Dont the stains on those old pulleys show up well in the photos !
I will have to clean them up 
I am still waiting for some decent weather to test this beast
Lately we have had gales with horizontal rain from the wrong direction or no wind at all
The weather gods smiled today and the new Mini got a good test sail on Kariotahi beach 20 knots of wind 45 degrees to the beach The yacht performed very well
very responsive and manoevrable The beach was soft and lots of holes so didnt
feel comfortable going for speed but plenty of slides donuts two wheeling and
tipped it twice exploring the limits Bounced it over creeks and gutters nothing broke or bent so a very good day in a very good yacht
The sail used was 4.4 sq m I tried it with the reef in which takes it down to 3.8sqM
but it seemed happier with the bigger area
Taking the knobbles off the front tyre would be an improvement I think and perhaps raise the boom an inch or two but otherwise nothing much
The stock standard design is good !
The mini on the black sand Kariotahi beach sorry no action shots
I hope you appreciate this reply Hiko because an accidental bump of the escape button wiped out most of what follows and I am just a two finger tapper. I have had to do it all again.
From memory.
Lucky you Hiko. The wind gods are not favouring me here at the moment.
I have a few questions to ask in regard to your post. The qualifier is that your's and my yachts are near identical except for front wheel and sail, so I want to draw a comparative and critical analysis of the two. Here goes.
1. You say you had 20 kts of breeze and 45 deg to the beach. This says to me that in the windward direction you did a series of long and short tacks and off the wind you gybed a bit until you had reached "land yacht dynamic" speed before achieving a long straight speed run. Is that the way it happened??? Or is your 45 deg to the beach estimation a bit off?? Or am I just an unskilled sailor??
Short pause while I select and copy the previous as a save method to counteract the accidental bumping of the escape key.
Yes that works.
2. Your bicycle front wheel, did it skid, dig in or was it just right in the turns??
3. At speed and power was the rear end overly ready to slide or spin out with slight oversteer?? You mentioned slides and spins.
4. You say the beach was soft. I noticed in the background of your photo there was a 4wd right at the waters edge on your "wide" black sand beach. What is your definition of "soft"?? It looked "concrete firm" to me mate.
You Kiwis may be spoiled with your black sand beaches. I was over there at New Plymouth for three years and I do not recall a "soft" black beach.
Cheers Cisco
.
Hi cisco
In the photo the yacht sail is directly into the wind 45 degrees is an estimate only
It is parked backed into a log or I would have to have laid it over to stop it taking off It doesnt look like it but there was a good wind the webbing on the batten ends are some indication
The beach where the yacht is is packed down by all the traffic as that is the entry point to the beach A little furtther out the beach is all ruts and bumps from the 4wds motorbikes horses etc and out by the water where the 4wd is sitting it is quite good as it is low tide Unfortunately out there there was a lot of gutters and holes up to half a metre deep Kariotahi is not normally like that in my experience
The soft stuff I think is due to all the light sand that has come off the sand dunes in all the recent hard south to south east winds we have had
Further down the beach where the sand is not so rutted by the vehicles the soft sand was sailable only if you could keep moving If you stopped you sank into it and
hard to get moving again
Short tacks out to the water and long tacks as far as I dare to the soft stuff
dodging the holes and gutters was my upwind strategy when I wasnt just fooling around
Down wind I would sail 90 degrees to the wind out to the water to build speed and then bear away and run directly down the beach and either tack or gybe in the turn at the end [usually gybe ]
I didnt notice the yacht skittery at all and went where I pointed it at all times
I didnt explore its speed potential too much as the holes and gutters were not that easy to see coming up [I hit a few ]
The slides and donuts etc was just me hooning around I could do them or not just as I liked [unless I stuffed up]
I had a good day!!!
for us but 
for them. They didn't particularly bother me though.
. Cheers Cisco
Hi Cisco
This business of soft sand sometimes is something we have to put up with I think
unless we were to fit massive balloon tyres and they probably wouldnt be that great on the hard
The soft sand is more of a problem to the rear wheels I feel than the front
I did some tests on the mini in this area and here is what I came up with
The load on each of the rear wheels is 58 KG and the front wheel has 14KG The footprint of the rear wheels at that load is 46.6 SQCM
The footprint of the front wheel is 33 SQCM at its load of 14KG
So the rear tyres are carrying 1.24 KG/SQCM and the front only 0.42KG/SQCM One third as much !
I dont see much benefit in going to a fatter tyre up front when the loadings are that small
These figures are only rough as there are a lot of other factors such as when the rear tyres sink in further the footprint grows bigger in proportion to the front wheel as the footprint gets wider than the front wheel
Also the leeward wheel carries more load than the windward one and the sail pushes some extra load on the front etc etc But my rough calculations tell me that the front wheel is fine as it is for a play yacht and it certainly seems like it to me on the beach
I think it will be better when I take the knobbles off
cheers Hiko
Hi Hiko, Yes I can go with what you are saying. Thing is that when a land yacht gets going, the dynamics take over and it becomes very hard to tell exactly what the various loadings really are.
I guess that is what makes them so interesting, exciting and fun. ie "We'll try this and see if it works." Cheers Cisco P.S. I corrected my spelling of Kariotahi.
Hiko, link to Coonarr thread:- www.seabreeze.com.au/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=40956
I suspect cisco has got too used to those tiny blokart front wheels. A 16" should be a instant improvement .. It just wouldnt fit into the big bag
