Fire Island Light Preview

If you love lighthouses (and who doesn’t), you may want to stop in Stoogle for a preview look at RJ Kikuchiyo‘s recreation of New York’s Fire Island light.

The lighthouse was first commissioned by Congress in the mid-19th century, and for several generations it safely guided merchant vessels into New York Harbor. Fire Island light was often the first glimpse of this new country for the throngs of immigrants that came to America over a century ago.

In 1974 the venerable beacon was decommissioned and it fell into disrepair due to the limited resources of the National Park Service. It was at risk of being demolished.

Many community members were determined to prevent that, however. They appreciated the importance of Fire Island Light to America’s maritime history, and they understood it’s iconic symbolism. Thirty years ago they formed the Fire Island Lighthouse Preservation Society, raising over 1.3 million dollars for the restoration and preservation of the lighthouse. In 1984 Fire Island Light was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the FILPS continues to manage it.

RJ Kikuchiyo knows Fire Island Light well in real life, so it’s no surprise that he put his masterful building skills to use re-creating the historic build for Second Life. However, from the beginning of the project RJ’s intention was to make FILH a special build, an inspirational centerpiece for the Sail4Life installation on Linden Lab’s Relay For Life weekend.

Well, since last September Fire Island Light has been quietly sitting over in DYC’s Stoogle annex, waiting for it’s RFL debut in July. As you can see from the video above, this is a highly detailed, museum-quality built that stands as a fitting tribute to both FILH and the litany of other coastal beacons that shone through fog and darkness to guide mariners home.

As part of the ongoing DYC renovations, we recently opened up the southern channel into Stoogle (the red arrow in the above map). So if you want to stop by for a preview inspection of Fire Island Lighthouse, you’re welcome to sail over and tie up at the lighthouse dock. Auto return for visitors is set at 30 minutes there, so you’ll have plenty of time to explore RJ’s build.

Be sure to visit in the next several weeks, though; you might not get another chance. 🙂 RJ’s decided that his Fire Island Lighthouse will be unique. There will only be one Fire Island Light in Second Life, and it will go to the highest bidder at the Sail4Life charity auction in July.

The sailor that has the heart to dig deep enough to make a winning bid on that day is going to take home far more than just a beautiful build. They’ll be graced with an enduring monument to the spirit of community that binds sailors for all time.

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!

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? 🙂

Hotlaps tops 300

Woots! Kudos to LucyInThe Sky Afarensis; yesterday she posted lap #300 to the Hotlaps spreadsheet! She hit that tercentennial ceiling in real style too, by adding a new boat class to the list: The ACA Racer Tiny. 🙂

On the six Hotlaps courses to date, a total of 54 skippers have sailed 305 laps in 33 different boats. Wowzers! Here’s the current list of skippers who did all that sailing, colored-coded for the spreadsheets:

And next, here’s a copy of the current, active spreadsheet for the Plum Gut course. Individual lap scores are arranged in columns based on boat class, and the colors for each entry identify the skipper. As highlited below, there’s a set of tabs at the very bottom of the sheet that allow a user to switch to different pages in order to view individual race line results, raw entry data, or summary sheets.

Sailors can even edit the various spreadsheet pages. If you make a mistake filling out the entry form, you can go to the Lap data page, find the error there and correct it. If any Hotlaps user wants to rearrange or sort the data for a particular page, please feel free to open a new tab on the spreadsheet to do that. You can then copy the data you’re interested in to your new page for editing, and leave the original intact.

click to enlarge

Of course Plum Gut is just one of the six Hotlaps venues. There are five more.

This collected lap data has many potential uses. Individual sailors can follow their own laptimes to see if different sailing strategies make a measurable difference in their scores, or they can compare how their times match up against other sailors in the fleet.

The hotlaps data also makes it possible to “performance handicap” the many, popular boats in SLSailing. As I’ve discussed before, that’s done by comparing the average lap time for a given boat on a particular racecourse against the same information for a standard, “index” boat: The Melges-24. After nearly two months of data collection, the Melges is looking like a great index, for a dozen reasons I wont bore you about here. If you own a Quest Melges-24, you likely know the reasons already. 🙂

Anyway, here’s the handicap table as of yesterday. Below, the table to the left shows the handicap factors for boats on each of the six hotlaps courses (where the data is available). The table on the right shows the average handicap score for each of those boats, with the associated standard deviation for the small sample of values in each case.

So, how useful and reliable are the handicap factors?

Well, that’s what were still trying to figure out, but let me briefly talk about three points that came up in last Thursday’s Midnight Madness races.

Midnight Madness is a fun, multiclass race every Thursday at 9:00 pm, cosponsored by Danshire and Eden Bay Yacht Clubs. At the moment I’m using  Madness results to calculate potential handicap ‘adjustments’ and comparing them to the uncorrected, “normal” finish times.

As usual, a small but really great group of skippers showed up this past Thursday to race the Hepurn Hotlaps course. Here’s the result for race one.

Race One Lap Times: 

 Chaos Mandelbrot   M24 crewed — Start: 00:05  —  Last lap: 00:10:32

 Kris Hollysharp   M24 — Start: 00:01  —  Last lap: 00:11:18

 SteveLL Resident   Q2M — Start: 00:11  —  Last lap: 00:15:01

 qwerty Qork   IDQQ99 — Start: 00:02  —  Last lap: not finished

 Glorfindel Arrow   IDA81  — Start: 00:06  —  Last lap: not finished

Race One Results:

 1: Chaos Mandelbrot  (M24 crewed, 1.10) — 10:37 — corrected 11:40

 2: Kris Hollysharp   (M24, 1.00) — 11:19 — corrected 11:19

 3: SteveLL Resident   (2M, 0.76) — 15:12 — corrected 11:36

 4: qwerty Qork   IDQQ99 — not Finished

 5: Glorfindel Arrow   (M24, 1.0)  — not Finished

Unfortunately, qwerty and Glorf both crashed. Chaos and Kris both sailed Melges-24, and SteveLL sailed a Q2M.

Kris was aggressive, extremely adept, and crossed the start line 4 seconds ahead of Chaos and Jane. However, a crewed Melges-24 can sail faster than one with a solo skipper, so Chaos was able to pull even with Kris and eventually pass her about midway through the course. Chaos went on to finish first, with an 18 sec. lead over Kris.

Looking at the prior handicaps however, a crew member gives an M-24 a roughly 10% performance advantage. Chaos’ corrected lap time would then be 11:40, a full minute behind Kris!

A similar issue came up with SteveLL. He was sailing a Quest 2-M, which is a much slower boat than the Melges-24. Steve cross the finish line a full 4 min. behind the lead boats, and there’s really no chance he could win a race without handicap adjustments.

However, factoring in the current handicap for the Q2-M (0.76) Steve’s corrected finish time becomes 11:36, a score that’s directly competitive with the two Melges in the race. In fact, with corrected scores Steve nosed out Chaos for Second Place!

For the Second Race, a wondrous thing happened. There was a bright light from above, the heavens opened up, and Pensive Mission appeared at the race line, holding on to his Tako. Although Pensive only makes rare appearances in regattas these days, he was one of Mowry Bay’s original Mow-Mows, and his skill with a Tako is part of SL’s nautical lore.

Well, in the Second Race we got a chance to see that legendary Boatman of the Mowry Apocalypse ride his Tako around Hepurn’s waters once more.

The Tako is quite a speedy boat and it’s powered by a real wind engine that makes beating to windward less of a hassle than most new boats. Thanks to Slanty Uriza, we also have a handicap from the Sulu Hotlaps Course. It’s 1.03, a close match for the Melges-24, so it made sense that Pensive was able to keep in close lockstep with both Chaos and Kris as the boats zoomed around the course.

A pleasant surprise occurred at the end of the race however, as I tallied up the scores. Since the Tako uses a very different wind engine, I wasn’t sure how “portable” the handicap factors might be within a mixed fleet or across different race courses. Well, to get a partial answer to that question I used Pensive’s single lap score to calculate a new Tako handicap for the Hepurn line.

Pensive’s Hepurn handicap worked out to 1.03, an exact match for Slanty’s Tako handicap using the Sulu line!! 🙂

 It looks like the handicap factors are proving to be both valid and consistent. That’s a nice thing. 🙂

Race Two Lap Times:

 Chaos Mandelbrot   IDCM91 — Start: 0:03  —  Last lap: 10:05

 Kris Hollysharp   IDKH47 — Start: 0:03  —  Last lap: 10:36

 Pensive Mission   ID25  — Start: 0:02  —  Last lap: 10:47

 Glorfindel Arrow   IDA81  — Start: 0:02  —  Last lap: 13:22

 SteveLL Resident   IDJB25 — Start: 0:05  —  Last lap: 14:40

Race Two Results:
1: Chaos Mandelbrot  M24 crew, 1.10 — 10:08 — Corrected 11:09
2: Kris Hollysharp   M24, 1.0 — 10:39 — Corrected 10:39
3: Pensive Mission   Tako 3.3 (1.03)  — 10:49 — Corrected 11:08
4: Glorfindel Arrow   M24, 1.0  — 13:24 — Corrected 13:24
5: SteveLL Resident   IDJB25 — 00:14:45 — Corrected 11:14

Midnight Madness February 21

On Thursday February 21 we’ll hold the second installment of  the Midnight Madness multiclass races. You can read about it here and see last week’s results here!

This week’s race will take off from the Hepurn raceline in Mowry Bay at 9:00pm; here’s the chart:

The wind is 15kt, 225deg (SW), with no variance.

Come join us, and sail any boat you want!!
We’ll use Handicaps again to figure out if anybody won. 🙂
You just bring the boat…

See you in Hepurn at 9:00pm Thursday!

[This event is cosponsored by Eden Bay and Danshire Yacht Clubs, as well as the Mare Sail Center and Mowry Bay Boat Club.]

Barney Dies, Pope Resigns, Midnight Madness Returns

Last week George W. Bush’s office announced that Barney, the USA ex-President’s Scottish Terrier, had passed away.
Before the full impact of this sad news could sink in, Pope Benedict XVI abruptly announced his own resignation.

OK, I know many of you thought these events were somehow linked, and their temporal correlation could not  be attributed to mere happenstance.

Be that as it may, I think we owe a tribute to both Barney and Benedict, and so I’m dedicating tonight’s Midnight Madness sail to this B&B Dynamic Duo.

We’ll meet at 9:00PM at the Breadnut Line in North Sea, and do a couple rounds of the Hotlaps Course. The wind is 15kt and 225deg, with no variance.

As you sail the route, don’t forget when you tack on a dog-leg of the course, be sure to give a Woot for Barney!

See you on the water for Thursday Midnight Madness, courtesy of Danshire Yacht Club and Eden Yacht and Boat Club. 🙂

Hotlaps 2013 Progress

The Hotlaps 2013 lap entries are growing; in the first nine days, seventeen skippers logged a total of eighty-six laps that are split across the four courses.

The skipper’s names are listed in the box to the right, and the colors match the time-trial entries that are included on the summary spreadsheets for each Hotlaps course.

Plum Gut has the largest number of laps so far, with fifty-three lap times logged for fifteen different boats (see below).

The Melges-24 is the tentative “Index Boat” for handicap comparisons, so it deserves special comment here. The average Plum Gut lap time is 8:46, based on seven runs by Armano, Yala74, and Kris. Although the number of entries is still small, the scores are consistent and tightly grouped with a standard deviation of only 10 sec. We’ll see if this changes as more laps get added, but so far the M-24 Index looks valid and reliable. Let’s see if that holds up as sailors add more data points.

Please click to enlarge

Below is a quick ‘Summary Table’ of Handicaps for the fifteen boat classes entered so far.

Knaptrackicon still needs Index laps, so it’s handicap factors are blank at the moment. However, where the data is available, the scores of the other three lines are pretty consistent. The WildWind boats are by far the speediest, with Wildcat45, RCJ-44, and TR30 all earning handicaps of 1.10-1.15 (meaning they are 10-15% faster than M-24). In contrast, the newly reworked JG-44 looks like it’s coming in with lap times that are roughly 15% slower than M-24 on all three courses. The Mesh Shop boats and the ACA33v3 look like they fall in the middle, while the Trudeau fleet, Caf Binder’s Jangars, Manul Rotaru’s BeachTri, and Balduin Aabye’s Bolero all come in at the back of the pack with scores 30 – 40% slower than the Melges.

Of course, a slow boat is not a “bad” boat. Several builders argue that slower boats are more realistic in SL waters, but that’s a discussion for another time. 🙂 The point here is that the handicaps are generating meaningful data, and we’re on track to fill in many of the blank spaces on the above form. 🙂

Yesterday I sent out posters to advertise Hotlaps. They are full mod/copy, so please stick one up in an appropriate place (like your local gas station bathroom). The notecard embedded in the poster gives details about Hotlaps 2013, including landmarks, charts, and links. The notecard is networked, so the Info will automatically update as we add more Hotlaps locations, and as Hay Ah adds new lap features to her racelines.

You got ten minutes?
You could sail a Hotlap! 🙂

HANDICAP HOTLAPS 2013

Handicap Hotlaps Kickoff

Handicap Hotlaps lets sailors practice their skill on a short, standard course and then post the results online. The previous article includes a long list of links to a variety of old discussions about Hotlaps and the related boat handicap scores, but reading all that stuff  can get very boring, very fast.

But hey, do you have a few minutes? Forget about reading that stuff… Let’s go sail some Hotlaps instead! 🙂

Handicap Hotlaps 2013

All you need to do is go to a raceline that’s set up with a Hotlaps course and rez your boat. The first three Hotlaps racelines are located in Plum Gut, Knaptackicon, and soon Breadnut (as soon as Hawk puts up the posters).  Over the next few days I’ll add several more.

Here’s how it works.

When you go to a Hotlaps line you’ll see two posters. Click on the top one that says “Hotlaps 2013.” It gives you a notecard with all the details for that line.

That note will include the current Hotlaps chart for the line, and it will also tell you how to set the wind. (Here’s a tip: the Handicap wind is always 15 knots with no variance, but the wind angle depends on the orientation of each raceline and course. In Plum Gut the angle is 0.0°, in Knaptrackicon it’s 180°, and in Breadnut it’s 225°. Check the notecard to be sure which wind is correct at a particular race line.)

Breadnut Hotlaps Course

Once you have the chart and the wind, you can sail a solo lap whenever its convenient for you by following the race course instructions. Once you complete the course, you’ll end up with a lap time (lap time is Finish Time minus Start Time). If you think that result is an ‘average, good‘ time for you in that boat class, then please take an extra moment to post your score online.

You can do that very easily by clicking the poster above the green buoy, the one that says “Enter your lap time here“. That will give you a web link to a data entry form.

Knaptrackicon DYC Hotlaps Course

Just add your skipper name, your boat class and your net lap time, and you’re done. Then you can go back and run the course again, or switch to a different boat!
Actually, you can run as many Hotlaps in as many different boats as you want; the more the better. Every time you submit a data lap time it helps define the relative performance of that boat class.

Please remember one thing: don’t just submit your best score on a race course; Hotlaps wants all your average, good scores. We are trying to determine the “average, good” lap time of an “average, good” skipper sailing many different boats!

Mo’ Hotlaps

Kudos to Hawk and Kentrock for all the help planning and setting up the first three Hotlaps courses. Hay Ah’s also promised to look at ways to improve the Hotlaps interface, so online scores will be better integrated with the raceline. 🙂

I’ll add Hotlaps to two more racelines this week, and Liv Leigh will soon add a Hotlaps course at Tradewinds. If you have a raceline, you can add your own Hotlaps course too. Just let me know so I can give you the info and add that site to the list!

Well, that’s enough reading; let’s sail!

Sailing Sansara

   

Sansara is Second Life’s original continent. The name for this huge region refers to a Sanskrit term for a Hindu concept of continuous motion in the physical world, and according to Linden Lab, the name Sansara was assigned to the original landmass  “in order to resolve… ambiguity.” 

(Cough; maybe that’s a stretch… When was the last time you pulled out a Sanskrit dictionary and an old copy of the Bhagavad Gita to ‘resolve ambiguity?‘ 🙂 ).

Anyway, don’t let that name stop you; Sansara has a venerable history that’s closely entwined with the development of SL Sailing, and DPW is busy adding new sailing features!

SANSARA AND HETEROCERA   

Sansara is honeycombed with interconnected waterways, and it’s linked by a one-sim corridor to the smaller, Northern land mass called Heterocera Atoll. 

If you click on the chart below, you’ll get a 2048×2613 pixel map of the Sansara waters that includes the sim names for much of the area; it reveals the large number of navigable waterways that adorn the continent.  Actually, you can sail for many hours exploring the wide open lakes and seas linked by narrow channels that extend across Sansara, and if you want even more, you can continue cruising Northward and enter the inner seas of Heterocera!

 Perhaps its no surprise, there are many sailing groups located in Sansara; here’s a chart template below showing the locations of a few of the clubs, groups, and communities around Adriatic Sea. It also shows the locations of race buoys, Linden racelines (in red) and private racelines (in pink).

 I wanted to talk about Sansara here because the Linden Department of Public Works is currently busy upgrading a number of nautical features across the continent, and it may be a good time for sailors to make suggestions regarding the features they might like to see.

For example, while I was writing this article, Mirtoon sim sprouted a new set of islands. Thanks to Naughty Mole, who was busy at work there adding content yesterday!

Changes are also planned for Icy Bay. Southwest Sansara has an extensive ‘Snowland Region‘ made from a large collection of ice-encrusted sims as shown in the figures below. Although Snowland is one of the largest SL regions without a major waterway, it’s eastern edge drops into Icy Bay, a region composed of a half-dozen arctic-themed water sims. Icy Bay presents a nice change of pace for skippers familiar with SL’s traditionally warmer sailing themes. DPW is planning more content features there, including snow and ice on the water.

  

Probably the biggest content change, however, is Mare Secundus, a newly-defined region of a dozen maritime sims located in the waters west of Mowry Bay. It’s still in progress, but you can’t miss the four-sim, serpentine string of islands that form a “2” on the map shown below. Go visit the region and see for yourself; it’s very nicely done, and it’s hardly secundus class!

[If you do go take a look, a bunch of us are having a debate over the origin of the term “Mare Secundus.” I have three or four suggestions, but my guess is they are all wrong 🙂 ]