John F. Hughes - Personal - Boats
home
I used to maintain the FAQ for rec.boats; I've taken the last version
that I compiled and put it into html format; you can read it here .
I spend too much of my time messing with boats. The current fleet
includes
- Sarah, an 1970 Alberg 37 sloop
- US 506, a Reg White Tornado catamaran
- DN 4550, a DN iceboat that I built a few years ago. (Local DN
iceboat
homepage.)
- Another home-brew iceboat with an old windsurfer rig to power it
- A "nester" dinghy, from Dave Gerr's wonderful book "The Nature of
Boats." I built this boat two years ago, and just love it.
- A 13 1/2-foot ultralight rowing boat: spruce stringers,
steam-bent oak ribs, kevlar diagonal strapping, and a heat-shrunk
dacron covering. Total weight about 35 lbs. First boat I ever built.
Design came from adapting plans in "WoodenBoat: An Appreciation of the
Craft;" I had to remove some concave bits...
Index
UNDER CONSTRUCTION: All of these items will eventually become references to real stuff
that you can look at; for now, they're merely stubs.
Navigation
- An ftp-able "nav pac" -- a C-language version of the Navigation
Pac for the HP-41 calculator.
- An ftp-able collection of C++ classes for navigation.
- A way to compute the azimuth, and especially its amplitude (the
azimuth at sunrise and sunset; useful if you're
trying to align a sundial or swing a compass.
- Various PostScript programs for generating plotting sheets,
logbook pages, dumbcompasses, etc.
- Some Java applets for playing with
code flags.
How-to-do-the-boating stuff
- Lists of activities aboard Sarah, like winterizing, getting under
way, closing up the boat after a weekend, etc.
- Menus and associated shopping lists
- Watch schedules
Maintenance
I spend a lot of time posting answers to maintenance questions on the
net here and there. I've kept some of them as permanent answers here.
- John's Guide to Goo: stuff you need to know about gooey things
used during boat maintenance.
- Stuffing boxes
- Doing an epoxy job on Sarah's hull
Theory
I'm pretty interested in theoretical stuff having to do with boats
- Radar reflectors -- theory of
- Can a wind-powered boat go faster than the wind, dead downwind?
- What's the theory behind iceboats?
- How likely are various bad events in boats?
Experience
Some things I've done, and others I wished I hadn't done
- Sailing resume
- The sinking of Trudy's dinghy
- A trip to Maine
- An ugly afternoon and evening in the Deer Island Thorofare
- The day the Tornado pitchpoled
- The day the Tornado was dismasted
- Trying to tow a large boat with a smaller one