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Log Date: July 6, 1998
Author: Terry Moore
Lat/Lon: 64.30 N 52.07 W
Location: Fiskefjord, near Atangmik
Course: At anchor
Speed: At anchor
Weather: Fog
Sightings: Two big ol' caribou
Centrifuge and rudder ruminations
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I had an unusual experience today. I came into contact with clothes-washing appliances in Greenland without walking away minus a few usable garments. Granted, I only used the sink and the centrifuge, but I was standing in the same room with many large washers and dryers. My prior experience with the like has left me with a pair of long johns with one leg cut off at the knee, and the other missing entirely; a tie-dyed pair of khakis (courtesy of Hodding); a shirt with two head-holes, just in case I ever sprout a new one out of my rib cage; and a new pair of running shoes that used to be my very own size 13, and now grace the feet of a six-year-old in Nuuk, minus the insoles, which look like two styrofoam packing peanuts.
Despite my lousy record, I took my clothes into my own hands once again, because I foolishly decided to test the emergency bilge pump this morning. I've been waiting for the bilge level to rise enough to make it worthwhile using the big pump, and three solid days of rain took care of that quite nicely.
The pump housing got an air lock, so of course just as I was burping it, the pump bit - blowing the plug out of my hand, and at the same time giving the highly pressurized bilge water some place easier to go than out the fire hose. Unfortunately, the shortcut was straight up my body, 15 feet into the air, then back down upon my head. In order to stop the mayhem, I had to wade into the geyser and kill the pump.
In a few short moments, I went from being smug about my dry-clothes management skills after three days of rain, to badly needing the services of a laundromat. Finding one was the easy part, even in the face of persistent rumors amongst the crew about its nonexistence.
Kids are great. You can always get a kid to talk to you, even when adults cross to the other side of the street to avoid any contact with your pine-tar-scented self. All I did was ask kids along the way, going in the direction that the last kid had pointed me. Eventually I ended up on the ground floor of an enormous apartment block with a family mural painted on the side of it. Apartment blocks are not unique anywhere in the world, but they pack quite a visual punch in this land of no trees.
Once inside, I decided that all I really had done was hose myself down with brackish bilge water. It's early in the trip yet, there isn't that much mung growing down there. A rinse and spin should serve nicely. It's all wool, so I don't even want to dry it in one of those big commercial dryers (like the one that miniaturized my shoes). A rinse in the sink and a spin are free. Otherwise I would have to go to the town hall and buy a magnetic stripe card in order to use the very machines that had already reduced the size and scope of my wardrobe.
Now lets talk about these centrifuge things. Why aren't there any of them in the United States? Is this some kind of conspiracy by the dryer companies? Plop your wet clothes into this cylindrical machine, spin 'em for 10 minutes, and they come out dryer than anything in my duffle. Certainly dry enough to wear, especially if your frame of reference is an open boat on the wet coast of Greenland, with good drying days coming not so often. And today I made no sacrifices to the gods of wash and wear. I'm feeling pretty good about myself.
We motor-sailed (rowing with the sail up) into Maniitsoq yesterday evening, and decided to call today a "lay day," mostly because the weather was too lousy to do any deck work. Just as well though, since the boat was crawling with kids the whole day. It doesn't take too long for the word to get out that there is a new game in town. They climb shamelessly over everything, squirreling themselves into every nook and cranny, ready with a joyful laugh and a minor retreat should they realize they have gone a little too far.
They are so much fun to have on board that it is even easy to forgive them taking turns blowing the conch horn incessantly. All day. I'm a little surprised that the inhabitants of the Maniitsoq waterfront haven't run us out of town yet, what with all the racket. Were it not for the rain and the company, we would have been hard at work, on the rudders mostly.
I eat, sleep, think and dream rudders these days. Big rudders, small rudders, Viking wedge rudders, foil rudders.... We have yet to solve our rudder dilemma, though I feel like we are onto something. My thinking has come full circle, away from, and now back to, the original small rudder that gave us so much trouble in Maine. That particular rudder is not the answer - it has the tendency to put itself hard over if you aren't on the ball at the helm, and we are running out of wood to shave before we critically reduce the surface area of an already small rudder. But something similar to that rudder is where I'm headed mentally at the moment.
We tried the small rudder again after our first withe (the line that holds the rudder to the boat) blowout of the season, just to compare the forces generated by rudders of different sizes. Our first withe didn't break, but we did manage to suck the stopper knot through the rudder.
I am now more convinced than I was after our mishap in Davis Strait last summer that the reason Vikings used such small rudders is because those were the only ones they could keep attached to their boats. It is pretty intuitive that the bigger and deeper your rudder, the better your boat turns. So why didn't they follow up on that particular line of thought? Instead, they became masters of building and balancing their boats through hull and sail trim so that the boat had a completely neutral helm, and would answer to a rudder considered ludicrously small by any modern naval architect.
Our small rudder steers the boat. It has other problems, but it does steer the boat, and it is so much gentler on the attachments and the hull than any of the larger rudders we are carrying.
Rob has spent even more time thinking about this than I have. Maybe too much - he has gone so far as to name the rudders, in accordance with their unique personalities. To this mishmash of half-baked rudder thought, add the new information that if left to itself, our hull tracks to the left. I have suspected as much for quite a while, so we did a "push test" the other day in flat, calm water sans rudder (after waiting for the tide to rise and assist us in removing our anchor from the bottom, but that's another story entirely) and the hull consistently turned left.
Having a hull that is slightly asymmetrical below the waterline can't have been too uncommon in boats built solely by eye, and hopefully a wedge on the keel will put that right. But it does mean we may have been barking up the wrong tree with our recent rudder reshapings. It is very nice this year to feel like we have the time to work through all of this without the pressure from the delays of last year. Fingers crossed that the Baffin Island ice that is now melting doesn't begin reforming before we figure it out.
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