North Sails: Evolving Sailcraft for a ‘fusion schooner’

North Sails Atlantic has been building schooner sails for over 25 years, for boats including Bluenose II and Highlander (formerly the Mayflower, built in 1922). The sails for Schooner Maggie B use laminate sailcloth and a unique sailplan to achieve a success in sailing dynamics for schooners. Frank Blair challenged some of North Sails’ concerns on the overlapping foresail, which resulted in North Sails’ creating a unique sail that produces excellent windward performance.

The boat’s designer Nigel Irens stated about the sails “I’m very conscious that if Maggie B seems to go well, then a good slice of that is down to you guys …Those sails are just fine!!”

The sails for a schooner rig have evolved along with the sailmakers’ craft. Traditionally a schooner would have upper and lower sails set on two masts and forward stays. This was done to improve sail handling and performance in various wind speeds. The lighter upper sails were used in fair and light winds, the lower or working sails for strong winds.

By contrast, the three working sails on Maggie B have a radial panel layout, meaning that pie-shaped panels of cloth are cut by laser plotter to specific shapes and aligned in the sail to conform to the load in each section. The four sided mainsail and foresail have over 40 panels each.

Maggie’s two masts are made with carbon fiber so the sailplan concept for Maggie B was to combine the upper/lower sail area to produce three sails, large enough to power the vessel in light breezes, but with reefs that would effectively reduce the sail area for stronger winds.

In keeping with the idea of a “fusion schooner” the selection of sailcloth was important. The sails are made with a Spectra Gatorback™, a laminate, made by North Sails Cloth division. The boat travels to tropical locations and can be moored for extended periods. Damp, hot climates cause mildew to occur in sail fabrics.

Spectra Gatorback™ has the best ultra violet resistance and strength, is a proven sailcloth laminate for this style of cruising vessel, and has a superior strength-to-weight ratio.

North Sails uses an additional protection coating called SailKote plus™. This has been very effective in stopping the growth of mildew in sails. It is a dry lubricant that reduces the skin friction and repels moisture. It is used on race boats to reduce sail chafe with running and standing rigging. It is proven to reduce surface friction. A biocide is added to inhibit fungus growth.

Location: 4° 27.5 S, 55° 27.5 E
Saturday 12:00, 12.16.2006

This will be the last Schooner Maggie B update until the first week of the New Year, when we will reconvene here in Port Victoria, Mahe, the Seychelles. The Maggie B is well settled at a mooring in the inner harbor. I dove on the mooring this morning (yes, yuck) to be sure of it. The mooring is about 100 pounds of granite plus some unknown piece of machinery about the size of 1/2 of a Volkswagen Beetle. I added a few ropes and a shackle and we should be fine. I have paid up my Seychelles Yacht Club dues, hired a local boatman to look after her (for a new pair of Oakleys from the US) plus made friends with nearby Aussie yachties.

I have posted a few new photos from the market here, that should be interesting for those of you that just know Whole Foods.

One insight that I’ve had being here for the run-up to Christmas, is that a “traditional” Christmas, with Santa Claus and pine trees and wreaths is far from the weather at that moment in Palestine when the Christian era started. Palm trees like here make much more sense.

Our favorite menu experience here in the Seychelles was last Sunday at La Digue at a Restaurant called Chez Marcel. The specials were listed on a big board. 1) Squid Curry; 2) Squid in garlic and butter; 3) Deep fried Squid; 4) Squid pasta. After these specials was CALAMARI! in excited capitals. It reminded us of the great “Spam, spam, spam” Monty Python sketch.

Finally, for you birders out there wanting to learn local names in other languages, you should be thrilled to know that in Seychelles Creole, the beautiful Long-tailed Tropic bird is called “Paille en cul” or “Straw up the butt.” Somehow a bit lacking in romance.

We’ll be back live about January 8, 2007. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Crew of the Schooner Maggie B.

All is well.

Location: 4° 37.5 S, 55° 27.5 E
Wednesday 12:00, 12.13.2006

The Schooner Maggie B is safely moored in the inner harbor in Port Victoria at 4° 37.5 S 55° 27.5 E. We have borrowed a mooring from a local sport fisherman. It has a good reputation, but I am going to dive on it (at high tide when the wind is blowing away from the fish factory) to make sure of the ropes and the base. We have also hired a local guy to check the boat daily and run the generator from time to time. The winds have finally shifted to the NW and this should be a very protected spot for the three weeks we’ll be away over Christmas and New Years.

La Digue is now our favorite island.

It has a nice protected inner harbor (see the web site for some photos). We were wedged in the first night with seven white plastic catamarans on our port and four on our starboard. Our anchor was out in the middle of the harbor and our stern line tied to a tree. On La Digue one rents bicycles to go anywhere. The beaches are just stunning. Fun surf and great snorkeling. Saturday night at the one bar/disco went on until the wee hours of the morning.

In with a vengence!

On Sunday all the rented catamarans disappeared for whatever was the next stop in the one or two week tours. It was just as well because on Monday morning the NW’erly came in with a vengeance and we dragged all across the harbor. Off at 5 AM with a “Maggie B — All Hands!” routing out the sleepers. At first the dragging was a mystery for we had about seven to one out with 1/2 inch chain on a big plow, but the anchor came up without even a grain of sand on it and we found later that there is only light silt on the bottom that any anchor would just coast through.

Planning and looking ahead

Back in Port Victoria we are going through supplies, planning for what we will need on the trip to Australia this January and doing some of the endless boat tasks such as chipping the hidden rust off the windlass and putting hard plastic protection up to give the fore gaff saddle something to chew on other than our expensive fore mast.

We are looking forward to having Owen Baker join us (Frank, Hannah and Bori) in January for the trip to Australia and beyond. His photo and sailing resume should be up on the web site soon. One of his many accomplishments was designing and building a mechanical amphibious vehicle that looked like an elephant. We just have to get photos.

A sad loss

We all were saddened to hear of the loss of Laura Gainey, a student on board the Picton Castle, a sail training ship home ported in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where the Maggie B was built and launched. It hit Hannah particularly hard as she had also been a student on the Picton Castle. Laura was washed over during a gale near the Gulf Stream when the boat was five days out of Lunenburg for Grenada. She was lost in waters that we passed through last March on our way to Antigua from Lunenburg.

Friends and family that might hear of Laura’s death and worry for our safety should know that while we accept the traditional dangers of the sea, we have a strict rule that our integrated harnesses and lifejackets with strobes are worn at all times on deck at night or in strong weather, and we must be tied into to the ship’s jack lines when out of the cockpit. Laura had neither harness nor lifejacket on when she was washed over, unnoticed, at night.

For Laura, by Emily Dickinson:

Exaltation in the going
Of an inland soul to sea
Past the houses, past the headlands,
Into deep Eternity!

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from the land?

All is well.

Location: 4° 20.85 S, 55° 49.6 E
Saturday, 12.09.2006

The Schooner Maggie B will hopefully be docked at La Passe, La Digue Island, the Seychelles for Saturday night, at coordinates 4° 20.8S 55° 49.6E. We are about five miles away as I write this. The plan is to tie the bow to the mole and the stern to a tree ashore. We’ll see. We have a Seychelles Island yacht guide translated very imperfectly from the French, so we never quite know what to expect.

It is Finished

One of our least favorite new Seychellois shopping expressions is “It is Finished.” It means Out-of-stock. But butter? “Yogurt, it is finished.” Heard way too often. Then, when something comes in, there is a feeding frenzy.

It’s no picnic!

Those who have been following us may think that much of our life is like last Sunday’s delightful picnic. They should have seen us working in the boat yard this last week. The Maggie B was hauled last Wednesday, to check the shaft and prop, and to clean the bottom and repaint with anti-fouling. The prop and shaft check went fine and minor adjustments seem to have fixed everything. The bottom was something else.

We were covered with barnacles, white hard wormy formations, and green weed. A real mess. Paint scrapers peeled off most stuff, and that was followed with a high-pressure wash, followed by scrapers, followed by sanding. End to end and every inch. She really seemed like a HUGE boat. Working overhead meant barnacles in the hair and every nook and cranny of clothing, working low meant being in the mud and slime of the shipway, bumping into metal scraps or huge timbers. Staging was rickety (I fell six feet when a board broke, happily not breaking anything else), ladders were chancy and the yard was incredibly filthy. I suggested to the owner that he perhaps was waiting for the next tsunami to clear it out like the Augean Stables. We were staying in a little old-fashioned 2 room hotel down the beach a ways, but we were too tired at the end of the day to do anything other than flop in the water and then shower, have dinner and sleep 12 hours, with Iboprofin for tired muscles. Even noisy C.

Clean and slippery!

But now we are all clean and the Maggie B is slippery again and ready for a fast trip to Australia. We are just arriving at La Digue is a little rain storm, that has a tiny rainbow wrapped tight around the boat. Tonight should be fun as Bori has worked out a rendezvous with the “rally” of young French from the Embassy, who are over here for the weekend.

All is well.

The Ballad of Bouillabaisse

A street there is in Paris famous,
For which no rhyme our language yields,
Rue Neuve des Petit Champs its name is —
The New Street of the Little Fields.
And here’s an inn, not rich and splendid
But still in comfortable ease;
The which I oft in youth attended,
To eat a bowl of Bouillabaisse.

This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is —
A sort of soup, or broth, or brew,
Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes,
That Greenwich never could outdo:
Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron,
Soles, onion, garlic, roach, and dace:
All these you eat at Terre’s tavern
in that one dish of Bouillabaisse.

Indeed a rich a savory stew ’tis;
And true philosophers, methinks,
Who love all sorts of natural beauties,
Should love good victuals and good drinks.
And Cordelier or Benedictine
Might gladly, sure, his lot embrace,
Nor find a fast day too afflicting,
Which served him up a Bouillabaisse.

Location: 4° 37.5 S, 55 ° 27.5 E
Sunday 12:00, 12.03.2006

The Schooner Maggie B is back safely moored in the inner harbor in Port Victoria, Mahe, the Seychelles at 4° 37.5 S 55° 27.5 E. We are sitting on a mooring which apparently belongs to a big fish game boat, which usually sits in at the commercial dock. How long we can use it is up for question. Possibly a few hundred Seychelles Rupees will solve the question.

One piece of exciting news is apparently there is an article in this month’s “Cruising World.” I haven’t seen it, but then there aren’t any magazines less than three months old in the Seychelles. Will advise as I hear more.

We have spent the last few days on the relatively unfun but necessary process of going through all our stores. Food and boat supplies. How much rice, how many water filters. All to get better prepared for the long leg to Australia.

Go get’em Nigel!

We are blessed with having people supporting the Maggie B all over the planet. This week Nigel Irens is fighting for us. Literally. He is in Paris at the Paris Boat Show, and certainly is cutting a heroic figure with his Royal Appointment and marvelously successful designs. But he is also taking our fight with Lewmar and Profurl to their home court. He has promised to burn his program (programs?) outside their booths in protest for the terrible designs that have caused the failure of four Lewmar blocks on the Maggie B and the endless spitting out of grub screws from the Profurl. I’m sure that both organizations will apologize profusely and show off more expensive new designs which will solve all our problems for only a few dozen extra thousand dollars, payable in advance. You go get ‘em, Nigel!

There are two fascinating Seychelloise specialities. Uniforms and horribly dangerous roads. Uniforms are universal. Every school, not just the Catholic ones, has their uniform and as the schools let out, different patterns sweep by, probably like the Montagues and Capulets in Shakespeare’s play. But it doesn’t stop there. Every woman clerk, assistant or secretary dresses rigorously like her colleagues. All rather like coveys of airline stewardesses. The same is true of the men in boat yards or automobile parts stores. It is all a great leveler, but seeing a cop or soldier is unremarkable because the hotel doorman has a more precise uniform than a Colonel of the Marines.

The roads are worth a whole letter by themselves. The essential scary part is not that they are in bad shape, quite the opposite — most all are well paved and clear. The scary part is that because it rains hard from time to time, they have deep ditches at the edges. Like four feet deep in many places, a foot or two wide, and right at the edge of the road. Besides making for a perfect way to break an axle immediately, it also causes dogs, cats and people to walk in the relatively narrow paved part due to lack of sidewalks. At the same time, whoever purchased the busses somehow thought that they were in Texas and got the Whopper Size. The bus drivers appear to have gotten exemption from Parliament from following the lanes. And many of the streets were designed with whip lash curves, in the middle of which one finds a car or bus stopped to chat with a pal. Did I mention that as a benefit of English Colonialism, that they drive on the left?

Today, Sunday, was a wonderful day. Our morning was uplifted by a 500 person Christian Evangelical meeting in the park 100 feet from the boat. The service started at 8 AM and really was going full blast when we left the anchorage at 11 AM. Bori, our Recruiting Officer, had made pals with some of the young people in the French Embassy and the Alliance Franciase. We put on a Sunday Picnic and gathered a crew. We were 14, which is perhaps a new record for the Maggie B.

We motored (no wind at all) about two hours around the North End of the Mahe, to a wild cove called Anse Jasmin. We all swam ashore to a wonderful wild beach where a Schellois pal climbed a coconut tree and threw down a dozen coconuts, which we then drank and ate. Then more swimming and a lovely “catch as catch can” salad lunch and some sunning and more swimming and then motoring back as the moon came up. It was a lovely day. The Maggie B may be the perfect Blue Water fast cruiser, but today she was an excellent picnic boat.

We are preparing to get hauled on Thursday.

All is well.