Sausalito, Houseboats and Rowboats

A woman who will be building a kayak with me gave me a tour of her housboat community in Sausalito.  I took some photos of the houseboats and a few of the rowboats docked near the houseboats.  The nice thing about a rowboat next to a houseboat is that in the morning you can get some exercise without going to the gym.
Not much to comment about here other than that the houseboat community seems to have arisen sometime in the 60's.  Some notable folks have lived on housboats in Sausalito, among them, Alan Watts, a popularizer of Asian religions and more recently, Steward Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog.  All these names used to be household words back in the seventies.  More recent arrivals to this world may have to google them.  So without further ado, photos of houseboats --
One more thing.  I should mention that there are several groupings of houseboats in Sausalito and this is just one of them.

Some housboats are boats.  This one used to be the Mare Island ferry.

Some houseboats like this one have floats.

The quonset hut.

And this one would be at home in town with a lawn out front.

And this one looks like a tugboat expansion

And some rowboats

This is a model that students build in a class.  Each student gets to take home their model.  And all students also work on the full size boat pictured below.  I assume they get a ride in it when it's done.

This pram was just sitting there at a boatshop.

 

The boats above are famous designs whose names I was told but promptly forgot. But to my credit, I recognized the names. You would probably as well.

This one just looked bright and cheerful.

And one more cheerful set and then we have to go.

Eating Mesquite

The mesquite is a small leguminous tree that grows throughout the American Southwest.  It blooms early in the year and then, late in the year, it grows long beans that eventually drop to the ground.  Unlike the beans we typically eat, these beans stay in their pod which does not dry out and release the beans but stays whole and keeps the beans locked inside.

 Mesquite beans on the ground under the mesquite tree.  In no time at all, you can collect enough for a meal. I did collect a bunch but made no attempt to eat them until I got home.

 The collection site right behind our breakfast table.  The picture was taken in January and all the beans were on the ground.

 Back home, I tossed a bunch of the beans in a high power blender.

 

The ground up beans looked like this.  I sifted them through a colander.

The sifted meal looked like this.  The meal is a combination of the ground up hull and the insides of the beans.

 The shell of the bean itself resists grinding and gets tossed.

Animals on the other hand eat the whole thing, hull and bean, possibly doing some chewing and run it through their digestive tract and deposit the hulls on the ground.
The next step is to do something with the meal.  You can get recipes online or you can just improvise.  The mesquite meal is sweet with just a hint of sour.  You can make a rue with it and add it to soup or parch it in a pan and use it as a thickener for stews as you would any flour.  Unlike flower, it does have a distinctive taste, however which you may or may not like, mostly it is a little sour and sweet and you may need to experiment until you find where to put it into your food regimen.

The Problem with Food

Recently, a friend gave me a few packages of fresh herring.  Herring were running in San Francisco Bay and he had caught and frozen about 150 pounds.  He urged me to give away as much herring as I could and to come back for more if I was successful.  Seemed like a good deal.  Just a few days earlier I had paid $5 a pound for herring at a fish market.  I also found out that herring wholesaled for $0.50 a pound.  That's a ten fold markup from wholesale to retail.  So here was a heck of a good deal, free herring that you would have to pay $5 a pound for at the store.
I got on the phone and called some Swedish friends who I was sure would want some herring because Swedes live by the sea and are fond of eating fish, or so I thought.  Turned out my friends were not that kind of Swedes.  They told me that they didn't care for cleaning fish.  But they would ask some other friends of theirs if they wanted some of the herring.  A little later they called back and said that they would take ten herring.  I told them that they were all frozen together in a package and the smallest quantity I could give them was 20.  Reluctantly they agreed to take one package.
So much for giving away food.
I suspect the problem with food is that we have gotten used to getting it in meal sized portions, all prepared and wrapped in plastic along with instructions for how to cook it.
The average consumer with a job who can afford to buy food seems to work until very late in the day and when he or she comes home is in no mood to deal with something that needs to be cleaned, possibly filleted and then cooked, especially if they have no clue on how to clean, fillet and cook something as exotic as a herring.  Much better to pull something out of the freezer and pop it in the microwave for 2 minutes. Like breaded fish sticks with no bones in them or pictures of dead dolphins on the package or anything unpleasant.
Another problem with food, particularly at the production end is that it doesn't come off some just in time supply chain.  It tends to for the most part be the result of some natural process that delivers a particular food in great quantities more or less all at once.  Most of the year there are no herring or cherries or sweet corn or peaches and then for a short time, there are more than you can eat unless you do something unpleasant and time-consuming like canning or otherwise preparing and freezing or salting and smoking your own food.  And who that spends ten to twelve hours in a cubicle or behind the counter of a convenience store wants to do that?

Grinding your Own

 A year ago or so we ran out of coffee while camping and while in town, picked up some more coffee.  I checked the bag that the coffee was in and it felt pre-ground.  Next morning when we got up to make coffee, the beans turned out not to be ground.  Luckily, there was a large rock at the edge of the campground and the banks of the river across the street yielded a mano, the stone you hold in your hands to grind the corn. With a little practice we managed to make a fine grind and breakfast was saved.

Closeup on the grinding operation.

 Of course, grinding stuff on stone grinders is nothing new.  It is in fact quite old and just recently, we visited Montezuma's Castle in Arizona where a number of stone grinders were on exhibit.

 

 The stone grinders in the American Southwest are known as Mano and Metate, the metate being the large flat stone and the smaller one you grind with is called the Mano.

 A slightly different arrangement visible throughout California are large flat boulders that were used for grinding acorns, a staple food in much of California before the arrival of the Europeans.  Unlike the metate which is flat, the grind stones for acorns have conical pits in them.  This prevents the acorns from spreading about.  Any that escape in the grinding process can be easily swept back into the hole.

And here is a long view of the grinding rock.  Note that the rock had a number of pits in it and so had room for a number of women to go about their grinding in a sociable way.  The rock also happens to be conveniently located in a flat area surrounded by oaks.

Preparing for the Apocalypse

Screen shot from the video game, The Last of Us, published by Naughty Dog

The creative arts are often a good indicator of a culture's subconscious obsessions.  They are not necessarily a good indicator of what will happen next, but they are often a good indicator of what we are afraid of.  The apocalypse seems to be one of those things.  The apocalypse, for those that don't have access to popular media is a civilization-destroying cataclysm, often undefined as in the book and movie, The Road, but sometimes explicitly spelled out as in the game, The Last of Us, (lethal virus or some such thing).

Cover from the DVD, The Road, based on the book by Cormak McCarthy in which the protagonists have to survive in a post-apocalyptic earth destroyed by some vague menace

I don't know how wide-spread fears of the apocalypse are but they seem to exist or these books wouldn't be written or movies wouldn't be made.

On the Beach, a movie from the fifties featuring a Nuclear Holocaust

It used to be Nuclear Destruction that we feared the most, which is understandable since the government had an active policy of making us afraid of it, complete with drills and everything but that fear seems to have gone away since the real thing such as the disasters in Chernobyl and Fukushima though thoroughly awful seem to be viewed as local, survivable disasters.

Post WWII Cologne, Germany.  By the time my family moved into the area a little north of where the picture was taken, things were pretty well cleaned up, although we still had piles of rubble across the street from our apartment building.

In any case, the main reason I bring up the apocalypse is that sometimes I wonder how much my own fascination with primitive boat building technology is related to expectations of societal collapse.  I don't fear collapse, perhaps because I spent my first decade in a country that recovered from being bombed flat in WWII. I see collapse as survivable but having lived through a partial collapse I don't see it as entirely improbable either. 

Replica of an Unagan kayak from Akun, Alaska

Meanwhile, I continue to build skin on frame kayaks because I love the technology and the boats.

Sea Otters, the Dark Side

A male sea otter was making unwanted advances on a sea lion at Moss Landing, CA.  The sea lion took refuge on the back of a kayak that happened to be nearby.  Full story here. in the San Jose paper. 
Apparently, although cute, sea lions have a behavioral dark side to them. 
There might be a lesson there somehow.  So school children beware.  Cute does not mean harmless.

Never Mind the Plastic Problem

See my previous post about the problem of plastic polluting the oceans.
This post here, is a never mind disclaimer to that post.   Stay with me while I try to explain my reasoning.
Sure, plastic is a problem, but then so is everything else.  How about acidification of the oceans?  Seems like when it comes to degradation of the environment we have lots of contenders and the average lay person non-scientist doesn't know what to do because just about everything we do potentially messes up the environment.  I am surprised that nobody is doing rankings of which of the many environmental affronts is the worst.
Actually, it seems that people are using the market to decide.  The invisible hand will tell us which environmental affront is the worst based on which environmental group's video on youtube gets the most clicks, or whose kickstarter anti environmental affront revelation project gets the most donations.
Anyway, barring those kinds of metrics, I am here to tell you to stop worrying about plastic.  Sure, plastic is bad, but plastic is also a handy thing to have. And in spite of all the problems that plastics create when tossed in the ocean,  there are worse threats to the survival of the bio-crust on our planet.
Of late, I am reading that potentially the greatest threat to the bio-crust is anthropogenic heating of our atmosphere. For those of you that haven't seen that adjective before, anthropogenic is a non-gender specific replacement for man-made. Once we get the earth hot enough, that increase in temperature will trigger all sorts of other processes that will guarantee that the earth will continue to get warmer without us doing anything further to help with the process.  It's kind of like starting a fire, for a while there you have to mess around with the wood to get it to burn.  You have to stick kindling under the logs and newspapers and stuff like that to get the logs burning, but once you get them going, they will keep burning on their own without any help from us.  It's the same with heating up the planet.  We had to burn lots of carbon to put enough carbon dioxide in the air to heat the earth up to the point where it could keep getting hotter on its own, but now we're almost there or maybe we're even there.

Permafrost in Siberia is melting and releasing methane into the air.  Methane is also bubbling up off the ocean floor off the coast of Siberia.  Methane is even better than carbon dioxide in keeping the heat in.  It's like going to Home depot and buying six inch thick insulation for the attic instead of just putting in the two inch stuff.  House is gonna be warm now.
Anyway, if this business about runaway heating is true, then we don't really have to worry about plastic in the ocean because getting cooked in our own juices will be way worse than having ocean critters eating little bits of plastic and dying and leaving the oceans fish-less.
Looked at from the human standpoint, not having any fish to eat will be the least of our problems in a massively overheated world.
Not my job here to give advice on how to stop global over heating.  Dmitry Orlov over at the cluborlov website advocates praying for a meteor to hit us and put an end to the oil burning that is generating all the extra carbon dioxide.  I personally advocate just using less of everything, but I see where that will never become popular for people to do on a voluntary basis, so maybe the ability of prayer to enlist the help of a higher power is not a bad way to go.

Our Plastic World

I saw a link to this video on Facebook the other day.

http://vimeo.com/8177268

Far as I can tell, it's a promo for a kickstarter project to raise money to make a movie about how bad plastic is when you toss it in the ocean.  OK, plastic is bad.

No, those aren't colored rocks, that's plastic on that beach.

The solution to the plastic problem is simple. Stop pumping oil out of the ground.  No oil, no plastic.  Of course that would impact lifestyles that people have become accustomed to.  What can you give the kids for their birthdays that isn't made out of plastic?  What sort of clothes can you get that aren't made out of plastic?

Some day when we no longer make plastic, we will have to go down to the beach to get our plastic, like a five gallon bucket or a beach ball or a pair of flip flops.  Sorry, they don't wash up in pairs.  You might have to mix colors.  With luck, you might find a right and a left in your size.

Walk into any sporting goods or outdoor store and the smell alone will tell you that you have stepped into a plastic goods emporium outgassing massive quantities of plastic fumes.  I am surprised that the state of California doesn't require stores to put warning labels on their doors to warn customers that the air inside these places is toxic.

One of the grander REI plastics emporiums.  Looks like they set this one up in an abandoned cathedral.

The irony of it all is that the people who shop in places like REI are lovers of the outdoors and generally lead healthy lifestyles, that is of course except when they go into an REI store and breathe the air there.

Sally Jewell, REI CEO sporting some REI plastic products.

Oh, & I just read that Sally Jewell, CEO of REI has just been nominated by Mr. Obama to become Secretary of the Interior.  So how does this bode for the elimination of plastic from the environment?  Not well, I imagine since plastic is REI's number one money making product.  If you took all the plastic out of an REI store, what would be left?  Not picking on REI here in particular.  It's not any worse than any other store, it's just that the irony is deeper.
Anyway, not participating in the plastic culture is next to impossible since everything made today contains plastic, at the very least in its packaging.

Is that a plastic gyre?  No it's thousands of plastic kayaks come together for a photo op. 

And then there's myself.  I use plastic string to lash my kayaks together,  and then I cover them with a plastic skin and then I seal the skin with a plastic coating.  I could do like Svend Ulstrup, a kayak builder and teacher in Denmark who only uses non-plastic materials in his kayaks.  I used to be like him, but like the convenience of plastic. It doesn't rot as fast as natural materials.  You have to let it sit out in the sun for two years to get it to start breaking down. Still, people love plastic because it's shiny when it's new but I'll stop using it if I can convince people that shiny isn't everything.

 

But if someone wants to come and picket my shop and make a movie about how I am polluting the ocean, I'd be willing to stop, and I would also stop wearing polyester fleece clothing even though it's warm and fuzzy.  Yes, every time I run the fleece through the washer, thousands of little polyester hairs break off the thing and go down the drain during the rinse cycle and from there on to the waste processing center in West Oakland and from there into San Francisco Bay and from there with the next outgoing tide through the Golden Gate and into the Pacific.  And from there, into the digestive system of all sorts of marine creatures who have no idea why they are feeling bloated even though they're hungry. 
I'm starting to talk myself out of wearing polyester fleece.  How about you?

The Curious Seal

One of the things I noticed when kayaking is that seals will occasionally pop their heads out of the water to see what I am doing. Humans must be as interesting to them as they are to us.  Seals will even follow me for some distance, alternately swimming under water and stopping to look me over. 
I also noticed that frequently a seal will pop up in the same area.  I don't know if it is the same seal every time or whether this particular area is favored by seals.  The thing is that I never see more than one seal, just one at a time at this particular place when I kayak through this area.  And this has happened for a few years now.  Time to go to the internet to see how long seals live.

Why We Blog

I think of blogging as a form of drawing attention to oneself.  But who exactly is paying attention to the blogger?  Is the attention that we get the right kind of attention, or is all attention good?
I checked last month's stats on my own site and fully a third of the hits were on my post on the frilled lizard boat.  Now I don't know where these hits come from, but I suspect that somewhere out there are school children who are doing a report on frilled lizards and stumbling onto my blog pages.  They are most likely disappointed by the results, but they will at least walk away with a nice photo of a frilled lizard.  But they won't really care about what I have to say about kayaks and kayak paddles and water.  So then, my real audience, the people I am addressing in my imagination is really much smaller than I imagine.  But still, large numbers are good for the ego and I can pretend that the people who search for frilled lizards really do care about what I have to say. 

Ventilation/Air Subduction & other reasons why paddles don't work as well as they should

One of my readers recently informed me that what I called air subduction already has a name in the field of boating, namely, ventilation.  OK, there we go, the internet once again comes to the rescue and dissipates darkness by spreading light, at least in the linguistic domain.
The original post, the one just before this was all about ventilation diminishing the efficiency of paddles.  Ventilation, the sucking of air down the back side of a paddle blade is a problem but can be fixed by appropriate modification of one's paddling technique.
But the problem, fundamentally of getting the best bang for one's paddling buck is that there are too many variables to the deployment of a paddle by a human and inadequate means for measuring input energy vs. forward propulsion, the two key numbers one needs to measure efficiency.
I thought the problem was more or less insoluble.  But perhaps it isn't.  Quite coincidentally while launching my kayak to do some paddle testing, I fell into conversation with a painter who has been commissioned to do paintings of some of the America's Cup boats. He told me that the boats have a person on board whose title is tactician and he advises the helmsman, the person who actually controls the boat.  The tactician sits at a computer which gets constant inputs from a variety of sensors and then suggests ways to wring additional performance out of the boat.
That's all I know, but I suppose that as software and sensors get more sophisticated, some of that learning paid for by sailing syndicates might also be used to increase the efficiency of lowly kayak paddlers.  I haven't done any serious research on the topic, but who knows, paddle design might be advanced from art to science, assuming of course that someone cares enough to spend the money to do the research.

Air Subduction in Kayak Paddles and cavitation in lee boards

I don't know if subduction is the right word to describe the phenomenon of air getting sucked down along the back side of a kayak paddle, but there I am using it.  Dictionaries indicate that common usage of subduction only applies to the geologic phenomenon of one piece of the earth's crust getting shoved under another but here I am with no one to stop me and so I am expanding the usage of subduction.
I mention subduction because it is a phenomenon that impacts paddle efficiency adversely but looks so normal when it happens that it's easy to miss entirely.  Subduction happens because pulling the blade of a paddle through the water creates a low pressure region on the back side of the paddle.  If the pressure is low enough, air will get sucked down along the blade of the paddle in response to the lower than atmospheric pressure there.  The result is reduced efficiency of the paddle.  Why? Because the amount of thrust you get from the paddle depends on the pressure difference between the front and the back of the blade.
Furthermore, this phenomenon seems to happen only with paddles that have long narrow blades.  At the start of the stroke with a long bladed paddle, only part of the blade is in the water and part of it is still out of the water, as you pull on the paddle, low pressure is created on the back side of the blade and the relatively flat surface of the blade that is sticking out of the water directs air down the back of the blade.  I suspect that water coming off both edges of the blade creates stable vorteces on both sides of the blade with a low pressure area in the middle that becomes the pathway for air subduction.
Commercial paddles with short, wide blades don't generate this phenomenon because the blade is fully immersed in the water before power is applied to it and the only thing sticking out of the water is the circular loom which does not produce any pathway for air to travel down to the low pressure area behind the blade.
But the phenomenon of air subduction with a long skinny blade is not unavoidable.  Depending on how the paddle is held and moved through the water the phenomenon can be avoided.  If the paddle blade is moved sideways as well as straight back, water moving across the face of the blade will not form the vortices that allow air to travel down the face of the paddle.
Since air subduction is dependent on low pressure on the back of the paddle blade, the lower the pressure, the higher the likelihood of subduction. Pressure is force divided by area so the same amount of force on a smaller area will create a greater pressure differential. And since on paddles with long narrow blades, only part of the full blade area is submersed at the start of the stroke, much more of a pressure differential is created across the face of the blade than in a paddle with a short wide blade where the whole blade is already fully submersed at the start of the stroke.

Lee board on a shallow draft Dutch craft.

The lee board deployed.  The angle at which the board is deployed controls the amount of lateral resistance that the board supplies.  The backward rake also allows the board to kick back and out of the way harmlessly should it hit bottom.

Not surprisingly the phenomenon of air subduction can appear anywhere that you move a  fin shaped object through the water like for instance a lee board on a sail boat.  The purpose of the lee board is to provide lateral resistance to a sail boat when it is sailing at an angle to the wind.  Some sail boats use keels to achieve the same results but lee boards are more handy in places where the water is shallow.  And they don't take up space in the cargo area of the boat like a centerboard does.  Lee boards are generally used on relatively slow moving boats which cargo boats generally are. And the triangular shape of the lee boards on Dutch craft puts most of the surface area of the board toward the bottom of the board, keeping the top of the board relatively narrow to minimize air subduction.
A slightly related phenomenon to air subduction is cavitation.  Unlike air subduction which happens when a foil pierces the surface of the water, cavitation generally happens when a foil is moving rapidly while fully submerged. If the speed of the foil is sufficient, it can create pressures low enough to cause water to vaporize. If you remember your high school physics, the temperature at which water turns from a liquid to a gas gets lower and lower as pressure drops.  The net effect of water turning to vapor is the same as air getting sucked into the water, it reduces the efficiency of the moving foil.  Generally, cavitation occurs in high speed propellers, but it can also happen in vertical fins on fast moving water craft like the one I posted about a few days ago.  Read more about it on the Vestas sail rocket site.

Skin on Frame Housing - the yurt gets a roof

Progress on the yurt continues.  Much of the progress is imperceptible to anyone but myself but the progress is there.  As it turns out, my initial suspicion that my first yurt would be a prototype for working the kinks out of the design turned out to be true. So let me share what I've discovered so far.

 I got the crown on the central ring of the yurt.  I used some kayak rib stock, 1/4 inch by 3/4 inch white oak, socketed into the central ring and lashed together with tarred seine twine. The idea behind the crown is that it will be open under normal conditions but covered when it is raining or heat needs to be kept in the yurt.
Another discovery I made after the initial assembly of the yurt was that for the sake of getting a good setup it helped to trace a circle on the ground first before erecting the walls so that the walls would form a perfect circle.  The perfect circle is essential so that all the rafters are the same distance from the central ring.
I also discovered that I had much more wood in the central ring than I needed and so it was too heavy and difficult to get into position when no help was available. What I did to remedy the weight problem was to cut some of the extra wood away from the center of the ring.  It was way stronger than it needed to be. 

 The next step was to cut out some fabric for the roof.  It took me some time to work out the trigonometry for the roof cover shape, but I did it.  But I have learned to distrust theory and test with an actual life size cover.  The other reason for getting the cover in place was that a series of rain storms were coming into the area and that would be a good test to see how the cover would stand up to the wind.

Here's an inside shot of the cover.  The wind lifted it some and pushed it off center.  Part of the problem is that the shape of the cover is like a pie with a wedge cut out of it and the edges adjacent to the missing wedge get pulled together and glued or sewn resulting in the desired pyramidal shape.
The cover is made out of some sort of vinyl covered fabric that is used for advertising banners.  A friend gave me a bunch of these banners and I cut them up to fit the roof. The fabric has two problems.  One is that it is very heavy and the other is that it is very stiff.  The combination of weight and stiffness makes it very difficult to pull this stuff up on the roof.  The weight also works against its portability.
On the plus side, the cover survived the storm and did not get blown off.  I also discovered that once again, there is nothing like building something to test a design because until you do, it's next to impossible to know what sort of problems the design has.  So far, none of the design elements have been complete failures but lots of them can use improvement.
The list so far.
The wall battens are slightly too flexible.  A bit more stiffness is advisable even at the expense of greater weight.
The skin is too stiff and heavy.  Lighter weight is advisable.
Other commitments have kept me away from the yurt, but the learning continues.  I will continue to post whenever there is progress or even when design ideas fail.

Sail Speed Records

New speed records for sail powered water craft are being set constantly. The latest by the Vestas sailrocket is 65.45 knots.  Of course these are records set under ideal conditions.  One should not expect cargo carrying sail boats to reach these kinds of speeds.  Still, regardless of limitations these records are impressive and raise the question, what makes these speeds possible and why weren't they achieved in the past? In other words, what has changed?
I suspect the answer to the question is multifaceted.  Perhaps the biggest impediment to new boat designs was tradition.  It took a while to apply airplane technology to sail design.  It also took a while to bring the weight of a sailing craft down enough so a sail could generate enough power to make the sailing craft rise on a hydrofoil.  Speed in a watercraft seems to be limited by friction between the craft and the water and minimizing that makes new records possible.
But in the past, new, faster sail boats evolved from working craft that had to operate under all conditions and not just special race course conditions.  One thing that is apparent from watching the videos of sail records being set is that the wind seems to be off shore with the craft racing alongshore, thereby avoiding waves. 
And there are any number of other things that a useful work boat has to be able to do that a racing craft cannot do.  Still, new ideas are always welcome.  I am looking forward to seeing recreational versions of these craft.  Who knows, perhaps a skin on frame model that does 20 knots would be a fun experiment.  Planing hull, no hydrofoils. 
The little experimenting that I have done with putting sails on skin on frame kayaks has taught me that the inherent flexibility of skin on frame hull limits how much sail one can carry.  The faster the boat is expected to go, the stiffer it needs to be, or in any case, stiffer than a boat that travels at 4 knots.

Sail Drone, further thoughts

In my original post on the sail drone, I expressed some pessimism that the thing would work.  In the meantime, the saildrone people put up some more information about their project and their designers.  Seems like they have enough experience to make the sail drone work.  One of the interesting things about the ocean is that the bigger the thing floating on it is, the more vulnerable it is to the forces of storms.  Small things like plastic bottles or coconuts can cross oceans with impunity.  So as long as a drone is small enough, it is probably impervious to damage. 
Still some problems remain for any autonomous drone.  The main one would seem to be collisions with ships and land masses.  Autonomy is one thing, avoiding collisions is another and adds complexity to the design.  The other problem with anything floating on water and containing electronic gear is water proofing.  As anyone who has ever bough a waterproof anything knows, waterproof is an optimistic term.  Water seems to be able to outwit almost any sealing technology so far invented.  Perhaps the most reliable technology is still the cork.  But we will see. I am keeping my eye on the sail drone website.

Sail Drone

While driving to work a few days back I noticed some people hoisting a small red airplane looking thing from a trailer.  As the lettering on the wing of the thing indicated, it was a saildrone. When I got home I went to their website http://saildrone.com. There wasn't anything there except a home page, but they have since fleshed it out some.  Anyway, some pictures of the saildrone.

 Here they are unloading the saildrone from its trailer.  At a distance it looks like the tail is at right angles to the main wing but that's an optical illusion.  The horizontal spar that the tail is mounted on is actually at an angle to the horizontal plane and that creates the illusion.

 That's a lot of crane to unload this small a thing, but the crane was already in place to take the Swedish Americas cup boat in and out of the water.  OK so some overkill is justified.

 The head on view shows the arrangement of the verticals.

And here it is sitting in the water.  Even with a little wind blowing, it heeled way over.  More ballast, I would think.  I also can't picture something this small operating autonomously in the ocean with breaking waves.  Snap that thing in pieces in no time and bend the heck out of any metal.  But I might be wrong.