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Wharram Tiki 30
Posted Nov 8, 2011
This is a boat that we built in the latter years of the 20th Century and sailed down to the Canaries just in time for our honeymoon. The name is 'Pilgrim' and it is a 30 ft by 16 ft catamaran. Hence my login name.
There is an emotional attachment, of course. But the deep underlying qualities of this design are why we chose it and with 12 years experience of sailing it (including a bad Biscay and the successful trip South, eventually) we can confirm that its promise was fulfilled, and more.
With any boat, safety is always a consideration.
The Wharram catamaran designs can and do boast of their legendary seaworthiness with good reason. These boats are almost impossible to sink. Being made of wood and lacking ballast they do tend to float well even when severely damaged. I like that in a boat.
The heaviest thing on Pilgrim is the outboard motor which I can still lift in one hand despite encroaching arthritis. So even full of holes, Pilgrim would still sorta float. There's enough wood there even without the 600 Litres plus of recycled plastic bottles that we buried inside the structure during construction.
There's evidence of this in the tale of an earlier Wharram venturer to the Canaries. In a 28-foot Wharram of earlier genesis he was sailing single-handed from the Canaries to (I think) the Cape Verde Islands. A down-wind trip that should have been utterly relaxing.
Far from it, since a short time out from the Canaries a whale took an interest in his boat, for no obvious reason. It may have been hostile, or scratching its back, or perhaps it was feeling amorous?
Either way, it was banging and crunching up against the twin hulls of the Wharram, and doing it hard enough to split the hulls, which started to leak.
So our intrepid skipper went around the boat popping anything that had to be kept dry, like food, clothing and navigational tools into plastic bin liners for safety. Meanwhile the boat gradually filled up and settled into the water, ending up with the decks slightly clear of the sea.
Very annoying indeed, and most uncomfortable. But he just turned the boat around and sailed slowly back (upwind) to the Canaries to sort out these unexpected problems.
We wanted a boat like that so we chose the Tiki 30, and added the empty bottles for good measure.
On a 'double-canoe' style of cruising cat, you have two boats and a space in between. This space between is where you work the boat, and where one can sit in the sun/shade and sip drinks as one sails along.
This space is ideal for sailors and non-sailors alike. It hardly tilts at all, is larger than the cockpit of a 60-ft mono, and comes for free.
There's room there for a portable barbecue, which works fine, since catamarans won't spill a glass of beer in most weather conditions. I've tried it.
Which brings us to an unexpected bonus of this arrangement and the trouble also taken to ensure that the boat is 'weatherly', and will sail well against the wind in all conditions. The same abilities that provide that weatherliness can also provide considerable performance - and this is the case with the Tiki 30.
All cruising sailors I know have a streak of racer in them somewhere, and I'm worse than most. I've been described as a 'sail performance Nazi' and that's probably fair .
So it's not surprising that we would seek out the larger monohulls, especially the ones where their owners/skippers had made disparaging remarks about home-made boats or catamarans inability to sail...
...and sail right through them to windward with the tiller-pilot engaged, barbecue sizzling away, and huge glasses of beer in evidence. I had a special torn t-shirt to wear for these occasions.
Some were rotten sports and would scream invective at us, which for me was the icing on the cake. On e fine chap in a 60+ foot cruiser-racer came galloping along the pontoon after being trounced and accused me of running our engine in order to pass him. I opened the hatch and showed him the 5-hp Johnson lurking there....
He was a good sport, and re-focused on our sails, suddenly. Examining them closely he announced "Those are HydraNet, like mine! You're deadly serious aren't you?"
The ability to catch and pass a boat twice as long and costing 50x as much is endearing to me. The little cat that could...
To also have 6 berths available is remarkable, although you'll find that on a long voyage you'll need one of them for storage - we keep sails and stuff in one berth. Only occasionally did we pop one of our 'tired and emotional' guests down there on top of the spinnaker for a few hours rest before dawn.
If in port/aground on a beach or safe anchorage we have had the boat littered with snoring bodies after a party- on the bow and stern netting, on the bow trampoline, the two side tramps and the cockpit floor (designed to take a full size inflatable double bed) as well as the six berths below.
A very social boat, the Tiki 30!
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Latest reply: Nov 8, 2011
The "Millenium" Bug
Posted Sep 10, 2001
Ok, it was not the Millenium, and it wasn't really a bug, either.
This millenium started in 2001 in the same way that the First century AD started with the year 1.
This in turn was largely due to the Roman numerals popular at the time lacking a zero, which is another story entirely.
Bugs were real creepy crawlies that fried themselves in the Vacuum tube valve-based computers of Grace Hopper's era. Back then uncle Peter Pobgee was at the NPL trying to make reliable memories with ripples in mercury delay line troughs.
No, the non-Millenium thing was anticipated even in its inception, as you will hear.
Back in the 1970s, computer "clocks" were usually electrical ticks that naggled a microchip's clock input pin to make the machinery inside whirr satisfactorily. Think of it as turning the handle on a mechanical toy.
Synchronous logic worked best with 2-phase clocks, and ripple logic pretty well guaranteed that it would glitch. If you wanted to tell the time, you used a wristwatch that was probably dumb analogue and had to be wound. Well, that's all I could afford then on an engineer's wage with two kids and a mortgage.
However one company made an alarm clock chip that could be read (sort of) by a computer. I forget the details, it's a long time ago, but the problem was that this thing would fling the data out without a pause, and this frequently tripped up the computer reading it. After all it was just a variant on an alarm clock chip.
This company was National Semiconductor Corporation of Santa Clara, California, and their applications engineers became aware that the world was getting very interested in these "Real Time Clocks" for computers.
It seems obvious now, but in pre-IBM PC days computers were (mostly) mainframes or toys. Mainframes were big, and needed only one 'real time clock' per umpteen users, so no chip demand there. And toys didn't need a wristwatch, did they?
However (as we now know) a palpable demand did exist, and in the way of corporations, the mighty NSC set to designing not one but two RTCs. One in California for the embryonic computer market, and one in Greenock, Scotland for the European smart TV market. This caused some friendly rivalry. Remember, this is in the days before desktop CAD so it was all hand-designed and hand laid out with tools that Leonardo would recognise.
For completeness their part numbers were MM58174 (Scotland) and MM58167 (Santa Clara). As if you cared.
A downy-bearded lad with a young family was in a meeting when the Santa Clara design team put their proposed approach to the assembled application engineers. The year was probably 1978, and the registers in which the date and time were held were discussed, including the fateful register that held the Year number. It was agreed (not without some laughter) that two digits was fine, since there were twenty two years before it became a problem.
In context, most of the silicon chip makers were not much more than five years in the big time, and besides, in 22 years this thing would be bound to be replaced, wouldn't it? Big grins all round.
Besides, any fool could trap for year rollover in software.....
Well, the Scots were out first with their simple but functional 58174, and Santa Clara followed with their all-singing 58167 that was nonetheless kept as lean as possible to reduce size, improve yield and maximise profit. No space therefore for an unnecessary extra year digit......
The Californian 58167 was (wisely) chosen by IBM for the first PC, and as a consequence of its success was perpetuated for all time in endless chip revisions and (eventually) in the 'Jungle' chips.
Over subsequent decades these gradually reduced the many chips in an IBM-derived PC to a mere handful.
Warts and all, the 58167 registers are likely still in there somewhere.
So it's not a bug, people. It's a _design_feature_
And besides, any fool would have trapped the year rollover in software. Many did.
What about the next millenium?
That's too far away to worry about, isn't it?
Isn't it?
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Latest reply: Sep 10, 2001
Pilgrimcat
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