The Green, Green Grass of Home

[slowpoke]

So Saturday I crewed on the Olson 30 for an outside the harbor race, and was reminded of a perpetual problem in the San Diego area: Seaweed! Amazingly, despite doing slalom courses to try to avoid the stuff, we still managed to hook the stuff twice, once on the rudder and the second time on the keel. So now I'm asking myself, is there any way to modify my keel to put a "weedcutter" on the front of it? How would I do it? And what does one look like? Since San Diego will most likely be the place I will race my boat most often, I need to know if it's a viable option.
Any suggestions?

[M&S]

I have wondered this too. Some of the Melges 24 have filled their original cutter slots. perhaps an idea would be to incorporate a stainless blade at the leading edge to bulb joint . Carry a wipe stick and keep the stainless sharp (by diving between races with a whet stone? )
Kelp is some tough stuff though.

[Chad]

I've seen two basic types-
One type where the cutter is on a wire or rod that travels up an down a cylindrical slot in the keel's leading edge. Cons: there's a slot in your keel, the cable jams or gets bunged up, the slot is fragile. Pros: they work great and are always ready to go "right now", when they're not bunged up.

And the type where the cutter is deployed from the end of a steel shaft that is inserted through a tube inside he boat, next to the keel. Cons: gotta go downstairs, pull the dummy plug, insert the knife tube, push it down, deploy the knife, cut the kelp, then reverse the steps to un-deploy. More "english" involved in cutting the kelp- it takes practice to get the right feel. Need to store the knife tube. Need to fabricate or buy the knife tube. Pros: nothing but a flush plug on the exterior skin of the boat, no keel slot, nothing attached to the keel at all.

With a small boat like this, it may be pretty effective to just learn to back down and get back to speed quickly.

[slowpoke]

I noticed a few J-80's out there. They have keels with bulbs, what do they do?

[Chad]

They have L-keels. They floss or use kelp sticks to push the stuff down and off.

[slowpoke]

I want to bump this, it's an important topic to me. On the SA threads someone wrote that backing down just wrapped the kelp around the keel more, which is what I'm afraid will happen with our boats. Any other suggestions?

[Chad]

... make sure a pair of swim goggles and a knife are part of your sailing gear? Or, send the bow guy off to leeward with the spin halyard, laying the boat over, and reach over and yank the kelp off?

Seriously, backing down will clear 90% of kelp encounters, and some manual method ought to be just fine the rest of the time. I don't think the complication and maintenance of a kelp system is warranted, unless you're sailing straight through the Pt Loma stuff at night, frequently.

[slowpoke]

You're the man, Chad! Actually, we didn't have this problem so much up in the Long Beach/Los Angeles area, so it's something new to me. I was surprised at how much speed we lost when we caught some kelp on the keel the other day, we must have lost 2 or 3 knots! And when you're only doing 6-7 to begin with, that hurts.