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ALCATRAZ - A Farrier F41 Catamaran - SAIL #33

SAILING & SAMPLE of BUILDING RECORD

The construction of ALCATRAZ, a Farrier F41 catamaran was started in April 2002 near Adelaide, South Australia. The shell of the boat was completed, undercoated by March 05 and the internal fitout and services installation completed in early August 2006. She was launched on the 26 October 2006 and exited the Murray Mouth on 31 October following which we motored to our home base, Marina ST Vincent, south of Adelaide SA.

SAILING

ALCATRAZ sails very nicely and puts the miles away when conditions allow, going upwind she'll do about 80% of windspeed and equal it in a reach. With the spinnaker we'll typically exceed windspeed by 20-30%.

The Tasmania cruise in March / April tested all the systems, none more then the instruments given the nature of the climate along the West coast of Tasmania.

Being in unfamiliar waters at all sorts of hours in the day and night forced me to learn and use the instruments better and to a far greater extent than had been necessary up to that time and I thought you might like to share my experience in going from, knowing nothing to where we were able to undertake a 2000+ Nm journey successfully.

We had a full set of charts for our trip but other then for overview purposes we did not use them for navigation. Electronic navigation is far more user friendly, eliminates most of the guess work and I doubt that anybody would by choice do it in the traditional manner.

We did have some reliability issues with the system and this did cause a few adrenaline moments, but nowhere near what they would have been without the instruments.

In the latest article I have tried to give an overview of my experiences in selecting, installing and commissioning the instrumentation and hope that this will help others plan their system.

During this winter sailing is curtailed but I visit the boat every month in order to get some maintenance done.

Some of the early sailing adventures of ALCATRAZ were documented, in an alternative location, a blogspot, http://alcatrazsailing.blogspot.com/ as I didn't have webspace available at the time. Since switching to Broadband I now have more space available and will revert back to my original format, for future articles, as it provides more flexibility in layout.

I will cover technical & maintenance issues, but think most of the future content will be about the things that fascinate me sailing this marvelous vessel.

Nov 06	Launch	The preparation, loading, transportation and launch of Alcatraz
May 07	Slipping	Slipping Alcatraz to change the oil in the Sail Drives, fix a seal, replace a transducer and some remedial work to the anti foul. Plus details of a mishap occasioned y the shipyard
Nov 07	Spencer Gulf Cruise	Finally a trip into Spencer Gulf and a visit to an Island group I have admired from the air. Have started to document sailing performance but need feedback as to what is helpful/boring
Jan 08	Docking Procedure	Learning how to avoid an adrenaline rush everytime you dock the boat
April 08	Tasmania Trip	The log of our circumnavigation of Tasmania, some of the mishaps, joys and the use of SOB software with Grib and AIS overlays for navigation.
July 08	Bimini	Details of the Bimini and Targa access plank
Aug 08	Instrumentation	Details of the navigation, sailing instrumentation and how I selected, purchased, installed and use them. Plus the commissioning and warranty issues I encountered.

BUILD RECORD

This web site was first established to share my experiences during the build of ALCATRAZ, but soon out grew the space provided by my ISP and once my e-mail's started bouncing I was forced to omit material to publish the updates. I also had to scale back a feature I liked providing, big enlargements of the illustrations (by clicking on them) as these provided for a more detailed study.

The final record comprises of 29 Chapters, some of which never appeared on the web as I didn't finish writing them until after the launch. To provide for simpler navigation I compiled a "linked" Index listing all the chapters, topics and items of interest.

The latter Chapters, services and furniture, are not F41 specific and may well be of interest to those of you building other designs.

Only some of the original Chapters and excerpt of some of the new ones are available on this site and these can be accessed by the active links (colored) of the Index or via the table below.

On completion,prior to transportation I took a set of High Resolution pictures (approx. 0.5Mb ea.) at these can be viewed at http://www.digitalvagabond.net/alcatraz courtesy of a fellow F-boat builder.

7	The SB Inner Hull	The first hull section I started, the excerpt covers the stringers, foam fixing and fairing and is fully functional including access to the enlarged photo's.
16	The Port Inner Hull Exterior	Again an excerpt of the original chapter, with photo's. The content describes the completion of the external surface of the final hull I build and it illustrates some of the techniques I developed as things progressed.
21	Front Deck, Bow beam and Netting	This is an excerpt with some of the photo's missing as I ran out of space. I left the text as it still illustrates the content provided on the CD
24	Waste and Water Services	The text of the Chapter was not edited, the photo's & diagrams are largely missing. The content of these latter chapters is applicable to others designs as it is normally determined by the owner
25	Electrical & Refrigeration	Full text, no data and partial photo's of a topic I spend many nights sorting out. Again all solutions are going to be different and determined by the type of function required by the owner.
27	Interior Fitout	Again the full text but only some of the photo's. I opted for the Tricel solution as I was keen to get away from the fibreglass/foam/fairing and this seemed to be more like traditional carpentry

NB: I did not "clean" up all the broken links in these excerpts so you may get some error messages.

I have not duplicated information available from Ian Farrier's site www.f-boat.com

The complete build record as outlined in the Index, including all the other build photos (672 Mb) is available on CD for A$ 100 (Australia) and US$ 100 (rest of world). Those interested, wanting to know more detail, or with queries/comment, please contact me by e-mail.

This site has been accessed

screen printing

times since inception in March 2003