Kaimusailing
s/v Kaimu Wharram Catamaran
| Vessel Name: | Kaimu |
| Vessel Make/Model: | Wharram Custom |
| Hailing Port: | Norwalk, CT |
| Crew: | Andy and the Kaimu Crew |
| About: | Sailors in the Baltimore, Annapolis, DC area. |
17 April 2024 | St Marys, GA
Dinghy Skeg
I was suffering with what seemed like a cold and also had allergy symptoms. I awoke and felt fine. The green pollen that was coating everything was gone. Maybe it will return.
07 April 2024 | St. Marys, GA
Clammy Hands
Items came in from TEMU, the Chinese cut rate retailer. One was a nice little drone that cost about twelve and a half dollars. It looked like an easy thing to play with while I coughed and sneezed. I was fighting a summer cold, even though it is not summer elsewhere, it seems like it here. A nice [...]
02 April 2024 | St. Marys, GA
Sun Doggie
After laminating the cedar strips onto the gunwales of the dinghy I found the screws I used wouldn’t come out. The epoxy had seized them. The screw heads were stripped so I cut a straight slot in the heads with the cut off wheel. The cedar smoked when the screw heads got red hot. I could remove [...]
21 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
Just Add Water
The rainy weekend started off with overcast and fog but no rain. It looked like I might be able to get something done on the D4 dinghy. I wanted to change the bow seat which is really the bow deck. The sailing option uses the deck to hold the freestanding mast. I didn’t like how the deck looked, [...]
01 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
D4 Dinghy Alternative Seats
The rain event was more wind than rain, strong winds with gusts up to 44 mph. We drove into town to see what the harbor was like. There was a small sailboat that had dragged anchor and was sitting close to shore. The tide was out. We left and played with Bleu at Notter’s Pond.
23 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
D4 Inside Seams
Day two of the dinghy build started out with me finishing wiring the hull bottoms together on the centerline of the bottom panels. This was much easier than the wiring of the chine edges of the bottom panels and the side panels.
French Toggles
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I had purchased the old rigging from Richard and Gill’s Antigua catamaran for a low price. He purchased all new rigging and found that the French yard that built the boat used custom sized toggles on the rigging which are unobtainable, except by having them fabricated. The rigging wire from his boat is 10mm which is larger than 3/8“, the largest size on my rig. My original headstay is only 5/16“ and goes bye-bye with the old roller furler. My plan was to take a couple of Richard’s 10mm stays and use them as the new headstay and inner forestay.
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I’ve decided to rig the boat as a sloop with self tending jib on a club boom with a headstay available to rig a yankee (topsail) and add some area, flying a cutter rig. Also a 500 sq ft genoa or code zero could be added when necessary either as a large jib on the headstay or rigged flying on the spinnaker halyard.
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Richard’s stays were terminated with those odd French toggles, but my mast is set up for the stays to have eyes attached to bails with bolts or pins. To fit Richard’s toggles, the bolt holes in my bails would have to be enlarge, which is very difficult with stainless. After a discussion with Radio Bill, we stumbled onto an idea to modify Richard’s toggles and create an eye on the end of the stay. The toggle consists of a swaged eye with a large pin pressed into the eye. A heavy stainless strap wraps around the pin and has holes in it for a large pin to attach the toggle to a turnbuckle or padeye. The idea was to press out the pin in the eye and discard the rest of the toggle.
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The boatyard maintains a metal shop with a 50 ton hydraulic press, so I brought the stay over to the shop and set up the press to push the pin out. This took a while and the pressure built up. The pin moved a little, so I knew it would probably come out eventually. It seemed to be stuck as I pumped up the hydraulic pressure. Then, suddenly, P-O-W!, the pin shot out the bottom of the toggle ricocheting on the floor. Pieces of the toggle went every which way. But now we had an eye on the end of the stay. No one was killed.
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The other stay that would become the new inner forestay had an eye already, it was covered with unwanted vinyl tubing to protect sails from chafe, but the other end had a French toggle. My plan was to put up the mast with the lower ends of these stays unterminated, then cut them to length and use replaceable eyes, such as Stay-lok or Norseman fittings. So, I cut the toggle end off this stay as close to the swage fitting as possible, and then the vinyl tubing could be removed easily. Both stays were then bolted to their bails.
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The image is from Sail magazine, it is a toggle.
