Cape Town Central

Central to the world,Cape Town can supply most marine and other products world wide and all the branded names your used to and trust.

Thats not a train station I am talking about,thats our On Line Shop,we started on the export side about eight (8) years back and so far we are still receiving requests for quotes and shipping,the pricing must be competitive,as we have a full deck kit of marine  hardware to send to England and  this week we have received an order from Switzerland for an Optimist kit and also a delivery of a Watchmate AIS to the Canary Isles,we turned the AIS order around within 24 hrs of payment,the Swiss order  will be cut and ready in about a week.

How to make your own Guitar

Alister contacted me recently about his hobby,he makes Guitars and wanted to know can we supply him with both bending plys and flexible veneers,he bought two sheets of each and the photos show the jig he made and how some American Walnut he sourced glued up,in this case we were trying to supply wood on wood veneers,our walnut is wood on craft paper,we thought the glue line would be affected but its open to trial.

The Big Bang

Not the real big bang but one ofour very own to start the Hout Bay Yacht Clubs opening cruise last saturday,many thanks to Jeremy who supplied the pictures.

THE NAUTICAL GUN SALUTE


Delivered on the occasion of the salute by the Honourable Order of Hout Bay Artillery for the sail past to mark the opening of the 2010/11 sailing season by the Commodore of the Hout Bay Yacht Squadron



They defended our shore with hot round shot and grape

When the enemy tried to invade our fair Cape.

Now we’re a Republic, no longer at war

Friendly fire honours those who come to our shore.

The sailors of Hout Bay now we also toast,

They brave the South-Easter (or so they do boast)

So may our libation bring winds that are fair

Neither typhoon or flat calm – the sailor’s nightmare.

Fine ships and our cannon we bequeath to our sons

The spirit of Hout Bay, the boats and the guns!



Gunner Jeremy Hele

Aries mount base is around the bend

This is the basic former of the platform,which will be 320mm from front to back and 150mm deep,it will have a top and a back on it next,then be glassed with biaxial glass cloth and more ofour 816 epoxy.

Just look at how tight a radius our 5mm bending plys will shape too,this was an easy job given a jig was made first,making copies is very easy of course,the furniture trade comes to mind and we have just supplied a maker of guitars for the same reason.

Well it may be but it may also work,an Aries vane gear needs a support base to extend past a transom boading platform,so one is being made from our 5mm waterproof bending ply (ce approoved) more stocks arrived last week,I can tell you who has it if you email me at kits@comlumber.com we can also ship country or world wide.

The HBYC opening cruise,with Hansa Brewery and an Octoberfest mug

What a great event,there are at least 90 pictures I took but lets start where it ended,with a beer mug! More pictures will be posted tommorrow.

Roy

Ocean Bound and its Aries Vane Gear

This weekend I was talking to David Scot Cowper about his two trips around the world on his yacht Ocean Bound,he used the same Aries Vane Gear on both circumnavigations,he went east and west about,at the time the only man to do this.

Gregs Didi mini cruise hull build is turned

Gregs father in law,Garth with his build and a proud moment after turning the hull,its his first boat buildI think.

Greg and his father  in law have been enjoying their build of the Didi mini transat,it was to be a race version,then they went for the cruise version with its lifting keel,we supplied the extra materials as required.

Steering Toylanders in the right direction.

While having the sole South African rights to producing the Toylander from Real Life Toys under a strict licence agreement,we have made some of our own changes as we built our own car,Isuppose its natural development.The first thing was to do away with the 20x 20mm body cleats made from wood,then design in our Finger Joints,making the assembly really easy,now we have our own type of steering wheel too,using the template supplied in the regular builders manual.We made the wheel larger than its 190mm diameter as shown and re did it at 250mm diameter and also cut it in 16mm MDF,which is harder and should be stronger than a wheel in 12mm plywood.

You may choose to round off the corners with a router cutter but the wheel will work well as it is.

Polar Bound at the HBYC marina

We are indeed fortunate to meet many cruising and local sailors,some are here for a day,some stay over our winter,some are starting out,some are part way on a circumnavigation,David Scott Cowper is one such person.He has a very special boat and is about to set off for Australia and another trip through the north west passage.

David Scot Cowper,a file picture.

I was pleased to meet David and took the chance to supply him with some Fluid-Film in a spray can,also in a paste form and asked that if possible he can try it out in the sub zero tempratures he will be in eventually,its said to withstand freezing,I have no way of testing that,David can but he says it will be a year on from now.

Both pictures are by R McBride using a Canon Gll camera on auto settings.

Text below is from the magazine Power and Motor Yacht,many thanks to them and their writer,Alex McMullen.

Roy

Over Russia and Around the World


How one yachtsman plans to circumnavigate the globe—the hard way.

Story by Alex McMullen — February 2002

What do you do for an encore when you’ve already performed four single-handed small-boat circumnavigations, the last one via the fearsome, frozen wasteland of Canada’s Northwest Passage?

Well, if you’re the seasoned British solo yachtsman David Scott Cowper, you set off on yet another circumnavigation of the globe, but this time you take in the 5,000-mile Northern Sea Route, along the north coast of Russia. Here you face the possibility of being stuck in the ice for several months, possibly even for a year or more. And a winter in these latitudes gives you 24-hour darkness and temperatures down to -40°F.

Long fascinated by the Northern Sea Route, Cowper cites as inspiration the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who in 1894 deliberately sailed his ship, the Fram, into the pack ice in what he called (and some people still call) the Northeast Passage. The idea was to gauge the strength of the current that was known to flow northward and westward, carrying the ice with it.

Cowper is the epitome of British reserve, a quiet man as polite and pleasant as you could hope for, but no publicity seeker. His achievement in being the first person to sail around the world in both directions—and briefly to hold the records for fastest single-handed circumnavigations, in both directions—went virtually unnoticed. Nor did his Northwest Passage feats in a motorboat create much interest even though he was the first person to tackle it single-handedly (albeit taking three years to do so) and the first to go around the world by that route.

If he completes his new voyage, Cowper will be the first person to travel single-handedly by the Northern Sea Route and says he will be the first to use it on a circumnavigation. Specifically, he intends to set off from Rosneath, Scotland, around the time you’re reading this, bound for the Azores, then Ascension Island, and then the Falklands, en route to rounding Cape Horn “the wrong way,” against its prevailing, often storm-force winds. Then he will head north up into the Pacific, calling on Valparaiso, Chile, Acapulco, Mexico, and San Francisco, from where he will set course for Dutch Harbour in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. From here he will aim to get through the Bering Strait and into the Northern Sea Route in July.

Cowper’s first two world-girdling cruises were in a 41-foot sailing yacht, the third and fourth in a 42-foot, wooden ex-lifeboat. For his toughest challenge yet, he has Polar Bound, a new 48-foot motorboat, designed and built not just for ocean going but for survival in pack ice.

Simply Red

Simply Red,with a little of the blues thrown in too.

Thats nothing to do with the band and its lead singer Mick Hucknell,who has now played his last gig with the band but the Argie 15 that has been built from one of our kits by Greg in KZN,he painted it red and is now well on his way with another of our kits,the Didi mini cruise,they turned the hull over just last week.If you look past the Argie 15 you will see it in the background.

Toylander kits to Joburg,

Click on the picture to see in a larger size with more details,we also include a 230mm diameter steering wheel blank in 16mm MDF for you to shape and finish.

These panel sets,there are two,will be going off to Johannesburg next week,with small detail changes to our cut files all the time, we are finding new ways to make our Toylanders even faster to build.

It is now spring in the Cape

We do not have the worst winters in the world,its sort of cold now and then,snow on the distant mountains,with rain in Cape Town,then come the end of September we get spring and here it is!

A visit to Palmerston Atoll by HBYC yacht The Road

Hello again,


As promised in our last epistle, I will attempt to impart the experience of our visit to the Palmerston Atoll

Firstly, where the H’—is it? Essentially it is part of the Cook Islands, which comprise of 15 small islands contained within an area of some 750 000 square miles bounded between 08 and 23 degrees south and 156 and 167 degrees west.



These in turn are divided into two sub categories, namely the north and south Cook Islands.

Since 1965 they have the status of being a self governing democratic commonwealth, affiliated with New Zealand. (how is that for a whole lot of Westministerese claptrap) which means that all citizens have Cook Island and New Zealand citizenship, and that New Zealand have sole control of Cook Island Foreign Affairs; Defense; and subsidizes finances.
Palmerston is deemed to be part of the Southern Cook Islands situated as it is at 18-03 south and 163-13 west. The atoll comprises six sandy islets scattered along the coral reef surrounding the lagoon. All in all a pretty lonely place. The privately operated supply ship only visits when the cargo is economically viable. We were fortunate to be present and able to assist in the offloading, when a visitation of this life line occurred, the first for 9 months.

Here comes the real, or is that surreal, side to the story, there are plus minus 70 inhabitants in total on the atoll, all of whom descend from a unique history. They are all descendants of a patriarchal figure, a Lancastrian by the name of William Marsters, who in 1862 settled there with his 3 Polynesian wives. He the proceeded to father 26 children, and divided the islands into sections for the 3 “families”. He also established strict rules regarding intermarriage, and to this day, some of his descendants control the island while the rest live and work in New Zealand and elsewhere in the Cook Islands.

For the visiting yachtsmen, (There is no other way to get there, except by the very irregular supply ship) there is no access into the lagoon if the draft of your vessel is more than 4 feet, so the locals have laid down a series of mooring buoys outside the reef, with each “family” owning their own string of about 4 each. (The numbers fluxuate as new are added, and others removed for maintenance).

Now comes the unique part of the tale, upon arrival within a mile or so of the island, a small craft belonging to one of the families will come out to meet you, guide you to a mooring buoy, assist in tying you to it, and from that moment on, for the duration of your stay, you and all on board are adopted by the family. They ferry you back and forth from ship to shore, they feed you, teach you about all their customs such as fishing, whale watching; coconut harvesting and preparation; catching land crabs; cooking in ground ovens etc. you are taken on tours of the island proudly shown all their infrastructure such as the school, generator plant, water collection system . We were again fortunate in the timing of our arrival, in that for about 4 months of the year, during the nesting period of the “Tropic Bird” population on the adjoining islands, once a month, (our experience was to be the last of the season) all the families collect some of the male chicks, who are at that time still flightless, but paradoxically much larger than their parents. A strict tally is then kept of how many each family is responsible for collecting, and the whole island population meets on the beach at an appointed time share out the birds accordingly. However if there are visiting yachtsmen present, the family who are looking after them is allowed to take one extra bird per visitor from the total captured, and the population in general absorbs the loss in their allowance with good will and smiles all around. Killing, plucking and eventually burning off the residual feathers is then performed with much ceremony, and of course the visitors are expected to partake enthusiastically. Shirley designated herself as official photographer, so deftly avoiding mutilating what she perceived as different manifestations of our pet Parrot Rubbish.

The birds were then cooked overnight in an underground oven, and consumed with great relish after church (attendance compulsory) on Sunday morning.

When, all too quickly, it was time for us to leave these amazingly giving and friendly people, we were presented with gifts of freshly caught fish and coconuts. It must be emphasized that apart from the regulatory levies imposed by the New Zealand’s representative (a very friendly all powerful administrator by the name of Tere) the locals did not expect any form of remuneration, except maybe some flour, salt or such, that we had to spare. I got rid of that darned stainless steel chain and convinced Shirley to part with some of that ever present pasta that she likes and I do not.

Should any of you reading this be sailing this way in the future, in our opinion it would be a great loss, in re learning how to treat our fellow man if nothing else, if you fail to stop and enjoy the experience

Well once again that’s about that for that.

Taffy ,Shirley and Rubbish.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the following:
History


Palmerston was discovered by Captain Cook in 1774, but he did not land on the island until 13 April 1777. He found the island uninhabited, though some ancient graves were discovered. Cook named the island after Henry Temple, 2nd Viscount Palmerston, then lord of the admiralty. The ancient name of the island was supposedly Avarau, meaning “two hundred harbours.” In 1863 William Marsters, a ship's carpenter and barrel maker, arrived on Palmerston from Manuae with two Polynesian wives and annexed the island from the British government. He added a 'third wife' and sired a large family of some 23 children, whose descendants now inhabit Palmerston. Thus, Palmerston Island is the only island in the Cook Islands for which English is the native language.

William Masters is said to have originally come from Leicestershire England, and his descendants now spell the name "Marsters", possibly due to the Leicestershire accent. By the time his youngest daughter Titana Tangi died in 1973, there were over a thousand Marsters descendants living in Rarotonga and New Zealand. Though only some fifty family members remain on Palmerston, all Marsters descendants consider the island their ancestral home. In 1954 the family was granted full ownership of the island. Three branches of the family remain on Palmerston, each branch being descended from one of Williams 'three wives', marriage within a family group is prohibited.[1] Palmerston is now administered by the Cook Islands government in association with New Zealand.

Toylander brakes fitted and working pictures

Note the smooth inside of the rim and the dome headed bolts we had to source and fit,as the original hex headed bolts would foul the brake rubber ends.

This section was to me the great unknown,how do all those metal parts we had made work and if so,will they work on our standard of wheel available to us at this time? The friction material in the builders manual is a short length of 1" (25mm) rubber tube,thats a neat idea and when its faced up to a rim with a rim thats flat on the inside face, presents a decent friction surface.In our case the rims are less ideal but using a rubber cap on the tube end has seen the system work well,with some hole adjustments the foot brake and the hand brake work well.

Brakes on Toylandering

Here we can see the hand brake in the On position,note fixing bolts and fastners may be temporary in all and any of our pictures pending our final package.

Here the hand brake lever is in the off position,you can see it going through a slot in the bulkhead.

The black rubber boot end is the friction material that grips the inside of the metal wheel rim.

Thats not as in the project has stopped but these Toylanders actually have brakes,thats a foot brake and a hand brake no less,how it all works was a mystery a couple of hours back but its making sense now and I can see it will work,we do need to make some adjustments to our cut files and record changes and list the correct bag of nuts and bolts,plus a couple of return springs we will also supply in our kit.