RGSP wrote:Lopez Mike wrote:I grant you that what this videos show would be fairly classed as a light chop in a brisk breeze made bouncy by a bit of adverse tidal current.
That said, there are few populated places on earth with such severe conditions as the N.W. coast of N. America.
That may well be true Mike, but for the record, the part of the NW coast of Scotland known as The Hebrides, has on average over 10 days a year with hurricane force winds, which are not classical hurricanes but just violent winter storms covering a large area, and our news media never report them, but we get saturation coverage of every real and even potential localised hurricane which hits the US.
My own area in eastern England is much calmer, but even so we are about 5 miles from Felixstowe, which under some measurement methods is the worlds busiest container port, and in the winter months it would be unusual for the port not to be closed one or two days in the month due to bad seas. The "usual" ships there are a bit under 200,000 tons, with an increasing number going over the 200,000. Oddly enough, they don't look that big when you see the real thing, and when the weather is bad they have to sit some miles offshore, so we don't really see them under those conditions.
I suppose what I was trying to say was that Rainbow looks like she could cope with fairly rough sea conditions, which is what you said, whereas most pictures I see of US boats in general suggest they would not. The pictures I see, of course, are what gets published in the international press, and probably don't apply to your area, though in my own defence I've visited the Bay area frequently, and have been horrified (possibly mistakenly) by the floating things, call them boats if you must, that apparently go to sea there.
Rainbow is a rather different boat than our Otter. The latter is a lake boat, although I've taken her into some surprising places. Rainbow can handle a surprising amount of rough water, since she lifts nicely even in very short seas. Being round bottomed, taking seas abeam is to be avoided. Here's a US Navy video of this sort of boat, equipped w/ a diesel engine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3iwg0Xe1Vc
The San Juan Islands summer conditions vary from flat calm to awkwardly boisterous, and since the islands are rather complex in shape, you can have rough going one moment, come around some headlands and suddenly it is a pleasant day out the next... or the reverse. We're glad to have a boat that can handle more than we can
. She's planked in 7/8" or 1" Alaskan cedar over black locust frames; I'm told she weighs 4500 lbs or so including steam plant. My job now is to get the steam plant into the same sort of condition as the hull. Next year's projects include replacing the boiler piping w/ schedule 80 pipe, replumbing the safety, adding a float to the hot well and adding a manual feed pump to supplant the injector and engine driven pump. I'm also replacing the HP valve guide, and probably adding a balanced slide valve to reduce wear in the guide. She steams very nicely at 150 psi, with ball bearing mains, rod and eccentrics.
- Bart
