Ian Henehan worked out this 12ft Goose Version and launched it into 20 knot winds. You can check the video to see that this is probably correct.
Oz goose smoking on a reach – Video
It certainly is, despite the poor camera angle which changes a few times the boat is fairly smoking along on a reach at one point with fine drifting spray blowing down the leeward side deck.
Ian’s home made Tyvek sail tears along the head eyelets about 2/3 of the way through.
It wasn’t critical as they had sailed off a lee shore, so they simply doused the sail and blew straight downwind back to their start point.
Yes … they sailed of a lee shore in a boat with rectangular planform. These boats do really sail extremely well, the enormous stability (note the crew never has to hike hard to keep the boat level and no weird rudder angles showing lack of control.
Ian’s Review of the Oz Goose in Strong winds
Here are Ian’s words
Hi Michael,
Wanted to let you know that we got the first of two Geese in the water today for maiden run.
We took it out on Lake Lewisville outside of Dallas where we would have a little room. The wind was 15-20kts, gusting up to 30kts and the chop was coming up the whole time. We could have picked a better day, but since this was the first possible day, we decided to take our chances. I picked a ramp that faced us into the wind. That way, when we broke something important, the wind would be helping us get back. Turned out to be a good plan.
We’re running the balance lug and it’s configured like your notes on the GIS, but without the “bleeter” and vanghaul. I’m sure we’ll toy with that later. The sail is Tyvek, another first for us. We pushed off the beach and were planing before we got the daggerboard all the way down. The boat seems quick and accelerates nicely. Smacking the flat bow into heavy chop is like stomping the brakes, so we suffered a bit for speed in the rough water. Since I didn’t get around to adding reef points, we were running the full sail.
It took a few minutes to get things together. We had the downhaul too loose at first for that wind. Once we got that cranked down, things smoothed out a bit. I may have the sail rigged a couple inches too forward. The boat tends to peel away out of the wind every so slightly. Hard to notice much when it’s rough. The tiller is light and so is the main sheet. We figured out that shifting towards the back kept us from bashing the bow into the chop so much. That made a bigger difference today than moving forward and keeping the transom clear. When we tried that, we just got soaked faster from the spray coming over the bow and it noticeably slowed us down.
It was hard to gauge accurately, but we were able to point a bit past 45 degrees into the wind. Maybe higher, but it was too rough to get a good feel. It seemed about the same going either way.
The boat is easy to sail. Even in the highest winds, we never had to hang out to keep her mostly level. A couple degrees helped cut through the chop a bit. We had been a little worried about breaking spars since they are yellow pine from Home Depot, but not anymore. I could see the yard dumping lift during the gusts and watch the flex in the mast and boom. The pine might flex a little more than desired, but I think it’s pretty tough.
The Tyvek sail was the weak point today. It goes great and the shape looked pretty good (to me anyway), but we managed to pull out the first three grommets on the yard during a broad reach. That was probably the strongest wind of the day and we were getting dialed in for speed. It will be easy to fix. I’ll reinforce the section a little better and probably shrink the grommet spacing to distribute the load better. I think we could have sailed all summer in slightly milder conditions and never had a problem. We were straight upwind of the ramp, so it only took a few minutes to get back. We’re fairly adverse to long upwind paddling exercises, so the planning paid off.
Here’s a link to some poorly shot video from today. The ruckus with the sail happens around 3:35. PD Goose – First Run
Thanks for the design and support. I’ll let you know when we get the other Goose sailing.
Ian
This video was so exciting we started building Oz Geese in the Philippines – Currently 73 boats
Since then the Oz Goose has been revised to make it even easier to build and is raced in growing fleets. Visit OpenGoose.com for the latest.
