I feel like I'm decidedly in the minority when it comes to the modern ocean sailing game. My boat is from 1966, my GPS a handheld unit from 1993, we've got paper charts onboard and no electrics whatsoever besides the LED lighting. Hank-on headsails (we carry five of them), tiller steering and a 35-gallon water tank. The engine only works to charge the batteries and get us in and out of the dock.

But I feel safe aboard Arcturus. 

For two main reasons. 1). Despite the lack of modern cruising gear, we've got all the safety gear. A Winslow liferaft (best on the market according to Steven Callahan, and he would know), lifejackets and harnesses for the crew, AIS, two EPIRBs, 30 gallons of water in gallon jugs in the bilge, a sat phone and all the requisite flares, radar reflectors, etc etc. And 2). I know what I'm doing, and I've simplified the boat.

This is seamanship – note the storm boards over the big saloon windows.

I have a problem with a lot of sailors that head out to sea with the idea that technology is going to make them safe. Mia and I often joke around that a lot of the current sailing industry makes and markets stuff with the idea that it will make life on the boat easier. Electric winches and windlasses, stack-packs for mainsails, mainsail furling systems, headsail furling systems, water makers, generators, etc etc etc. I could go on and on and on. But that's just not the truth. These systems make life at sea convenient. And ultimately, they make life harder, not easier. Even if everything works flawlessly, you've still got to make electricity for all that stuff, and that requires running an engine or creating even more complexity by adding solar or wind charging, which is just one more link in the chain.

Ready to step the new rig in Annapolis.

On Arcturus, yes we had to go forward to change headsails, and yes we had to pump water by hand out of the tank, and yes we had to plot our positions on paper, and yes we had to fiddle with the wind vane when the breeze got shifty, and yes we have to furl the mainsail when we put it away, and yes we have to haul in the anchor by hand, and yes we have to row ashore in the dinghy, etc etc. But you know what we don't have to do? We don't have to charge batteries more than 1 hour every 4th day, we don't have to mess with fidgety water pumps, we don't have to live with the uncomfortable glow of a chart plotter in the cockpit, we don't have to live with partway furled headsails not setting right, we don't have to worry that the autopilot is going to take a dump. That's my definition of comfort at sea, and all of those supposed 'inconveniences' make it more of an adventure for us.

First, you must realize that none of that crap is necessary, and that all of it represents very recent developments in the history of sailing. Then, you must understand the limitations of all that fancy gear. If you can live with them (and financially afford them), then by all means go right ahead. But know what to do when they fail.

This is seamanship – fabricating Arcturus' new centerboard lifting mechanism with sculptor Rodney Carroll in his Baltimore studio.

I heard recently a suggestion on signaling devices, being better "seen" at sea. Traditionally, you'd carry an assortment of flares, battery powered lights and radios and whatnot. Stuff that will work no matter how badly damaged the boat itself is. These were 'primitive', I heard. A simple AIS installation would solve the matter entirely, making all of that stuff redundant, I heard. And what would happen if the boat lost power? I wondered. Solar panels and a backup source of electricity! If you lose all power, I heard, you're in big trouble, and no amount of flares are going to help you.

This annoys me to no end. It's missing the point entirely! You cannot rely on technology to save the day. That's just not what ocean sailing is about. Everyone that decides to head offshore is taking a risk, perhaps bigger than they account for. It's wilderness out there, no matter how 'connected' you might feel with SPOT devices, sat phones, SSB and the like. You're on your own in a hostile world, and you'd better know how to take care of yourself.

Think about this the other way around. Pare it down. There are two or three major systems on a sailing boat – the hull, the rig and (sometimes) the engine. Keeping the water out of the hull is a given. Beyond that, keep the rig up, or the engine running (one of the two will suffice), and the boat will make it wherever it's going. A battery-powered (or oil-lit) set of nav. lights would make you better seen by others (and keep you legal), and a few gallons of water for the crew will keep you healthy. That's it folks. Anything beyond that only increases safety, convenience and comfort. You've got the essentials covered. This is how I believe any offshore passage should be approached. Start with the basics and build on that.

This is seamanship – studying the paper charts before departing St. Pierre last summer, en route to Ireland.

As a final note, I wonder what people think the definition of seamanship is? You hear stories of heroic rescues, of patched-together rudders and masts when something goes wrong at sea, and these are the thoughts that come to mind. But for myself, seamanship starts long before the voyage. Getting the boat ready, getting yourself ready, thinking of all the contingencies before they happen. The best seamanship then, is exhibited by the crew with the least amount of stories. The best seamanship is boring.

QUIZ ANY CURMUDGEON these days on the subject of proper wayfinding and you'll soon find yourself reefed down in a gale of conventional wisdom about the importance of paper charts, compass bearings, dead reckoning, sextants, and the like. But what curmudgeons tend to forget, as they rail on about how modern nav tools are corrupting us, is that many of their sacred cows are also just tools. They are more primitive, simpler, hence more reliable in one sense (if not more accurate), but still they are not the organic root of navigation.

Reduced to its purest form, human navigation (as opposed to more advanced forms used by migratory cetaceans, birds, and fish) is simply a matter of being able to look at something from a distance and say what it is. In a state of nature we can travel knowingly only as far as we can see.

I am now almost old enough to be a curmudgeon myself, and what I wonder about modern satellite navigation is this: will it ultimately impair our ability to just eyeball our way around a body of water? Will it cut us off from the root of navigation?

What satellites do is turn navigation into a video game. You are a throbbing dot on a glowing screen, and the object of the game is to maneuver your dot through the various hazards on the screen using the controls on your boat. All you have to see to do this (unless you're trying to do something very precise, like bring the boat to a dock or a mooring) is the screen itself. Everything else you see around you–the buoys, the landmarks, the textures and contours of the shore–precisely because you are not trying to extract any information from it, is little more than scenery.

Anyone up for some navigational Pac-Man?

Shut down the game and the scenery becomes more meaningful, and thus more vivid. The big reason for this is that the scenery now poses a threat, merely because it is unclear what is what. The tool we played with most before we had satellites and plotter screens, the paper chart, represents (more or less) the accurate recollections of those who have gone before us, but gives no hint of our own current location. To figure that out, we have to figure out what we are looking at and relate it to the chart on an ongoing basis.

One of those old-fangled analog chartplotters: position not included

This can be an intense process, particularly when you're sailing somewhere you've never been before. For example, I well remember the first time I ever sailed south down Buzzard's Bay into the teeth of a summer sea breeze, because my two buddies and I, as we slashed to windward through the vicious chop, spent the entire afternoon quarreling furiously over the identity of the distant humps we saw on the horizon through a frazzled glaze of salt spray. The only thing we agreed on was that the humps must be the Elizabeth Islands. What we disagreed on–at great length, and in multiple permutations–was which hump was which island. The debate, as I recall, was greatly aggravated by the fact that the most prominent landmark, a very tall windmill on what turned out to be Cuttyhunk, appeared nowhere on our chart.

One of the things I realized that day is that uncertainty is a powerful stimulant. It heightens the senses and sharpens the intellect (and an appetite for argument) in a wonderful way. I really learned Buzzard's Bay that afternoon in a way I never would have had we merely been monitoring our progress on a plotter screen.

What I also learned is that eyeball navigation must always be a debate.  Even when you're alone, sailing without debating partners, you must question every conclusion you reach and be willing to change it as soon as any doubt is cast upon it. You must revel in the uncertainty, and your mind and eye must always be probing, asking questions, testing assumptions. What if the chart is wrong? What if this buoy is missing? What if this tower is not visible at this angle? And so on. In the end, when you have solved the puzzle and know the identity of everything you see, your knowledge will be much more complete than it would be otherwise.

What's most intense is doing all this without a chart. This is truly organic navigation. I had the good fortune once to sail under a skipper who was a master of the art and thought nothing of entering harbors he'd never seen before regardless of whether he had charts or not. Probably the most impressive bit of eyeball navigation I ever participated in was when we entered Charleston Harbor in South Carolina without a chart… at night, no less.

This sounds a bit like hubris, of course, and it is. But we sure did feel proud of ourselves after we made it into the harbor and tied up the boat that evening. The flip side of the story, unfortunately, is that my skipper ultimately lost his boat, a large Alden schooner, eyeballing his way down a river in Spain one night. Even worse, he had charts for the river, and even a GPS onboard, but simply wasn't using them.

The moral of this story is not that you should never rely on your eyeballs to see where you are going. Rather it is that you should rely on them first, then use every means available to figure out what you are seeing. Nowadays I think what happens is the exact opposite. It seems we now teach young sailors to navigate by simply handing them an electronic device to play with. Often their inherent ability is measured by the extent to which they don't need a manual to master it. Then later, perhaps, as a "back-up," we try to teach them some traditional skills.

Yo, Dad! I think we better tack now!

Instead, we should first pry everything from their hands, give them nothing (except maybe some binoculars), and teach them how to see the world like true navigators. Then, when they receive more tools to augment their ability, they hopefully will not be too quick to take them for granted.

Written by Ben Ellison on Mar 20, 2013 for Panbo, The Marine Electronics Hub

I'm not a pagan but my first wedding was on the Summer Solstice in 1976 and the second was on the Vernal Equinox in 1993. So, yes indeed, today we're celebrating twenty years wonderfully together (though right now about a thousand miles physically apart). But I want to write about what largely drove those wedding date decisions: my fascination with celestial mechanics, largely acquired through marine navigation, particularly the celestial kind. I learned about the apparent and true motions of the heavenly bodies, the foundations of geography, and what makes this such a balanced day on earth… 

So today is one of two during our globe's annual revolution of the Sun when the axis it daily rotates on is tilted neither toward nor away from the Sun. Today is the day that the Sun appears to track directly over the equator, which is simply and naturally defined as the midway point between the two poles of that axis, also known as True North and True South. Roughly speaking and polar areas excepted, the equinox is the day that night and day are of equal length everywhere on earth, with the sun rising at 6 am and setting at 6 pm local time.

Today is also special in celestial navigation because the easiest and most fundamental calculation, the noon sight, is even simpler since there's no need to look up the Sun's declination in an ephemeris. If you were at sea you would start measuring the Sun's increasing altitude above the horizon a little before Local Apparent Noon (LAN) and stop measuring when the Sun appeared to get lower. You wouldn't even need to know what time it was as LAN is naturally self-defined as the moment the Sun reaches its zenith, when it must be either true north or south of your position on earth. Then you'd just make minor corrections for the height of your eye and possible atmospheric distortion, subtract the result from 90 degrees and, shazam, you'd know your latitude. (So given that I already know that I'm at 33° 40' 54"N today, I also know that the Sun will be about 66° above the horizon at high noon.)

Actually, if you very carefully time the moment of a noon sight LAN with an accurate chronometer, you can also calculate your longitude. That's because longitude and time are forever married measurements of earth's rotation, as keyed to True North as latitude, though without a natural start point. That's how it came to be that the Greenwich Observatory — which I got to visit on my second honeymoon — defines the prime (zero) meridian of longitude and we used Greenwich Mean Time before it was rebranded as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Celestial navigation gets a lot more complicated when time/longitude get involved but values like Local Hour Angle and Declination are really just extensions of the grid made natural by our polar rotation about every 23 hours and 56 minutes, with the other 4 minutes of 'time' being our orbit around the Sun…

Some navigators were happy to do celestial with just a check sheet and a calculator, but it makes more sense if you actually understand subtleties like the Equation of Time and why the planets wander amongst the stars between one nautical twilight and the next, when you are anxiously trying to find them before the horizon vanishes. And that understanding is also apt to connect you to ancient times when figuring out celestial mechanics was critical to safe passages and even nation building.

If you Google words like Equinox you'll find that the study of celestial mechanics has led some people in strange directions, but what moved me after a while was simply how pleasantly small and dumb it makes me feel, yet how well we little humans have organized our knowledge of what we can see. Did you realize, for instance, that if you are on the equator going zero knots Speed over Ground (SOG) you're still going a neat 60 knots per minute True East because the nautical mile is based on the circumference of the earth? Like the poles, the equator and the lat/long grid I take some comfort in natural standards as oppossed to more arbitrary human-based measurement units.

A wonderful place to get into all this is from the deck of ship sailing day after day, night after night, with just horizon and celestial bodies in sight. But that brings me around to a gripe I have about certain sailors and finally gets us to a point about marine electronics. Should a relatively small group of performance-oriented sailors get to define True Wind as relative to the surface of the water and not to True North. I don't think so!
   Here's the story. If you have a wind display on your boat, it's quite likely that True Wind is calculated simply by subtracting your boat's Speed Through the Water (STW) from the Apparent Wind Angle and Speed sensed by the cups and vane on your mast. In other words, the motion of the water the boat is traveling through is not accounted for, which is why it's somewhat better termed True Wind relative to water. However, this value was not only much easier to calculate before GPS came along but it's also very useful for establishing performance benchmarks. Once you've learned that your boat can do, say, 7.5 knots with the full main and #1 headsail at a certain "True Wind" angle and speed, you can use your instrument to duplicate or maybe improve on the performance because the vagaries of current are not involved. But as useful and omnipresent as this form of "True Wind" is, it's not really True, is it?

Many earthlings naturally think of True Wind as relative to our planet — just like True North, True Headings, and the lat/long system our charts are based on, not to mention the celestial mechanics I've been yammering about. And today true True Wind is relatively easy to calculate, being the difference between the COG/SOG vector and the Apparent Wind vector corrected to True Heading with electronic compass input. Dan, Johan, and I have been sparring over the details of this recently, which was part of my inspiration. A day isn't completely balanced without a wee rant.
   At any rate, I don't expect to change any sailor minds on this subject, but it would be nice if some stopped insisting that their unnatural form of True Wind was the only True Wind. And maybe some day we'll overcome the confusion with better terms like Ground Wind and Sailing Wind. In the meantime, here's wishing you a wonderful equinox. All is well aboard the M/V Gizmo with many installs in progress and all sorts of boating life to ponder.

Click here to read comments about this Panbo entry, or add your own.

Here's the full readout on what happened and the consequences:

At a hearing 30/05/2011 at Southampton Magistrates the Officer of the Watch of a fishing vessel pleaded guilty to one safety charge brought under Section 58 of the Merchant Shipping Act 1995. He was fined £1,700 plus costs of £6,435.

On the 20th August 2010 the Andrea had finished fishing and was returning to port in the Netherlands. The skipper and rest of the crew were below leaving Jan Baarssen alone on the bridge in sole charge of the vessel. The Andrea is a 36.5 metre beam trawler registered in the UK but is based in the Netherlands.

The Alexander von Humboldt was returning to Germany after a training voyage with a crew of fifty nine (59) consisting of thirty three (33) trainees and twenty six (26) full time crew. She is a large three masted sail training vessel registered in Germany. 

The visibility on the day was good (10 Km +), wind was southerly force 5-6 with weather being grey and overcast. 

During the afternoon of the 20th August 2011 the Alexander von Humboldt detected the Andrea on a steady bearing on its port side. The Andrea was not fishing and was the give way vessel. The

Alexander von Humboldt started sounding its whistle. The Andrea failed to give way. The Alexander von Humboldt also tried to contact the Andrea by VHF radio but had no response. The Andrea claims to have gone hard to starboard and when within 15-20 metres of the Alex von Humboldt, the Andrea was seen to go full astern. The Andrea struck the port quarter of the Alexander von Humboldt. It was a fairly low speed collision. 

Apart from some scratched paintwork, the Andrea was undamaged.

The Alexander von Humboldt was lucky to suffer only some dented shell plating with associated damage to internal wooden bulkheads and deck planking together with bent or buckled handrails. It was very fortunate that no harm came to the crew of the Alexander von Humboldt and that its rigging and watertight integrity remained intact.

Mr Jan Baarssen, 51, of Urk, Netherlands pleaded guilty for conduct endangering ships or persons. He was finerd£1,700 plus costs of £6,435.

In passing sentence the Magistrates stated that it was fortunate that they were no injuries especially among the sail training crew.

Mr David Fuller O.B.E., Principal Fishing Vessel Surveyor for the Eastern Region of the MCA stated: "This is yet another incident occurring on the return of a fishing vessel to harbour. Fishermen are reminded of the requirement to keep a good lookout at all times. Also that that the trip is not over until the vessel is safely tied up in port.

We would like to thank the German and Netherlands Police for their assistance in this matter."

Our first couple of nights after leaving La Paz we had strong coromuel winds, but after getting just another twenty miles or so north the nights have been silent. No swell—the beauty of the east coast of Baja—and not a ripple on the water. You can’t sleep better than that.

Today we motored an hour north to Puerto Escondido—it is time to fill up the water tanks, do some laundry, and stock up some fresh fruit.

We pulled up to the fuel/water dock and while I filled the tanks and gave the boat a quick rinse Ali and the kids went ashore to play. When I finished up I got my first chance to pull the boat off a lee shore single-handed. Like a pro I wrapped a stern line around a dock cleat and back up to myself, threw off the bow line, backed the boat up to get the front of the boat to swing out into the wind, and pulled away with a smug sense of satisfaction.

From there I motored out into the bay to pick up a mooring. I swung out around the mooring and let the wind drift me back into it. On the first swipe I picked up the line, got my line through, and tied her off. I glanced around discreetly but couldn’t spot one person who had witnessed my amazing accomplishments. If a tree falls in the forest but nobody is around to hear it does it still make a noise? Granted, in the catamaran I would have thought nothing of pulling off these tricks in a twenty knot wind, but I tell you what, these monohulls take some skills to maneuver.

One of the best things about our catamaran was the ability to lay down on the front trampolines, reach down and pick up a mooring line without a boat hook then hold the boat perfectly steady while the lines are tied off. With this boat we’re standing like eight feet above the mooring ball and there is no maneuvering—you get one shot—and in a breeze you have to be quick about it.

After getting settle in I headed to shore to join the gang and spend the afternoon in the much less appealing—but no less exciting to the kids—pool.

ATTENTION EARTH PEOPLE! As I write this I am approaching Bermuda, blasting along but 70 miles out on what seems a perpetual close reach, due for a landing sometime in the wee hours tomorrow, of which more later. What I really want to spout off about right now are inflatable tenders. I was thinking about this as we were preparing to leave Puerto Rico, while regarding our neighbors on a 45-foot Bristol next door, who were about to depart for Annapolis. They had just stowed their RIB tender for the passage, and it took up all of their foredeck. I mean ALL of it! On Lunacy, meanwhile… well, you see that photo up there?

No, that is not a spare sail. That’s is Lunacy‘s 9-foot inflatable tender, with a hard floor no less, rolled up and stuffed into the mainsail’s empty bag.

See here. There’s plenty of room for people to power-lounge and even handle sails on Lunacy‘s foredeck while underway. The stowed dinghy doesn’t get in the way at all, and can even be used (as demonstrated by my stalwart mate Chas. “May I Cast Off Now?” Lassen) as a convenient backrest.

I realize, of course, that RIBs have all sorts of performance advantages, but ultimately I don’t think their enormous popularity, at least as far as cruising sailors go, is quite rational. Their two humungous disadvantages–they are very heavy and take up a lot of space when stowed–outweigh their advantages by a long shot, IMHO, if you’re cruising on any sort of small to mid-size sailboat.

The sail bag idea came to me over the winter. When I bought our new Apex inflatable last fall, the salesman swore to me that, unlike all other inflatables on the market, his could be easily stowed away in the fabric valise it was delivered in. But of course he was lying through his teeth. I realized as soon as I unpacked it that I’d need a hydraulic press to squish it down small enough to get it back in again. I was loathe to leave the new dinghy uncovered on deck, getting baked by the hot tropic sun while we were away from the boat, and was very pleased to find it fit inside the mainsail bag just perfectly.

In all other respects, by the by, I am totally digging the new dink. With the special long oars I made, it rows quite well. Also, because it’s so much lighter than its predecessor, it planes much more easily with the outboard on.

Editor’s Note: Those studying my recent account of Lunacy‘s passage from Puerto Rico to Bermuda may have noticed that we did NOT find that abandoned Swan 48, Wolfhound, ex-Bella Luna , that I blogged about earlier. Ah, well… You can’t always find that needle in the haystack, but I can deliver on my promise to tell you about the time I delivered a Swan 48 down to the islands.

I HAD OFTEN delivered boats from the northeastern U.S. to the West Indies in early November. I had also done northbound trips from the Indies to New England in the spring. But I had never before been asked to take a boat south to the Caribbean in early April. Why, pray tell, would anyone want to do this? The answer, not surprisingly, involved a racing schedule.

The boat in question, Avocation, a Swan 48 that had recently changed hands, was now being managed by Hank Schmitt, of Offshore Passage Opportunities, and he planned to campaign the boat at Antigua Race Week. He needed to have it in St. Maarten by Thursday, April 21 (this was in 2005), so he could fly in and take it to Antigua in time for the start of Race Week on Sunday, April 24.

I met Hank and the boat at his home base in Huntington, Long Island, early on the morning of Wednesday, April 6. Hank had already assembled a pay-to-play crew, the members of which slowly trickled on to the scene as we attended to a few last-minute chores that afternoon. They were an excellent mix. We had two young deck-apes, Jordan and Nathan; two middle-aged sailors, John (a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces) and Keith (a small-business owner from Florida); plus one seasoned offshore veteran, Jim.

The weather charts I downloaded that evening were pretty bleak. The forecast was for a deep low generating gale-force winds to appear in the waters between Bermuda and the eastern U.S. on Saturday, April 9, right about the time I expected we’d be crossing the Gulf Stream. If I were in cruising mode, of course, I would have waited patiently for this low to pass, but since we were in delivery mode, and a no-go decision now meant that Hank could not possibly race at Antigua, I felt we had no choice but to set out as planned early on the morning of Thursday, April 7.

We screamed down Long Island Sound. Though conditions were initially light, by 1400 hours a moderate southwesterly had filled in. Flying full sail on a broad reach, we maintained speeds of over 9 knots all through the afternoon into the early evening. By 1640 hours we had cleared Plum Gut; by 1800 hours we had cleared Montauk and were reefed down in open water, close-reaching into what had become a quite brisk 25-knot breeze. The sea was very lively, and by sunset most of the crew was seasick.

The wind stayed strong until about noon the following day, moderated as it shifted south, then shifted southwest and became very light late in the day. Through all of this, we motorsailed aggressively, as I wanted to keep our speed at 7 knots or better in hopes of crossing the Stream before the arrival of the forecast gale.

The Proverbial Fan and What Hit It

The crew member who suffered the most from seasickness was John (or “Johnny Army,” as Nathan called him), our Special Forces man. A veteran of tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq, he later paid me what I considered to be an immense compliment when he described our voyage together as one of the most miserable experiences of his life. In spite of his malaise, however, he did everything I asked of him. He also anointed himself weather-data specialist and made repeated attempts to download charts en route via his government-issue Iridium satellite phone. He had practiced doing this on shore before joining the boat, but for some reason was unable to download data while offshore.

As a result, we didn’t know what to expect when Saturday, April 9, arrived. Would the gale materialize, or not? We had rain and a light southerly all through the day and, again, motored to keep our speed up. After midnight, however, the wind shifted southeast, dead against us, and started building. Soon it was blowing 30 knots, and again we reefed the boat down. It wasn’t quite a gale, but it was bad enough. There was still a lot of Gulf Stream current flowing under us, and the seas were very lumpy. Sailing closehauled on port tack under a double-reefed main and staysail, we had the starboard rail well buried and nobody aboard felt very happy.

In the midst of all this, not long after we shortened sail, I was awakened from a fitful sleep by a cry from the cockpit: “The instruments are out!”

I shouted up to the watch on deck to cope as best they could, then rushed to the nav desk, on the lee side of the boat, to check the electrical panel. My heart sank when my right foot landed in a large puddle of water as I slid in behind the desk. Then came the telltale scent of smoldering wiring. After lifting several floorboards, I soon figured out what was going on. We were taking on quite a bit of water, which was pooling up all along the lee side of the boat. Under the nav seat, low down on the starboard side, there was a collection of small step-down voltage converters, several of which were now submerged.

After checking the through-hulls, the prop shaft, and the rudder post, I concluded the water must be from some deck leak that was active only when the boat was well heeled. How to get rid of the water was another problem. Shallow bilges may help a boat sail fast, but they are nothing but trouble if you are taking on water under sail. With the boat well heeled, the intakes for both our electric and manual bilge pumps, located on the centerline in a shallow sump, were barely awash and could not pick up the bulk of the water on our lee side. The pumps could be used to keep more water from coming aboard, but they could not pump the boat dry.

As the sun rose Sunday morning, I was debating what to do about this. One option was to heave to and stand the boat up straight enough for the pumps to work. To keep the boat dry, however, I would have to do this repeatedly, which would slow us down. Another option was to re-route the manual bilge-pump’s intake line to the lee side of the boat where it could do some good. By 0900 hours, however, the question was moot, as conditions moderated and the boat’s heeling eased enough for the pumps to be useful again. Taking stock of our situation, I found we had lost all of our navigation instruments (but not the GPS, which fortunately was on a separate circuit), our autopilot, our VHF radio, and our 12-volt outlet, which we had been using to charge our two handheld satellite phones. We also found that the genoa leech was thoroughly shredded. This, presumably, happened while we were furling the sail in high winds the night before.

Jim enjoys some quality time on deck during our rough passage to Bermuda

Sunday night the sky was clear enough that we saw some stars, the first of our passage. All through Monday, we had a moderate northerly (at last!) pushing us along on a nice broad reach, really our first pleasant day of offshore sailing so far, and by 2200 hours Bermuda was in sight. During our final approach, I had a long debate with Bermuda Radio on our spare handheld VHF. Their ironclad policy was that boats entering St. Georges at night could not lie at the customs dock, but must instead anchor out in relatively deep water on the south side of the harbor and wait for customs to open in the morning. I was nervous about anchoring, however, because we were now pretty tired, we had no depthsounder, and I had a hunch our anchor windlass wasn’t working. (Hank had warned me it had not been inspected or tested since the boat was purchased.) In the end, I elected to heave to and wait outside for daylight, and Bermuda Radio apologized profusely for their intransigence.

As soon as the sun rose Tuesday morning, we eagerly got ready to enter the harbor. Almost instantly, however, one small problem presented itself. We unexpectedly ran out of fuel and had to switch tanks before motoring through Town Cut.

Damage Control in Bermuda

My hunch, it turned out, was correct. On testing the windlass in St. Georges, I found it exhibited unique symptoms. That is, it could drop chain, but could not pick it up. As soon as the windlass received power, it started merrily spooling chain overboard, and the only way to stop it, I soon learned on sprinting to the bow to seize the handheld control, was to keep a thumb firmly planted on the UP button. No matter how hard I pressed UP, however, the device refused to reel chain back in. Unfortunately, I was alone on the boat when I discovered this and so found myself trapped at the bow, unable to shut off the power, with the windlass control clutched in my hand.

Just then a tourist appeared on the wall where we had tied up the boat. “Where have you come from?” she asked in a congenial tone.

“Here, lady,” I answered eagerly, proffering the control unit. “Can you hold this for a minute???”

I also discovered the windlass could not be operated manually, which meant, in effect, we had no windlass at all. I had better luck, however, dealing with our other problems. Steve Hollis of Ocean Sails, truly a prince among sailmakers, agreed to repair our genoa leech on a very expedited basis. I also discovered the headsail furling line was very badly chafed in one spot, so I replaced it. Some minor damage to the mainsail leech was repaired with tape. Some sections of the overhead down below, which were continually falling down due to tired Velcro fasteners, were permanently screwed back into place.

St. Georges, Bermuda. We spent our visit here tied up on the bit of wall behind the red skiff

But the big issue, of course, was the electronics. At first I assumed we’d have to proceed without these, but after poking around I found the voltage converters under the nav seat could be easily interchanged. The converters were necessary, because Swans, like many contemporary European boats, have 24-volt house power systems. This facilitates the feeding of hungry devices like bow-thrusters, electric winches, and our useless windlass, but means that power for common electronics–such as depthsounders, wind instruments, stereo systems, autopilots, radios, etc.–must be stepped down to 12 volts to be useful. By engaging in some triage, I was able to reactivate useful systems, such as the instruments and the autopilot, at the expense of less useful systems, such as the stereo and courtesy lights. I also remounted the active converters higher up in the space under the nav seat in hopes they might better survive another bout of serious windward sailing.

Avocation lashed to the wall. Its concave shape presented a problem with the wind on our beam

Nathan (left) and Jordan (right) refueled the boat by jerry jug

By the morning of Thursday, April 14, we were ready to depart Bermuda–without John, unfortunately, as he had to fly home to the Army. What was also unfortunate was that we were trapped in place by a stronger than expected south wind that sprang up during the night and pinned us firmly to the concrete wall where we had tied up. Because the wall was concave, I was afraid to spring off it, for fear of damaging our flawless topsides. So that morning we watered and refueled the boat via jerry cans (we were, ironically, just a few yards from the fuel dock), and by 1400 hours, fortunately, the wind moderated and shifted southwest, so at last we were able to set off again.

Adventures in Fuel Management

On leaving Bermuda, I regaled the crew with tales of the easterly tradewinds. “Just a couple of days of motoring through light stuff,” I promised them, “then we’ll be screaming along on some kind of reach.”

But reality, as so often happens, made a liar of me. We did initially sail on a close reach out of St. Georges, on a moderate southwesterly wind, but this soon shifted dead on our nose. The following morning the breeze built briefly to over 30 knots, and again we took on water courtesy of our mysterious deck leak, but fortunately this time the converters were high and dry to windward. From that point forward, with rare exceptions, we had incessant rain and either light headwinds or no wind. As a result, we again motored aggressively, hoping not to beat a gale this time, but simply to get quickly to the trades.

Late on Saturday, April 16, we again unexpectedly ran out of fuel. In all we had about 70 gallons of diesel aboard, divided between two integral tanks, plus an extra six gallons in a jerry can. The first time we ran a tank dry, going into St. Georges, I had simply been negligent, as the fuel gauge read very close to zero. But this time I was taken aback, as according to the gauge we still had a quarter of a tank left. The gauge, it seemed, read very differently depending on which tank was engaged.

Motoring through the light stuff. Jordan enjoys a book while the autopilot steers

After switching tanks, we motored aggressively for another 24 hours, but as we got further and further south without finding the trades, I became more and more circumspect and ran the engine at lower RPMs for shorter periods of time. I also dug out the owner’s manual and spent some time consulting the boat’s fuel-consumption tables. Finally, as we flogged along through weak rain squalls very early on the morning of Wednesday, April 20–with some 90 miles still to go before we reached St. Maarten–I concluded, based on my study of the tables, that we had only about five gallons of fuel left. Thus, when the wind (again) died completely at about 0430 hours, I felt we had no choice but to keep the engine off and sit motionless awaiting its return. It now seemed very unlikely that we would reach St. Maarten by Thursday.

Fortunately, we didn’t wait long, as a moderate southeasterly soon filled in. Though this wind grew much weaker and more variable during the day, we were able to sail the boat closehauled more or less toward St. Maarten at an average speed of less than 2 knots. To do so, however, required very careful steering. The crew by now, after nearly a week of quarrelsome, rainy weather, was too bored to pay much attention to the helm, so I steered the boat through most of the day. By 2000 hours we were still, however, 65 miles from St. Maarten, and I was convinced we would never arrive on time.

But then, suddenly, we got lucky. The wind grew stronger, shifted in our favor, and all through the rest of the night we sailed straight at St. Maarten at 5 knots or better. Around sunrise Thursday morning we cleared the east end of Anguilla. By 0900 hours we had turned on the engine again and were rounding Pointe Basse Terre, at the western tip of St. Maarten. We figured we would, unfortunately, be just a few minutes late for the 0930 bridge opening into Simpson Bay Lagoon. But then, while monitoring the bridge’s radio traffic, we made an amazing discovery–it wasn’t 0900 after all! It was 0800, as St. Maarten, despite being well east of Bermuda, is an hour behind Bermuda time.

I felt like Phineas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days, pulling victory from the clutches of defeat, thanks to the unexpected gift of an extra hour. We arrived at Simpson Bay with more than half an hour to spare and, after idling around a bit, started to queue up to enter the lagoon. But then, just as suddenly, our luck ran out. Just five minutes before the bridge was to open, the engine again faltered and died. Once again–literally just a few hundred yards from our final destination–we’d run out of fuel.

The drawbridge at Simpson Bay Lagoon. We got stuck (temporarily) on the wrong side

It all came right in the end, however. We anchored in the bay (with no help from the windlass, of course) and a tow boat came out to pull us into the lagoon when the bridge opened again at 1130 hours. Just an hour after we finally got the boat secure in a marina berth, Hank arrived from the airport. He was delighted to learn that the fuel tanks were empty. This meant he could take on the very minimum amount needed to reach Antigua and so would be carrying as little extra weight as possible when the racing began.

What The @#!*& Happened To The Trades???

After finishing my wrong-way delivery (it obviously would have been better to do this beforehand) I did some research on weather patterns in the Caribbean during the month of April. I found the following on page 206 of Don Street’s Transatlantic Crossing Guide (W.W. Norton, 1989):

One thing I can predict, after thirty years of sailing in the Caribbean, is what I call the April Calm. It doesn’t show up on the weather charts, but every year for the past twenty-five I have noted that sometime between the last days of March and early May there is a spell of four to eight days where the wind goes flat. April is thought of as a windy month, and so it is; but sometime in that period—during the [spring racing] regattas—will come that stretch of calm weather, which means either a few light-air races or trouble in getting from one regatta to the next on time. Don’t ask me why, but it’s true.

Need I say more? In retrospect, of course, I wished I’d carried a little more fuel on our passage south, and I now believe I should motored at lower engine speeds to conserve what fuel I had. I also wished–both because of the forecast gale on the Bermuda leg, and because of all the light air we found en route to St. Maarten–that we had started our trip a couple of days earlier. In any event, even if you are traveling north (as most sane people do) at this time of year, you’d do well to remember the April Calm when planning your passage.

PS: Avocation is still for sale as I pull the trigger on this post and is aggressively priced!

Schooner Arcturus in Auckland, New Zealand (2006)

Incredibly, it seems, I’m getting more and more emails from people looking to me for advice on how to get out and go sailing. I was in the exact same position not very long ago, and it still confounds me as to why in the world people are asking me!? But it does feel pretty cool too.

I got a recent email from a young guy in Australia looking for advice, and I asked him if I could publish our email exchange here. He said yes. This is it:

“Good morning Andy,

Sorry for bombarding you, i understand the busy life of a sailor myself. My plans have recently changed so i thought i would give you an update before you replied to my original email.

The origional plan to buy a boat has gone out the window as i was relying on a second friend to help with the investment but my goal is still to see as much of the world as I can through sailing. The easiest was i can see to achieve this by crewing / signing up as a delivery hand or even chasing some professional qualifications. Obviously paid or subsidized work would help me stay at sea for longer as i plan to make this my priority and not do other work.

Do you have any advice on training i should target, whether formal qualification of just experience? Also any sources of information such as websites i could look at?

The main qualification I can see that leads to professional work is the Yachtmaster but from what i understand you either need alot of experience behind you already or alot of money to pay for a fast track program.

Thanks again, hope your enjoying your time out on the water.

Blake”

…and my response, written this morning…

“Hey Blake!

Okay, no excuses from me for how long it’s taken me to reply to you! I really appreciate the fact that you took the time to write me – part of the reason I think is that it doesn’t feel like very long ago that I was in your same position, writing to guys like John Kretschmer and John & Amanda Neal asking for the same advice. In fact it feels downright ridiculous that anyone is asking me for advice, because frankly I’m not sure how I ended up here! But I’ll do my best to help you out, and hopefully can inspire you along the way.

First things first – no matter what you decide to do with your life, sailing or not, NOBODY is going to hand you anything. There are no secrets to success in life – I kind of compare it to losing weight or getting fit – there are no special formulas, simply eat healthy and exercise. Applying that to your case, you gotta just go out and do it. You’ll be amazed at how the universe lines up for you when you put your mind to something. And furthermore, never say ‘no’ to any opportunity that comes up, unless your gut tells you so (for example, don’t get on a shitty boat and risk your life – I’ve left three boats at the dock so far in my delivery career, one in Bermuda, one in the Panama Canal, so don’t be a hero. You’re gut will tell you when to drop it). So there’s my philosophical answer.

Practically, offshore sailing is one of the easier things to do in life (generally speaking – long distance, bluewater sailing involves a lot of responsibility for the boat and crew, but not too much actual work besides sail trimming and cooking), and one of the scariest things for most people, even sailors. Which is good for you if you decide you like it – there are not that many people doing it!

I personally think the best way to get offshore is to volunteer as a crewmember with either a delivery (be careful, some delivery skippers are real jerks), or a family on an extended cruise (again be careful here – if they have kids, make sure you get along with them!). I personally like taking new people offshore on deliveries as a 3rd or 4th crewmember because I enjoy the training and I love sharing my passions with other people. And since they’re the 3rd or 4th, I know that the mate and I (who is usually my dad or someone I pay with professional qualifications) can sail the boat 2-up if the new person is totally useless, there isn’t much risk involved. Expect to pay airfare to and from the boat in such cases, but the captain/owner should pay for your food and living expenses onboard.

There are two ways of doing this – sign up for online websites (oceancrewlink.com is probably the best and cheapest) or simply get out and meet people on the water. When I lived in Brisbane during a semester of uni, I’d take the train to the coast and go racing on Wednesday nights just to get out sailing and meet people – you never know where those opportunities might lead, who you might meet. The online stuff is pretty tough to do if you go in cold, meaning you have no connection to the boat or anything – it’s hard for you to judge the boat and skipper, and it’s hard for them to judge you without a reference. So sometimes dock walking works better, particularly in places like Bermuda out here where it’s a way-station for people moving boats around. I will also always post crew opportunities that come my way on my Facebook page, so keep and eye out for that.

I’d avoid the professional route until you get some miles under your belt. I did the Yachtmaster and it’s expensive, and you’re right, you need lots of miles or lots of money for the fast track. You can earn the experience first by pursuing volunteer gigs, then go and get the license if you think you want to continue with it.

The rally boats are the best way to crew because you know they are well fitted out – we require certain safety gear at a very high level. The skipper might be lame, but you can feel good knowing the boat and it’s gear is in good shape.

Hope that helps!

+Andy”

Our anchor chain has been looking iffy for a while now.  Not “terrible”, not “dangerous”, but not exactly the way you would want a piece of equipment that is holding your vessel in place to look.  So, much gnashing of teeth and a great deal of money later, Papillon has a new 12 mm short-link G4 chain.

We decided to add 75 m of eight-strand rode to our 65 m chain.  We wanted 24 mm, but they only had 28 mm.  Well, okay.  Bigger is better, right?  Now.  How to attach the chain?  No problem – the good people at the shop spliced in an eye for us, so we could shackle the chain on and be done with it.

Except, the eye is the size of my head.  Not really going to fit through the hawsehole out of the anchor locker, which is an opening the size of my wrist.

Yeah, no.  Not happening.

Home-splicing it was.  For those of you who have never had to try it, splicing means partially unravelling the fancy rope you just paid a fortune for, then following a simple series of twenty or so steps to weave it through your equally expensive chain.  The idea is that, when you are done, the rope is so tightly wound through the chain the two won’t separate.  Ever.  Ever, ever.  Because, if they do, some sad night you are going to drift away.

Instructions in hand, Erik and I got started.

Step 1: Weave your rode through the final link of your chain.

And we stopped.

Didn’t we just experience this situation?

Here we discovered the true difference between 24 mm and 28 mm eight-braid.  We had no trouble with strands 1-6.  Strand 7 was a little dicey, but we made it.  But strand 8?  Ha.  Ha!  Not going through for love nor money.

And so the problem solving began.

What we needed, clearly, was more tension on the line to make a bigger hole.  First, we tried a tug of war.  All that accomplished was that Erik pulled me across the ground, and I got gravel in my pants.

Out came the bosun’s chair.

Be sure to feed Mom chocolate to add much-needed mass.

Not enough weight.  Out of the chair, Mom.

Let’s hang some real mass on that rope!

I clung to Erik’s legs as he spun in a crazy circle.  Again he tried to thread a garden hose through a needle.  Again he failed.

I stepped away for a few minutes to see what the kids were up to.  They have been making excellent use of the few green spaces in the yard, building forts and fairy houses and barges.  When I returned, I discovered that the rear end of our station wagon now floated ever-so-slightly above the ground.

Approved use for a trailer hitch, I’m sure.

Not satisfied with lifting a ton and a half into the air, he got back in the bosun’s chair.

Don’t give me that face – this wasn’t my idea.

Not.  Happening.

Finally, we unravelled the last strand into its component threads.  And I hear you splicing purists wailing in the background.  I know.  I know it is all the delightful twisting clockwise and anti-clockwise that gives rode its strength.  I know.  But we had no other choice.  We lifted our car in the air, for crying out loud!

Tiny strand by tiny strand, we got the last bit of the line through link one.

Oh, yeah!

The rest was a snap.  Well, relatively speaking.  We only had to feed four strands through each of the subsequent links.

And here we are.  Splice of the gods.

When it was done, Erik strolled away with a spring in his step.  I bent down to take a second look at our job.  Not bad, not bad.  I closed one eye, and lined up my wrist with the splice.  Hmm.  Is it really going to fit through the hawsehole?

I think I’ll have the girls distract Erik while I measure it tomorrow.

I didn’t come up with this idea myself. I learned it crewing for a guy down in Florida who always stored not one, but two rope anchor rodes on his foredeck while cruising. Even on offshore passages he kept them out there, with the coils of rode lashed to stanchion post bases, and never had any problems.

The big advantage of doing this, if you have a boat with a belowdecks rode locker rather than a modern anchor well, is that it saves you the bother of somehow getting all the rope down the hawsehole. Chain is heavy enough that it will just fall down there on its own, but rope wants encouraging. Either you need a crew member below pulling the rope down into the locker as you raise your anchor, or you have to shuttle back and forth between the foredeck and locker doing it yourself.

If you’re cruising somewhere with lots of sticky (or worse, stinky) mud on the bottom, storing your rode on deck also keeps all the mud that clings to your rode out of the interior of the boat. Unlike a chain rode, which can be quickly rinsed off as it comes aboard, a rope rode tends to want to stay attached to its mud, at least as long as it is wet. Much of the mud will fall off after it dries up and turns to dirt, and if the rode stays on deck, the dirt will too.

I don’t like stinky and/or icky anchor lockers, so when I was cruising on Crazy Horse, my Alberg 35 yawl, which I always anchored on rope, I often kept my rode on deck when cruising up and down muddy rivers and creeks (see photo up top). Like my old skipper in Florida, I just kept it in coils on the foredeck.

If you don’t like the idea of keeping loose coils of rope on deck, you can trying storing your rode in a bag or bucket. I always like to store a spare rope rode this way, as it makes it very easy to deploy when you need it. If you have two anchors out, having at least one of the two rodes in a bag or bucket also makes it much easier to disentangle things when the rodes end up twisted. Just uncleat the rode in the bag or bucket, pass it in its container around the other rode however many times is necessary, and you’re done.

I’ve just finished A Voyage for Madmen, Peter Nichol’s excellent chronicle of the original Golden Globe race. In it he recounts an exchange between a young Robin Knox-Johnston and the attending customs officer when Knox-Johnston returns from his round-the-world sail. Asked his port of embarkation and his port of last call he answers, for both, Falmouth, England.
Well, we’ve met no customs officers and only gone a couple hundred miles but last night I recalled this line with a smile as we bowled into Beaufort Harbor under our tiny storm jib alone. Two days before we had left another Beaufort, this one two hundred and fifty miles to the Southwest, and on the way my little twenty-eight foot boat brought us admirably through high seas and gale-force winds, the gnarliest conditions I’ve ever sailed in.

We left Beaufort, SC on Wednesday afternoon, trying to time our departure so that the six-foot tide would take us out to sea against a stiff southerly breeze. We screwed it up though, caught up in last-minute tasks, and found ourselves nearly ten miles from the end of the channel when the tide turned. It took us hours to beat out to open sea. Even with my trusty little Yanmar thudding away the only way we could get some traction against the combined force of incoming tide and ocean swells was to tack back and forth, zig-zagging ponderously across the channel like you might when riding a bicycle up a steep hill.

Eventually, finally, we broke free and turned East for the best part of our trip, a fast and comfortable broad reach under jib and reefed main. As we turned North we let out the sails and by the next morning we were sailing wing-in-wing, which we kept up until late that night. In the afternoon we caught a fine mackerel but were too fatigued and queasy to think about eating it. It went into the icebox for later.

When I came on watch around two in the morning on our second night we were passing Cape Fear. We had earlier dropped and lashed down the jib and were under reefed mainsail alone with a gathering storm to our West. With wind and swells building and the boat running down the face of each wave at eight and nine knots it was getting harder and harder to keep on track, even after I put in the second, and final reef. Still, the wind was building.

We had earlier flown my storm jib for a little while, just to try it out, but had foolishly switched  back to the normal one just before dark. Now it seemed we would need that sail again. Although it was late, we were all tired, and conditions were pretty wild on deck it was becoming obvious that even double-reefed the main was just too much sail and that the only way to keep the boat safely under control would be to crawl forward to un-hank and bag up the jib, replace it with the storm jib, and then drop the main altogether. With a forecast of fifteen to twenty knots I simply hadn’t considered that we might end up overpowered even with both reefs in the main and I was about to pay the price of that lack of foresight.

I confess that this photo of a pair of waterspouts is from a different storm we managed to avoid a few days before. Fearful of getting my camera doused I only managed a couple pictures on this leg.

Of course we had jacklines and harnesses rigged but it is still a hell of a job removing and replacing a foresail on a small boat in ten and fifteen foot ocean swells, especially in the dark. Then, just to make things a little worse, I’ve found that the splices on my Dynex Dux rigging make it so that hanks must be added and removed about four feet up the forestay, meaning in order to do the job you have to kneel, or stand, on the bucking foredeck. I roused two more crewmembers and we got to work. Luke and I clipped in and went forward to wrestle the sails while Chris took the helm. By now we were actually sailing away from our destination as the wind was so strong that the only way to manage the helm was to sail close-hauled with the main sheeted out on the edge of luffing.
Eventually, Luke and I were able to get the jibs switched out with no loss or damage. At points we were half-submerged as the boat pounded into the occasional ill-timed swell but aside from the sort of fear which must accompany an adrenaline rush it did not feel particularly unsafe. It was, apparently, too much excitement for one of our inflatable lifejackets- quite a few hours later I was rudely awakened from a well deserved nap as it self-inflated with a terrific hiss, I suppose in protest against this earlier ill-treatment.

When the storm jib was up we moved back to the main, and here ran into a problem of engineering. When I set up my reefing system I used aluminum pop rivets for everything, as they were all I had on hand. Tied up to the dock on a pleasant spring day I was not quite thinking about this sort of moment, but I should have been. As we sheeted the main in to help with flaking (or, more accurately, frantically piling) there was a huge boom and something went slack. I could just make out a block waving around so I guessed what had happened and let go the halyard, yanking down the sail as quick as I could and holding it in a bear hug while Luke tied it off. We later confirmed that all six rivets holding the padeye and turning block for the second reef had sheared off when we tried to sheet the sail in!

I suppose I’ll replace those with stainless steel!

Still, the main thing was done and this was a small price to pay for being back under control. With the mainsail down and lashed and the storm jib up we were done mucking about on deck and able once again to turn downwind and get back on course. Actually, we were flying along! With just that tiny storm jib we were running well above hull speed, averaging six and seven knots with the GPS jumping above ten as we surfed down the biggest waves. I’ve no wind instruments on the boat but judging from the bits of spindrift starting to break we were getting gusts near forty knots. This would be winds of Force seven or eight, to put our run between Beauforts on the Beaufort Scale.

Not counting storms I rode out as a child in the relative safety and comfort of my bunk this was the craziest sailing I’ve ever done. It was exhilarating, sure, and plenty scary at times, but it also wasn’t so bad, really. I’ve a well-found boat, built to take much worse than this and refitted with care. We had all the proper safety gear- jacklines, lifejackets, harnesses, and we used them all, even when just at helm in the cockpit (breathe, mother dear). All the same, it was the first time any of us had sailed in these conditions and they were magnified by the smallness of our boat and the foolish way I had arranged our sails. I know that next time I will be better prepared and will act more quickly- there was a period when I knew we ought to replace the regular jib with the storm sail but I was tired and I decided to wait. I won’t make that mistake again!

The morning after our storm

By the time we were back on course and under control Luke and I were exhausted and went below to pass out for a couple hours. When I came back up to take the helm I was surprised to find that the wind and seas were holding steady and we were still flying along under just that little sail. Over the next twelve hours things settled out a bit but winds remained strong and with the light of day the seas looked mountainous, looming up behind our little craft to raise us into a view of miles of windswept whitecaps before dropping us into troughs which obscured all but the nearest waves. At one point I heard a howling in the sky and looked up to see a pair of military jets burst out of a cloud to dodge and weave around each other. They were firing some kind of flares at each other in a mock battle and it seemed somehow to fit the scene, a dogfight in the air to match our struggle with the sea. We kept on that way, under storm jib and no other canvas until making port in Beaufort, NC nearly a full day later, and all that time we were averaging a good five or six knots. Altogether we ran two hundred and fifty miles in forty-eight hours, a record for the boat, and for nearly half of it we were flying just that one sturdy little sail. Then we slept, blissfully and with dedication.

I’ve been posting a bit lately about abandoned boats, and my SAILfeed colleague Clark Beek has rightly pointed out that it is high time I bloviated on the subject of salvage rights. Many people believe that if you find an abandoned boat it automatically belongs to you, and yes, I intentionally played into and exploited that popular misconception in the title of my first post on Wolfhound, the abandoned Swan 48 now adrift 600 miles east of Bermuda. But in fact the law isn’t that simple.

Salvage law is very old and dates back to medieval times, when men went to sea primarily to engage in commerce. A vessel in trouble often carried cargo worth as much or more than the ship itself, and the men attracted by her distress were just as likely to plunder her as to save her. Thus the core principle of salvage law has always been that honest men who risk their own lives and vessels trying to save other vessels should be very well rewarded.

Under current U.S. admiralty law, which conforms to international salvage law as laid out in the Salvage Convention of 1989, assistance rendered another vessel is considered salvage when: 1) the assisted vessel is subject to a reasonable apprehension of marine peril; 2) the assistance is voluntary; and 3) the assistance is successful in whole or part.

A successful salvor is NOT entitled to just keep the salved vessel, under any circumstances, but is entitled to a generous award. The amount of the award, under the law, is based on the following factors: 1) the value of the vessel and its contents after the salvage is complete; 2) the salvor’s skill and initiative in minimizing damage to the environment; 3) the degree of success obtained by the salvor; 4) the level of peril to which the salvaged vessel was subject; 5) the salvor’s skill and initiative in saving the vessel, human lives, and other property; 6) the salvor’s labor and expenses; 7) the amount of risk run by the salvor; 8) the promptness of the services rendered; 9) the availability and use of any alternative salvage resources; and 10) the readiness, efficiency, and value of the salvor’s vessel and equipment.

Consider all these factors together, and you’ll note they strongly favor the salvor. The idea being that salvors should not only be compensated for their time and trouble; they should also receive a substantial premium as an inducement to render assistance in the first place. In a “low-order” salvage, where the risk to a salvor is negligible and the salvaged vessel was in little danger, the premium will be relatively small, but in a “high-order” salvage the total award can, under the law, be as high as (though it may not exceed) 100 percent of the value of the salvaged vessel and its contents. Also, salvors automatically get a high-priority lien on any vessel they save and may keep the vessel until the owner posts security.

This, of course, is where the misconception come from. If you are entitled to an award equaling 100 percent of the value of a vessel, some owners and most insurers may well propose that you simply keep the vessel, as this saves them the administrative and transactional costs of selling it to pay you off. Even if you don’t want the vessel, they can force the situation by not paying you, thereby compelling you to seize the boat.

In the immediate example, salvaging Wolfhound, a vessel that most likely has already been given up for lost by its insurer (the owner, I assume, has been paid off and is out of the picture), would certainly entitle you to a “high-order” award. You will have either towed the vessel hundreds of miles, or you will have put crew aboard to rehabilitate and navigate the boat to shore, a decidedly risky proposition. The vessel, in perfect condition, is worth $500-600K. In her present condition, she may be worth $200K or so. So I’d guess you’d have a good chance of getting to keep her… if you wanted her.

On the other hand, if Wolfhound drifts on to a beach somewhere, like Running Free on Martha’s Vineyard, and all you do is put a line on her and pull her off, it is not likely you’ll have earned an award equal to 100 percent of her value.

When Is a Tow Not a Tow?

The more pertinent question for most of us involves commercial towing services like Sea Tow and TowBoat/US. Lots of people sign up as members of these services and pay a flat annual fee they think covers any troublesome situation they might get themselves into. But in fact in many circumstances where you most need help, your service contract does not apply and the guys helping you are entitled to claim a salvage award, which can be very large, depending on the circumstances.

In one particularly egregious example I found online, a guy in a leaky fishing skiff, a Sea Tow member, reports that a Sea Tow skipper demanded a $2,000 salvage fee after loaning him a pump in a marina for not more than 10 minutes. This sort of abuse no doubt is the exception rather the rule, but the current legal landscape does give the towing services a huge advantage.

The fact is nearly everything a towing service does is salvage under the law, for the definition of “marine peril” has historically been very broad. The peril need not be immediate, and any vessel that is disabled and adrift, and certainly if it is aground, is held to be “in apprehension” of danger. Most companies do however perform basic services, like straight tows of disabled vessels, “soft” ungroundings, or fuel drops, for a straight hourly fee, or for free, if you’re a dues-paying member. But different companies draw the line between salvage and “basic services” in different places. These differences are normally defined in the company contracts you sign (or impliedly agree to), but in almost all cases the bottom line is the same: when you’re really in trouble and need help the most, the amount you pay in the end can conceivably run as high as the value of your boat.

Is this fair? Most insurance companies, though they pay the bulk of salvage claims, don’t have a problem with it. They recognize that competent towing services spend a great deal of money on vessels and equipment. They appreciate the fact that these people are on call 24/7. And, of course, they would much rather pay a claim for a portion of a vessel’s value (which is what normally happens) than be confronted with a total loss.

How To Deal With Salvors

The best policy, of course, is to deal with them as little as possible. If you are serious about cruising, you should be prepared to get yourself out of trouble in most low-risk situations. If you do need to call for assistance you should:

A) Get in touch with your insurer and let them negotiate directly with the salvor if possible. Most salvors will welcome a chance to cut a deal up front, as this means they get paid much faster. A good marine insurer will maintain a 24-hour claims service. Note, too, some insurers limit their salvage exposure; a good policy will cover you for 100 percent of the value of your boat.

B) If you can’t reach your insurer (or don’t have one) negotiate yourself before any assistance is rendered. Never assume you’re contracting for a straight tow or other “basic services,” even when dealing with a towing service you are a member of. Establish clearly whether or not you’re in a salvage situation and understand how the bill will be calculated. Don’t be afraid to use your leverage, which is that a salvor cannot aid you against your will. Don’t be afraid to get on the radio and call other services for help if the people on the scene are not reasonable. (Note, however, salvors can act to save your vessel without your permission if you are not on the scene or if you do not expressly forbid it. The law presumes you want your boat saved, so you must be clear and firm when refusing help.)

C) If the sh*t is hitting the fan and there is no time to negotiate, you should at least establish that the salvor is working on a no cure/no pay basis. Under the law, they are not entitled to an award if they don’t save your boat. There is, however, one exception to this rule, which is that salvors do get paid something if they prevent or minimize environmental harm while failing to save your boat, which is only fair, as you’d be on the hook for the damage done in any event.

The Bottom Line advice: When choosing a towing service to join as a member (which in most cases is well worth it if you do much coastal sailing), study the service contract closely. Find the language describing what services are covered and what is considered salvage (or “vessel recovery”) and make sure you understand it. The more precise the language the better. You can assume the service provider will try to take advantage of any vague “weasel words” (as I used to call them in law school). Also, you want an arbitration clause. You certainly do not want to have to go to federal court to settle a dispute over payment (or anything else).

Holy moly. All this chatter from Charlie Doane about abandoned sailboats, and look what Matt Rutherford has turned up in mid-Atlantic. He’s apparently the second person who’s found – and boarded – Wolfhound (ex Bella Luna)  in the last two weeks.

Matt – famous for his record-breaking Solo the America’s voyage – and Nikki have been at sea since early June on Matt’s new steel Colvin schooner on their first research voyage for their newly minted Ocean Research Project. It was in the midst of this voyage that they spotted the Swan (and were offered a bounty to tow it to Bermuda). Read Matt’s account below, and follow their progress (and donate!) at www.oceanresearchproject.org.

Wolfhound – Day 55

The day after we finished our research we were sitting on the back of the boat enjoying an early dinner. Nikki suddenly stopped eating and said ‘look there is a sail boat over there’. It looked strange to me as the sails were not up and it seemed to be drifting around. Our first thought was that someone might be in need of some assistance so we changed course and turned toward the drifting vessel. As we passed close by I yelled out ‘HELLO’ half expecting to see some unshaven desperate sailor pop his head out but nothing happened. Nikki warned me that if I went onboard the sailboat I might find a dead body. I had to see if someone was in danger so I jumped into our flimsy kayak and paddled over then climbed aboard the injured sailboat. After a full inspection of the boat I found that it was abandoned.

The boat was a 48 foot Swan named Wolfhound full of nice gear. I could have easily striped the boat but I wanted to do the right thing. I found the owners phone number and the number for his insurance company and called them both telling them I found Wolfhound the 48 foot Swan and asked them what they would like me to do. As expected the owner wanted his boat and asked if I could tow it to the Chesapeake Bay. I told him I would be lucky if I could tow it 715 miles to Bermuda. I thought the sailboat still had a lot of life left in her and we could use the salvage money. It was worth a try.

The next day I returned to Wolfhound and pumped all the water out of the bilge. I had to secure the mast because the forestay and backstay were broke. I secured the mast with a few halyards, the mast wouldn’t be able to support a sail but at least the mast wasn’t going to fall down. She was dragging an anchor which I pulled back on board and tied off. I also took down the ripped up main sail and stowed it away inside the cabin. I had done everything I could to secure the Swan.

Nikki and I discussed our game plan. We didn’t have enough fuel to tow Wolfhound all the way to Bermuda so the next day I was going to kayak back to the Swan and pump out its fuel tank hoping to get at least 30 gallons of diesel. The next day I disconnected one of my ships batteries placed in in the kayak and paddled back to the Swan. I used a waste pump that I found which was brand new still in its box and my big group 31 battery that I brought and started to pump Wolfhounds fuel tank dry. I was disappointed when I only got 12 gallons of diesel. I tried to bring back a jerry can with the Kayak but the Kayak flipped, I was being drug behind the Swan with one hand on the kayak and the other hand on the swim ladder. I dragged myself and the kayak back onboard and decided there was no way to get my battery and three jerry jugs back to my boat using the little kayak. After searching around I found a Zodiac inflatable on Wolfhound so I pumped it up and threw it overboard. At least now I have a good way to shuttle the 12 gallons of diesel and my big battery back to my boat. Then craziest thing happened. On the way back to my boat the bottom fell out of the dingy. One minute I’m just rowing along and the next minute I’m looking down at nothing but water. My 100 pound battery I brought with me had a line attached to it and the line nearly rapped around my leg. If it had it would have taken me to the bottom of the ocean with it. I struggled to get back to my boat and climbed aboard, but I did manage to save the 3 jerry cans that had the 12 gallons of fuel in them. Nikki and I set aside 20 gallons of fuel in reserve and decided if we can’t get Wolfhound to Bermuda with the remaining fuel then we cut her loose and use the 20 gallons of reserve fuel to get to Bermuda without her.

The next day we spotted a freighter and asked the freighter if it could spare 50 gallons of diesel. At first they were hesitant but when the saw that we were towing a sailboat the freighter agreed to help. I had to pull up next to a slow moving freighter, stay 10 feet from its hull and maintain a prefect course in order to get the fuel. It took every bit of skill I had to hold my boat in that position for an hour as the guys on the freighter lowered one jerry jug at a time down to Nikki. It was absolutely nerve racking. You never want to be that close to a freighter in the open ocean, but if we could pull it off we would have enough fuel to easy tow the boat to Bermuda.

As we pulled away from the freighter we were all smiles. We now had enough fuel to motor to Bermuda. We were going to pull it off. A few hours later I noticed our RPM gauge was jumping around and the engine was starting to struggle. I backed down the throttle and the engine died immediately. I said to Nikki ‘we must have got dirty diesel, I’ll change the fuel filter’. I changed both fuel filters and bled the air out of the engine and she still wouldn’t start. It was getting dark so I thought it best to get some rest and deal with it tomorrow. The next day I took my oil extraction pump and jury rigged it to my primary fuel filter. This way I could pump all the dirty fuel out of the fuel tank through the fuel filter and into jerry jugs. By doing this I would clean all the fuel and then I could pour it back in the tank. I had to sacrifice two more fuel filters but it went remarkably well and now all the fuel was clean. I only had one fuel filter left but we should be okay. I reconnected the primary fuel filter to the engine, we bled out the air and — nothing. The engine still wouldn’t start. I spent the next 36 hours bleeding and re-bleeding my engine until I had to finally except that the fuel I got from the freighter was so bad that it ruined my fuel injection pump. There is no way to fix that out at sea, my engine was dead.

That changed everything. Now the only hope we had to get Wolfhound to Bermuda was to get her engine started. The first thing I had to do was remove the lines that had rapped themselves around Wolfhounds propeller. It took about an hour of hard swimming before I could get all the lines off of Wolfhounds prop. While I was doing that a line rapped around the propeller on my boat. I had to cut lines off of two different boats propellers back to back in the middle of the open ocean. By the end I was covered in scraps and cuts and completely exhausted. After that fiasco I took another one of my ships batteries over to the Swan 48 and got it connected to the ships electric system. I was able get the engine to turn over but I couldn’t get it to start. At this point the wind died and my boat stopped but the Swan didn’t. I watch helplessly as the Swan rammed my boat putting a dent in the side of my ship. Then it spun around and the tow line rapped around it rudder, so now we were pulling it backwards. It took three hours to finally get the Swan 48 spun back around the right way. As all of this was happening the seas were building. I was still on Wolfhound and Nikki was on Ault. There was no way I would be able to bring my battery back to my boat and from the looks of it I would be lucky to get back at all. I narrowly managed to row the little kayak back to my boat as each wave was trying to flip me.

Again Nikki and I sat down to discuss a new game plan. The owner of Wolfhound had offered us $45,000 if we could get it to Bermuda. Nikki, myself and the non-profit are completely broke. We were going to put $20,000 in the next year’s scientific expedition to the Arctic and split the rest. We would have a financial security blanket. We could afford health insurance, car insurance and pay our cell phone bills until we left for the Arctic next June. Back on land we spend well over 40 hours a week managing the various aspects of the non-profit but we haven’t been able to raise enough money to get paid a salary. It could have been a huge help. But between the two boats we had two broken engines and only my boat could sail. We got an accurate weather report from Predict Wind that told us for the next 7 days we had nothing but headwinds and light winds. We tried to tow her under sail into the wind but the combined leeway was pushing us east, further out to sea and away from Bermuda. We knew if we dragged the boat long enough we could get to Bermuda but how long, two weeks, a month? Every day that went by my boat was receiving more damage. That and it is hurricane season, we can’t just be out here like a sitting duck. Just as Nikki and I were having this conversation I heard a noise. The towline had rapped itself around my windvane again threatening to rip it off. We are out here to do research not salvage boats. You cannot let greed corrupt good judgment. There comes a point when the risks outweigh the reward. At 4:30pm after 5 long days of towing Wolfhound I cut the line.

We cut Wolfhound free and started making some headway when the halyard on the mainsail failed and for the last 36 hours we have been trying to beat into 15-20 knot headwinds with only a foresail, going nowhere. In a day or two when the wind dies I will climb my unstayed mast to the top and fix the problem. I can’t say I want to do it, but it has to be done. After that difficult climb up the mast we will be able to raise our main sail again but then we will be becalmed for 3-5 days. When the wind finally picks back up we will continue back to land.

On the bright side of things, every major sailing trip I’ve ever done I did with a broken engine so it’s nothing new to me. There are no big storms anywhere in the Atlantic (for now) and we have plenty of food and water. We won’t be going anywhere for the next 5 days because of the light winds but at least we will have a chance to clean the boat up, fix things and regroup.

By Endurance…
Matt Rutherford

Just as all roads once led to Rome, many cruising sailors now believe that all working lines should lead to the cockpit. The result, unfortunately, is often a pile of multi-colored spaghetti that is hard to manage and actually makes it more difficult to sail your boat.

On aft-cockpit boats the most common scenario now is that almost every line coming off the mast or deck forward of the cockpit is led back through blocks and organizers to a battery of rope clutches arrayed around two winches on either side of the companionway under the cockpit dodger. The more active lines are usually the mainsheet, two control lines for a main traveler situated just forward of the dodger, the main halyard, and one or more mainsail reefing lines (for either a slab-reefed main or an in-mast furling main). Less active lines led to this same location may include one or more headsail halyards, perhaps a dedicated spinnaker halyard and a spinnaker pole downhaul, perhaps one or more topping lifts (one for the main boom, plus one for the spinnaker pole), plus maybe a mainsail outhaul.

On race boats this is not too troublesome. The dodger is normally removed, so the companionway winches are easy to access and grind. The tails of all the active lines are simply flung down the companionway into the main cabin, where there is plenty of room for them to splay about without getting too tangled up with each other. Plus there is plenty of crew aboard. Each companionway winch has a grinder on it, so it easy to work the winches simultaneously if necessary, and there are people at the mast to jump halyards and clear any snags in any line running back to the cockpit.

On a cruising boat, however, the all-lines-to-Rome strategy is very much a two-edged sword. Theoretically, it enables a small crew to handle a boat without leaving the cockpit, but it can also make it harder for a small crew to work a boat. One big problem is winch access. With the cockpit dodger raised, as it normally is on a cruising boat, companionway winches are harder to use. The dodger frame may block winch handles from swinging all the way around their winches. The dodger also makes it impossible for crew to get directly over a winch, which is the preferred position for loading and unloading lines and grinding the winch. Instead the winch must be loaded and unloaded at an awkward side angle; the grinding also must be done from the side, with the grinder sawing the handle back and forth over a short throw distance, thus squandering a large part of the mechanical advantage the winch was designed to create.

Line storage and organization is another problem. Unless you dump lines down the companionway, it is very hard to keep the many lines at the forward end of the cockpit neatly sorted and ready for use. Many sailors install line bags around the companionway, but inevitably several lines get stuffed in the same bag and get tangled with each other, which leads to annoying situations where much untangling must precede even the simplest bit of line handling. The alternative is to make up separate coils of line and hang them neatly on hooks or line ties, but coiling a line while crouching under a cockpit dodger can be awkward and uncomfortable.

This one coachroof winch serves five lines led aft from the mast. Here the dodger is removed, which makes line handling easier, but with the dodger on it’s only harder to take lines on and off the winch (Photo by Malcolm White)

Also, lines that must be handled more or less simultaneously are sometimes led to the same winch. A classic example is a slab-reefed mainsail, with both the main halyard and a reef line coming to one winch. This means you must first put the halyard on the winch to ease it in a controlled manner (note, too, you’ll be under the dodger and won’t be able to see the sail, so you won’t be sure exactly how much to ease the halyard unless you have marked it), then you must clutch the halyard, unload the winch, reload it with the reefing line, take up on the reefing line, clutch the reefing line, unload the winch, reload it with the halyard, then take up on the halyard. All of which can be done much faster if the lines are on separate winches.

Yet another issue is friction in the line runs. Leading everything aft to the cockpit means lines must be longer, with one or more extra turns around blocks to create fair leads to the winches, all of which makes the lines harder to pull. This is particularly true of halyards. When a halyard is led aft to the cockpit, it is impossible for one crewmember to hoist it very far by hand, so most of the hoist must be done on a winch, which takes much longer. Extra friction also makes it noticeably harder to control reefing lines on slab-reefed mainsails.

With halyards at the mast one man can quickly hoist a sail

With halyards led to the cockpit it takes two crew to efficiently hoist a sail–one jumping the line at the mast and another at the winch aft (Photo by Malcolm White)

Not that leading lines aft to the forward end of a cockpit is always a bad idea. Often it makes a lot of sense, but it should not be done on a wholesale basis. Instead each line run should be evaluated independently.

First consider the mainsheet, as this is normally the most important and most frequently handled control line on board. On any cruising boat sailed by a small crew, where it is likely one person will want to handle the main and the helm simultaneously, I feel it is critical for the mainsheet to be within reach of the helmsman. Unfortunately, the mainsheet on most modern aft-cockpit cruising boats is led to the coachroof, where it can’t be reached from the helm unless the cockpit is small and the boat is steered with a tiller. Another problem with this is that if the dodger is up you often can’t see the main while trimming it.

The arrangement found on most center-cockpit boats, where the mainsheet is led to a full traveler directly behind the cockpit, is far superior. This takes three frequently used lines (the sheet and the two traveler control lines) out of the spaghetti mix around the companionway and puts them right where the helmsman can get to them. This way a sole watch-stander can easily cast off the mainsheet or drop the traveler if a big puff hits the boat. Another big advantage is that the mainsail is in plain view, and accurate adjustments can be made without having to duck in and out from under a dodger to check on trim. Finally, leading the sheet from the end of the boom rather than the middle, as is required when the traveler is forward of the cockpit, puts a lot less stress on the boom and reduces the effort required to trim the sail.

The only problem with leading a mainsheet to a traveler behind the cockpit is that the sheet must be carefully positioned so it doesn’t catch the helmsman unawares. If the traveler is very close to the cockpit with the sheet angling forward over the helm position, the helmsman may be caught by the sheet in an accidental jibe. This is sometimes an issue on undersized center-cockpit boats, where the cockpit is just a bit too cramped to work well, and also on some older aft-cockpit boats with travelers behind the cockpit. Modern aft-cockpit boats almost never have space for this, and to make the mainsheet accessible from the helm the sheet and traveler must instead go right in the cockpit. Usually these days the traveler is mounted on a rail spanning the cockpit seats just forward of the helm. Alternatively, it can be situated on a bridgedeck right behind the companionway. Cockpit-mounted travelers are often seen on race boats, but are much less popular on cruising boats. Most cruisers believe the sheet gets in the way when led to the middle of the cockpit and poses a danger to the crew if there is an accidental jibe or if the traveler is accidentally released and suddenly crashes to leeward. These are valid concerns, but the danger should be minimal if the traveler and sheet leads are properly designed and the crew is reasonably wary.

Another way to make the mainsheet more accessible on an aft-cockpit boat is to lead it to a traveler mounted on an arch over the cockpit. In many ways, this is ideal. A double-ended mainsheet can be led down either side of the arch and can be easily reached by the helmsman on either side of the cockpit. Both the sheet and traveler are also removed from the cockpit, so there is no chance of their tangling with the crew. In some cases these arches span the aft section of the cockpit, but this only works on boats at least 40 feet long, as there must be room under the arch for crew to stand. In others the arch spans the forward end of the cockpit, where it can also serve as a base for the back end of a dodger. This works well on smaller boats, as the arch can be lower here. The one drawback to cockpit arches is that they often look ungainly. Only a few builders now put them on boats, but I suspect they will become more popular over time.

This forward traveler arch gets the mainsheet out of the cockpit and provides a solid base for the back end of a windshield/dodger rig. The only problem is the traveler here is too short

I also feel halyards and reefing lines for a slab-reefed mainsail should not normally be led to the cockpit. Halyards are always much easier for a single crewmember to hoist if they are left at the mast. This way you can quickly haul the line hand over hand for most of the hoist, and only use a winch at the very end to haul the sail up the last few feet. On smaller boats 35 feet and under, you really only need the winch to tension the halyard after the hoist is complete. If the mainsail’s reef lines are also at the mast, you can quickly reef the sail from a single location with a clear view of the sail. In layouts like this, the reef lines are normally led to a dedicated winch on the back of the mast right under the boom, though on older boats the reefing winch or winches may be on the boom itself, which is not as convenient. The halyard, meanwhile, runs to another winch on the side of the mast nearby, so it is very easy to handle the lines in rapid succession. I’ve found I can nearly always tuck in a reef working at the mast at least twice as fast as I can in a cockpit; it is also much easier to coil the lines and stow them afterward. The drawback, of course, is that you must go to the mast to do all this. On many modern boats, however, you’ll often need to go to the mast anyway, even when lines are led to the cockpit, to clear lines or to put a tack ring on a reefing horn. Having to shuttle back and forth between the cockpit and mast in the middle of reefing only slows you down.

On my boat Lunacy all halyards and reef lines are at the mast, where they are easy to use in rapid succession. The open space here, the flush deck, and the granny bars make this an ideal working environment

The lines that should be led aft to the cockpit, in my opinion, are those used less frequently and those requiring small infrequent adjustments. These include topping lifts, vang lines, spinnaker downhauls, and mainsail outhauls. Also, there is no harm in leading rarely used halyards for roller-furling sails back to the cockpit. Note, however, that any halyard for a headsail that is likely to be changed for another sail while underway should always stay at the mast, as all work concerning the dousing and hoisting of the sail can then take place at the mast and forward of it. Finally, if you have an in-mast furling main, it of course makes sense to have all its control lines led aft to the cockpit. Indeed, there is little point in having an in-mast main if you routinely have to leave the cockpit to cope with it.

ATTENTION, PEOPLE: This post is repurposed content from my book, The Modern Cruising Sailboat. If you find it useful, you should click on over to Amazon or Barnes and Noble and buy the whole tome!

Written by Ben Ellison on Aug 10, 2013 for Panbo, The Marine Electronics Hub

While my friend Leonard Lookner was first to come upon this distressing scene Wednesday afternoon, he too was sailing and thus, a powerboat just behind him was first to offer assistance. But it was Leonard’s iPhone photos that fueled a local PenBay Pilot news piece, which then prompted an interesting SailNet discussion. Of course, it was suggested that marine electronics or digital charts were somehow to blame – allegations I’d like to refute, and I also want to report on how well this worse-than-it-even-looks situation actually turned out. Plus, getting reminded to be careful out there is never a bad idea…

When the Hylas 70 hit the submerged ledge it was only about an hour or two after high tide, so the salvage operation not only involved removing a large carbon fiber rig, but also managing the yacht as about eight feet of tide went out from under a very precarious perch. In fact, what I’ve heard is that the teams from Wayfarer Marine and Prock Marine delayed the mast clearing operation when they realized that it was helping to hold the boat in place, but eventually the last shreds of carbon around the gooseneck gave way and she lurched hard to starboard, almost throwing a couple of salvors off the deck.

The good news? As I understand it, none of the crew or charter guests on board Archangel were seriously hurt, and the boat seemed to come out of it pretty well, too. Yes, she looked quite forlorn when I spotted her tied up at Wayfarer Thursday morning, but there were no emergency pumps in sight, and it’s said that she motored back herself once the tide came back up and Prock had used a crane barge to remove the mast. Credit to Hylas for a wicked strong hull and especially to the Wayfarer and Prock teams. Apparently, the Coast Guard investigators on the scene were amazed at our local capablities, but I’m not!

Then again, the photo above shows how snappy Archangel looked as she departed Camden just a few days ago, and who knows what internal damage the surveyors will find. The photos also seem to support the theory expressed on Sailnet that the large lower aperture for the GMT in-mast furling might have created a weak spot in the rig. I have no opinion on that subject, but this was the early Sailnet comment that got my attention:

I have read a few articles on how our reliance on electronic charts and plotters have increased the groundings, accidents, and sinkings. Once, when paper charts were the norm and you had to take physical readings, you never really knew exactly where you were. You had to fudge it a bit and give known hazards (and some suspected ones) a wide berth. With the “accuracy” of electronic charts and GPS, many sailors and powerboaters are cutting it a lot closer, thinking that what they see on the chart is really there and that the GPS is telling them exactly where they are on that chart. This does not take into consideration shifting bars, mismarked hazards, and even other boats that may have sunk there.

I’d really like to know more about the alleged articles showing how chart plotters are causing more groundings and sinkings (anyone?), because I am extremely dubious. And if there really is a statistical increase in accidents, which I doubt, how would anyone separate the presence of electronics from the absence of experience that so often distinguishes modern boaters from the old school? I also roundly reject the notion that knowing less about where you are on the water is somehow safer, and I’ve tried both. I think that what makes you safer is knowing the tools you have, and we have very good tools these days.
Check out some recent Gizmo tracks shown on the Garmin BCM app screen above. I only had them handy on my iPad because I was experimenting with Garmin data transfer recently, and I certainly didn’t create them to make a point, but note how consistently Gizmo stayed north of the clearly charted ledge that the Hylas hit. It didn’t involve “giving a wide berth” to every possible hazard, but rather driving quite close to the deep, bold southern tip of Lasell Island to stay in safe water. I’ve done this many hundreds of times over the last 40 years, starting with only paper charts, a compass, and a ‘flasher’ depth sounder. Nowadays, GPS, chart plotting, and radar make the passage more relaxed and help me keep my eyes out of the boat to better see the lobster buoys (and enjoy the sights). And an NMEA 2000 depth sensor mounted on Gizmo’s forefoot, along with Simrad StructureScan, help me make some of those interesting little side trips. (Note that I purposely went close to that submerged rock just above Mark Island, because I’ve never seen it uncover and was curious if there’s really something there, which there is.)

Above is the NOAA paper chart for the Lasell Island passage seen as an electronic “raster” chart (or RNC for raster nautical chart) in the app Memory-Map, with the commonly used route overlaid. I’m very comfortable with this format, and often find that it emphasizes the most important data points. Note, for instance, how the offending ledge, is annotated with “(10)”, which means that the “rock which covers and uncovers or is awash at low water” actually has a “drying height” of 10 feet. (Familiarity suggests that it’s more like 6 feet with our normal 10 foot tide range, but the idea is good, and you have to drill down in other charts to see it.)

I was glad to see that very few SailNet commenters responded to the idea that Archangel’s skipper might have avoided the grounding by using paper charts — and one, who I know to be a great sailor, admitted that he’d hit the same ledge with a paper chart in his lap!  Several also recommended Nigel Calder’s excellent How to Read a Nautical Chart, but I’ll add that you can freely download the underlying U.S. Chart No. 1 here and the latest edition includes a column of ENC symbology that unfortunately did not make it into Nigel’s 2nd edition.

Above is a NOAA ENC (for electronic navigation chart) displayed by the interesting app SEAiq USA. Because they are vector charts they can look different from one charting engine to another and you can also customize the look to some degree. SEAiq offers excellent ENC control, I think, and doesn’t this chart look useful for getting through that passage?

Here’s the NOAA raster overlaid with the PhotoFusion satellite maps that I so like in TimeZero products like the Nobeltec TZ. I think that this sort of land and shallow water detail can help a visitor understand these waters like a local does. Note, too, the overlaid tidal current arrows (though perhaps the only positive of all the lobster trap buoys is that you can use them to see what the current is doing every 30 feet or so ;-)

The Navionics Mobile vector chart utilizes bold colors well, I think. I also note that this and Garmin’s show an always-dry area at the end of that long ledge extending southwest from Lasell, which is true and also very useful information when you’re trying to pass close at high tide. I don’t understand why we’re not also seeing that on the NOAA charts, but it does seem to be an example of commercial electronics being a dite better.
Finally, the screen below shows C-Map charting in the app Plan2Nav, but I’ve put it in course-up perspective view, which would look better if I’d actually been underway. Not many boaters like this 3D style, but I think it can be a useful tool when understood. The overall point is that there were many electronic resources that could have helped Archangel’s captain get through that passage without a fuss. He screwed up plain and simple, and likely feels terrible about it (though I’ve heard he was an active and valuable part of recovery operation). I’ve screwed up, too, and probably will again. Perhaps the most interesting conjecture on that SailNet thread concerns the multi-tasking stress of running a high-end charter operation, but if you want more knee-jerk anti-electronics sentiment — “Another computer assisted grounding, perhaps?” — check out the CruisersForum discussion.  Am I off-base to be annoyed by this stuff?

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Well, thanks for the comments on that last post, Tom Trump, but I think you jinxed us! Or, more accurately, I think I jinxed myself.

I’m warm now, drinking a hot cup of coffee (decaf!) in the sommarstuga, after having eaten about 10 ounces of wild smoked salmon and having had 30 minutes in the sauna. Not a bad afternoon, but I’d say deserved after this morning’s near bout with hypothermia.

You see, here at 60º north, when something goes wrong, you pay for it. Thankfully it was a small price, in the big picture, but I paid nonetheless. Here is what happened.

Claes (‘Clabbe’) came by again last evening, the old-time sjöman I wrote about recently. He arrived as he did the other night, in his little open wooden boat, drank a glass of wine while we finished dinner, and took us all out for a little adventure around the creeks and coves here in central Åland. The weatherfolks were calling for a cold front to pass sometime overnight, so it had clouded up for our little tour, but that didn’t matter.

We motored past mostly farmland, where the cows were bathing (it was hot yesterday, at least for Åland), and past a family of swans en route to a small ditch that we navigated through, that opened up into a little bay by an old abandoned apple orchard. Claes grounded the boat on the shore near an rickety old barn, tied the painter off to a tree and off we went for a short promenade through the forest road and to an inshore, freshwater lake where the Ålanders often come to catch crayfish.

It was after 10pm when we returned to the dock after our little ‘snipaäventyr’ in the same wooden boat I was fawning over the night before, built in 1938 on the neighboring island of Föglö, and with a Finnish gasoline engine from the 1940s. It was almost dark. Claes left in the boat and retired home to his stuga, while Mia and I went off to bed in the bunk beds by the sauna. I knew then that the wind was going to shift to the north – why we had planned to leave today, to sail SW to Sweden – and even thought about moving the boat last night. But the bed was too comfortable, and I didn’t.

This morning we awoke to heavy rain and thunder, a few minutes before 8am. The boat looked okay on anchor in the small cove, so we walked up to the stuga for breakfast. I spent the next hour or so drinking coffee and reading while the wind slowly built outside and the skies began to clear with the frontal passage. Every few pages I’d glance out the window at the boat, which seemed to be sitting okay.

I walked down to the dock when I heard some halyards banging and noticed the flags flying sideways. Sure enough, Arcturus’ anchor cable was pointed north, but her bows were pointed west, sideways to the increasing wind, and she bobbed in the little wavelets in that special way which you know means the boat is sitting on her keel. Oops.

Mia and I rowed out the 100 yards or so to the boat and tried to decide what to do. There was no real danger, as the bottom of the little cove was soft seagrass, and even though the wind was pushing us further inland and harder aground, there was no real ‘worst-case’ scenario. I tried to be patient. My friend Mike Meer likes to quote a leader he had once on an outdoor adventure program. “When the shit hits the fan,” he says, “stop and have a cigarette. Nothing’s going to happen in those 3-4 minutes and it gives you a chance to relax and think.” I didn’t have a cigarette, but instead a big hunk of dark chocolate, and pondered our options.

I was a little miffed at myself for writing that kedging article for SAIL a few months ago. I had to open my mouth, and now I was forced to take my own advice.

We got out the Danforth anchor, which we’d been using as our stern anchor, and rowed it out as far as the cable would allow. When we started hauling on it, instead of freeing the boat, all we did was manage to dredge up a gigantic pile of that aforementioned seagrass, which would come back to haunt us yet another time (just wait). So Mia remained onboard while I rowed back in to the stuga to ask Lotta if she could ring up Claes. Maybe the old-time sjöman could come to our rescue with one of his boats (though I was admittedly embarrassed to ask for his help).

In the meantime, we rigged the longer anchor cable to the Danforth to make a second attempt to help ourselves. We knew that just outside the small cove, when the water got slightly deeper (10’ instead of 5’), there was good holding mud, and if we could get the anchor there, it might work.

Claes turned up before we had a chance to try. With he and I in his launch and Mia at the helm of Arcturus, we managed to swing the boat into the wind, but not much more than that. Mia couldn’t get any power out of the engine for some reason. It just bogged down, which I thought was because the boat was hard aground and just wouldn’t budge. Finally we just took the main anchor and all of its cable (80’ of chain and about another 200’ of rope) way out into the deeper water. I clambered back aboard and hauled away (appropriately, I had put off the windlass project until next year, so I slowly hand-over-handed it).

This worked! Arcturus slowly moved into deeper water, despite the wind pressing her towards the shore. My shoulders burned, but once the boat was unstuck, she came around pretty easily. But the engine still wasn’t making any power.

Just then I had a very appropriate little bit of hindsight, recalling that Lotta had told us a few days ago how much trouble Tryggve has with the seagrass getting wrapped around the prop on his 9.9 Evinrude that powers his small wooden launch (which, in fact is the only thing that gets Tryggve in the water nowadays, according to Lotta). We felt this swimming too – it’s like standing on a giant sponge, or someone’s extra-thick, matted down hair.

But we had another problem. The engine wasn’t getting any waterflow either. The strainer was clean. The impeller was fine. What then?

I theorized that the seagrass had actually gotten in the through-hull itself. When I took the engine intake hose off and opened up the seacock, the water barely trickled in. I stuck a long screwdriver down the hole, but all that did was bring up a bit of the grass (I was on the right track), and a tiny shrimp. I put the hose back on, and this time disconnected it from the strainer side, blowing with all my might to push out whatever was clogging the through-hull (grass!). That helped a bit, but the water still just dribbled into the bilge. I wanted a geyser.

Arcturus has the old-school bronze seacocks with horizontally opposed tapered plugs, greased in their housings to allow them to open and close. Thankfully I was familiar with it, from having dismantled it a few years ago to grease it, so began disassembling it, knowing full well that if I couldn’t get it back together again the boat would sink. Anyway, long story short, I got it apart just fine, but the thing was still clogged. Problem was, there is a stainer on the outside of the hull. Time for a swim.

And this is where that payment came due. With the passing cold front, the air temperature this morning was in the high 50s, the water about 68 (actually pretty warm for these parts – we had gotten used to having our morning swims in about 65º water). Mia had only days before accidentally found the diving mask we keep on board (a little foreshadowing anyone?), so I reluctantly climbed in.

The prop was as I expected – a basketball size clump of green hair wrapped around all three blades and fast against the shaft forward of the prop. You couldn’t even see the metal (much less anything else in the murky water). The hull strainer was also as expected, clumped with this sea-hair in the small vertical slots. Thankfully this sea-hair wasn’t quite as strong as real hair, and came apart fairly easily, though it still took me 30 minutes and probably fifteen different dives to clear everything. I was able to pick out the sea-hairs from the strainer with my splicing fid, and cleared the prop mostly by hand and a bit at the end with my diving knife.

Once out of the water though, I couldn’t stop shivering. Lotta had been watching all this from the dock, and had even rowed out to offer their home-made sea-hair clearing stick (see, this was bound to happen), but I had it mostly wrapped up (or unwrapped) by then. Instead she returned to the stuga to get the fire going in the sauna.

Mia and I still had to move the boat to a more sheltered cove, which we found around the corner. It took a while to clear all the lines and anchor cables we’d gotten out and clean the mud off the bow from re-anchoring. When we returned to the stuga, we found the aforementioned smoked salmon on the table waiting for us, the fire burning hot in the sauna. After my chill this morning, I understood better why all Finns have a sauna in the house.

So there it is then, a little deserved ‘action’ for being ‘having too much fun’, as Tom said, being lazy last night and not moving the boat, and for writing so much about ‘seamanship’ and how to handle problems exactly like this one (in another bit of foreshadowing, I’d only yesterday sent the link for my article on how to clear a wrapped prop from SAIL Magazine to my Swedish friend Krister, who was the one in the photo). The sailing gods weren’t going to let me off that easily.

To read more from Andy & Mia and to listen to Andy’s podcast Two Inspired Guys, visit their website at www.59-north.com. Thanks!

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Adeles 1940s two-cylinder gas engine.

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Claes’ dog Molly, snuggling with Mia

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Mia, the ‘snipa’ grounded in the reeds behind her.

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The sauna by the stuga.

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‘Arcturus’ mooring outside the stuga.

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Claes’ 1938 wooden ‘snipa’ motor launch.

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Someone is having fun!

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The ‘snipa’, with ‘Arcturus’ in the background.

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Claes at the helm.

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Mia (note the bathing cows in the background!)

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Through the ‘ditch’

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The old abandoned farm building by the apple orchard.

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Lotta getting ready to tie us up.

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Land ho!

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I just read Sailing Alone Around the World, by Captain Joshua Slocum, for about the tenth time. On this reading I noted that Captain Slocum careened several times on his voyage, usually to paint the bottom. This was long before travel lifts, but being a budget cruiser, Captain Slocum wouldn’t have paid for one anyway. He just found a suitable beach with an adequate tidal range and let nature do the work.

Why don’t we careen anymore?

If we careened on our local American swimming beach to slap on a few coats of Micron we’d undoubtedly end up in handcuffs, but in much of the world nobody cares. Also, careening might not allow enough drying time for modern (and expensive) bottom paints, but there are lots of other tasks below the waterline. I’ve known two people who’ve had to haul out to get the adjustments right on folding propellers. I guess they thought the job too complicated to do underwater, so they bit the bullet. In both cases, after a trial run, the adjustment still wasn’t right, so out a second time at something like $500 a pop. Ouch.

Some modern designs with swing keels or spade rudders couldn’t careen without damage, but most sailboats, even with fin keels, should be able to careen without incident. If not, this poses some pointed questions about how the boat might handle a grounding or unintended careening, of which I’ve had many.

The one time I intended to careen was in Richard’s Bay, South Africa. I’d noticed while diving that there didn’t seem to be anything holding on the rudder shoe. It wasn’t falling off, but it looked like someone attached it with stainless screws, and the stainless did what it does when deprived of oxygen for years on end.

My buddy Ian arrived from California with some stout bronze screws, the Richard’s Bay harbormaster said he didn’t mind, and the tidal range was about eight feet, so I plowed Condesa into the beach, stern first:

Once the tide was all the way out things started to go wrong. We powered our electric drill with ship’s batteries through a small, plug-in inverter, which didn’t give enough oomph to go through a inch of bronze. To make matters worse, to get the drill at the right angle we had to dig a hole under the rudder, and this hole quickly filled with water. Ian would bail out the hole as fast as he could with a bucket, then I’d jump in with our underpowered drill until the hole filled again, no more than ten or twenty seconds of drilling before we had to bail again:

Somehow we got a few screws in with adequate sealant, while working up a great sweat in the African summer, and the rudder has stayed on for the last ten years:

T’would have been easier in a boatyard, but not $500 easier.

Q:  I’d like to go cruising, but I’m not so keen on sharks.  Do you see many?  Are they a problem?

A:  Ah, sharks.  On my list of Things People Worry About On Our Behalf, they sit second only to pirates.  And I understand that.  They are strong, fast, and have those excellent triangular teeth that just scream out “higher predator!”  The media doesn’t help this image.  If you go watching shows with names like Ten Deadliest Sharks, then you are feeding your fears.  As my mother would say, don’t put beans up your nose.

Short answer: you do not need to curtail your cruising plans because of sharks.  We have two issues to deal with here: what am I looking at? and how do I behave?

First of all, “shark” is not a monolithic category of bulked-up fish on a killing spree.  There is a big gap between your kind and gentle sharks, like plankton-eating whale sharks, and your eating machines, like the ever-popular great white shark.  So do your homework, and find out what sharks are going to be where you are.  For our part, we do a lot of snorkelling over shallow reefs.  That means that, most of the time, we see blacktip reef sharks, or vakis, as they call them in the Tuamotus.

Just doing his thing on the reef in Makemo.

The ones we see are normally about my size.  And I’ll admit, it is a little disconcerting the first time a shark swims past you only ten feet away.  It is a little more disconcerting when the shark comes back for a second look.  But it makes sense: they are curious, and their life depends on sizing up the other “fish” they meet.  Last year, we sailed to a remote, rarely-visited motu.  There was no village nearby, so no one fished there, which meant the area was essentially wild.  Erik and I did a drift snorkel through the pass, and at one point looked down to see a bed of twenty grey reef sharks (raira in Pumotu) resting below us.  I won’t say my stomach didn’t give a small lurch.  But we ignored them and they ignored us, and everyone went home with all of their limbs.

This leads me to my point around behavior, which I can sum up this way: don’t be an idiot.  Don’t swim in murky water, or at dusk, or where somebody is cleaning fish nearby.  Don’t touch a shark.  Don’t chase it, don’t poke it, don’t scare it, don’t chum it.  Just watch.  All else being equal, you’ll be fine.  Your riskiest moment in shark-infested waters (I can’t believe I just got to write “shark-infested waters” in a literal usage.  I love this blog.) comes when you are fishing.  If you are in the water spear fishing and you hit a fish, get that fish out of the water immediately, because this is the moment when sharks become actively dangerous.  Sharks detect the pressure variations caused by an injured fish thrashing around, and can smell minute traces of fish blood (they are not interested in human blood, I might add) up to a quarter mile away.  When you hit a fish, the sharks will come, and fast.  Do not get between a shark and and an injured fish.  Better you lose dinner than lose your hand.

Some sharks are always a little risky, even if you are behaving yourself.  According to the International Shark Attack File, the vast majority of attacks come from tiger sharks, bull sharks, and great white sharks.  Yes, these sharks are more aggressive than our friends the vakis.  But the short answer is, they don’t want to eat you.  They want to eat everything.  Indy has an early reader about sharks (the cover is pictured above), and her favorite section shows things found in their stomachs.

I find this oddly comforting.  Think of great white sharks as the goats of the sea.  They are indiscriminate.  There isn’t a whole lot of thinking going on; it is more “I see it, I eat it.”  So don’t take it personally, and, if they worry you, don’t swim in places that have great whites.  I know I wouldn’t.  But, vakis?  No worries.  We know how to leave each other be.

But really, all of this is looking at the issue backwards.  Sharks aren’t a problem.  In fact, sharks are absolutely necessary.  They are what is called a keystone species, which means that they exert an important regulatory effect on an ecosystem, both in terms of the fish they eat and how their presence affects the behavior of other animals in the system.  When you lose sharks, you gain problems.  So the reefs and the open ocean need sharks.

And sharks are really, truly, beautiful creatures.

When you get beyond your fear of those big, sharp teeth, you can appreciate how lovely these fish really are.  They are a joy to watch in the water, and it is a great privilege to swim beside them.  We have seen sharks of all sorts – lemon sharks, nurse sharks, whitetip reef sharks, vakis, rairas, hammerheads.  We have seen sharks smaller than Indy, and 12 foot behemoths.  They are beautiful to watch.  Yes, they can be dangerous, but so is driving your car.  I think we would all be better off to spend more effort learning about sharks and protecting their place in the oceans than being afraid they maybe might bite us.

And so I will leave you on that note.  Don’t worry about sharks.  Just leave them alone, watch them and enjoy.

You may have seen this video a couple of years ago back when the collision, during Cowes race week, took place. They’re having a trial about it now, as the skipper of the yacht, a Corby 33 named Atalanta of Chester, insists that he was not negligent. Watching what happened per the viddy, I’d say what it was, in law-school lingo, was negligence per se. As in: you should never try to cross in front of another vessel, particularly one that is much, much larger than yours, unless you are about 1,000 percent sure you’re going to make it.

But the skipper on trial, Royal Navy lieutenant Roland Wilson, presumably is not a total punter when it comes to boathandling. His defense seems to be that the ship, the Hanne Knutsen, a 120,000-ton tanker, gave confusing sound signals as it was turning while trying to avoid another disabled boat.

I do know racing sailors sometimes get crazy about this stuff. They often seem to think that just being in a race somehow exempts them for having to observe the Colregs. But it also seems to me that you do have to be a little crazy to run a 120,000-ton tanker down the Solent during the middle of Cowes Week. It’s like driving a tractor-trailer into a bumper-car rink with over 1,000 bumper cars in it. You’re bound to crush one eventually.

Here’s another PBO link with a little more info.

The trial runs until October 25. I’ll be very curious to see how it turns out.