The Case for the Bent Wand

Snowed today. Five inches new on the ground. I'm not sure spring is coming this year. But I'm spending my time thinking about moth sailing anyway and I came up with an interesting idea. I'm not sure its a good idea, but it is an interesting thought problem related to moth sailing. So I need a new wand, no big deal, I have a ton of small carbon sections to build it out of. So what is the ideal wand shape? Most wands are straight, but do they need to be? What if your wand was bent? How would that effect how it senses the water? So here's the thought problem. Lets say you have a slightly longer wand that is bent 45deg about 2/3 of the way down. This would have the immediate effect of making you need to adjust your linkages, but thats pretty easy. When the wand is pointing down I don't think it would change much, except it would change the angle of the end float, which could be nice. But when the wand is up above 45 deg you could end up with some interesting effects. With the wand above 45 deg the knuckle of the wand would hit the water before the float does and would effectively make your wand much shorter when the boat is riding low. I made a diagram of this effect and as far as I can tell the net effect would be a change in gearing of the wand mechanism. When the boat is riding low the wand would sense the water at the knuckle and this would increase the rate of motion of the wand when riding low. When riding high beyond the knuckle the wand would function normally. So would this be a good thing or a bad thing? Effectively you'd get more flap motion when riding low and the same motion when riding high. Adjusting the angle and the location of the bend would create an infinite number of gearing options. You could also put in multiple bends to get different gearing at different ride heights. Has anyone tried this yet?

Thank You USPS

So after a year of waiting I finely got my official BL daggerboard push rods from the supplier. You may recall that last year I used a push rod made by a local machine shop. That rod worked fine but it was damaged in, um, lets call it an industrial accident. So I got two rods and they showed up in a flat box. As soon as I saw the box I knew something was wrong. The USPS had bent the roads in shipping in several places. Luckily I was able to call the supplier and they agreed that rods probably hadn't been packaged sufficiently to make the trip and are sending replacements. In the meantime moth repair continues, but I fear that the moth is going to be ready before the weather is...