Writer looking for advice...

[Hallberg-Rassy]

Be easier to distract his attention as a heavy boom swung around,

Personally, I'd go for female crew member in other boat lifts shirt. Works every time. But then perhaps my taste in literature isn't so high.

Is there a love interest involved?

 

[Writer looking for advice]

Might be good to define which boat, and which coast (or 'conference'), and work it back from that.

May be a Herreshoff S-Class might fit into an Ivy League budget?

I can't say I know '50s Collegiate Sailing but Inter-Collegiate I thought they raced two person dinghies. MIT very much led there.

Did they call them yachts or sailboats?

Hi - thanks for the tips and the links. I'll look into those points, you're right - may need to be amended to reflect smaller class of boats. Thanks again!

 

[Writer looking for advice]

I suggest mining the sailing novels of Sam Llewellyn for countless clever ways of bumping people off on boats.

Hi - thanks for the tip, I'll look into them. Cheers

 

[Hallberg-Rassy]

Would it not be difficult to fit a crew or 4 or 5 into anything smaller? Dinghies take two.

 

[biscuit]

Advice to a budding writer : NEVER use the ellipsis..............

 

[Whitlock]

All of these answers just confirm the old adage that you should write about what you know. I you don't they will find you out.

 

[Mistroma]

On all the goosenecks I have sailed with it would probably go un-noticed for the rest of the season. Even if the gooseneck were to fail the boom will only move forward against the mast for a limited distance as it is usually under compression when sailing and will be constrained by the luff of the mainsail. The writer also has the problem of when it would do so and (as discussed by others above) how to get the victim in line for injury.
I did have a goosneck failure once on a single handed delivery trip, not sure when it actually happened but it could have been a number of hours before I noticed the shape at the bottom of the main looked a bit odd. Boat continued sailing on autopilot so no drama or warning caused.

I also thought of the gooseneck first as a more obvious point of failure allowing the boom to move suddenly. Of course my second thought was that it would be impossible to time failure to coincide with a specific person being in the wrong place.

I found a split pin on the side-deck a few years ago and searched all over to find where it came from. I scanned the rigging with binoculars, took pictures with a 23:1 zoom and so on. I was convinced it must have fallen from my rigging or the boat moored beside me. Unfortunately, he had left before I spotted the pin and I decided it must be from that boat.

I rarely go forward to the mast and it was a couple of months before I spotted the lack of a pin on the recessed part of the gooseneck. It had only begun to move slightly in that time and might well have come loose in another few weeks. It wouldn't be easy to make a tiny device to remove the main retaining pin at a specific time as it is usually held in place pretty firmly.

 

[strannik]

I'm not sure why you initiated this thread on this part of the forum. I've never looked at this forum segment (I am sure to the relief of many) but Scuttlebutt might be more appropriate. I was only intrigued by the title of the thread - and I cannot help. If you fear that Scuttlebutt only innvolves modern yachts (you would be wrong) but sabotaging a modern yacht would be not much different to sabotaging one used 50 years ago. There are also many on Scuttlebutt with decades of sailing under their belts.

Jonathan

Totally agree

 

[Bodach na mara]

I also rarely visit this section of the forum and was intrigued by the heading. In over 50 years of sailing I have experienced only 2 incidents involving booms out of control. In the first I was steering downwind when the owner decided to go forward to the shrouds on the windward side to take a photo. This was not a smart idea as we were in the Kyles of Bute near the narrows and the wind is well known to be flukey there. We were taken aback by a wind shift and gybed. The boom hit the owner who managed to hold on to his camera but his glasses went overboard.

The second time was this year when I decided to do a crash gybe as the wind was only about force 3. When the boom pulled the mainsheet tight the swivel block came apart and if anyone had been forward on that side they would have been overboard. Of course nobody should be anywhere but in the cockpit during a planned gybe unless they are on the foredeck to attend to the spinnaker. Where the boom cannot reach anyway.

By the way, in the earlier photo, the yacht has a very low boom, typical of an American racing design and also a boomed foresail known as a widowmaker for obvious reasons.

 

[Laser310]

US College/University yacht racing teams pretty much exclusively sail small 2-person dinghies - not big boats

big boat racing at the college level is extremely limited.

The storm trysail club - sort of the US equivalent of RORC - has been organizing a big boat regatta for a college sailors for a few years now using members boats, but it's once a year, and is pretty new.

The US Naval Academy is the only US University that I am aware of having had a fleet of big boats (Navy 44's)

I don't know that they had them in the 1950's though..., and I don't think they ever match race them.

 

[DownWest]

Personally, I'd go for female crew member in other boat lifts shirt. Works every time. But then perhaps my taste in literature isn't so high.

Is there a love interest involved?

Seem to remember Modesty Blaise used that technique to give her an advantage when confronting the bad guys. Think she refered to it as 'bracing' them.