Kaimusailing

The weather report was dire, gale warning, forecast for freezing temperatures, and up North it would be worse, my friends in Crisfield would get it, and Cornelia Marie, up in Baltimore would get it too. It’s such a burst of polar air, the normal temperature differences won’t exist, the cold air will hit us all with the same below freezing temperatures.
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I haven’t been posting as often as I have done in the past because my fire has gone out. Life goes in cycles and sometimes you have to hunker down, especially when the weather goes sour, and reflect on happier times when the sun was out, you were complaining about the heat, now you complain about the cold, cloudy, damp.
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It’s a good time to work below decks and organize and clean up, but for some, like me, it doesn’t happen right away.
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Plans were in the works for Pizza Night on Christmas Day in the woodshop. This will coincide with the polar blast that will take us down in the 20 degree range which hasn’t happened since the mid 80’s.
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I peeked at Thursday Night Football which is normally only visible on Amazon Prime video, but lo and behold, it is the local team, Jacksonville Jaguars, who are playing my NY Jets, and it will be carried on local TV. Might be a treat to watch, might be a tortuous loss. Who knows. The odds are pick-em.
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I watched the game and it was an awful game by the Jets Zach Wilson, quarterback in his second year. The talk is that he is through in New York. He was unable to improve his play.
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I caught a cold and spent time sneezing and coughing. Christmas Eve day was football all day. Oddly, Christmas Day was football too. No Pizza Night, I was sick and didn’t want to contaminate anyone else.
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The relentless cold didn’t help. I was burning propane cylinders in the little heater that several times I couldn’t believe was on. I won’t forget this holiday season or the preceding year. Awful.
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For some reason I was searching for a boat design I had saved, the Crowther Buccaneer 28. I was going to put the hull design through the Delftship design program. The design was by the great designer Lock Crowther and there is a lengthy series of posts on boatdesign.net of frantic boataholics like me trying to get the design files of 40 years ago. Finally I was able to download the .pdf files of the design but had to do it on the Pandemic Porch, coughing and sneezing. How crazy.
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I remembered I also had downloaded plans for an Ian Farrier design, the Command 10 years ago. I didn’t need to search for the plans, they had been saved in the same place as the Buccaneer 28, but I knew they both had been lost over the years. Then there was a reference for the Command 10 being uploaded to the same site that had the Buccaneer. I found it and downloaded the Command 10, coughing and sneezing.
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It was not helping my cold, but I was only out for a few minutes at a time to attach the wifi where it was strongest, on the porch. I could spent the rest of time down below in the warm galley and look at boat design.
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The Command 10 had Ian Farrier’s patented achievement, folding crossbeams. The Corsair brand of trimarans use this feature. The Buccaneer 28 is simply an elegant design, every part of it is engineered with every other part to produce a boat that is a ballerina. It is 28 feet long with a beam of 21 feet, trimarans are wide like that. It offers 5 berths for a racing crew, a galley, and 610 sq ft of sail driving a boat that weighs about a ton, plus payload. On deck it is about 8 feet wide but with outriggers netting and two floats, called amas, bringing it out to 21 feet wide. When the first one was built and launched it sailed out to a race which it won all on the same day.
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Perusing the boat plans gave me something to do that I enjoyed, but even that was put aside as my illness sapped my strength. I did the home covid test which was negative. Big Dave claimed to have had this cold virus beginning a couple days before I came down with it and now he was feeling better, not 100%, but better. I kept waiting for the day when symptoms would subside. The wee hours of the morning were spent shivering, sneezing, coughing, and waiting for the day to break. It was taking days for the polar outburst to gradually warm up to normal. By afternoon I could trundle around slowly and get things done. Later the North wind’s bite would come back and I would retreat into the galley where the little propane heater tried to make a difference.
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The image is part of plan sheet 7 of Lock Crowther’s Buccaneer 28. Very Pretty.