Ballast

  One of the things I really like about the Enigma is the ballast is easy to remove and in fact the design is such that you remove the ballast when taking the boat out of the water.  This allows the boat to be car top-able if needed.  It also allows you to play with the trim of the boat to suit gear you have and the crew.  If designed for it you can even make it adjustable while sailing to help with rounding upwind.  When I saw the first Enigma Dave showed me the various ballast options he had.  They included a cement floor pad and sand bags which came with the Enigma and some bagged lead ingots that Dave had built and which he seemed to prefer.

Concrete floor pad ballast for Enigma

Sand bag used for ballast and Dave's green lead ingot bags

I thought for quite a while about what would be a good ballast approach. I rather like Dave's approach but don't really trust my sewing to adequately contain lead dust.  It seems the boat needs somewhere in the neighbourhood of 64 kg (140 lbs).  I worried about the other approaches because one clumsy mistake and you could damage the boat by dropping a weight from the hatch and have it fall to the floor.  I don't like being one clumsy move away a serious problem although it is unlikely I would be moving the ballast anywhere but in shallow water.  The lead bags seemed the most elegant and easiest to manage but still struck me as an awkward shape to have at the sides of the cabin.  Any of them would be a hazard if they came loose at the wrong time.  Lead had some appeal but I am over cautious about lead dust as I certainly could see the boat having kids in it at some point and it is a nasty substance.  Any container needs to form an incredibly good seal.  Another good quality for the ballast would be the ability to take on more weight as the food and supplies are used up.   That one is likely where the sand ballast idea came from.  The easiest source of lead for me is automotive tire balancing weights.  It occurred to me that a hose filled might serve as a good base ballast with another hose that can be filled with sand, rocks, or even water to allow for variability at any point in the trip.  I did my calculations thinking I could get hose with 2" internal diameter and it would work out pretty well but that is not as easy to get as I thought.  I have some 1.5" so I might experiment with that for now.  I like the idea of recycling this hose for the purpose.  The good properties about the hose weights is they lay tight along the side of the boat, are easy to secure, can be moved up and down the boat with some pretty simple mechanisms.  If they are dropped they tend to distribute the force along their length and break fall and they do the same should they get loose when the boat is tossed about.  They are also easy to carry around and to create a durable seal.  The position for this ballast according to Dave is towards the mid area of the boat to compensate for the aft weight of the captain (doesn't really have a complementary sound to it).