[Rhodes22-list] wind speed issues

[reidhester]

When Shannon and I went on our honeymoon to the BVIs in 1984 we chartered an
Allmon 30. This was with a year's experience of Hobie 16 sailing and racing
under our belts but little monohull experience. It was Thanksgiving time and
the winter winds were blowing 20-25+kts down the Drake Channel. I vividly
remember trying to sail upwind with full main and genoa. The boat
continually rounded up. It took a while to figure out that I needed to let
the traveler down and then sheet in the mainsheet hard. That helped a great
deal but it would've been better if I'd reefed the main. But we had no
practical experience in that and so it didn't come to mind.

The other time we were flummoxed about the wind speed was when we first got
our F-24 trimaran. We hadn't been sailing a whole lot in the previous couple
years and the boat was new. We were on Lake Mead AZ when the wind kicked up
and we were beating back to the Temple Bar marina. The wind instrument kept
reading ~19 but we were felt overpowered with full main and jib. Once we
made it to the marina we tried getting a wind reading from the marina but
the only reading was from the VHF weather channel. We had tied up to the end
of the new dock on the "T", had the boat secured w/4 dock lines and the wind
coming down the dock kept trying to lift the windward ama. I was glad we
were tied up to a new dock with new docking lines. It sure felt like it was
blowing harder than 19 kts. I got out the wind instrument manual to try to
figure out what was going on. After some reading and experimentation with
the settings I realized that the read out was in meters/sec. That's about
half the readout for kts. So 19 meters/sec + ~38kts! We were much relieved
to discern this.



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Warmest regards,

Reid K. Hester, Ph.D.
Director, Research Div
Behavior Therapy Associates, LLC
www.drinkerscheckup.com
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