I became a member of the Royal Cruising Club (RCC) this year. The club has been very welcoming and has a thriving online community, as well as regular events and meet ups. It is of course the home of the RCC Pilotage Foundation, the publishers of most of the pilot books I’ve depended upon for years. I hope, in the future, to get involved in producing and maintaining these. The club is pretty relaxed, but does have a thing about flag etiquette. Members may choose to fly an undefaced blue ensign, which is a privilege rarely afforded to Sailing Clubs, but they insist that all members fly the club burgee from the truck (or masthead) at all times. The idea is it makes you easily identifiable and thus facilitates members saying hello to each other – which makes sense, especially for a club with no land base, where the whole point is to be away cruising.
Practically it’s a bit tricky: modern mast heads bristle with radio antennas, wind instruments, radar reflectors and the like. The solution is a small crane that extends a light halyard clear of the masthead. The problem with this is that the burgee can’t rotate freely and will ultimately tie itself around the crane – in my case some 20m above the deck. This is where a pig stick comes in: it’s a stick which can be hoisted with the crane halyard, but that will extend above the crane and around which the burgee can freely rotate. Traditional solutions involve garden canes and coat hangers.
I felt the need to overengineer this a bit. Two lengths of carbon fibre tube, some epoxy, a few 3d printed parts and two sets of roller bearings later I’ve got a solution.
Its a 2m 10mm diameter carbon tube, with a second larger diameter tube mounted on roller bearings, long enough to support the burgee that sits on a bushing and it held on by a top cap.
I’m pleased to say it works rather well. It’s been up for five days now and seen gusts of over 30kts without a problem, and the burgee remains untangled.
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