The "Jai Dee" a Fatty Knees 8 is a great sailing tender, simple seaworthy, reliable and easy to hand by myself if need be. I like to take Jai Dee out upto 1 mile off shore in about 15knots but if something went wrong you could probably drift back to the coast. I was also wondering what an unlikely capsize would be like..
So carried out a capsize test in a safe place. An unusual NNW wind left Palleranda beach's waters flat with a slight breeze. It's not that easy to capsize a Fatty knees but i stood on the leeward gunwale and over she went. Its a different story to most buoyant racing dinghys. On the Fatty knees the buoyancy chambers are relatively small so she floated just above half way out, the keel and center board about 4 inches above the sea. It's easy to right just a push your arm down on the centerboard and by grabbing the gunwale from windward.
When she is upright, its about half full of water and is fairly unstable. I got aboard from windward by sheeting in the main and floating over the windward gunwale. Its easy to roll back to windward.
Once aboard, kneeling amidships seems stabler. Found my 1.5 litre bailer was a bit small but got it bailed out in about 5 mins. (This is a bit long so added a 4 litre bailing bucket to the inventory). More capsize practice would be good. With 2 crew it might be easier, crew1 to windward and other crew 2 to lee ward could stay inside the hull as it came up, then do the bailing while crew 1 acted as sea anchor on the bow during bailing.
