To use the cabin top tracks with the genoa, you have to furl it to the size of a 100 jib...You get a bit of an improvement but not as much as a real jib because the shape is severely compromised when its furled that much.

Steinhatchee has such a cool personality, I have been many times in both of my sailboats. Seems like a lot is centered around the Sea Hag marina which even though their prices have gone up a bit in recent years (they used to charge only 50c per foot a few years back) is still a nice place to dock fo...

I tried the cabin-top fairlead tracks on my :macx: once, hoping for improved pointing. I gave up on it. I do not remember exactly why, but I did not get the improvement I'd hoped for. Were you using the stock 100 jib? If you tried doing it with the genoa for example, it would not work as well. The ...

I'll be rooting for you and following closely particularly in terms of how much work it ends up being and how it looks when you are done! I'm a bit mortified of doing a crappy job, a lot easier to paint a bedroom well...lol I know when I painted my 17, at least half the work was in the prep if not m...

Thanks! Yes, I believe I did meet him on my first or second trip down there well over 10 years ago now (these 2 trips were with one of my teenaged daughters at the time - all grown up now). Remember it well .. It was at Adams Key tide station beach where we got one of the biggest no-see-um swarms I'...

sunshinecoasting wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 7:23 pm How many times do you have to get hit to realise that grounding is what's causing it, DO NOT ground your mast under any circumstances.

I think you missed the fact that the first time I was hit in 2012, the mast was NOT grounded.

Lots of good comments on how a mac compares to a keelboat but also don't forget that the headsail type makes a big difference on a mac. Most of us (myself included most of the time) use a genoa sheeted outside of the shrouds. Whereas if you use a 100% jib (like the stock jib) sheeted inside the shro...

@Russ, there is a very simplistic ceramic thing on the main panel from the street that is designed to blow up if there is a direct hit to that line, but the 3 times I got hit it was in the backyard and only caused a surge and not blew out the lightning arrestor. But no hull damage, correct? That's a...

Can't say I can buy into the dissipater theory either seeing I had one and it got melted by a lightning bolt. I watched the video that physicsteacher posted and most of it it seemed pretty reasonable, until he started going on and on about the dissipater and then with a smirk said he had a melted on...

Yes, I think the wires from the shrouds into the water did give it a path around the sides which did cause less damage. For example, on the first strike, both the lift motors got fried (one right away and another one that failed a few months later) and that was a real pain to fix. They didn't work r...

Well, I just had to pull this post out of its almost 10 year old grave....why....CAUSE I GOT HIT AGAIN!!! So, guess what, most everything in this thread is kind of BS cause in Sept 2018, my macX got hit a second time by lightning and this time it was grounded, so the only thing to learn is that ligh...

To 'bump' my own trip log a few years, later in 2020, I did in fact cruise the middle keys specifically to close off all my tracks over the last dozen years of cruising the keys (1 week at a time for the most part). This cruise was a bit more challenging to do in the middle of 'Covid'. https://i.pos...

This seems like a nice old thread to 'bump'.. @Hershel, did you ever paint your boat? Russ obviously takes good care of his, mine is too far gone to wax now after almost 25 years in the FL sun with hardly anything but cleaning. I did a paint job on the deck/cockpit of my little 17 foot boat a few ye...

Thanks Russ, guess I should have figured you might be hosting images now with as much trouble as its been in the past. Perhaps you scale them down so they dont use as much space. Well, we all know good and well that the Blue hull is always the fastest :wink: but since green is actually half blue, it...

Sorry to post in such an old thread, but the topic is interesting because I have done it with my 100w flexible solar panel so that I could use it on both my sailboats. The most interesting use is where I built a pvc frame for the panel and then it is the perfect width to act as a 'bimini' for my cs1...