I need to sell Kudu. Maybe it’s that time of year again? I really do this time though. I simply cannot keep her any more – and after all the work I’ve put in, this is most upsetting, but c’est la vie. I’ll get over it.

Here’s the latest spec – you will not, I’m absolutely certain, find a spec like this on another Corribee. Everything here is new, nothing was purchased second hand, unless it came with the boat  – which is the hull, sails, and roller reefing.

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Genoa and main in great condition

Plastimo 406 Roller furling

All lines lead aft to cockpit (spinlock jamming cleats)

Suzuki 5hp four stroke (2008)

2 recent Harken deck winches for halyards, reefing lines etc

2 new Harken sheet winches, plus custom stainless steel mounts, and self tailing adaptors.

All woodwork (teak) has been recently treated with Deks Olje

200ah AGM battery + custom battery tray.

40w Solar cells

Recent complete re-wire, plus quality splash proof switch panel (BEP marine, not these cheap nasty things).

Shore power system – quality Marinco stainless inlet.

Electric bilge pump + manual bilge pump (both brand new and fitted)

New Lewmar forehatch

New custom designed rudder (vast improvement over the original)

New outboard bracket.

New Barton main sheet track & car

Hot/cold running water system, including calorifier, water pump, and stainless sink/mixer taps from penguin engineering.

Hull fully insulated with 12mm plastazote

Interior has been totally rebuilt using marine ply and hardwood.

Origo 3000 double burner meths stove (I love these things; best stoves going.)

Custom cabin table, which doubles up as an emergency washboard.

Custom stereo system – I built it, it’s impressive.

Mast compression post replaced with custom stainless version.

She needs some finishing off, but only minor bits of touching up and tidying. I’ve been sailing on her as is.

Looking for £3,500 for a no fuss quick sale.

I think it’s fair to say that this has been the longest break between posts that I’ve done since I started this blog back in 2008. Life has just been hectic this year. Indeed, I don’t really know where all the time has gone. I feel a little confused that we’re nearly at the end of summer already.

Also, I haven’t taken a single day off work this year. Of course, I have had the odd day off over a weekend, but not one day in the working week since we started building our company, Croud, back in February. This is beginning to take its toll. Not in any drastic way, but nevertheless, I feel like I need an escape.

I tried a mini motorbike adventure a few weekends ago, but it went terribly wrong. Having ridden to the lake district on a Saturday afternoon, I couldn’t find room in any of the peaceful campsites, so ended up on a busy “family” site in Consiton. I’ve stayed there out of season and it’s lovely, so I shan’t put them in bad light by mentioning their name here. I do usually wild camp, since I have a distaste of camp sites, but trying to get a motorbike to a suitable place is somewhat difficult.

So anyway, there I was, having had a good meal and two pints of my favourite ale, Consiton Bluebird, ready to go to bed at about 2130. By 2200 I was definitely asleep. Perfect! Just what I needed; an escape, some peace, not thinking about work (much).

Then the terribly wrong bit happened. Two Geordie couples returned from the pub at ten to midnight. I shall adapt any quotes for the benefit of easily offended readers.

“poor us a drink love”
“get your own ducking drink you runt”
“who are you calling a runt, you ducking runt”
…and so on.

That was couple #1. Couple #2 were having different issues, however, since soap operas aren’t my gig, we’ll just settle for a fact; it took them until 0230 to shut up sufficiently for me to attempt to sleep again. At that point, Yorkshire lass enters the scene, and thus ensues another party in another group of tents. That was the final straw.

I’d struck camp by 0245, and was on the road again. It was a (to me) new bike, and as soon as I set off I realised that this was the first time I’d ridden it at night. I could tell, since if I’d have ridden it at night before, I’d have fixed the headlight which was doing a stirling job of illuminating the front wheel! Couldn’t turn back though, too proud, must continue in to the darkness. I could sort of see if I squinted anyway.

I navigated the B roads out of Consiton, through Ambleside, and on to Windermere. I spent the rest of the night sleeping rough, without my tent, next to the bike in a carpark by the lake.

Not quite the relaxing weekend I needed.

Enter Kudu (finally)

So, with a bank holiday coming up, I’m determined to get my peaceful weekend. I bloody well need it. Kudu isn’t really quite ready, but she’s ready enough, so I’ve booked her lift in to the water. I’ll go to work on Thursday, and when I come home she’ll be floating, and I can go for an overnight trip up the river. I cannot wait.

However, as you may have learned from this blog over the years, things rarely go as I plan.

When I last made an attempt to put Kudu in the water, she started to leak. This was a great surprise as she had never leaked before. It wasn’t drastic, but it was from the bottom, and trickles never get better, so I had her lifted out again. I identified the problem area, but never got around to fixing it… until this evening.

A bit of sanding back antifoul and some prodding with a pointy metal bit, extracted this from the offending area:

This is a plug of, I think, polyester resin. It filled a drilled hole. It has no taper, and was in no way chemically bonded to the hull, since if it was, there’s no way I could have extracted it intact. How on earth this didn’t let go while I was slamming my way up the North Sea, I’ll never know.

Here’s the hole, just on the inside of the starboard keel. I have not drilled this, I simply picked at it quite gently with a watchmakers screwdriver.

Fortunately, I’m quite the expert at sorting out holes in plastic boats, so it’s no major concern. The problem is, I’m not sure I have time to do it before Thursday.

Watch this space. I hope I get a weekend away. I can’t wait to write about it if I do.

In response to a few comments I thought I should write a post.

I am still alive, but I have things to deal with at the moment that don’t allow for writing about it on the internet, hence no posts.

Progress on the boat has been slow, but not non-existent. The forehatch and weather were proving tedious, so I gave up trying to make it look good. The problem was/is, each batch of epoxy filler is taking between 24 hours, and 48 hours to go off to the point where I can sand it. I’d fill a bit, wait two days, then sand it and find it needs more filler. After several attempts, I gave up trying to make it any smoother, and painted resin over the lot of it to seal it up.

Once painted, whenever that will be, it won’t look great, but it’ll be strong and water tight. Show boats never go to sea anyway.

I’ve started on the fore hatch properly now. The original hatch opening was sanded down to GRP with a belt sander, then the new 18mm ply template was epoxied to it. I added a bit of silica to the epoxy just to thicken it up a bit and create a better bond.

Since this picture was taken, I’ve sanded the template to shape and added some epoxy filler to blend it in with the existing deck structure. Once this has gone off, I’ll sand it again, then paint the whole lot in epoxy, sand, paint, and bolt the new hatch in. The bolts will run through the deck, so it will be a mechanical attachment too. Not that the epoxy will be weak, of course, but it doesn’t hurt to have a little more strength.

The rudder is still in progress to. The annoying bit is waiting for epoxy to cure. If it wasn’t for having to wait 24 hours each time, I’m sure it’d be done by now.

I’m not sure how the rest of the UK faired today, but in the North West we had sunshine. Warm sunshine at that! I have for sometime insisted that I am solar powered, since when the sun is out, I work much harder and feel much more motivated. Probably like everybody else, but dark, short days really do take their toll on me, especially when my “indoors” space is so confined.

So, the rudder stock has now been bolted and epoxied, which is yet another step closer to having that finished, and I’ve done a bit of interior trimming and finishing of woodwork. The cabin currently stinks of drying Deks Olje since I attempted to do it inside where it would dry better, but have had to give up and put all the wet bits outside after being fumed out.

I also sold the wood burning stove I bought late last year, today, so that’s a bit more of a comfort in the money stakes. I’ve celebrated by spending a whole £3.70 on a curry and a loaf of bread for my dinner. Yum!

I also had a huge tidy up today and got rid of a load of rubbish from under and in the boat. I hope tomorrow is a similar day, I’ll be done in no time at this rate, but alas, this is Britain, so I’m quite sure it’ll change. The barometer is already dropping. Yay!

I’ve been attempting to teach myself how to splice three strand rope this evening. Three strand is apparently the easiest of the lot, but I’m struggling a bit. I’ve created a loop, but I’m not convinced I’ve done it correctly.

My first splice was, although forming a loop, a tangled mess of confused strands. My second was better, but I think I managed to have two strands following each other. My third seems to be ok, although I’m not sure how to tidy the ends up.

I think skills like splicing are best learned from an old hand, rather than a book. Still, I shall persevere, then move on to double braid when I’ve cracked three strand… and have sourced a tubular fid.. or made one out of the scrap steel box.

In other news, the rudder is coming along nicely. It’s almost ready for the epoxy!

This rudder lark might get tedious. However, it’s comforting to keep posting these things since you lot tend to yell if I’m doing something entirely wrong

I’ve promised corribee.org that I’ll condense the whole Corribee rudder affair in to a single post for other owners once I’ve finished (and tested it).

The follow is a picture taken while I still had enough light to take it. Progress is considerably further now.

The above was done entirely with a belt sander, but I was lent a power planer with sped the job up. I should have the profile complete by tomorrow, and then I can epoxy it. Annoyingly I’m running out of epoxy, so it might be a while before I can totally finish it, but apart from the forehatch, this is the last “big job” on the list.

My finger in the air deadline of early March is still looking promising. I’ve invited two friends over for a beer at the end of Feb, which will be the shed dismantling weekend.

This has been one of those jobs that’s seemed to take forever for one reason or another.

Still, it’s all in order now, and I only need to make a few final touches to finish it totally.

The brown non-slip tape was from heskins.com, and you can just make out the drip tray for the tap in the top left of the pic.

Underneath, that’s routed out, and channel directs the water to the sink, below the step.

You’d think a rudder was quite a simple thing, wouldn’t you? Just a plank of wood that directs the flow of water one way or another and invokes a turning moment in the boat, but no. It turns out, there’s science behind these planks of wood.

Here is the rudder that was on Kudu when I bought her, and the rudder than got me up the East coast of Britain.

Please excuse my crude drawing.

My calculations so far as follows. I’m new to this, and haven’t needed to do this sort of maths since I was in school, so I’m rather rusty. Please do feel free to correct me if you see an error.

According to the formula for working out the surface area of a trapezoid ( A = 1/2(42+54) x 49 ), this entire rudder has a surface area of 2352 cm2.

The area forward of the rudder line of the rudder shaft, or the balance are, is 588cm2, or 25%.

Now, for the proposed new rudder I’m follow the advice of the good people on the YBW forums, who suggest that the balance area should be between 18 and 15%, the latter offering more feedback to the helm.

I want (I think) to keep the surface area of the rudder the same, but increase depth where possible, so a rudder shape more like the following seems reasonable.

53cm is the maximum depth of the rudder, which is limited by the draft of the keels, so based on a = h x w (the surface area calculation for a rectangle), I can work out the width, or chord. 2352 = 53 x W. Oh gosh, I feel clumsy doing this.

Ok, W is, by my reckoning, 44cm, which doesn’t give me the shape I was after really, since it’s closer to a square, and doesn’t allow for a hydrofoil profile. At least not NACA12, since the rudder would have to be incredibly thick.

What to do?

When I bought Kudu, the rudder was in a sorry state. Parts of it were softening, and the whole affair had developed a slight twist, and the design itself left much to be desired. It was simply a flat sheet of ply, circa 18mm thick.

Since I was all but clueless about such things back in 2008, I “fixed” the small rotten patches by cutting them out and filling it with wood filler, then laminating the entire rudder with polyester resin and a layer of roving. It wasn’t a neat job, but it strengthened the rudder and was, in my opinion, sea worthy.

When I actually got to sailing Kudu in fresh conditions, I found she had a lot of weather helm above 25knots (of, wind, of course). I now believe that was mainly down to sail trim, in particular the main needs a third reed adding to it, but the rudder certainly had some helping hand in the problem.

I am no hydrodynamicist, but I have done enough research in this area to know that a flat board of plywood makes for a very inefficient rudder. Introducing an angle of attack in relation to the water flow (i.e. steering the boat, or countering weather helm) creates a lot of turbulence on the downstream side of the rudder. If you increase the angle of attack sufficiently the rudder will stall, and then become a brake rather and a steering device.

The solution is to create a hydrofoil profile to the rudder, which will not only stop the rudder stalling (at least anywhere near as soon), but it will increase it’s efficiency since it works along the same principle as an aircraft wing. The hydrofoil shape causes water to flow more quickly over the downstream side of the rudder, which according to Bernoulli’s principle induces a lower pressure relative to the upstream side, and thus lift, which pulls at the rudder and makes the whole affair of turning a much more efficient one.

The trouble is, I have no idea what dimensions this new rudder should have. If I get it wrong, it will really make a mess of the way Kudu sails, and use up a lot of expensive wood and epoxy to boot.

Luckily, there’s a MK1 Corribee on brokerage at Preston at the moment, so I popped along with a big sheet of card and cut myself a template of its rudder. Alas, the Corribee on brokerage is fin keel, and it seems that the rudder is somewhat deeper than whatever should be on the bilge keel version, because it’s too deep to fit on Kudu.

The other potential issue with it, is that it’s entirely unbalanced. This might be ok on the fin keel boat, but I suspect it will be far too heavy with my bilge keels.

I’m now back to square one. I need to make a new rudder for Kudu, but I have no idea where to start.

Any help, of the non guessing sort please, would be very, very much appreciated.

NB: Here the rudder as it was in 2008 before I’d moved aboard.