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.
21 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
01 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
23 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
15 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
11 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
06 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
26 January 2024 | St. Marys, GA
14 January 2024 | St. Marys, GA
09 January 2024 | St Marys, GA
23 December 2023 | St Marys, GA
10 December 2023 | St Marys, GA
25 November 2023 | St. Marys, GA
17 November 2023 | St. Marys, GA
17 November 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
03 November 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
26 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
17 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
11 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
04 October 2023 | Alice B. Tawes, McReady Pavilion, Crisfield, Maryland Eastern Shore
03 October 2023 | Alice B. Tawes, McReady Pavilion, Crisfield, Maryland Eastern Shore
Recent Blog Posts
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.

15 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Dinghy Day One

A Wharram Pahi 26 had been anchored in the river nearby the boatyard and was hauled out with the travel lift. I went around to look at it and talked to the owner couple. I was surprised that it had been built in Martinique in 1988. The boat is more than 30 years old.

11 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Redux

The inflatable (deflatable) dinghy I had bought was deteriorating. It had bottom seams separating. It is a West Marine branded dinghy made out of PVC. HH66 is the adhesive to reattach the seams. A friend had a similar problem and bought the same adhesive. I was waiting to hear from him how it worked [...]

06 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

The Clincher

We decided to go to Amelia Island for the day, probably to the beach. Our plan to cycle around on the Raleigh 20’s seemed like a bad idea, Bleu can’t keep up with a bicycle for very long and when he quits he quits. So we would walk, where?, Fort Clinch State Park. She has a forever pass for Florida [...]

i60e Action Cam

05 February 2018 | st marys, ga
Capn Andy/chilly winter
With my main distraction, the quadcopter drone, out of the way with a burnt battery charger, I had no excuse to malinger. I had an unpleasant task that I was avoiding, sponging out the bilges that were somehow collecting rainwater. It is hard for me to contort myself down under the galley table, under the dinette, where the bilge’s lowest point is in the starboard hull. The fluids that make it down to there look offensive, so I used the same disposable gloves I use for painting to sponge out the water. I got about 3 gallons out, doesn’t sound like much, but each drop had to be squeezed out of the sponge and it took a while.
.
In the port hull there was an accumulation, not as bad, and soon both hulls were dry, more or less. It seems that water takes a while to drip drip drip back to the lowest point. I left the cabins open to help dry them out.
.
The micro SD card for the action camera came in, so I loaded it into the camera and formatted it. I shot stills and some video. One glaring (literally) problem was lens flare. Also high white levels are too high. Digital video is kind of like paint by numbers, you can’t go higher than 100 percent white, there is no number for it. As a result the software has to do something to compensate. TV cameras play around with the values of the bright areas of the image. They start to reduce or compress the values as they approach 100 per cent. This action cam doesn’t do that at all, it just gets blasted with sunlight, even reflected sunlight, and also when light gets into the wide angle lens it spreads around and contaminates the rest of the image. Sailboat masts that are painted white look like flat white glowing masts, even though to our eyes there is some shading of them. A white boat with plank seams on it comes out as a white boat with no plank seams. Plus, this camera does not appear to have any attachment points for filters to help us with this explosion of light.
.
It looks like this problem is caused by the wide angle lens and the relatively small sensor used to render the image. Longer lenses provide less opportunity for light to come in at an angle and bounce around in front of the sensor. Stills shot with this camera show the fish eye distortion around the edges that result from using such a wide angle lens. However, this lens was chosen for its ability to gather a huge field of view. It is not a precision lens to capture a specific frame of video, it is a shotgun of a lens to capture as much as possible, like a snowy mountain full of snowboarders. The fact that it did well in side by side tests with the Go Pro 3, 4, and 5 tell me that this is what you get when you get an action cam. Wide field of view and nuclear shots when the sun is forward of the lens.
.
Shots that did not have this extreme range of contrast looked fine, detailed, coming out of a little camera. I wanted some video software to attack the extreme contrast problem, but so far I have a simple video editor that won’t do any correction. I will continue to look for something.
.
I did find out that the settings for the still photos also applied to the video, color temperature, ISO, exposure, but they were inadequate to correct the lens flare, which is a physical thing happening before the light hits the sensor. Another problem is the camera weighs nothing, so although it won’t make your helmet droop to one side when you have it mounted to one side, it has no mass to dampen the jitter that action imparts to it. Some have described this as “jello”, the image jiggles as the camera jitters. Maybe this is why the Canon EOS feels like a brick, the mass keeps any jitter, even from the SLR shutter and mirror, from disturbing the shot. If you mount the action cam to a solid object it will still reflect any vibration. Normally the mounts have rubber donuts to smooth out the vibration, but these allow camera movement and at some point you have a harmonic oscillation, at some frequency of vibration the image will turn to jello.
.
On the other hand it is amazing to have 4K video coming out of this little plastic camera, and if the photographer can manage the image contrast, the videos and stills look fine, detailed, accurate. I guess there is a certain license to introduce some lens flare from the sun, some jitter, some “jello”, the same way ENG video was allowed to depart from the strict rules of videography, it imparts a feeling of rawness, action, real life, adventure. I was looking at some edited videos shot with action cams of an Aussie sailboat, the Superfoiler, or something like that, an awful boat to sail, but exhilarating, and the shots were real time edited. They had probably an action cam on each sailors helmet as well as several mounted on the boat. When you’ve been watching stuff like this you know when the lee bow goes under something is going to happen. The sailors are on trapeze’s and they are hit with a sudden deceleration and they swing forward and around, the boat begins to pitch forward, water is splashing everywhere, some land in it, some are bravely trying to keep their balance, but no, they too go under. Not sailing, mayhem. There was no lens flare in those lighting conditions.
.
So this sort of thing appeals to me in a basic way. Wish I would have had it long ago.
.
The image is from Superfoiler.com / Andrea Francolini - First and only race completed for the inaugural series of the Super Foiler Grand Prix. Euroflex with Outterridge, Ashby, & Jensen finished first.
Comments

About & Links

SailBlogs Groups