DC Friday 4/6, A Learning experience

[JimSouthwick]

To my late mother, there were no such things as disasters, only "learning experiences". Yesterday's session featured one of those. The wind, what there was of it, filled in very slowly and very late. After watching the anemometer most of the afternoon, I finally decided at about 5 to go down to the Bridge launch and take a look. A little breeze, but not a whitecap in sight. The perfect opportunity to see what my new 9.5 would do. What it did was get me up on a plane; as Carl has long known, big gear rules (at least at DC)! Planing along on *board (the board and the tack) I looked down and noticed something odd - the foot of the sail was inverting, something I had never seen before and couldn't explain. Moments later, as the rig collapsed, I had my answer, sort of. Had my "unbreakable" Ezzy RDM broken? Surely not! And, in fact, it hadn't. What had broken was my Fiberspar RDM extension. What to do? Waiting for the wind to push me onto the lee shore was the simplest option, but it would have taken quite a while. Instead, inspired by Layne's success last year in self-rescuing with a broken mast, I decide to take a look at the carnage inside my mast sleeve. http://homepage.mac.com/jsouthwick/PhotoAlbum80.html Turns out my luck was not all bad; I still had the collar and the retaining rig. So after extracting 8" of splintered carbon composite from my mast and reshaping the end of what remained of my extension by beating it against the Euro pin, I was able to reinstall the collar, stick the now considerably shorter extension into the mast, apply zero downhaul tension, and sail home - very carefully!

The moral of the story (if there is one): RDMs rarely break in flatwater sailing, but carbon extensions can, especially, I suspect, when used close the maximum limit of their range with really big sails. I've got an aluminum Streamlined on order.