Leeward Cruise for April 30!

Here’s the Leeward Cruise Info for Tuesday, straight from Admiral Chaos!

LCC Sail-For-Life Cruise
5pm Tuesday
April 30 2013

This week we are going to cruise to the Sail-For-Life Event, the grand opening of the Bistro on Blake — Thanks Kal and Jacqueline.

As always we there will be no charges for cruising or partying but all donations at the party will be for Sail-For-Life.

This should be a fun cruise suitable for BIG boats as well as tiny boats. Lots of deep water, lots of places to re-rez and a brand new club to break in.

Music by Bennythe Boozehound.

Here’s the Chart:

click to enlarge

Here’s the landmark for the start:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Orlop/81/103/22

And here’s the destination landfall:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mer%20Des%20Jackals/130/134/22

Wind:
North South at 15 – 18 knots
on a Trudeau this is /x set wind 180 10
On a bwind this is S then 15
On a Quest this is wind dir 180 and wind spd 15

No one left on the dock!

Ernestina Sails Kingdom of DeMolay

Almost exactly four years ago, I posted about RJ Kikuchiyo’s remarkable  recreation of the ship Ernestina, one of the last remaining Grand Banks fishing schooners from the late 19th century.

RJ’s version of Ernestina is rather majestic in size, and highly accurate in detail; it weighs in at over 1,500 prim. (Yikes!) 

Dispite that remarkably complex build, Jesrad Seraph was able to power Ernestina with a sail engine that worked reasonably well, as long as a skipper sailed in sims with sufficient free resources. 🙂

If you click on the figure to the right, you’ll see a rather disconcerting problem that’s fairly common in such prim-heavy vessels. With any degree of lag, the boat temporarily separates into its component parts and you get a “rubber band” effect, where pieces of the build accelerate at different rates. In the lower image to the right, you can see that the deck is traveling a full boat length ahead of the hull.

Similar problems happen with Star Bay’s Oceanis boats, and for that matter, with  old Trudeau prim schooners like the Larinda in the above picture.

Well, I’m talking about this again because all grids are not the same, and RJ recently posted a very interesting video of Ernestina sailing in Kingdom of DeMolay. There’s apparently no fragmenting on their grid, and even two schooners can sail in tandem without the typical ‘jerkiness’ that often plagues vessels on SL’s water sims.

Take a look at the ocean surface in the above video too. I’m really impressed with the realistic water textures, spray and fog effects.

Hey Leeward Cruisers? What about a ‘road trip’ some week to check out the sea conditions? It looks very sailor friendly! 🙂

Oh, and if you want your own Ernestina, RJ Kikuchiyo is offering this amazing build full-perm and free on SL Marketplace. If you pick one up, be sure to say thank you to RJ!

Sail4Life plans 2013 Second Sol Regatta

Friend? Can we talk?

Is your romance with virtual sailing losing it’s lustre?
Are the usual griddy races depressing you,
leaving your bowsprint retracted
And your mainsail flapping aimlessly?

Well sailor, never fear.
Sail4Life is here to help.
We have a therapeutic intervention planned
to get you off that barstool, out of the doldrums,
and back on the raceline where you belong.

We’ve got a regatta that’s
certified to stiffen your spar
and sharpen your sailing skills…

All you need is an overwhelming desire
To sail, to laugh, to win,
And never to give quarter.

Friend? You need SECOND SOL.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The 2013 Second Sol Regatta

I’m excited to announce Second Sol 2013, a  Sail4Life competition for  the upcoming Trudeau Patchogue II.  Second Sol is open to a maximum of sixteen racing teams of 1-4 sailors each, and the event will run from Saturday June 15 to Sunday June 23. 

Second Sol is co-sponsored by more than eight Yacht Clubs and Sailing Groups grid-wide, and it’s dedicated to the memory of Francois Jacques. Second Sol will be Fran’s regatta, and it will support Sail4Life, the charity she loved and tirelessly supported for nearly a decade.

If Fran were here, I know she’d he running this regatta instead of me. Fran was a true icon of SL Sailing; she was an avid sailor, avisonary leader, and a true, dear friend to all she met. SL’s community of virtual sailors owes much to her memory and legacy.

As the new sailing season opens, Second Sol is a chance for us all to pay tribute to Fran once again, and to do it in a way she would want: a fleet full of friends, all bellied-up at a race line in support of cancer research, waiting for the  count-down to begin. 

Regatta Format

Sailors can sign up for Second Sol by filling out a simple entry form here.

The regatta series will begin with two qualifying rounds. Round One will kick-off on June 15, and Round Two will follow on June 22nd. For each round the sixteen boat fleet will be divided into four separate “timeslot groups” of approximately 4 boats each.

Each timeslot group will race four heats on June 15 and four more on June 22; each heat will take approximately 10-12 minutes to complete. That means the qualifying races will be serious fun, but no burden; sailors just need to compete in two 90 minute events spaced a week apart, and there will be several timeslots to choose from. Different clubs will host the timeslots on their home water, and the RD’s will post the charts and details well in advance of the races.

The Qualifying Rounds will be scored using a “standard, low-point” system for the eight heats, with four discards. The large number of discards should add to the excitement. A crash – or two – wont eliminate you, and the winners of the Qualifying Rounds won’t be decided until the very last boat crosses the finish line. 🙂

The top boats will then advance to a Finals Event on June 23, followed by an awards ceremony and closing party.

Second Sol Info

Major announcements about Second Sol will be posted on Metaversesailing.com and in-world; interested sailors are invited to join the S4L 2013 REGATTA group in Second Life.

Regatta details for racers and team discussion will be posted on SLSailing.net in the Official Second Sol Discussion Thread. Sailors are welcome to post their opinions and technical questions there.

Second Sol signup

To compete in Second Sol, each race team needs to complete a simple entry form, and agree to donate $L5,000 to any RFL kiosk prior to June 15.

2012 Solstice Challenge

Sponsors are most welcome too. In fact, for last year’s Solstice Challenge a dozen sponsors rather incredibly donated over $L30,000 in support of each team that entered.  Fifteen teams hit the water in June 2012, and in just two days of fun racing those sailors raised $L700,000-800,000 for cancer research. Woots!

Each team that completes a Second Sol entry form this year will receive a free Patchogue II raceboat, hand-delivered by Jacqueline Trudeau.

Patchogue II under construction (courtesy of Orca)

The Patch II is J. Trudeau’s latest creation, and she is donating all the boats for this S4L regatta in memory of Francois. The boat’s official launch date is still several weeks away, but Second Sol racers will get the first hulls before anyone else. Trudeau promises the pre-release boat will be competition-ready and delivered to the teams at least three weeks prior to the Regatta Opening on June 15.

This year all team members will also get a goodie bag full of wondrous nautical stuff donated by many SL merchants and boatwrights supporting the Regatta.

 Second Sol 2013 promises to be one of the major, fun sailing events of 2013. It will be full of great racing, good friends, and loud regatta parties. It’s exactly what Fran Jacques loved, and the event will be a fitting tribute to her, Sail4Life, and the whole SLSailing community as well.

The countdown’s started! Seven weeks to go before the first race! (You have a team name yet?) 🙂

Danshire Yacht Club Gets a Makeover

I wanted to take a moment to give a huge shout-out to Elbag Gable and RJ Kikuchiyo for their wonderful help expanding and remodeling Danshire Yacht Club in Knaptrackicon.

Knaptrackicon

Knaptrakicon sits in the middle of Nautilus between Bingo Strait and Dire Strait, and it includes the major channel that connects the North and South waterways for the linked continents of Nautilus, Gaeta, Satori, and Corsica. That makes Knaptrackicon a rather critical gateway for many who sail there. Click on the map above, and you’ll see what I mean.

Click to enlarge: Knaptrackicon in 2009

Knaptrackicon in 2010

DYC

In an effort to keep at least a narrow channel open, in early 2010 Tig Spijkers and I moved Danshire Yacht Club down to Knaptrackicon. When several more parcels went on sale there soon after, Elbag Gable joined in and picked them up, widening the waterway for all sailors to use.

The image to the right shows the channel and builds as of May 2010. The waterway is open and easily navigable, but there are still small builds on either side of the canal that make it difficult for more than one boat to pass at a time.

Well, that’s changing pretty quickly now! A few months ago, Elbag made another wonderful gesture, buying up several of the remaining parcels in the sim and deeding them through DYC to improve sailing. It was now possible to widen the channel, re-terraform the western half of the sim, and give the DYC builds a “fashion makeover.” 🙂 

That’s where RJ Kikuchiyo stepped in and took over, completely redesigning the space to give it a consistent, classic Northern European theme. RJ is a truly legendary maestro of maritime architecture in Second Life. Although the work is not yet complete, the new additions are strikingly beautiful, detailed and true, reflecting both RJ’s artistic vision and his knowledge of maritime history. Please stop by and take a look, and ask RJ about it!

Mandelbrot exp(7)

Quite a few sailors did stop by DYC this past Tuesday; the Leeward Cruisers celebrated  Chaos Mandelbrot’s Seventh Rez Day!

click to enlarge

The cruise route for the day left DYC  and swung up through Dire Strait to Fedallah, before turning Southeast to cut back into Bingo Strait.

If you click on the map to the right, the green dots will give you a sense of  the size of the fleet. Early in the sail, boats were strung out all the way from DYC to the ends of Dire Strait! 🙂

As usual, the cruise was full of fun sailing and flat jokes, and Bennythe Boozehound’s music selection kept everyone pretty excited all evening. It was a great way to break in the new dockside dancefloor at DYC!

Sexy Sixty

Open 60 beta

In the summer of 2009 Corry Kamichi launched her  JMO-60;  it quickly became my all-time favorite Wildwind monohull. The  JMO-60 was beautiful, blazingly fast, and chock-full of nice details and racing options.

JMO-60 sailing past the WildWind Fleet in 2009

Nonetheless, four years have gone by, and that’s a long time in SLSailing. This ocean racer was clearly due for a refit. 

Corry Kamichi knew this too. As soon as she finished her Wildcat45  catamaran, Corry started a total rebuild of her old global JMO racer.

The pieces are now falling together, and the name of her new boat is the Wildwind Open 60. It’s in beta sea-trials now, and I don’t know when it will launch or the full package of features the boat will ultimately contain.

That’s Fearless Freenote in the distance coming in Second Place 🙂

What I do know is the boat is fast, fun, and stable, and it’s dressed-out with every bell and whistle any die-hard, hi-tech sail-racer could want. 🙂

I’ll give you the full scoop when the boat’s officially released, but I just couldn’t resist posting a few pictures now, to show off what’s new from Wildwind!

DYC Hosts LCC For Chaos Rez Party April 16

Kudos to Kittensusie Lander for organizing the great LCC cruise on April 14. The start sim was flooded with boats of all sorts, the fleet had great fun navigating the long voyage, and the apres-cruise party was so crowded it overloaded the sim!

That’s pretty much business-as-usual for Leeward Cruising. For a long time, the team of Kittensusie Lander and Chaos Mandelbrot have lead fun sailing events that go off like clockwork each Sunday and Tuesday. Everyone’s invited: sailors and non-sailors, racers and cruisers, newbies and old-salts, from mainland and off-islands… they all converge on some designated dock. They hope for a great time with good friends, and they are never disappointed.

On April 16, Danshire Yacht Club will host the regular Tuesday 5:00pm LCC sail. This one’s a bit special though, since it’s in honor of Chaos Mandelbrot’s Seventh Rez Day. Woots!

That’s a lot of water under the keel, as it were. In those seven years, Chaos has done much to build SLSailing, from his early days hosting Trivial Obsession for LL and racing Takos at SYC, to winning the J-Classic Regatta (with Nomad Zamani) in 2009, to his current co-leadership role in the Cruiser fleet. As if that were not enough, Chaos is this year’s Team Leader for all of Sail4Life.

So if you have the time, come sail on Tuesday to help celebrate Chaos Mandelbrots’ Seventh Rez Day.

I admit there are several other great people who have done as much to build SLSailing, and they too deserve all our praise. But… how many of them are penguins? 🙂

LCC Cruises for Chaos on April 16

The chart and details will post on Monday! 🙂

Hotlap Handicaps for April

I’ve been away quite a bit recently, so I have lots of catching up to do here over the next few weeks. 🙂 I’ll begin with a quick update and reminder about Hotlaps! 🙂

Hotlaps 2013 is a format that lets sailors build sailing skills and have fun by doing solo practice runs and sharing the scores online.

The database allows skippers to compare their lap times with others and contrast the relative performance of different boats under the same ‘trial lap’ conditions.

There are currently six different raceline locations, and each one has its own Hotlaps course: PLUMGUT, BREADNUT, KNAPTRACKICON, LINKOUS, SULU, and HEPURN.

Sailing a Hotlap takes only ten minutes, and you can do it any time you want, in any boat. Just go to one of the racelines and click on the ‘Hotlaps 2013′ poster above the green buoy; it will give you all the info you need.

Since the beginning of the year, a total of fifty-seven skippers have sailed 344 laps in thirty-eight different boat classes. Woots!

The names of all the skippers that have posted lap times is shown in the table to the right. Each name is color-coded to make it easier to find a sailor’s individual lap times on the spreadsheets for each of the hotlaps courses.

If you go to the Handicap Hotlaps 2013 spreadsheet, you’ll find individual pages for each of the hotlaps sites, as well as raw data entry lists and summary sheets.

Here’s a snapshot of the current hotlaps results for Plum Gut, showing the individual timescores separated by boat class and the calculated “average good lap time” for each boat.

click to enlarge

With repeated runs, it’s impressive that nearly all sailors come up with similar lap times for a given boat; the variance across the fleet is pretty small. (That’s good!)

The consistency of the Hotlaps data makes it possible to generate simple performance handicaps for different sailboat classes. The handicaps are ‘normalized’ with respect to an index boat (the Melges-24) to make the handicaps factors easy-to-use. The Melges-24 has a handicap of “1.00.” A boat with a handicap of 1.30 has a lap time that’s 30% faster than the M-24, while handicap of 0.70 means the boat is 30% slower.

Anyway, here’s a snapshot of the current, summary table showing the calculated handicaps for different boats on each of the six hotlaps courses. The handicap for a given boat is nearly always consistent across all six Hotlaps courses. That’s pretty good evidence that the handicaps are valid for any racecourse in SL.

click to enlarge

If you look at the above table, you’ll see a few new boats listed. 🙂 I’ve been sailing the Rene Marine 12 a lot recently, and it weighs in with a handicap of 0.69, making it roughly 30% slower than the Melges-24, but pretty close in performance to the RM Pilot, Laser One, Francois Jacques, and Trudeau One.

Kudos to Peacy Cortes, who recently added the venerable Tetra 35 to the spreadsheets. The Tetra clocked in with a respectably speedy 0.97, pretty close to the engine-related Tako 3 (1.03). Yesterday Wrye Diabolito also posted lap data for the Becky Baby Sloop II, earning that boat a 0.75 handicap similar to several other Bwind-engine vessels on the list.

There are several more additions to the list, so take a look. And if you don’t find the boat you’re looking for, or if you disagree with a handicap factor, that’s great! Just pull that boat out of your pocket and go run a few more laps on any of the six courses, and then post the results to the spreadsheet!

The more “average, good” lap times sailors submit, the more accurate the profile will be for each of the boats in the fleet.

S4L goes Out Of This World on April 14!

Next week Allie Tomsen will stage a super party to get sailors in the groove for Sail4Life 2013. Don’t miss this one; Allie promises it’s going to be:

“Out of This World”

No kidding, it’s at:
The Space Club on Deitide sim
Saturday, April 14 
From 2 to 5 p.m. SLT

What’s the Space Club?  Glad you asked!
Allie tells me it’s connected to Wicked Beauty Light Shows,
“the Home of SL’s spectacular visual effects.“

Here’s even more from
S4L Event Captain Allie:

“Sail4Life’s spectacular club event will light up the sky on Saturday, April 14, from 2 to 5 p.m. SLT. Dance among the stars–and planets– as DJ Benny the Boozehound spins cosmic tunes. Featured entertainment: The ever-popular CHIPPENSAIL DANCERS. Come alone or with someone, dress casual or for space survival.”

See you there on April 14!