I don’t know when I last wrote about the “Bird Problem”.
Maybe it was in Mauritius when our windex (that little arrow at the top of our mast which points into the direction of the wind) fell broken to the deck after a crow tried to sit on it. That crow was cheeky and smart, as crows are known to be. After breaking off the windex he flew down to a nearby railing to watch me and see what I’d do about his handiwork. Smart or not I didn’t like what he did to our windex which I had to spend a day fixing (since no replacement windexes were available in Mauritius).
I know it wasn’t when a Bald Eagle tried to grab onto our masthead long ago, in British Columbia, and his strong talons nearly crushed our delicate B&G wind instruments, which are right alongside the windex. I was pissed off about that but I never wrote about it.
I think probably it was back when we were anchored in Mexico with Carl and JoAnne on Far Niente. I wrote,
The first voice I heard on the radio this morning was Carl, from Far Niente, calling “Wings, Wings".
When I answered he just said, "Look up!"
I stuck my head out the hatch and craned my neck upward, and there on the spreaders staring back at me were two large Boobies. When Boobies are up on your sailboat mast, look out below! We just spent hours the previous day cleaning up after the last Boobie. Up on deck I went, and I grabbed the end of a wire Spinnaker halyard and swung it wildly against the mast, which caused the Boobies to gracefully drop off their perches and to glide off across the water towards...
Yes, you guessed it, Carl's boat, where they landed and decided that so much excitement called for a little relief; on Carl's boat.
I happily called Carl on the radio to notify him, you see we help each other out.
Later the Boobies flew over to John's boat. Both Carl and I called John.
That was Zihuatenejo in 1998. Now I am writing again about the bird wars because that’s what they are: wars! Not only do they make a mess, they can break things, expensive things.
Here in La Cruz there are very few Boobies but plenty of Pelicans and Frigate birds. The Pelicans will land on your railings and poo all over the place, but they don’t bother the boats in the marina, only in the anchorage. So we’re safe from Pelican poo. Frigate Birds, however, are a problem. They love to perch on the top of sailboat masts in the marina. Not only do they drop their stuff all over the boat (which is devilish hard to scrub off) but they can break sailboat instruments. Our sailboat instruments are very good, but old; irreplaceable in fact. So when the Frigate Birds started landing on our mast, and squishing our wind direction unit, it meant war.
Now there are a couple of ways to fight against these birds aside from banging on the mast with your hand whenever you notice one or someone tells you about one which scares the Frigate bird off. This is not a good way to prevent damage because the bird can sit there for hours before anyone notices it. One way to prevent damage is to take down all your mast head instruments. That definitively prevents damage to expensive parts but it doesn’t stop the birds from landing up there anyhow and littering your deck and sail covers. It is also inconvenient to go up the mast and replace the instruments every time you want to go sailing, then take them back down again afterwards.
Another approach is to put a garden rake up the mast, supposedly to prevent the birds from getting close to the wind instruments. I say supposedly because while several people have put rakes up their masts it hasn’t stopped the Frigate birds. The Frigate birds just land on the rake and poo like crazy. At least they can’t get down alongside the rake to reach the instruments. One poor boat owner, while putting up a rake to protect his instruments, broke the instruments with the rake, and the birds still land there to do their duty.
One thing I know is that these birds do not like landing on sharp objects. Modern windex units have a needle like rod sticking straight up. Frigate birds won’t land on that needle. I guess it hurts their butts. We have one of these needles on our windex. It works. The B&G wind instrument, which has its own vane for pointing into the wind and a set of spinning cups to measure wind speed, is not so equipped and those are the parts which are at risk on Wings.
I decided to add a needle to my B&G. Just something simple but sharp, which would stick right up the Frigate bird’s rear end should one try to land there. My solution, simple but hopefully effective, was to attach a piece of sharpened stainless steel rigging wire to the wind direction vane with wire ties. I figured it would add some windage but probably would not stop the device from operating, and should discourage the Frigate Birds.
That is what I did.
So far, so good.
No Frigate Birds have been sighted on our mast since I did this. Happy Happy.
The world of yachting lost a great designer when, after a long battle with cancer, Doug Peterson died in a San Diego Hospital on June 26, 2017.
We only knew Doug slightly, but we consider him to have been a great friend of ours; after all Doug Peterson designed Wings, this lovely boat of ours, so we have a connection with him. And now he is gone.
For giving us Wings we owe Doug Peterson a lot, and we will miss him.
Doug was a boat nut. He grew up in Los Angeles and moved to San Diego as a teen-ager and was often found hanging around the San Diego Yacht Club. Members there remember a scruffy young man who really liked boats. He stated in an interview: "I started putting boats down on paper when I was 10, and have never wanted to do anything else." "My father is an aerospace engineer, and he taught me a lot from the beginning about design," Peterson said. "I was the kind of kid who used to crawl around boat yards looking at things. I was the one always looking over the side of a boat at the wake."
Doug sailed a lot and as young man decided to make his career designing yachts. He drove to the east coast and got a job with one of the established firms but he must have had his ideas already in his head and he was impatient. He only stayed one week, sleeping in his car, and then suddenly, he announced that he was going back to California to build a boat. That boat was Ganbare, a wooden 35 footer which turned yacht design upside down. It was his first boat and it won just about everything.
But it wasn’t easy. Doug was 28 years old 1973, still wore his hair maybe a bit too long to get a real job and he was not an established designer. He didn’t have a commission from anyone to design a boat for them. He didn’t really have the money himself. He had however impressed some of the local sailing community with his ideas and enthusiasm, including Carl Eichenlaub, the fabled San Diego sailor and wooden boat builder, and Carl agreed to build Doug’s design, on a budget. In eleven weeks they completed Ganbare, an IOR One Tonner which shocked the IOR fleet with her speed and sweet sailing ability.
After nearly winning the 1973 International One Ton Cup with Ganbare, clearly the fastest One Tonner in the series despite being built on a shoe string budget, Doug’s career took off. He sold the boat in Italy, paying back all of his costs, and was rewarded with several new design commissions.
Another of Doug’s boats, 'Gumboots', swept the fleet the next year. By then Doug Peterson was a design sensation and his office was producing design after winning design. After Ganbare,and Gumboots, he produced many well known and successful boats including Kindred Spirit, Vendetta, Racy, Great Pumpkin, Petrified, High Noon, Anabelle Lee, High Roler, Country Girl ( Half Ton ), Louisiana Crude, Stinger, Checkmate, Eclipse, Yena, Rubin, Ragamuffin', and Moonshine. Besides pure speed, Doug Peterson’s designs were known for being moderate boats with great all around sailing characteristics. Because of this his designs dominated both offshore racing and production racer/cruisers fleets as well. Production boats such as the Contessa 35, the NY 40, the Baltic DP Series and the Serendipity 43, sold well, were commercially successful, and sailed well, being winners in race fleets around the world.
Wings was the first Serendipity 43, a production boat built from the Louisiana Crude lines by Tommy Dreyfus in his shop in New Orleans.
By the early 80’s much more radial boats, which the IOR rule encouraged, were being designed by others. Peterson preferred moderate boats and his later IOR designs, still moderate instead of radical, were not winners. In a way though, Doug was right about that. The new boats were not popular with the owners and IOR racing soon faded from the scene. Doug continued designing boats even though the IOR design faded from popularity. He moved on and designed several well known cruising boats such as the Peterson 44 and later became involved in several Americas Cup campaigns. He was a key design member of the winning 1992 America3 and in 1995 the was part of the Team New Zealand design team which produced NZL 32 Black Magic, another breakthrough boat. Black Magic dominated the 1995 America’s cup series. He designed the winning Louis Vuitton Cup boat for Prada Challenge in the 2000 cup.
We met Doug the first time in the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club basement on a snowy night when he and Laurie Davidson attended a workshop with the owners of several IOR boats for the purpose of adjusting the IOR rule to make older designs, such as Peterson’s Serendipity 43, competitive with the newer boats, such as Davidson’s fractionally rigged one tonners (Mad Max was an example). Doug and Laurie understood why the newer boats rated better under the IOR and they proposed an adjustment which leveled the fleet. Although Judy and I did not win many races under the IOR in the 80’s even with that rule change, we appreciated Doug Peterson’s easy going approach to solving the problem.
Later I spent a little time around Doug in Auckland New Zealand while I was covering the 2000 America’s Cup and Doug was working for Prada. One time I mentioned to him that I owned one of his boats, Wings, and that it had turned out to be a great cruising boat. Doug was surprised, he said, “It did?” I replied, “Yes, it did.” He seemed happy to hear that.
On another occasion I shared with him a joke I had made to people we met cruising that the Serendipity 43 was one of Doug’s better design and that he had taken many features of it over to Black Magic, his famous breakthrough AC boat. When I mentioned this joke to Doug he surprised me by agreeing, “Yes, I did.”
Doug was hard to manage in a corporate world however, and the America’s Cup was definitely corporate. When I tried to schedule interviews with him, he never showed up. Other reporters had the same experience. Finally a rather flustered Prada PR manager told me I’d just have to find him myself and that the press conferences were a good place start. It was and once I buttonholed him he was friendly and open. He told me one day that he loved the lines of a Swiss AC boat called “Be Happy”. When I saw the boat on a pier prior to being shipped back to Europe I understood Doug’s statement. I liked the boat too and if Doug Peterson thought it was a good boat, I knew it was. I thought of making it into a cruising boat. What a fantasy.
Through the 2000’s Doug continued to design beautiful super yachts for European clients and builders, and he spent time racing classic wooden boats in Europe as well. In 2008 the 227ft replica of the schooner Atlantic, for which Doug was the consulting engineer was launched. Atlantic, built at the Van der Graaf BV shipyard in the Netherlands, was completed in 2010.
His most recent design is a 104ft Jongert Sloop, the design was done in 2015 and the boat is under construction now.
In March 2017, Naval Architect Doug Peterson became the fourth SDYC member to be inducted into the America's Cup Hall of Fame
Doug Peterson isn't the first of Wings' creators to die. Tommy Dreyfus Wings' builder, died in 2007.
Peterson died Monday, June 26, 2017 in a San Diego hospital after a long battle with cancer, aged 71.
I am a sailor, born of a nautical tradition passed to me by my father and my Grandfather Alfred. I’ve spent most of life on my passion which is the sea and the vessels which go upon them. I have had many such vessels and now I live on and sail on the sloop WINGS.
which I acquired in 1986 with my wife Judy
who shared my passion. For ten years we lived on Wings in Seattle and sailed, including racing. Then we left the Pacific Northwest and voyaged across the world, across the seven seas, to faraway places, and made them our own.
For thirty-eight years I have lived and loved this life. I still live on Wings, in Mexico, and sail and race often. Judy passed away in June, 2023 and I miss her but you can still join us and sail the seas as we did for all those glorious years. Fred Roswold, SV Wings, Mexico
Frigate Bird on a neighbor's instruments
Solution
Two Birds in the bush
Doug Peterson.jpg)
