Spring 2024

Winter's over! Sailing season is here again! We had a brief attack of 35°C weather, then it dropped by 10°C, then it warmed up a bit again.

On Australian father's day I invited my Dad out on the river with the boys and me. This time I decided to take us upriver to check out Newstead. We'd be sailing past HMAS Moreton and a few citycat stops.

For this outing I wanted to try a different way of rigging the jib. Our jib is slightly undersized for the boat, so there's a fair length of halyard, about 300mm, between the head of the sail and the pulley on the mast. This means the head can flop about when we're getting close to tacking, spilling wind. This can make it difficult to maintain momentum through a tack. As an experiment I threaded the forestay through the halyard shackle, and secured the jib tack slightly higher up along the forestay, rather than right at the bottom where it usually sits.

We launched from our usual Colmslie recreation reserve boat ramp and headed upriver. There was a nice 10 knot northerly and patchy cloud cover. There were a few citycats cruising around. Sailing downwind of the big apartment blocks on the north shore was a bit annoying as the wind was pretty squirrelly. We tied off to a floating anchor point marked “NOT FOR PUBLIC USE” just off some fancy riverfront houses in Bulimba and broke out the eski for some apple slices, mint slices and zooper doopers. The wind spun us around the buoy a few times as we ate.

After the break we sailed back downriver to the boat ramp. We had some difficulty in tacking once or twice. My new jib rigging didn't seem to have helped much. Both the halyards are quite stretchy. I think it might be worth replacing them.