KatieKat 2002 Cruise Chapter Six

This is the sixth webpage of our cruise covering the year 2002. This is one long continuous page, and clicking on any of the underlined dates above should jump your screen to the appropriate section on this page (or you can use the scrollbar on the right to navigate up and down this page). Joe Siudzinski

10 August, 2002 -- Sydney to Port Macquarie with Guest Crew

Recent events, with some excerpts from the cellphone updates I had made:

Friday, 26 July 2002
Managed to salvage a number of previously-corrupted photo files... need to quit playing and get back to boat cleanup and maintenance.

KatieKat at Ferguson's Boatshed Marina by The Spit Bridge at a slip kindly arranged for us by fellow Polish multihuller Tom Piotrowski.

30 July 2002
Four blokes, two racing bicycles for the two avid racers, and over 500lbs (250kg) worth of stuff have shown up to live on KatieKat for four weeks. Kathy's wisely gone home to visit her family. Good test to see how one surviv...., uh, lives on a 10m catamaran with this many people and all this STUFF on board.

I had been joined in Sydney by my very good friend Adam and his son Simon, with their friends Shuk flying in from Kuala Lumpur and Ivo from Boise, Idaho. Simon and Shuk are avid bicycle racers, while Ivo is an electronics whiz.

Kathy departed, while Adam and Simon showed up with just a portion of the STUFF that was eventually brought aboard. Those two cardboard boxes contain two bicycles and hopefully no cockroaches.

2 August 2002
Spent a full day at the excellent Sydney boatshow; now awaiting good weather so we can all head north.

The Boat Show encompassed Darling Harbour and the huge Convention Center next to it. Exhausting!

The guest crew did the usual tourist bit, with Simon and Shuk braving the Sydney traffic on their bikes

Obligatory Kodak moments.

Simon, Adam, and Shuk did the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb.

Cycling Fools

5 August 2002, 0600
Inside Blackwattle Bay in Sydney, where we sat out the 35-45 knot winds which are off the coast. Departing at dawn for points north.

KatieKat in Blackwattle Bay by the Anzac Bridge. Note the depressed waterline from all that STUFF!

Each pursued his respective interests at the Sydney Fish Market, which fronts Blackwattle Bay.

7 August 2002
In Port Stevens, where we've temporarily stopped to allow the guest crew to recover from their fish-feeding frenzy. The bumpiness of the waters outside Sydney followed by an all-night beat into confused seas was not a pleasant introduction to coastal sailing for them.

9 August 2002
In Port Macquarie. Trip from Port Stephens highlighted by 29-knot westerlies (forecast was 10-15 SE) and running the Port Macquarie bar at full ebb. Guests having a great time vegetating, riding bikes, petting kangaroos and tree-huggers (koalas), and recovering from their sailing "ordeal".

Hi Mom!

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15 August, 2002 -- Port Macquarie Tourists

Reserving this space for photos of antics at Port Macquarie, where we were unexpectedly held up for a week due to bad weather.

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18 August, 2002 -- Preliminary Drogue Load Testing

What happens when you ask a bunch of visiting engineers what the anchor, para-anchor, and drogue loads might be, especially when initial rough measurements don't correlate to published data! Why, bring a full-blown instrumentation system and measure things...

Reserving this space for photos and a writeup of a series of instrumented drogue drag tests while heading up the coast. The very precise shackle load cell data was captured on a PC and all the boat instrumentation data on a Mac with GPS timestamping. Now if we could only reliably measure wave and swell height..

I have all the instrumentation still onboard, so this is just the beginning of what will hopefully be some rigorous data-taking over the next few months to determine the Seawind's actual rode-loading characteristics.

Update 1 September, 2003

I realize that I have been remiss in updating this information. Unfortunately, I had not performed any follow-up drogue testing before returning the instrumentation.

The load cell is inside the pin of a 15,000lbs-rated shackle! The load-cell sensitivity and the instrumentation accuracy is such that even a bag of groceries could be accurately weighed.

The first time we deployed the drogue, I simply threw it into the water. The readings were very low (on the order of 50-75 lbs), resulting in some head-scratching. We then retrieved the drogue and understood why...

The technique I now use to deploy the drogue is to first let out the bridle, then the tether which loops back to the boat, and only then do I CAREFULLY ease the drogue into the water. The readings we were getting with a properly-deployed drogue were on the order of 300-500 lbs at a boatspeed of around five knots, varying significantly as the boat attempted to surge down a wave.

These two photos show the deployed drogue bridle and tether.

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25 August, 2002 -- Manly, QLD - Crew Departure

Reserving this space for photos of the departing guest crew, who survived the month-long ordeal onboard KatieKat :-)

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