The Whisker Pole - Friend or Foe?

Nobody's a stranger to my well-worn notions of death by spinnaker. Or, more recently, humiliating defeat by spinnaker. Next up, of course, might be catastrophic identity theft by spinnaker, or, keeping with the times, Vince and Jen Married by Spinnaker! Believe you me - they're everywhere.

So why is it I feel such a strange compulsion to indulge in the use of its simpler, only-slightly-less-accident prone cousin, the whisker pole? Am I a victim of split personality? Am I duplicitous? Do I secretly love spinnakers and won't tell your sister? Jerry Springer-worthy stuff, no doubt, but you'll have to answer it for yourself.

Let's step back a second. What's a whisker pole? Basically, you use it to push your headsail out to give it more room to catch the wind when there isn't much wind to be caught. You're cheating a little, is all. Well, maybe you won't think so, but I've got a guilty conscience.

Picture it - it's Puget Sound, East Passage. Foggy morning at about 10 AM, you're out near Dolphin Point and the wind's just doing nothing. Your jib is just dead. What do you do?

Well, some lunatic unclipped his spinnaker pole one day in just such a situation. He clipped the pole to the jib sheet and pushed it out. He made a big baggy half-balloon with it and - viola - he gets half a knot of speed.

It's 10:15 AM and we just got the pole up. We think. Not sure. Does that look right? Do the jaws go up or down? Does it matter? Should I yank on this thing? Woah, maybe not.

Now, I dunno about you, but I see a pole, and a pole lift, and a big baggy chute-looking thing all of a sudden and uh...well, that thing's starting to look like an asymmetrical spi..spi...I can't say it.

But wait! It's missing a foreguy. There's no downhaul on the pole, it can't be a spinnaker. Whew, man, that'll save months of therapy.

10:30 AM. We're getting an extra knot of speed. This pole is really working. Suddenly, the fog clears ahead. A gust of wind pops up. The pole flies into the air as the jib is punched forward. It flies again. And again. My foredeckman Mike jumps to the rescue, holding onto the pole. This won't last.

I realized that day, as the wind picked up, that I'd have two options - I'd either need to drop the whisker pole and proceed along normally as the wind picked up, or attach a downhaul.

But wait. A downhaul? The thing the Volvo Ocean Race guys call a downf---er? that'd pretty much make it a spinnaker. Wouldn't it? What would happen if you put a downhaul on a whisker pole? Would it be a gennaker? Would it be a spinnaker? Would it broach the boat magically, because I broke some unwritten law of the sea?

And if I do decide to get savvy and attach my own downhaul (there's a fairlead block in that toolbox somewhere), what do I call my MacGyver combination? A Poleaker? Polaker?

And will I use it? Would I dare? Is it possible that I actually might be getting used to spinnakers?

Scratch the thought! We never had this conversation! Who wrote all this stuff? Prank blogger, prank blogger!

*DELETE*

Related Tags: sailing, spinnaker, whisker pole, puget sound, cruising, charles cox

Five-Minute Slices: Tablet PCs at Your Local 7-11

You're looking at the new cyborg. A 7-11 employee using a Tablet PC, stylus firmly in hand, ready to - do what, exactly?

Inventory. The inventory of the future.

I caught up with this guy and in between my picking through the muffins and Slim Jims, got to talk to him a little about this futuristic business model, his thoughts on the future, and just what the hell is a kielbasa hot dog anyway, mister "Oh Thank Heaven"?

Charles: How does this thing work, anyway?
Joe @ 7-11: I use it for inventory. I tell it how many items are left, it orders them automatically. Like I'll put down 2 for strawberry muffins, because that's how many are left. See, there's a graph.
Charles: It shows how many you've been selling?
Joe: Yes. Not many.
Charles: Well, nobody likes strawberry muffins, so no surprise there. But why does it help?
Joe: It doesn't help me - we used to have vendors do this. A chip guy, a soda guy, they'd come and count their own items and take care of all of it for us. Now they make me do it.
Charles: When do you have the time to do it?
Joe: Late at night, like now, I just do it when I can.

Ah-hah, I thought. Five-minute slices, again. Look at this many-to-one convergence; someone's getting promoted up there. They took a guy that had free time, and consolidated the work of at least three vendors down to him and a tablet PC.

Now, for the bad.

Dude: Woah, man, are you playin' guitar? (motioning at the Tablet around his neck)
Joe: No, it's for inventory...

That's one of the problems. The Tablet PC makes Joe look like a dork.

Joe: I wish it were faster...

The universal lament.

Joe: I just don't like it.

And that's really where it breaks down intangibly. From the psychology side, it's not surprising people don't like to take on extra work. Often it doesn't fit what they thought their job profile was, and the amount of transition is difficult. The tablet doesn't offer him anything. It's not a good trade.

Sure, there's the novelty factor. I mean, we all like the idea of tablets - it's a neat hybrid, a sort of petite-artiste moment, scribbling on an electronic etch-a-sketch, drawing a pair of boobs on the screen, but sooner or later the honeymoon's just over and the workers realize they're evolving, but their pay isn't.

But this is a good example of where we're going, like it or not. Productivity increases in an individual, done just whenever, cut hours of time off of an entire group of vendors that had to be scheduled to arrive during certain availability windows. This guy can do in his spare time what it took specifically billable hours for vendors to do, and for the company to coordinate.

Related Tags: tablet pc, 7-11, convenience stores, productivity, inventory, convergence (hah, I finally got to use that word)