish my PhD and not knowing where I would go next, I couldn't acquire something so big that it would have to stay in the water (quite apart from the cost). I had to go to the other end of the spectrum for something small enough to carry on a train. I read an article about this little kite-powered French inflatable catamaran.

It weighed only 10 kg, so it was quite portable. I bought one, and found out quickly that it barely went upwind, and that when in my wet suit, I had no room on the boat for my dry clothes. Great portability doesn't help much when the boat is not worth carrying to the water.

In 1996 I was too busy to do anything connected with sailing and in 1997 I was too broke to do anything much, what with being unemployed while waiting whether the PhD grant application would succeed. I did mess about a bit with a 40 year old folding Klepper kayak, but couldn't get the skin waterproof enough. So it was only in 1998 that I got hold of a folding canoe, and used the kite on that. I think that year I managed a total of about 5 days on the water, and there was another day when I didn't dare to try because launching an 8.5 m2 kite in that wind would have been suicidally stupid. I would have simply died of embarrassment if I had managed to kill myself in such a spectacularly idiotic way (but you'd have been dead anyway - Ed.).

Except for that one day, the wind was so weak that I had a hard time keeping the kite in the air at all. When the wind was right, the boat worked fine. I had a little frame on which I could mount a foil for lateral resistance, I could shift the kite attachment point fore and aft to steer the boat; and rudders were not required. If only the kite had stayed up where I wanted it, and if it could have been depowered, this would have been perfect. But as it was, the concept was simply not suitable for my purposes. I sold the kite and built another rig for 1999.

For the sail I used a self made Chinese junk sail. Instead of using leeboards and a rudder, I tried a stabilizing foil on a string developed by Paul Ashford of the Amateur Yacht Research Society (the sailing nerds; I am, of course, a member). The stabilisation worked exactly as predicted, and so did the steering, as long as I didn't try to tack.

In 2000, I found a place at a canoeing club at Loch Lomond where I could keep a boat. The slots in the boat house were only big enough for kayaks, though, so I couldn't use the canoe.

Fortunately, Iain was willing to lend me his outrigger boat for the year. I managed to build another foil assembly that could go either way, proa-fashion, as well as another sail, and tried that for a bit. In September that year, I moved to Trondheim.

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