Weekend Supermoon and Sunday Drive

Had a good weekend. Blood moon was last evening. Most people saw it, lots of pictures online so I won't bother posting another.

Did the library thing on Saturday. Came out to warm Fall weather, orange sunlight from faint traces of smoke far away. Lovely. Sunday watched the F1 from Japan, not a super-exciting race but nobody died and there were no serious wrecks, so that was good. Mercedes won again. Either they are cheating or everybody else's engineers are just incompetent compared to Mercedes. They are much faster than everyone else and the other drivers are competent so my suspicion of them cheating is probably right. After we did the usual bacon and eggs, and a short hike around the neighborhood. Then I came back and finished my homework. Afterwards we decided to take the Porsche out for a drive in the country, up highway 20, but only to the Sierra Discovery Trail in Bear Valley, near Lake Spaulding.

Walked the short trail and its silly signs, and enjoyed the water spilling out into Bear River, which the park follows. They have warning signs about sudden level rises, as it is creek small when low, and small river when high, like it was when we visited. There's even a waterfall. Afterwards we went about 250 yards to the South Yuba River, which goes into a canyon that the Bear River misses. The Bear River eventually follows the southern border of the county I live in, near I-80, but the Yuba River goes north, then west, then down to a lake before spilling through the Yuba Goldfields and ending at Marysville, where it used to cause huge floods in the Spring. The Yuba River provides most of the water supply for the local pot growers, is highly contaminated with sewage and some mercury and arsenic, and contributes to the overall insanity found in the local hippies. Sigh. We also visited Fuller Lake and stared at this fishing lake before returning home. That car is really fun at 45 mph. The throttle is so responsive and the car so light you can make it accelerate and apex every turn without getting dangerously unstable like most cars do. And you can do this fun thing at lower speeds so you don't even have to break the law or go very fast to have fun.

I spent my afternoon reading and staring at the Stevenson Project plans for a type of Day Sailer boat called a Weekender, which I am gaining an appreciation of the more I look at it. I still want to do experiments with a homebuilt board sailer with bow-keel type angled daggerboards. I have visited many lakes that are quite shallow and would be interesting to fiddle with boat experiments. The Weekender is slightly weird looking.

Its around 17 feet long, and 500 pounds, and sort of a scaled down sloop sailboat. I could tow a boat like that behind my honda, on a trailer, though my Honda wouldn't like it much. It would be like carrying 5 people in the car, after all. That said, this is a clever design.

 See how small it is? 

Here's the assembly steps. Build your keel, then attach the plywood with glue and screws. All the plywood goes on bent, making it both curved and under tension. This makes it prestressed and extra strong. As it comes together you would then epoxy both sides of the wood to make it both water tight and incredibly durable. While there is TECHNICALLY a cabin inside, I wouldn't sleep in there. Its a place to stow some camping gear or luggage or a cooler. This is a DAY sailer, meaning you use it during the day. I can easily see using a carbon fiber mast instead of a wooden one, and setting up the jib boom so you can adjust it from the cockpit. At only 17 feet long, you can even setup the boom to be higher than your head so it won't whack you. The math is interesting. It would be fun to take out onto Lake Tahoe with Dad. Or my neice or nephews. It is completely unlike their prior experiences.

I do like this design. For the larger lakes, it would be fun. For the smaller ones, a used Sunfish or this other boat, the Wing Dinghy has potential. Its cheap to build from thin marine plywood, and the thinner wood would let me cartop it, which is much lighter than a trailer.

This is a 12 foot version of the International 14, a popular model in the EU on which the Laser is based. A Laser is a fun boat, and easily available used, but it is unnecessarily heavy at 130 pounds, mandatory weight. I want something about 40 pounds less than that so I can car top it. That points me at the Classic Moth.

My problem with that is I won't want an open transom (put a board across the back end) or have to wear a wetsuit when sailing on a warm day. Screw that. I'm willing to put up with Stays (those lines that run from the boat to the mast) because then you can adjust your sail and raise and lower it, and the weight of the Moth is only 75 pounds, which is fantastic. That sort of lightness is easily placed on my car roofrack and taken out for those shallow lakes and sailed around for an hour, then picked up again and removed, no hassles with boat ramps or fees. I like the curves on this boat. Its very simple and ergonomic and light. You can't row this, or carry lots of cargo and a second person onboard would need to counterbalance you and sit in the right places, but it would be a good boat, at least as good as an RS Aero 9.

At $8500 and too new for used boats, this carbon fiber and fiberglass wonderboat is amazing, and only 80 pounds rigged and ready. But its a boat you sail wearing a wetsuit and being so light is tippy as heck. They are promoting it at West Coast Sailing in Portland. The used ones will turn up in 10 years, probably. I don't want to spend that kind of money on something that's eggshell thin and likely to crack when grounding on a rock. For some of the local lakes, a rowboat or kayak makes way more sense. Sardine Lake, for instance.

This is Sardine Lake, at the Sierra Buttes, at the north end of the Sierras. It is all downhill north of here, once you get past Gold Lake. This is used for trout fishing, and freezes with several feet of ice in the winter. The trout get huge, around 3 feet, and are really the landlocked Rainbow trout-version of Salmon, called Steelhead. I don't like the taste, myself, but anglers like them. The smaller trout are the ones to eat, but only after they've had months to just eat bugs so they don't taste like bait. Lately, all the trout taste like bait so I suggest not eating them.

Something I like about sailboats is you don't have to invent reasons to get in the boat, like fishing, which is mostly an excuse to hold a rod in one hand and stare into the distance while you drink beer with the other one. Not that beer isn't great fun too. I love a good stout or porter, myself. Lager? Meh. Belgian white? Bleah. IPA? There are good ones. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is a very nice ale, with a nice balance of hops. I suppose a day sailer would be a good place to stash a cooler and sip a beer as you gently circumnavigate a lake for the day. Downside is if I drank more than one driving up that curvy road and then down the curvy highway 20 would be dangerous. So, sensibly limiting oneself is key.

And I certainly wouldn't fish in Scotts Flat, since the water is contaminated with mercury. Still, it is recreational to sail there, and I like the humor value of regattas, and the economic value of being able to park my boat (and trailer) there as part of the club fees. We'll see. If I sail the Sunfish to its full potential next Spring and Summer, I might be satisfied.

I'm pretty sure that any librarian in this area needs to connect youths with recreation and the library as a source for making recreation better. Its also important to convince the local college to offer courses in Documentary film making (using things like a GoPro Hero camera and teach editing and narration), as well as materials manufacturing of stuff like carbon fiber and machining so the toys (and bicycles and motorcycles and boats) can be built and repaired.

I've also been reading through a book I borrowed on small wooden boat construction. Building Small Boats by Greg Rossel, Woodenboat Publications, Brooklin Maine, copyright 1998. This book is journeyman level woodworking with general descriptions of a lot of boat building techniques for serious wood ship construction. While these are technically "small boats" they're probably several thousand pounds of wood and takes a huge amount of effort to build. Planks are heavy, and take a lot of effort to shape, trim, align, etc, compared to marine grade plywood which weighs a fraction as much.

Skerry under construction

Skerry finished hull

Skerry with sail

This region is a little far for commuting to Sacramento for work, but people do it. And they are getting poorer when they do. Wages are frozen or falling, thanks to inflation, and the price of gasoline is a major expense. When you think about this area rationally, you realize that mass production is a bad idea. You can't be competitive because the cost of getting materials here makes your product more expensive. However, small scale construction of luxury goods makes sense, plus this is a recreation area so manufacturing to take advantage of local expertise and testing means that luxury manufacturing makes sense. Thus the guy with expensive 4WD popup RVs, one every couple months, is working in the right place. Right up till his heart attack kills him. That's what hypertension and cocaine will get you. But I digress. We ought to be making mountain bikes here, for the serious hills. And dual drive motorcycles. There are shops that do serious Rubicon trail mods for jeeps and other vehicles. One of my neighbors runs one. Why aren't there small boat building companies here? We've got a local lake, and a bunch of other ones. There's a trailer manufacturer around 10 miles down 49. Mostly utility and horse trailers, but they sell. That skillset leads to making Teardrop trailers, and trailer rentals. There's some boat sales and RV sales in Penryn, which is next to Granite Bay, which borders Folsom Lake. Normally Folsom Lake gets used for bass fishing and water skiing, but it could be used for sailing too. Right now its very low due to drought. Once it rains properly it will return to full size.

Another market that needs exploitation is motorcycles and motor scooters. There's one place that sells them, but their markup is severe so they sell fewer than they might. If they offered markDOWN they'd sell a lot of them. Vespas and Piaggios and Honda scooters. Shouldn't bother with 49cc models, however. They are pointless. Can't even climb the hills. And the twin cities are on stair step hills, with a big ridge between. Everywhere hills. If a local shop were modifying and improving motorcycles to operate better here, such as upgraded brakes and appropriate gearing to climb hills and extra lights for visibility under the trees to oncoming cars, more people would ride, and the more people who ride, the fewer accidents people have. Especially once you realize that a motorcycle is more fun ridden SLOW rather than fast.

If you need to go fast, join a racing club or build a race car and participate in official events. Or just get a car that's closer to the road so it looks faster. That's how perception works. Or you know, buy an Xbox and drive their Forza simulator. Its pretty good, and you can get a chair that rumbles or moves, depending on how authentic you want things. In any case, luxuries can be as expensive as your market can bear, so carefully adjust as needed.

Finally, I think the locals should be making stuff to sell to tourists. Penn Valley raises llamas and alpacas, and make wool from them. They sell in local shops for big profit to yarn snobs. Good. Same with local junk jewelry, artists, wood workers (sculptors and cabinet makers). Real jewelry too. They sell through galleries on Broad Street in Nevada City. And that's fine. When something sells, they make the profit and share with the gallery.

The old furniture store that closed really ought to be a Vespa dealership, run by the Grass Valley Cycle Shop by the Save Mart grocery store. If they had a sales room displaying Vespas, and offered free delivery in northern California so a tourist could buy one and have it turn up at their house over the next week? That works. That would sell. For many people, a Vespa is a romantic thing, like an old car or one of those wooden power boats from the Italian Lake District you sometimes see driven on Lake Tahoe by the very rich. Scooters really ought to get free parking at the college, so people would have an excuse to use them. Sierra College is missing an opportunity there. There's no downside to increased enrollment.

The local college should be teaching carbon fiber construction, 3D printing for lost wax casting of jewelry, fiber making so all the local alpaca wool can be turned into $200 sweaters, and boat building so people with interesting designs can build them and test them at Scotts Flat Lake or up at Tahoe. Why the heck not? It is better than them moving away after they graduate high school. It's the tragedy of this place that only unwed mothers and trimmers stay behind. You have to offer more than minimum wage retail if you want your youth to build a life in your town.