Traveler Car

[Hongoose Maru]

Hey Everyone,
I own a 1987 Seawind 24 catamaran that needs a new traveler car the old one was a four wheel with th control sheaves and I'm wondering if I would be better off with a six wheel with the control sheaves?
Thanks,
Jay

[Fortis]

It depends ont he track, the brand and a bunch of things including whether the last unit handled the load adequetly or whether it bound up and locked in place in heavy conditions.

I like the cusomised four wheel Ronstan car I have just mounted to the latest project. I thought about upsizing to a 6 wheel but reading the load specs on Ronstans's site convinced me that we would never face loads liek that even if our rig was 4 times bigger and we went out to play in a 60knot storm with full sail up (we would have other problems first!)

6wheelers ae pretty old hat nowadays. The trend is towards ball-bearing cars like the Lewmar and Harken systems...they are nice and smooth, but very pricey and rather more finicky about contaminants like sand grit and fish scales.

I'd stick with the four wheeler, unless you want to look at a major refit,



Alex.

[AdriftAtSea]

Hongoose-

Welcome to sailfar.net .  Always good to have another multihull sailor here.  :)  We're a bit out numbered by the monohullers...but the mindset is what counts here,  not the number of hulls. :)  Why do you think you need to upgrade to a six-wheel traveller car.  If the old one worked well for you, I'd recommend sticking with it.

[Hongoose Maru]

Thanks for the replies, I went ahead and ordered the four wheel car yesterday. The truth is this is the first sailboat I've ever owned, and the first catamaran I ever sailed, (crewed on a buddy's 38' Irwin many seasons, once across the Gulf of Mexico) so I'm still learning. In fact I just started to use the traveler to trim the mainsail when it went bang!
Thanks,
Jay

[AdriftAtSea]

Just remember that generally, multihulls are reefed for the strength of the gusts or peak wind speeds, and monohulls are reefed for the average wind speeds.  The reasoning behind this is that a monohull can heel and bleed off the extra force of the wind during a gust, a multihull can't. 

Since this is you're first boat, and first multihull, I'd highly recommend that you read the following books:

Chris White's The Cruising Multihull, a bit long in tooth now, but all of the information in it is still quite applicable...and it is full of a lot of good information.

Thomas Firth Jones's Multihull Voyaging, which focuses on smaller catamarans and trimarans.  Has a lot of good information in it as well, but not as technically deep as Chris White's book. 

Michael McMullen's Multihull Seamanship is also a good book to get your hands on. 

Don Casey and Lew Hackler's Sensible Cruising, while not multihull specific, is worth a read too.

Dave Seidman's The Complete Sailor is another good book to have on the boat, especially if you've not sailed all that much. Very well written, easy to read and understand with very good, if simple, illustrations.

What are you sailing plans??  Given that you've bought a cruising catamaran, what are your cruising goals? Also, where do you sail out of currently???

[Hongoose Maru]

AdrifAtSea-
I own the Chris white book, I appreciate the rest of the list, I'll track them down. Yes my boat is called a cruising cat, but we're talking bare bones cruising. I have spent three or four days on her at a time when she lived on Lake Livingston in east Texas. She now lives on Clear Lake, outside Houston Texas, and I sail on Galveston Bay. This June I hope to join a group called Texas 200 for the first annually run from south Texas up the coast to Matagorda. That is if I can get her and the trailer in shape by then.

[AdriftAtSea]

Let me know if you've got any other projects you're looking at... since I've done a fair bit with a bunch of different trimarans and catamarans.

[Hongoose Maru]

I've got allot of things I want to do, I've never had the mistress or the bridal out of the sailbag. Tho PO gave me a stern lecture about never flying it while I was alone. I sail 95% of the time single handed, the other 5% is with people who have no clue except where the beer cooler lives.
I also have the complete factory deck tent thats never been out of it's bag. Seems as if life has other priority's that doesn't include spending time doing what I enjoy most, sailing!
I also have great expectations of adding more electrical, stereo, VHS communications, and instrumentation, all before June.

[AdriftAtSea]

I hope you're planning on adding VHF communications...since VHS communications are pretty short range...usually to the nearest TV. :)

I just upgraded the wind, speed and depth instruments on my boat to the TackTick gear.  Man, what a simple installation... no wires needed for the displays, and no wires needed for the wind transducer up the mast...  The hull transmitter, NMEA interface and depth/temp and speed transducers had to be wired, but that was relatively simple compared to the other stuff. :)

I'm about to install a new to me Icom M504 VHF radio with hailer/foghorn.  The biggest problem with installing it is where am I going to mount the hailer horn?????   

I have the older Raymarine VHF 54 and will probably end up selling it and the Raymarine ST60 instruments I removed last year.   Let me know if you're interested. :)

[Hongoose Maru]

Hey not only am I illiterate, but I'm not very smart either! Yes it would be better with a VHF unit(but I do love those Gilligan reruns). Thats the problem only having a computer at work, no time for important stuff. Yes I would be interested in anything you might want to get rid of, send me a PM.
Thanks,
Jay