The View from the Helm

mY nESTER WITH THE MAST IN THE WRONG PLACE

Many of you will have seen in my book, photos of my Nester dinghy sailing.  I enjoyed her, but she  had two flaws- she twisted quite a lot, and she sailed with lee helm.  My own fault, of course- for convenience I put the mast too far forward. I built the forward side-to-side member at sheer height so as to have enough “engagement” of the bottom of the mast (about 11 inches)  to eliminate any stays. How could I have failed to see a better solution- one with the mast in the right place?

So I’m ripping that member out, removing the rowing thwart aft of it, and making a new rowing thwart, enough higher in the boat to result in exactly the same height of engagement, yet not too high, I hope, to still be able to row from that position. I’ll keep you abreast of progress in this blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 10th, 2011 at 3:54 pm and is filed under new work, our yachts abuilding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.