We bought a pair of AeroBOTE Rover inflatable SUP/MicroSkiffs so that we could bring boats along when we are towing our travel trailer. We tried one out on Shell Creek as soon as we got them home.

Starr on BOTE

My dog Starr never wants to be left behind so got right aboard.

New BOTE

One of the BOTE boards had been inflated just for pictures but never taken outside. The other was new in the plastic bags. Both are 2021 model year boats. They have standard HIN numbers that indicate one was manufactured in December of 2020 and one in March of 2021, so it's nice to know these were made when everything was running smoothly in the world.

12 volt BOTE inflator

The guy who sold these to us threw in a 12 volt inflation pump. The BOTE's come with manual pumps.

BOTE Motor Mount Sockets

If you're going to mount an outboard, these sockets must be inserted into the hull during inflation.

The U shaped metal clip locks the socket into the hull and a black plastic retaining pin holds it in place.

BOTE Motor Mount

The outboard motor mount inserts into the plastic sockets and there are two straps that go through D-rings on the cockpit sole to make sure it stays in place.

Also shown are the two fins that insert in slots in the bottom of the hull. It's hard to paddle straight without these but they are not needed if using an outboard. There's also a strap up forward that I guess could be useful for stability but we're getting hard grab racks.

Epropulsion BOTE

We have an Epropulsion Spirit electric outboard motor for our Picnic Cat sailboat and it works great on the BOTE. We want to try towing one BOTE with the other but ran into a little problem with that plan.

BOTE Seam Leak

Disaster! I blew up the second BOTE! I had left them both mostly inflated and mostly in the shade but as the afternoon wore on, this BOTE was in too much sun and the seam exploded due to overpressure. The other one was in more shade and was fine. I began researching how to repair inflatable SUP seams. I'm not the first to explode a seam, it seems...

Seam Repair Stuff

If you're reading this because you've blown up an inflatable boat seam, you're going to need scissors to trim fabric strands, acetone and 220 sandpaper to prep the surfaces, wood strips covered in wax paper, and clamps.

Seam Clamped Open

The BOTE repair video recommends using HH-66 glue but I could not find it locally so went with POLYMARINE PVC Inflatable Boat Adhesive sold at West Marine. They make a two-part version of this cement but I wasn't sure how to accurately mix it at 25:1 so went with the one part kind.

It's a contact cement so you apply a layer and then let it sit for 20 minutes before applying a second layer. Not wanting to hold it open that long, I figured out a way to use one of my clamps.

BOTE Seam Clamped

After the second layer of cement was tacky, I pressed the two parts together by hand then used wax paper-covered wood strips to create even clamping pressure along the seam.

Seam Side View

None of the online videos of SUP seam repairs seemed to cover a complex situation like this one, with corners and a carry strap and a lower hull section and connecting fabric. They all seemed to have pretty straight and simple seam blowouts. This one wasn't as easy to clamp and I was wondering if it would work when I looked at it from the side.

BOTE Seam Wrinkle

The resulting wrinkle in the fabric made a pop when it let go as I inflated the hull to test the repair.

BOTE Seam Repaired

I let it stretch out for a while at 5 psi before inflating it to the minimum operating pressure of 10 psi. The white area shows that I did not get the alignment quite right, but I got it wrong in a way that provides a little extra slack in the fabric around my repair. I guess that's better than the repair being under extra tension. It held pressure over night.

BOTE Deck Protection

One of the repair videos that I watched had a comment from a guy wishing to buy new foam deck padding for his BOTE because his dog was tearing it up. I decided to put some Dri Dek panels down to protect the BOTE deck from Starr's claws.

BOTE Chair

I attached the cut off corners to the aft end to provide a little more space when I bring along my folding chair.

BOTES on Trailer

I unloaded my Hobie Tandem Island from its trailer and with a pool noodle here and a bit more padding there, it's a double stacked BOTE trailer. Good enough to get them down to the creek for a test run this morning.

BOTE Fins Wrong

I did not mention it, but you can see in some of the photos above that the strap across the transoms on the BOTE I repaired is upside down. Still works fine and quality control slip ups happen. I wasn't going to mention it but this morning I went to mount the fins in my boat to paddle it and found that one of the fin mounts was installed on the boat backwards by the factory. Really, BOTE?

BOTE Grab Rac

We bought BOTE Grab Rac bars for both boats but only one came in time for the test ride today. It can be moved to an aft mounting position easily to get out of the way of paddling but it has to be mounted forward when using the motor.

Tow BOTE

The big test of the day was how it works to tow one BOTE using the Epropulsion motor on the other BOTE. It works great! I didn't measure our speed but set at 100 watts both boats went upwind nicely. At 400 watts they seemed to go a bit faster with a great deal more noise.

Bubbling BOTE

UPDATE: My seam repair held 10 psi over night and worked through our test but then my boat began slowly losing pressure. I kept wetting the seam repair with soapy water, listening, and looking and could not see where my repair failed. But what are the odds of ANOTHER leak just happening to appear right when I'm testing my repair? Very low. I decided to dip my repair in my pond to look for leaks and this picture shows the result. The PORT side of the boat bubbling vigorously! I repaired the STARBOARD transom. My repair didn't bubble a bit.

This is especially puzzling since I'm certain the boat had only been under a maximum of 10 PSI during the entire time I was testing my repair, so overpressure can not have caused this new problem.

Closed Seam Leaks

I flipped the boat over and found that there are actually four little leaks. I circled the two that have bubbles in the pic and made arrows to where the other two are. I'm not sure how to fix this but have emailed BOTE to ask. They did manage to have a robot and a human respond to me over July 4th weekend, so that's more customer service than I really expected on a holiday.

Seam Patch Cut

UPDATED UPDATE: I decided to try putting a patch over the four tiny leaks that I found in the seam of my BOTE. I later learned from a BOTE factory rep that it would have been a good idea to apply PVC Stitch brand liquid glue first. Another thought that occurred to me too late was to set the air pump to deflate and have it try to suck glue into the holes. If I could turn back time...

Seam Patch Clamped

But you can't turn back time once you've done this. Or maybe you can? I've emailed to ask about whether patches can be removed.

Seam Patch Inflated

As for whether this patch needs to be removed, I haven't decided. It leaks out both ends and I can hear it and see it with soap bubbles. On the other hand, it now seems to lose about 1 PSI per hour. The chances of my wanting to be out on this thing for longer than four hours are remote. I know it holds 14 PSI and if it leaks down to 10 by the time I'm done for the day, do I really care? I'm not at all sure I do.

BOTE Foam Deck Bubbles

I may not run out of things to pester BOTE about, starting with the foam deck on my boat. I emailed to ask about those bubbles.

Upon closer inspection of both, my wife's boat shows that the factory could get one of these right. It doesn't have the flaws mine does. The backward fin is the most glaring but there are other things. The upper and lower air chambers aren't aligned. The sides aren't quite straight and my boat is wider than hers. Various seams are not quite straight. Making one of these takes skills. Whoever made my wife's boat had them, whoever made mine didn't, and quality control missed the BOTE.

All that said, I'm still very happy with these boats, mostly because my wife is happy with hers and because we paid about what hers is worth for both of them. If we were retail customers who bought 2024 boats from a dealer and one was like mine, I'd want them to take it back. That's not our situation. We bought these from a guy on Facebook who said he bought the inventory of a closed dealership. I can deal with the boat I've got, and now I know more about fixing them if necessary.

Some video of the repair:

And the Tow BOTE Test:

The post BOTE Aero Rover Inflatable SUP MicroSkiffs! first appeared on Tropical Boating.

I thought it would be nice to switch from gasoline to electric auxiliary power for our Picnic Cat and after a little internet research revealed that customers found the gearbox on the Torqeedo motors noisy and the ePropulsion's direct drive quieter, I ordered an ePropulsion Spirit. That was in July. It arrived at last in the beginning of November and, skipping right to the end of the story, I was right! It is nice! I did learn a few things along the way...

The first question to answer when ordering one of these is: which shaft length do you want? This should be an easy question with a standard answer. It's not.

There's a global standard in shaft lengths. All my life, a "short" shaft small outboard means the shaft is 15 inches long. A long shaft is 20 inches and an extra long is 25 inches. On a sailboat, you generally want a long or extra long shaft.

ePropulsion outboards come in three shaft lengths: extra short, short, and long. The salesman told me that an ePropulsion "short" is equivalent to any other manufacturer's "long" shaft engine, so that's what I ordered. The picture at right is the Tohatsu 5 hp with 20 inch shaft that came with our Picnic Cat. As the tape measure shows, the propeller shaft is about a foot off the concrete floor. The ePropulsion prop shaft should be at the same height, one would think.

Without moving the boat or the engine bracket, I swapped the Tohatsu for the ePropulsion and made the same measurement. The prop shaft sits about 15 inches above the concrete floor, so that's somewhere between a standard 15 inch shaft and a 20 inch one. Testing on the water demonstrated that the ePropulsion is deep enough to avoid sucking air from the surface in most conditions, but not all. Steep chop resulted in pitching that brought the prop to the surface. It's fine for my purposes, but I would recommend that people who are going to power a sailboat into steep chop get the ePropulsion "long" shaft version.

Before trying it out on the sailboat, I decided to make sure the motor worked and evaluate its performance using an old friend. This is a 1958 Feathercraft Cartopper 12 that my father bought new, so it has been in the family my whole life. I've operated it with a wide variety of outboards and know what to expect from it and it's easy to launch it into the creek using my golf cart, so the ancient boat got the modern powerplant, at least briefly.

The ePropulsion Spirit is supposed to be equivalent in power to a 3 hp gasoline outboard. It seemed pretty close to me. The boat went 5 knots at full power with two men aboard, which is about what a 3 hp should do. I was pleased with how quiet the motor is, especially at lower power settings. It passed this test and so it was time to try it on the Picnic Cat.

The motor fits on the bracket OK but the tiller is pretty long and it does not tilt up and back like most do. It pulls out and folds down. Because the boom gallows is in the way, it's necessary to rotate the motor all the way around backward while tilting it to get it into this position, then fold the tiller down.

The previous picture makes it a bit hard to tell but this shot of us departing shows that the tilted motor is well clear of the water and shouldn't drag even with the boat heeled over in that direction.

Another shot taken by my drone. The head of the Sailing Center took a visitor for a little introductory sail and she loved it.

We had the perfect day to test one of the things I wanted the ePropulsion motor to do. I put rod holders on the boom gallows because we like to fish but a sailboat in light air is not great for trolling. When the wind slacks off or when you tack the boat, it can slow down enough that the lure drops to the bottom and gets snagged or fouled with weeds. We had just that kind of wind, about 5-8 knots most of the time.

Just a little added power from the motor did a great job of keeping the boat moving through those lulls. If the boat is quiet, the faint hum of the motor is barely detectable. This is just the result I wanted!

I had been a bit worried that the shaft length would not be enough to prevent cavitation (actually ventilation, but old habits die hard). I got the boat moving fast then quickly shifted to reverse and gave it a lot of power. This did result in it slurping a bit of air from the surface for a moment but it was easily controllable so it passed the panic stop test. We had a good sized fishing boat go nearby in the harbor, throwing a pretty steep wake in the shallow water. The pitching did result in some cavitation and the chop slowed the boat way down. If powering continuously into that kind of chop, I'd want the long shaft version.

Overall, I'm very happy with the motor and hope it lasts a long time. My oldest outboard at the moment is a 1986 Evinrude 15. I'm not sure I can hope for that many years out of this one, but we'll see!

A little video from my drone flight:

Picnic Cat Sailing Charlotte Harbor from Tom Ray on Vimeo.

The post ePropulsion Electric Outboard On A Picnic Cat first appeared on Tropical Boating.

We had a lot of fun with our Com-Pac Sun Cat and I missed owning it but also came to realize that the Sun Cat was really more boat than we were using. One of my Rules of Boating is that the smallest, simplest boat that will do what you want to do is always going to have the best work to play ratio. I had sailed a Picnic Cat once while working for Gulf Island Sails and knew I would enjoy having one.

I contacted former Sun Cat National Champion Scott W to talk Picnic Cats because I knew he had owned one for a while. Turned out, he had been thinking of selling the boat and made me a good offer and pretty soon we had a new-to-us 2008 Picnic Cat!

I barely looked at the boat before buying it, since I knew that Scott had been using and upgrading it. There were only a couple of things that I knew I wanted to change. First was the 5 hp Tohatsu outboard. We had one on the Sun Cat, which weighs more than twice as much as a Picnic Cat, and it was more than enough. Putting one on a Picnic Cat seemed over the top to me. I looked into electric outboards and wound up ordering an ePropulsion Spirit. I'm glad I ordered it in July, as I'm writing this at the end of October and the new motor only arrived in Miami yesterday and should get to me next week.

Scott had been moving toward a plan to use the Picnic Cat in the Watertribe Everglades Challenge. By my count, that's his third-craziest boat choice for that event, so a more or less normal idea coming from him. As part of that plan, he had a very deep second reef point installed in the sail. I took the boat for a yard sail to check out the reefing and sail handling setup.

The halyard blocks on the gaff boom had been upgraded from the factory ones, which is nice, but there was a 2:1 purchase added to the throat halyard. I saw no need for it and removed that part. Other than that, the two halyards on a Picnic Cat come with turning blocks on the mast and cam cleats on the coaming and a line bag had already been added to the boat, along with a bulkhead compass.

I'm not sure how the clew of the sail is supposed to be secured but I'm pretty sure this is not it. It does work, however. Also shown is my favorite improper use of the enigmatic "long pin" that is a feature of all Com-Pac catboat folding masts. The long pin is supposed to be inserted above the gaff boom when the sail is fully lowered and the mast is about to be folded. If you fold the mast with that gaff boom fitting in the hinge, the results are unfortunate.

I don't use it that way. I put it through the downhaul block, securing the boom above the cockpit. It's just convenient when raising or lowering the sail to not have it drop all the way down. If I want to tension the luff for better sail shape, I have to remove the pin. I seldom care enough to do this. I can get sufficient tension along the luff with the throat halyard.

Also in this pic is the cam cleat I installed to quickly secure the tack reef. If I want to employ the second reef point, it would be necessary to drop the sail and re-thread the reefing line. I hope to never use that reef point.

I had some tiny blocks left over from when I put a jib on my Adventure Island so I made a new outhaul for the Picnic Cat. It's led to a jam cleat further up the boom, easily within reach when sailing.

I wanted to try reefing in calm conditions in my yard before I had to use the reefing system on the water. The picture at left shows the sail with the first reef tied. I might have to release the long pin and pull the outhaul to get the speed wrinkles out of the middle of the sail, but it looks like it can work.

The tack reef cam cleat. Very quick and easy.

The clew reef jam cleat. Also shown: the jam cleat for the outhaul.

The double-reefed sail.

All I can say is, if I'm ever using this reef point it's because things have gone horribly wrong with whatever I was planning and I'm trying to survive and bring the boat home.

The tack reef has quite a stack underneath the reefing line.

The clew reef has quite a mess behind it too, but I'm pretty sure that if things went so wrong that I needed this second reef point, I could use it.

Satisfied with the rig, we took the boat out for a sail on Charlotte Harbor. It was a beautiful day with a nice breeze, just right for testing out the new rod holders and trolling along the shore a little bit. No fish, but we felt lucky anyway. Might have been the banana.

The post Com-Pac Picnic Cat Fun! first appeared on Tropical Boating.

Once the Stray Goat repairs and upgrades were complete, I decided to sail the boat and get some other listing pictures and put it up for sale. Two of the guys who help out at the Charlotte Harbor Community Sailing Center came over to sail the boat while I flew my drone and got overhead pictures. I sailed it a bit solo and learned that I would want the rigging a bit different for solo use so I could adjust the "bleater."

A few Goat Island Skiff owners have installed seats along the sides of the boat and those would be really nice. You can see in my pictures that it's tempting to sit on the aft deck for lack of anywhere else, but that puts too much weight aft and puts your body in the way of the tiller.

I was kind of hoping it would take a while to sell the boat but this was the last time I took it sailing.

A Goat Island Skiff even looks fast and fun just sitting on a trailer!

Before long, a woman saw the ad and showed up and bought the boat! Hooray! Proceeds were donated to the Sailing Center, at last fulfilling the wishes of the original owner/builder.

Before long, she showed up with a sailing picture on the Goat Island Skiff Facebook page.

The post Selling the Stray Goat first appeared on Tropical Boating.

After my abortive first sail back in 2020, I had a small list of projects to accomplish prior to a second attempt. The first two were related: One of the trailer bunks is directly below the daggerboard trunk so reworking the trailer bunks to better support the hull and getting the boat up onto boat stands so that the daggerboard could be fully inserted were projects that went together.

Modified Trailer for Goat Island Skiff

I got the boat up on stands and started with the trailer. I used the planer to shape the forward and aft bunks to more closely match the rocker of the hull, then used a router to cut notches for the runners. I replaced the bow roller with a small wooden pad and added plastic bunk slick pads to all the bunks. It took a few tries and a bit more trimming with the router and adjustment of bunk mounts to get all the bunks to contact the hull evenly. The small forward pad contacts the hull underneath the mast step. The next bunk back contacts the hull forward of the centerboard trunk. The next one holds it under the back end of the centerboard trunk and the aft bunk contacts the hull underneath the aft bulkhead.

Daggerboard Stripping

The daggerboard and trunk had been damaged in a hard grounding at some point and I repaired the resulting nicks in 2020 but found that the daggerboard had a lot of friction against the trunk and would not go all the way down when I first sailed the boat. I guessed that my 2020 repair to the trunk might have left an epoxy booger or something that needed to be filed/sanded down. I also saw what I thought was a crack running most of the way up the length of the daggerboard. The actual answers turned out to be a bit more complicated.

I got under the boat and looked up through the trunk and it looked just fine. No epoxy lumps or other irregularities that might bind up the board. Moving on to the daggerboard, I decided to just strip the whole thing, do something about the crack, and repaint it. I set my brother's planer to cut very shallow and started taking off the paint, shown in the picture at right.

I found that the "crack" I had seen was actually a glue joint where the aft-most of 6 pieces of wood was glued to the one in front. The glue joint was fine, just not quite full, so it looked like a crack but was not. I also found that the top foot or so of the daggerboard was sheathed in fiberglass cloth. I also noticed that the board did not appear symmetrical. One side was excessively curved, the other was too flat. I asked about it on the Goat Island Skiff Facebook group and designer Michael Storer commented that the whole daggerboard should have one or two layers of fiberglass cloth to prevent this kind of warping.

Warped Daggerboard

The picture at left shows the problem. People in the GIS group suggested various methods of counteracting this warping but the simplest one was to lay it on the lawn overnight and let it absorb moisture from the grass. I did not think this would work but it was quite effective! The board still did not fit in the trunk and it had to fit with enough room to accommodate at least one layer of fiberglass, so I had some material to remove with the planer and belt sander. I looked in the GIS build manual and decided I was probably not competent enough to build and use a foil template to get the shape exactly right. I also saw instructions to coat the bottom of the board with two layers of diagonally-cut fiberglass cloth. I set about planing and sanding the board, rounding the bottom, and trying to compensate for the remaining warp in the wood. The planer grabbed and removed a couple of knots from the wood, creating voids that would need to be filled with epoxy putty.

I cut a couple of diagonal bias pieces with the ends trimmed to wrap around the leading edge of the daggerboard.

Once the end flaps were wrapped in place, the front corner of the board should have at least a few layers of fiberglass and the rest of the tip has two.

After the glass on the tip cured, I sanded it smooth with coarse paper then went over the whole daggerboard with 150 then 220 sandpaper to prep it for a layer of fiberglass. I put long deck screws into the top and bottom of the board to hang it while the glass was being applied.

Daggerboard Fiberglassed

I interpreted the instruction to put "one or two" layers of cloth to mean one is fine. The leading edge wound up with a couple of bubbles so I cut those out, smoothed it down, and epoxied a four inch strip of glass cloth around the leading edge. After it was all cured and sanded, I checked one more time prior to painting. Yes, it fits in the trunk nicely now. I put the boat back on the trailer but have to lift it back off one last time to glue a couple of pieces of carpet to the back edge of the trunk as an impact cushion.

When I capsized the boat, I saw bubbles vigorously coming out of the aft buoyancy compartment from at least two places. I figured I might install a hatch in that compartment to access it from inside and find and repair the leaks without disturbing the varnish on the outside. On closer inspection, I had a much more serious problem than I thought. The entire bulkhead support had broken free from the bottom of the boat from one side to the other in what must have been some kind of impact event. This wasn't a bonding failure. It tore the wood apart in places. What happened remains a mystery, but after consulting with the brain trust in the GIS group, I decided to dig out the crack a bit with the saw blade on my Fein Multimaster and then repair it from both inside and outside.

On the front side, I spread liquid epoxy around the area, pushing it into the crack with a brush, then ran a fillet of epoxy with structural filler along the seam, again pushing the putty into the crack. I had a couple of scraps of diagonal bias cut glass cloth left over from the daggerboard job and laid them over the crack to further reinforce it. I cut one of them on the wrong side of the Sharpie pen line, so now a black line is a permanent part of the boat. Oh well, it's not the only cosmetic flaw on this Goat!

To access the buoyancy compartments through the seat tops, I bought a 10 inch round Armstrong deck plate for the bow compartment and a 10 by 20 inch rectangular plate for the aft one. Starting with the bow one, I used a scrap shim to draw the circle for cutting.

The Armstrong plates have no hatch frame. They sit directly on the smooth deck and are pulled tight by clamps that underhang the deck edges. The picture at left shows test fitting the 10 inch circular plate in the bow compartment deck.

Cutting out the deck for the forward hatch resulted in slicing through a reinforcing stringer that runs down the center of the deck. The Armstrong hatch relies on the deck being stiff to maintain a good seal. It was still stiff along its aft edge, where it was near to the bulkhead, but was too flexible along the port and starboard edges and at the front edge. As the picture at right shows, the nearest vertical support was almost a foot forward of the hole, too far to keep it stiff.

I used some scraps to create another vertical column near the edge of the hole, copying the design of the existing one.

I cut up the round piece of plywood that was removed from the deck to make two crescent-shaped pieces and epoxied them to the underside of the hatch hole edges to stiffen it along the sides.

Opening up the compartment revealed the the hull stringer along the starboard side was never sealed in epoxy, so while I was sanding and epoxy coating the bulkhead edge to seal any leaks I also coated as much of it as I could reach. The forward compartment did not take much water in the capsize and may have leaked through the four inch round hatch beside the mast step, so I'm not really sure the bulkhead itself needed sealing but I figured it couldn't hurt. In any case, if this compartment leaks a bit in a future capsize, it will be easy to clean and dry it out.

After sticking flashlights, measuring tapes, and a camera through the four inch deck plates in the aft compartment repeatedly, I decided that I really could not accurately measure the positions of the structural pieces under the aft deck so I just needed to cut a hole and repair the resulting damage. The picture at right shows the result. My jigsaw blade sliced deeply into a vertical support piece and carved a wedge off a lateral one.

The rectangular deck plate has two underhanging clamp arms and I had to cut a notch into the already weakened lateral support piece to allow the hatch to slide into place.

I had to cut notches into the seat support for the forward ends of the hatch clamps, and also had to trim down the clamp ends a bit.

The aft hatch installed and clamped down.

I cut the scrap piece that was removed from the aft seat into three pieces. The end pieces were used to double the thickness of the sides of the hatch opening, with extra epoxy used to start sealing the plywood edges.

The center piece of scrap wood was epoxied to the bottom of the boat to anchor two new vertical braces under the seat. Extra epoxy thickened with structural filler was used to repair the cut made by my jigsaw in the existing vertical support. After that cured, I cleaned it up and coated all the exposed wood with liquid epoxy.

After everything was sealed I decided to test the water tightness of the bulkhead joint by filling the aft compartment with some water. I let it sit for a bit and no water appeared on the other side, so it passed that test.

I got the bulkhead repair cleaned up on the front side and put a coat of varnish on it. The whole boat needs several more coats of varnish, but at least it's ready to put in the water now.

The post June 2021 Stray Goat Projects first appeared on Tropical Boating.

As the 2020 summer drew to a close, I got the last bits of needed work done on the Stray Goat, or so I thought, so I decided it was time to do a little "yard sailing" and check out the rig before my first launch. Here's how it looked when I raised the sail in my yard.

I had never sailed a boat with a lug rig, so looked for lug rig guidance at Goat Island Skiff designer Michael Storer's website. Shown at left is how I rigged the "bleater" using what Storer described as the "strong" method.

As mentioned on the previous page in this series, the builder of Julie B had put the stainless D-ring for the downhaul aft of the mast. This led to a crack in the mast partner, which I repaired, and led to a comment on Facebook from Michael Storer that the D-ring should be beside the mast, not behind it. I moved it. The builder had opted for the "vang-haul" setup described on the Storer web page linked above. At right is how it looked when I first raised the sail.

Michael Storer said that the downhaul/vang-haul tension is critical for a lug sail performance so I think I will replace the horn cleat with a cam cleat for easier adjustment. At left is how the rig looks with the sail fully eased out. Note the shorter tag end on the vang-haul line, as I had to ease it out some to let the sail all the way out. The block is rubbing against the mast, so maybe I'll put a piece of leather there or wrap it in rope to protect it.

With the sail flipped to the other side, there's a whole lot of slack in the vang-haul line.

I rigged up the mainsheet traveler the same way the builder had left it.

And tied the mainsheet ratchet block line more or less the way I remembered finding it.

Satisfied that the boat was usable, I headed down to the ramp at the Port Charlotte Beach Complex for my first sail. The Goat looks great waiting at the dock, but the image at left shows the first problem I encountered: The daggerboard bound up and I could not get it to go all the way down. I decided it was better than nothing and I'd take the boat out anyway. My friend Dennis was coming over to sail with me, so my plan was just to sail around in the small basin beside the boat ramp until he showed up.

I found that the boat had a bit of lee helm and didn't do too well tacking upwind. I headed downwind into the center of the basin and was just drifting along in the light breeze when I saw the ripples from a gust of wind coming at me across the water. As it hit and the boat accelerated, I remember thinking this was going to be fun and then I remember diving for the newly-uphill side of the boat before falling into the water as it capsized toward me. Reversed airflow at the top of the sail had created a powerful sideways lifting force that just drove the top of the mast into the water.

I righted the boat and got back in but it was very unstable, being half full of water. Before capsizing again, I noticed lots of bubbles coming out of the aft buoyancy compartment. I decided to abort and put the boat back on the trailer. I released the halyard and tied the sail into the boat before righting it again and getting back in to paddle over to the dock. Dennis showed up about that time and he got a 1500 gph bilge pump and an 18 volt drill battery out of his truck. Good thing too because bailing it all out with my little bailer was going to take half an hour at least. Rowed over to the ramp and put it back on the trailer. Rowing upwind was difficult, probably mostly because I don't row and the oars are not great.

When I got home I found that the forward buoyancy compartment also had water inside. Not sure exactly where it's leaking but it's around the bulkhead just forward of the mast so difficult to access. AFter all the work of restoring the boat, I was not happy with the prospect of more work before I could sail the boat again. I also figured that by the time I finished the necessary work and got back to sailing, it would not be long at all before the seasonal decline in water temperatures would make capsizing no fun at all. I don't like water below 80 degrees. I decided to buy the boat a cover and park it under my house until the harbor got warm again.

Now the water is warm again and I'm back in the mood to work on the Stray Goat. I plan to reshape the daggerboard trunk so that the board goes all the way down, do something to protect the mast, yard, and boom where they wear against each other, rework the trailer bunks to better support the boat, and varnish the tiller and rudder cassette.

I'm thinking of installing deck plates atop the bow and stern buoyancy compartments to allow me to re-seal the bulkheads from the inside. The bow compartment's bulkhead edges are not easy to access so I just think doing it from above through a deck plate will be easier.

The post Finishing Up & First Sail in the Stray Goat first appeared on Tropical Boating.

The turkeys appeared on my camera again, this time with a large male that I don't think was present last time around.

I got several other pictures but this one was clearest.

And a little video of the turkeys walking past the camera.

The post Wild Turkeys on the Trail Camera first appeared on Tropical Boating.

With the Watertribe Everglades Challenge starting tomorrow, I took one of my aluminum boats out to Stump Pass today to check on the current locations of sand bars. There's usually a little swash channel running right along the shore on the north side, allowing participants to save some distance by cutting the corner instead of using the main channel. That didn't look like a great idea today. There's a small bar out from the shore a bit and some waders demonstrating it's about knee deep on the outside of it. There's also an orange ball anchored in the channel just off the end of the bar.

I flew my drone over the area and got this overview shot showing the shoreline and the position of the sand bar. It looked pretty darn shallow between the bar and the shore, shallow enough that I didn't want to try to go there in my little skiff. This was around noon today.

A cropped in picture taken from a bit further west than the previous one. Click to enlarge and you can barely make out the orange ball from the first picture, located just off the sand bar.

I haven't worked up the nerve to launch my drone from my little skiff but decided that it would be OK if the boat was beached. Worked just fine.

The post Stump Pass March 5, 2021 first appeared on Tropical Boating.

Anyway, our community does NOT wish to lose Fishin' Frank's and there has been an outpouring of help and support to encourage and enable Frank to reopen in a new location. Part of that effort was a benefit in the form of a Catfish Tournament. I'm often annoyed by catching catfish and try to avoid it, so the idea of catching them on purpose had a certain humor in it for me.

My wife had recently hooked a very large catfish in a fishin' hole just down the creek from our place and we decided to enter the tournament and go try to find that fish again.

At the risk of revealing our super-secret fishin' hole, it's a bend in Shell Creek and you can see our pontoon boat, Speck Tater, in the middle of this picture at left.

My wife and grandson and I all succeeded in catching catfish and I caught one that was pretty big but for some reason good fishermen were actually taking this tournament seriously and some began chumming days before the event. Sheesh. Really? It's a CATFISH Tournament, not a real fishing contest. Anyway, I guessed that my entry would be a top ten or maybe top twenty fish at 4.5 lbs but was pretty sure at least one person would beat it.

The weigh-in started at 1:00 pm and we arrived at 1:30. Someone had already brought in a fish weighing about a pound more than mine and the weigh-in continued until 4 pm. I just saw the results on Facebook and my fish wound up being 16th place so my guess of top ten to top twenty was pretty good.

I hope everyone had as much fun with this as we did and most of all I hope to soon visit the new, improved Fishin' Frank's!

The post Fishin’ Frank’s Catfish Tournament first appeared on Tropical Boating.

Today's novel Kubota B-26 job was a platform from which to pick mangoes that were about 17' off the ground. The roof of the tractor is about 8' high, getting me close enough to bend the branch and grab them.

The other day the tractor became a Travelift to put a boat up on a trailer where it would be easier to work on it.

The post Unusual Tractor Jobs first appeared on Tropical Boating.