As a change from Anchors ... Flag etiquette... ironmongery at the masthead....

[Kukri]

RNSA as well, I think.
I don't know if it is enshrined in their articles of war but certain members would take a very dim view of a boat without a burgee at the masthead.

PS,

Minn
I have been dying to ask.
I thought you had just bought an Ohlsen 38? And then, like a flash, you had bought a big Nicholson, is this right? Just asking out of curiosity and, if this is correct, deep respect

Doug. Yes, I parted after 29 years from my beloved 37ft gaff cutter Mirelle - but she has gone to a very good home and now wears the ensign that she always aspired to and two of the three burgees that must be flown at the masthead.

On the rebound, I bought an Ohlson 38, which is a perfectly nice boat. Two years later the big Nic came on the market. The Nic 55 has always been my "ultimate dream ship", but I never thought I was going to buy one. After three weeks of "not thinking about her". I asked the broker for the details; after another three weeks I went to have a look, fell head over heels in love, and bought her.

Sailing a Nic 55 short handed is a bit like I imagine the life of an elephant's mahout to be - she has beautiful manners, but if you find yourself in the wrong place she will swat you, without even noticing! Brute force has no application - everything must be done with cunning.

Add an Uffa Fox Fourteen and my sons' Squib and International Canoe and I am very seriously over boated! So the Ohlson is for sale in the spring...

Back to the topic at hand; there is no chance at all of my attempting a spinnaker peel so I’ll use one of the spin halyards.

 

[Sybarite]

Being pendant, it's an antenna, not an aerial.

I think you mean pedant.

 

[Seven Spades]

My club encourages it but is not prescriptive. TBH it looks so much nicer flown from the mast head and it is not that hard to organise. I got Berthon to do mine it was a lot easier to write a cheque than faf about tryig to get someone to winch me up the mast and then to decide how and where to fix it so I just gave them the burgee and let them get on with it.

 

[lw395]

I can't see the point of flying a flag underway where it can't be seen from (more or less) all around.
If the club burgee needs airing, it goes on the backstay over the ensign.
If I join a Royal bunch of bunting-worriers, I suppose I'll move the block to the top of the backstay.

 

[lw395]

Aerial is a noun these days and has been for a long time but it's probably originally an abbreviation of "aerial something or other" I imagine. Whilst in RAF training I was taught by a civvie instructor that an antenna would only receive whilst an aerial would both transmit and receive so we spent the next few weeks saying radar aerial just to annoy him. He may have had a point but got it the wrong way round or something but the two terms have been interchangeable in my experience until you get to something like a parabolic reflector, at which point the whole thing was always referred to as either an antenna or an array. Technically array shouldn't be used unless it's a phased array or similar with multiple antenna elements (not array elements for some reason). The term antenna was often used to describe just the reflective dish, sometimes called an antenna array, whilst the the bit that actually transmitted the signal towards the dish to be reflected outwards was referred to as the antenna element. Sometime it included the receiver element and sometimes it didn't and the receiver element was named separately - never heard of a transmitter element though.

In short you can use any term to describe either function and not be wrong as the OED doesn't go into much detail and is not a scientific or technical dictionary anyway. Arthur C Clarke actually referred to a "radar aerial" on a few occasions I believe but radar was mostly bits of wire in those days anyway.

Never heard the term pigstick before, always just called it the burgee stick so that's today's thing learnt...

Most aerials/antennas are reciprocal devices, they work the same in either transmit or receive.
Ferrite antennas are an exception to this, they generally don't have a great future as transmitters because the ferrite saturates at quite low power.
It's pretty common to refer to ferrite antennas as aerials.
I presume the word antenna referred to long sticky-out bits on insects before aerial came to mean a wire sticking up in the air?
So it's equally strange to call a loop, slot or patch aerial an antenna.

There is more debate about how far apart transmit and receive antennas have to be before you call them coupled inductors or a transformer, than whether antenna and aerial are synonyms or UK/US equivalents.

These days we talk of aerial arrays or antenna arrays meaning the same thing.

Isn't 'pigstick' a verb?

 

[pyrojames]

I had an 8’ staff, but now have moved to a telescopic one of 10’ overall to properly clear the VHF aerial. It has the advantage that is stows more easily below too.

 

[Kukri]

How does a telescopic one work, James? What stops it telescoping when in use?

 

[john_morris_uk]

This whole thread has left me slightly confused.

We fly a burgee from the masthead and we too have all the normal masthead paraphernalia. The burgee is zip tied to a bamboo stick a couple of metres long (I don’t worry about it being able to swivel and it never seems to make any difference to its ability to fly) A couple of clove hitches in the masthead burgee halyard onto the bamboo half a metre apart and watch to keep it from fouling anything as you hoist to the masthead. It’s a few moments work and the burgee is well clear of the top of the VHF antenna.

Sorry but I fail to see what the problem is.

 

[lw395]

A wet bamboo stick close and parallel to a VHF monopole.
An interesting problem for an RF field simulation package perhaps.

 

[jwilson]

This whole thread has left me slightly confused.

We fly a burgee from the masthead and we too have all the normal masthead paraphernalia. The burgee is zip tied to a bamboo stick a couple of metres long (I don’t worry about it being able to swivel and it never seems to make any difference to its ability to fly) A couple of clove hitches in the masthead burgee halyard onto the bamboo half a metre apart and watch to keep it from fouling anything as you hoist to the masthead. It’s a few moments work and the burgee is well clear of the top of the VHF antenna.

Sorry but I fail to see what the problem is.

Not having or wanting to add a burgee halyard block or other extra ironmongery on top of the mast is the problem.

 

[Kukri]

This whole thread has left me slightly confused.

We fly a burgee from the masthead and we too have all the normal masthead paraphernalia. The burgee is zip tied to a bamboo stick a couple of metres long (I don’t worry about it being able to swivel and it never seems to make any difference to its ability to fly) A couple of clove hitches in the masthead burgee halyard onto the bamboo half a metre apart and watch to keep it from fouling anything as you hoist to the masthead. It’s a few moments work and the burgee is well clear of the top of the VHF antenna.

Sorry but I fail to see what the problem is.

Simplest possible case:

Masthead of my teenage son’s Squib:



(Sorry the Windex is already squiffy!)

There’s nowhere to hoist a burgee clear of the Windex.

I suppose he might try to attach the Windex to the backstay crane when he lays up.

 

[michael_w]

Having a club burgee on a boat like a Squib is a bit silly, like those folk who go around with red ensigns on their Wayfarers. Just settle for the Club's name/initals on the transom.

 

[Kukri]

Having a club burgee on a boat like a Squib is a bit silly, like those folk who go around with red ensigns on their Wayfarers. Just settle for the Club's name/initals on the transom.

I used it to illustrate. I would agree if racing. Otherwise, I don’t, so far as burgees go. Flying a burgee is a sign that you are not racing, so others should not “give way” as is the common and courteous practice. He happens to cruise with a tent, in what is usually a racing boat.

Flying an ensign in “Home Waters” was, according to my late father, considered “tripperish”, in the past, but if, as some people do, you go cruising in a dinghy in Foreign Parts, you are going to have to fly a Red Ensign on your dinghy. (You can’t fly a defaced ensign on a boat less than seven metres in length, according to the Admiralty!)

 

[lw395]

Not having or wanting to add a burgee halyard block or other extra ironmongery on top of the mast is the problem.

Some people bolt the burgee stick to the headboard of the main.
But if it goes awry and you can't get the main down, you didn't get the idea from me!

 

[lw395]

Having a club burgee on a boat like a Squib is a bit silly, like those folk who go around with red ensigns on their Wayfarers. Just settle for the Club's name/initals on the transom.

Racing a small boat like a Squib, you could use a rectangular racing burgee instead of the windex, like a lot of dinghies.

 

[pyrojames]

How does a telescopic one work, James? What stops it telescoping when in use?

A. Sry narrow taper that happily jams, but come free with a twist. I think mine came from the flagpole company or similar. It’s on the RTYC website about how to fly a burgee.

 

[pyrojames]

This whole thread has left me slightly confused.

We fly a burgee from the masthead and we too have all the normal masthead paraphernalia. The burgee is zip tied to a bamboo stick a couple of metres long (I don’t worry about it being able to swivel and it never seems to make any difference to its ability to fly) A couple of clove hitches in the masthead burgee halyard onto the bamboo half a metre apart and watch to keep it from fouling anything as you hoist to the masthead. It’s a few moments work and the burgee is well clear of the top of the VHF antenna.

Sorry but I fail to see what the problem is.

Likewise. That’s how I have always done it, except I used something other than bamboo....

 

[Kukri]

A. Sry narrow taper that happily jams, but come free with a twist. I think mine came from the flagpole company or similar. It’s on the RTYC website about how to fly a burgee.

Thanks, James. Got it. (And change from £600 ! )

But having learned the fencing wire and bamboo trick when learning to sail, I still do that.

 

[pyrojames]

I used it to illustrate. I would agree if racing. Otherwise, I don’t, so far as burgees go. Flying a burgee is a sign that you are not racing, so others should not “give way” as is the common and courteous practice. He happens to cruise with a tent, in what is usually a racing boat.

Flying an ensign in “Home Waters” was, according to my late father, considered “tripperish”, in the past, but if, as some people do, you go cruising in a dinghy in Foreign Parts, you are going to have to fly a Red Ensign on your dinoghy. (You can’t fly a defaced ensign on a boat less than seven metres in length, according to the Admiralty!)

Blues can go on the mother vessel or any boats that normally are stowed on deck.....

 

[john_morris_uk]

Not having or wanting to add a burgee halyard block or other extra ironmongery on top of the mast is the problem.

??

The cheek block for the burgee halyard weighs a few grams. If you consider that excessive ironwork at the top of the mast then you or I are in the wrong pastime.