The world encompassed

Invention is only a finger away

2012-01-24T15:15:00.001-05:00

Yes, that title struck me as slightly off-putting, as well. But docking, as seen in the video above, is all about on-putting, or at least putting the boat safely on the dock. Step one is stopping, or slowing enough to get a line around a bollard. Luc Cote, who with his wife Tina has the slip at my marina that is kitty-corner to mine, has done exactly that. He's invented a simple device to make docking safer (you stay aboard instead of jumping off with a line) and more certain (you can give yourself plenty of slack to secure the line).

The low blue boat in the top center of the establishing shot is Valiente. Such is fame.

Luc and Tina live aboard an Irwin 37 (which is for sale if you are interested). Luc runs a water taxi service from the marina and has had a lot of time and muscle memory to dedicate to the issue of better, safer docking. The "Dock Wand" is made to accomplish that. I saw them at the recent Toronto Boat Show and they had made a hundred to sell, but had in fact sold 500. The Dock Wand would appear to be a hit.

Not much more than a length of line, a plastic pole and a brightly coloured ball, the Dock Wand is, like most good ideas, so simple and straightforward, one feels slightly moronic even contemplating the long list of reasons one didn't invent it years back. In my own defence, Valiente has quite a low freeboard and my wife usually jumps off with a hook in one hand and a breast line in the other. Alchemy, by contrast, is both four times or better the mass and even at midships calls for a bit of a hop to reach the level of the dock.

So I might have to wander over to get one myself. The videos are pretty self-explanatory. One spliced end of a longish line goes to a cleat (ideally centered or forward). The other end goes to a ball used to lasso the aft cleat on a dock. That accomplished, you can drop the thing in the water: You are "on" enough to either stop in calm weather, or to give you time enough to jump off with more lines to finish securing.

I can see this as being a big help for big sail boats, power boats and single-handers of all types. I wish them well and I hope my readers find it a clever and useful tool.

Sometimes a picture says three words

2012-01-24T12:49:00.000-05:00

Vada a bordo, cazzo, indeed

A question even wartime propaganda cannot answer

2012-01-17T22:20:00.002-05:00

Heh. I've found that the orange bitters I've taken to using in my somewhat modded Dark 'n' Stormies sparks an urge to design T-shirts that only amuse nostalgic British drunken sailors.

Or pirates.

Or Johnny Depp fans.

Heh.

Runs in the blood, bred in the bone

2012-01-03T09:32:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned before that I didn't purchase a sailboat until I was 38, which is rather late to get in the game. This was despite the fact that I had a father who spent over a decade in the British Merchant Navy, including 1941-45 when it was a definitively hazardous occupation. Perhaps because, as a veteran of both the "Murmansk run" and post-war whaling in Antarctica, my father had been almost literally to the ends of the earth that he didn't show a lot of passion or interest in recreational sailing, any more than a retired demolitions expert would enjoy pulling apart drywall with a wrecking bar.

Being a mate on a circa-1950 merchant freighter and a "here, Dad, hold this" on a circa-2000 sloop actually don't have a lot in common. Throw in the fact that I was born ten years or so after he "left the sea" for a new country and a completely unrelated career as a film editor, and the related fact that he was 75 when I bought my first boat, and about the only "seamanlike" behaviour I noticed the two of us sharing was a love of Errol Flynn pirate movies and a tendency to notice when there were errors in movies like Dead Calm or Master and Commander. The rest of his side of the family were not involved with the sea, or so I believe. Someone at some point in the mid-1800s got on a ship from Ireland to Wales, but there it seems to end. Until me and Dad, I guess.

Nonetheless, I was aware from his unforced, salty expressions, and from the rapidity with which he could read a map and tie a knot, and from the occasional emergence of some picaresque and not often age-appropriate anecdote, that he was the real deal: A working sailor. I recall pretty vivid childhood incidents in which tales were spun about under what unsavoury circumstances he got his tattoo, the smell of whale guts after the three-foot long flensing pole opens up the animal, and his avoidance of death several times at the hands of the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine and assorted Japanese and Italian armed forces. At certain points, out would come a sperm whale tooth, along with the knife used to cut it away. Ripping yarns, indeed.

It's no wonder he considered himself lucky, or that his life merited such run-on sentences. He's pictured here circa 1945, being only about 20 and already having been bombed, strafed, tattooed and, if torpedoed, they were misses or duds. His friends were not so lucky, and after he moved here, he had little contact with them. He died in 2006 when my son was just past five, and it's a sadness to me that my parents aren't around to be grandparents to him, nor to wave at us from the dock when we leave.

On the other hand, it's a rather sad fact that some people of my acquaintance have deferred their own cruising plans because of aged parents in need of assistance and management of their affairs. I would be at peace having that problem, actually, but it's a fact that moving to the front of the line chronologically has its upsides if you are wanting to cruise.

My wife's family is extremely Canadian, meaning they've been here since before Confederation (1867 for my non-Canadian readers) and probably there's Hudson's Bay Company employment and a little bit of native blood in the otherwise Scots-English mix. But her father grew up close to water and with access to little boats. Although he couldn't make a career out of it, he did design and saw built a few boats. Unfortunately, all of his photos and drawings were lost in a fire many years ago, but he did see that at least one of his designs, a 38 footer of sprightly lightness (he told me "10,000 pounds", which is indeed light for that LOA...Airex core may have been mentioned) is still sailing at around 30 years old.


A Culross 38 built in the 1980s

So, I guess you could say without fear of exaggeration, and despite in my case a rather delayed start, that the son my wife and I have produced is the son of sailors on both side, and the grandson of sailors in a half-measure. As pedigrees go, that'll do. He's certainly fine with falling in the water.

Nothing if not practical

2011-12-10T11:38:00.001-05:00

This is Ken of the good ship Silverheels III, three or four years now out of Toronto. Astute readers may recognize the boat name appended to many comments posted to this blog, most of them helpful and constructive when they aren't hectoring me to hurry up and get sailing.

Ken and his lovely and talented wife Lynn are currently anchored somewhere in the "insurance applies" part of the Southern Caribbean, and have, as this photo illustrates, fully embraced the tropical lifestyle. In fact, their biggest challenge recently is digging out of the dim recesses of their sturdy Niagara 35 enough musty trousers and long-sleeved shirts to make the trip back to Canada for the holidays without freezing to death on the trip from the plane to the parking lot.

Ken and Lynn are, like most cruisers, nothing if not practical. You fix your own gear (Ken was for many years responsible for resusitating busted electronics gear abused by students of Ryerson University's Radio and Television Arts course, and was in fact there doing it when I was there as a student 30 years ago...only I didn't know him then.) You source and prepare your own food. You hump your own laundry into the tender, and, if necessary, beat it on your own rock, although it rarely comes to that, I suspect.

But the not-so-dirty and not-so-secret of life aboard? You don't wear many clothes at all. When the air below is the temperature of blood, it's practical to save on sweating through clothing by not wearing it at all. You'll only have to wash it later. If you postpone donning a T-shirt and shorts until the cooler evening hours, you might get two evenings' wear out of it. This economy of treating clothing as a special event means far less expense on sometimes extortionate shoreside laundries, along with a reduction in the chances that an errant wave will douse your carefully packed laundry just as you are coming alongside. If you don't wear it, you don't need to wash it.

Offshore, many folk doff trou upon leaving sight of land or in international waters. Sure, you might have boat sandals, a big, floppy hat and strategic applications of sun block, but there lay undiscovered countries of once-hidden flesh that, in time, take on the all-over golden hue of the once-pallid (if in fact Caucasian) cruiser.

Not that photos of this reality ever make the sailing mags. Everyone there seems to be in shirts they rolled Jimmy Buffett to get, and usually a salt and oil-stained Tilley hat. Little do the lubbers know that the brown, it goes all the way down. I have heard of night watches conducted with T-shirt, harness and tether and not much else, and the T-shirt's only on to reduce the chafing of the harness. Barely sailing? Indeed.

Concerns about moles going funny aside, not only is nudity aboard practical from a clean-clothes conservation viewpoint, but it's arguably healthier than bothering to get dressed in many conditions that the active cruiser is likely to encounter. The damp of sea air, even assuming you don't actually catch salt spray on some part of your clothing, can affect skin to the point of peeling. Salt blisters can form in unlikely places. Nothing ever feels quite dry. So allowing sweat to evaporate directly from one's skin...all of one's skin...means ablutions can be performed with a freshwater swipe of the sponge (conserving water and effort). The breeze, if present, cools and comforts the sailor, although if you notice that a body part is doing a reasonable impression of the arrow of the Windex, it may be time to consider donning foulies.

So let's hoist a glass of the finest rum to Ken, Lynn and all other clothing-optional cruisers. It's a rarely discussed aspect of the liveaboard life, and it takes a brave fellow with steady hands to solder in the buff, but it's a healthy and practical response to feeling hot, hot, hot. Boaters with air conditioning don't know what they're missing.

Seeks cruising kitty (Obscure TPB reference).

Saying yes to sailing off into the sunset is saying no to a broken system

2011-12-04T11:01:00.001-05:00

Over the years (and it has been years) since this blog and our multi-year plans to sail with a young son began, I have received the occasional opinion that it would be better if we waited until we were closer to retirement age. The logic goes that our finances would be "on a firmer footing", our son would be on his own or in college, and we could "downsize" our downtown home, recoup our investments and get a nicer boat with electric hoo-hahs and all mod cons.

Putting aside some fairly large assumptions inherent in such an opinion, such as a) there's no prospect that our house will actually show a profit in 15 years' time as the general economy may be in the dumps; and b) our son, if at a university, might be ruiniously expensive if scholarships are unobtainable; and c) our health and strength would endure to that stage at such a pitch that we could, as a sailing couple, operate a 40-45 footer safely in all weathers. This isn't even taking into account that we might have living relatives both ill and old and underfunded in our care, or that diesel could be three times its current costs. Lastly, there's d) a large reason to go is to expose our son to the rest of the world while such a fleeting opportunity, historically speaking, for non-rich people, by Western standards, to do so is still open a crack, and so on.

Basically, the "go while you still can" mantra holds for us. Working like dogs until 60 or 65 in order to have a nicer Beneteau holds little appeal if other things we can't control come into play in a deleterious manner. We know more than one cruiser who have either commenced cruising or are planning to cruise with largely the same outlook, although many started from differing assumptions.

If you wait, the opportunity may never come. The stars may fail to align.

Consider our boat, Alchemy: It was custom-built in the late '80s by a fellow who took a long time to finish it. I'm not convinced, having spoken only briefly to him on the phone, that he wanted to travel the world, but for whatever reason (age, interests changed), he owned it for 17 years and never took it into salt water, despite the fact it's ludicriously overbuilt for the Great Lakes. See "Why do I have eleven 5/16th inch stays?"

The second owners further fitted out the boat for a couple of years with some top-end amenities, and then received a lucrative job offer unto retirement that convinced them to give up, or at least postpone, their dream of world travel. We're therefore the third owners in 23 years of an ocean-going boat that's not been to the ocean. We might actually push off in said direction, unless the "curse" strikes our enterprise as well. Let's keep fingers crossed, and, if necessary, sacrifice a goat against that possibility.

One of the more compelling reasons, however, to sail off that I present to well-meaning interlocutors seems to have an almost universal affect on those suggesting a more protracted run-up to passagemaking.

That reason is that I believe I will never receive a pension, and I will never actually be able to retire.

Not in the conventional, that is to say, post-1965 and pre-2008 sense. Like most humans throughout history, I will likely die in harness, which could mean a fate as ugly as the world's oldest telemarketer. My only consolation in doing so will be that I am likely to do so at an older age than the historical norm, if we can keep purifying the water and don't bugger up the air or food supply too badly.

I am also hoping that if I have to work until I snuff it, I will have no regrets and plenty of feedstock for pleasant dreams having sailed around the world for five or so years.

Still, my outlook is not very comforting, is it? A lot of people currently cruising have pension income of some sort, and that may be well-funded, or well-funded enough that such fortunate folk may pass naturally (or simply swallow the anchor) before the piggybank runs out. Congratulations to them; I bear no grudge.But I believe, sincerely, that I will not be among their number. My 12 years' younger wife or 40 years' younger son? Not a chance. Everything they have paid or will pay into my country's national pension scheme will be utterly gone (or devalued to the point of "gone") by the time they reach retirement age, which, if the entire house o' cards is to kept in a wobbly state of mostly upright, will be between 75 to 80 years old, and for the Greeks, 110 years old.

So I hear this: "Wait, you are sailing off in middle age because you think pension schemes are the devil's songbook?"

Well, yes, I intend to and I do, although there are other reasons. But having invested my own money, such as it is, for many years, and having been self-employed for only a somewhat shorter period, my belief that pensions as currently administered in my country and most, but not all, others, are a mug's game are based on two simple, and contrasting concepts.1) Governments have treated pension funds as piggybanks at the same time as they have kept contributions artificially low to avoid alarming the peasants. Thus, the commitments far outstrip the ability to pay.

That doesn't make pensions stupid. It means that you have to have them run at total arm's length from idiot governments who can only think in four-year cycles. A pension demands the ability to count to 100 and to stick with it whether people whine and bitch or not.2) For the same whining and bitching reasons, governments have not directly linked life expectancy to retirement age. The age of 65 was arrived at whether men died, on average, at 67. You don't need a lot of planning or even cash to pay out two years of benefits for 40-plus years of planning, esp. as the average age of 67 implied that a lot of men kicked off years before that and got NOTHING. My grandfather died two days before his 65th birthday in 1968, for instance. Not a penny did his widow, who lived a further 25 years, get from the pension scheme of the day. My mother died at 68; she got three years, having contributed since the age of 18: 50 years.

Now, some might say "Ah, but that's just a roll of the dice. It doesn't invalidate the pension logic." And I might agree with such a person...in principle. But pensions have long since abandoned any notion, in my view, of "principle".These days, men my country live until 81 and women nearly 84 in Canada, on average, and collect pensions for 16 to 25 years, as they can "retire" at 60 on a partial or 65 on a full pension. Trouble is, having built all those universities and discouraged the trades, we aren't STARTING work until 22 or 23 (or 25 if you go for a master's or a PhD) and therefore expect to pay generous pensions (in the context of maximum years of earnings) for 20 years from a working life of 35-40 years. So the second concept is that in order for this pie-in-the-sky pension scheme to work would have being to kick the retirement age to 75 about 20 years ago by upping it a year every two years or so. The biggest bulge in the python would have been therefore "encouraged" to put away more themselves, because the bareness of the cupboard marked "pension benefits" would have been clearer earlier, when we had a hope of applying some fiscal probity instead of clapping Tinker-fucking-bell back to life.

Anyone else see a problem with this? In all of the Western democracies save perhaps Germany (which could be sabotaged by the "Euro project" in this respect even yet) and Scandinavia, the pension-planners' "house" cannot collect enough to pay out all those winners. Those of us who work as self-employed persons actually make a double contribution to a fucking pyramid scheme that will be sucked dry from the enormous generation of "boomers" directly ahead of us in age...and who will NEVER support pension reform because it is not remotely in their interests to do so.

Looked upon in that light, buggering off with no income (visible to my nation's government at least) in a boat for five years is actually a break from the daily wallet-sized prison rape of living in a society that wishes to print money without doing the requisite math. We may not make any money, but we get an absolution from pissing into a bottomless well from which we, as the currently middle-aged income earners and contributors, can never plausibly draw.World cruising is therefore a withdrawal of our services, a refusenik tactic, as much as it is a nice way to see the world while there's still a world.

I have mentioned before that some of our ambition to make a rather unconventional trip like this was rooted in a rather pessimistic view of humanity's future (we should go before piracy is normal in every ocean) and of the continuing degradation of the environment (see the lovely atoll nation before it's a sandbank; sail while there's still fish to catch off the stern and space between the garbage patches). Add to that the compelling rationale that long-term cruising withdraws the family finances to a significant degree from the never-ending shell game of national pension schemes, and it gets harder some days to be cheerful about the prospect of casting off at all. I only thank Neptune or whatever watery deity applies that I figured this out at 40 instead of 60. I have been planning our escape accordingly, and postings such as this are "goon-baits" in the fine old Colditz tradition. The system will only collapse more quickly if everyone figures it out for themselves. See "Europe: now".

UPDATE Dec. 14, 2011:

According to this story, my country cannot even fund its pension scheme to its own bureaucrats and other federal government workers.

"One of the figures Ottawa uses to determine its pension liability is a moving average of past “nominal” yields on 20-year federal bonds, while the other is an assumed return on investments of 4.2 per cent based on averages earned since 2000.

The C.D. Howe report says the “made-up” numbers are not realistic in today’s world of low interest rates and low investment returns.

“Both these interest rates are well above anything currently available on any asset that matches the plans’ obligations,” Mr. Robson said in a news release Tuesday."

Pension plans must be formulated on the payout side on the basis of everyone slightly outliving the forecasted draw-down. That is, if the average age of death is, say, 80, and the vast majority work until 65, you provision for 16 or 17 years of payouts, averaged out. This is because the average age of death will tend to move forward as people who would have died within that period benefit from medical and other life-extension methods, like a more active lifestyle and a better diet. Pensions were easier when people retired and dropped dead three years later.

Pension plans must be contributed into on the basis of the most conservative outcomes; in a low-interest, low-inflationary period, one cannot "bank" on even a pension fund's considerable buying power to outdo the market. So if one's assumptions are too rosy (and "too rosy" is a real problem in this area of management), the pension will inevitably have less money to address an ever-expanding set of entitlements and obligations.

In sum, when the bureaucrats generally assumed to have gold-plated retirement funding start to question the imperial habit of coin clipping and currency debasement (to cite what in part did in the Roman Empire), it's time to review what we, the washed but nonetheless vast plebian population can expect, if anything, to keep us out of the garbage bins, food banks and future auditions for "Bum Fights, 2030".

Remember, it's November: a late haulout and a near miss

2011-11-12T12:18:00.001-05:00


Don't let the calm water fool you

I like to sail and pay a pretty penny...although not as much as a small econobox car driver on an annual basis...for the privilege of doing so. By sharing costs and balancing off "steel boat restoration" with "plastic boat fun" in my increasingly fume-addled mind, I've been able to justify sailing one boat while I try not to screw up the fitting out of another, beached one.

This is prologue to relating this year's other haulout (I participated in hauling my club three weeks ago), that of Valiente, my 33 foot sloop. Leaving distractedly late from my summer marina berth, I cadged free shelter at my club, although in a rather exposed spot (see above) from the prevailing and gusty mid-fall westerlies, which can swing into NW or even north with rapidity. The previous entry related my last sail of the season, but there was more "fun" in store in the following week.

I haul Valiente in as cheap and "unfacilitied" a location as I can find within reach of bicycle from my home. A glorified series of parking lots in Toronto's "Portlands" called Pier 35 fills the bill nicely...there's not even a washroom on site, no electricity or water can be easily accessed, and the place is overrun with feral cats fed by well-meaning if idiotic white people in nice cars. To top it off, it's downwind from a vast recycling plant. Do not power wash the boat...it's pointless unless you seal it in plastic afterwards.

Hauling here means having a tolerance for a little eccentricity on the part of the denizens and the staff. This is a boat boneyard, with several decaying examples of production and/or homebuilt boats that will likely never get as much sea under their hulls as they've had rain on their decks...sooty, sooty rain. One also must do for oneself: I bicycled out at the beginning of the week to erect and rebolt Valiente's somewhat rusty cradle.

Note: My name's not "Smith"

I brought the pads in the boat. I was supposed to be hauled on Wednesday, November 9th, late enough in my view to be courting frosty nights that would trouble my sleep with visions of ice-shattered engine blocks, but the boat yard's boss said that he was behind in hauling due to a crane breakdown, and I would be welcome to haul Thursday afternoon, and to tie up in the channel from which he hauled at any point.

Well, I didn't, because my sailing pal Jeff suggested it was an exposed channel, I thought it looked dodgy and unsafe (and didn't want cat poo on deck) to leave a boat unattended in that channel, and the wind looked strong and potentially very gusty. So I stayed put at my club and doubled my lines. I told Mr. Crane Operator I would be there 10 AM Friday and received permission to stay on our club wall until Friday.

The first thing I noticed, as one does, on a not quite windy but looking like it might get windier Friday morning was frost on the patch of grass the kids fold sails on. The second thing was that two of four fenders were missing. One had gone taking part of a shackle with it. There was slight damage to the rubrail. I was evidently at least partially in the line of fire, if fire was gusting November wind. Fun fact: Colder air is denser than warmer air. 40 knots of near zero will feel worse than 25C precisely because it is.

"Whew," I thought as I chugged off to the grubby, cat-infested place of stowage, "I'm glad I didn't stay tied to that wall. Might have scratched her up, but good".

Truer words...

This is or perhaps was (pending insurance adjuster verdicts) a 1989 Irwin 38 sloop. The colour is because it was in Caribbean charter, where the sun turns gelcoat into chalk. The damage is courtesy of being exactly where I planned to be, plus shredded fenders, plus parted lines and plus torn-out cleats. This boat came loose in only a little gale, bounced off a few concrete walls, hit a booze cruiser and generally got severely slapped about.

It's worse in person, actually. So is standing beside the owner, who was trying to remain stoic.

Anyway, because the poor thing might be so damaged as to collapse on its cradle, an insurance adjuster had to examine it not only for the usual "repair or scrap" verdict, but to determine if it was even safe to move with half its decks torn up and daylight coming out the transom. The yard boss decided in light of approaching high wind to haul me (mostly) out of the water and away from the wall. Suited me fine, even if I was inexplicably listing to port in the slings.

Prior to the 25-30 knot gusts

I may have spilled my drink at this point.

Note that if one's mast is either side of the yellow stripe on the crane frame, one's beverage may develop a leak.

Also note that attention to detail in the anti-fouling painting area seems to have paid off...that's a pretty clean bottom for a boat in direct sunshine in a murky, weed-choked marina.

You can just make out the chunks missing from the stem of that steel ship off my stern. Done by the wrecked Irwin, alas

After much fuffing about and a somewhat unnervingly slow hoist and lowering occasioned by the newness of the Big Yellow Crane, we settled in for winter. I am leaving the mast in somewhat experimentally as it will greatly increase the speed of commissioning next spring.

Off we go. I always find the sight of either of our boats being moved on wheels a touch nerve-wracking and vaguely amusing. A sort of fish on bicycle image, I suppose.

Winterized the engine rapidly, and will apply selected tarps and charge, then disconnect, the batteries next week. Then, back to the world of steel.

What the world of steel will always feature: 93% zinc coatings

Last sail of 2011: Laying her down in style

2011-11-06T23:25:00.001-05:00

I had, with a sailing pal, my last sail of the season today. November 4 in Toronto is quite late as most local boats are hauled for the winter and demasted, winterized, etc., as the night temperatures can go below 0C. I am hauling next Wednesday as freezing isn't expected, so I took the boat out today.

So the last sail of my season was, somewhat unexpectedly due to the honking great high pressure system above Lake Ontario, a bit of a howler. I saw close to 20 knots apparent with nonetheless flat seas because all the wind was coming off the land and was weirdly gusty, probably due to urban heating. The 24 hour Toronto Island record said "8 kilometres of wind, gusting 30".

Well, try and pick a sail for that. We were either crawling under a full main and a No. 2 or we were on our ears at 30 degrees over. Great, technical sailing, however. I was able to luff way up into the wind during the puffs, as the whole "apparent wind" thing was obvious: as we picked up speed, I could steer 20 degrees to windward and thus reduce the number of tacks I had to make the channel to Toronto's inner harbour.

But I insisted, as I rarely do, that we and my pal both wear PFDs. There was NO ONE on the lake except us (not surprising at the air temperature was 8 C despite the full sun). The water's about 9C, I guess, having had a few drops and splashes land on me from the bow. The fact is that even a fit person could be "shocked" into a daze or unconsciousness if they fell in, never mind get hauled out, and the weird, gusty wind meant the boat was getting headed constantly and heeling very rapidly without much warning from the sea state.

I don't always wear a PFD in the summer, but spring and fall I do pretty religiously. I haven't seen a need to wear a tether on Lake Ontario, but I have several aboard, and I sure as hell wouldn't be typing this had I not been wearing on on the Atlantic Ocean in 40 knots of "surprise" wind in the middle of the night.

Now, I think the type of tether, and more importantly, the ease with which one can release from a D-ring, is up for debate, but not the use of a tether at all. That's like saying you don't use a seatbelt because you can never find the damn big red square button on the latch mechanism.

Anyway, here's some pictures. As mentioned, I was ably accompanied by Jeff Cooper, a man who sailed a great deal many years ago, stopped for a couple of decades, and is rediscovering his love of sailing. So having him aboard is a treat, because all my gear is about 40 years old and therefore he's used to seeing blocks without Torlon bearings or (gasp) winches that merely winch, and do not self-tail!

The start was unpromising, if coolly pleasant. The wind off the land was from due North with a bit of East trying to manifest, but the high pressure and the land station speed of a solid six knots did not promise much in the way of excitement.

Still, north wind in Toronto means "flat sea", and a similarly brisk air and water temperature meant no fog. But because I've been fooled before in the autumn, I opted for a full hoist in the main and the old No. 2 genoa, even though the No. 1 was requested. I had a feeling.

Said feeling might have arisen from watching the incessant turboprop commuter planes that blight the waterfront. They were landing in an obvious cross-wind, jinking and crabbing with intent into the wind.

Judging by the offbeat landing approach (whoops!), there was more than six knots of wind overhead. So we eased off and headed south around the front of Toronto Island to find it.

Of course, you see a lot of nature from a sailboat, particularly when you have the entirety of the water to yourselves. We saw no other boats out on the Lake, not cops, nor fishermen, nor commercial traffic. We both noticed, however, that the leaves were hanging on the branches very late. Some are still in the process of turning red, orange or yellow.

We found a hatful of wind, 15 pushing 20 knots apparent (apparent in the sense that I apparently had a bit too much sail up at points) as we barrelled around the point and "laid her down" heading for the Leslie Street Spit. Too busy sailing in a fairly technical fashion to take shots (this is the part where the nearby weather station was recording "N8, gusting 30", which sums it up for people who know a header as something other than a soccer move), we still saw a flock of what I think were bufflehead ducks fishing in the lake.

After a brief consideration of how close I should run into the beach on the Spit in order to make the Eastern Gap in one tack (because I hate tacking in channels, even when empty of boats), we transited Toronto Harbour and speculated how many eyes in the towers of finance and condos of glass were on us as we gracefully returned to home base.

Some grace was jeopardized while we removed..and then retied...a debris boom from the entrance to my marina. Obviously, they are going into "pure liveaboard" mode, and it's time I hauled out before something freezes. Ever try to hold a boat still while essentially untying a gate? There's no pictures of that, either. Too busy trying to keep the boat off the wall and the crew out of the water.

It was, nonetheless, one of the best days of sailing both Jeff and I agreed that we've ever had. So long, 2011.

How to get ahead in cruising

2011-11-03T11:37:00.000-04:00

True story: When my wife first stepped aboard the custom-built, steel pilothouse cutter of unclassifiable but vaguely Land Rover-ish design that we now own, she peered behind the only door aboard and spotted the Lavac head. She asked "is that the one you can flush a pair of jeans down?"

"Yes, but why would you want to?"

"Just in case. OK, I like the boat".

So we bought it. On such miniscule decisions are vast enterprises founded.

Status: Painting the engine bay interior with multiple coats of "Mascoat db", a ceramic-based sound insulating paint. I'm using a freshly purchased paint sprayer which is doing a fine job, but which requires a lot of cleaning due to the fairly thick nature of the paint. Nonetheless, it is clearly superior to doing it by hand, and, given that I'm recovering from a wrenched back muscle, is well worth the investment.

A plea for segregation over integration...at the helm

2011-10-29T17:30:00.000-04:00

I am currently involved in a mostly civil debate on the merits or lack of merits in integration of the autopilot and the GPS/plotter aboard the modern cruiser. I suppose not supporting integration is to implicitly support segregation. Thus are my views on humans and boat electronics different, I suppose.

For the uniniated, a modern chain or hydraulic-type autopilot (AP) steers the boat using parameters derived from some sort of compass (usually a fluxgate type capable of sending data). One figures out from a chart or a chartplotter or a visual bearing to a land mark one's desired course, say 270 M or due West (magnetic). Assuming the wind is with you (or the motor works if no wind is for you), the boat goes more or less due West. Eventually, and assuming you are keeping a proper watch, you should be where you intended, realizing of course that you can't likely go on AP straight into your dock; at a prudent distance you will have to hand-steer as traffic increases and land draws near. :Land kills more boats, generally, than the sea. Watch out for it, kids.

Now, if you dial in 270 and end up where 260 would have put you, Something's Going On. It could be a tidal effect, a current, leftover sloppy waves pushing the boat off, or maybe your gear isn't precisely calibrated or you are reading True instead of Magnetic or vice-versa. Your job is to find out why. The AP working as it should has revealed an anomaly to you, and Your Brain, Eyes and Hands can rectify this unscheduled detour.

By contrast, slaving the GPS to the AP means the AP steers to a waypoint selected by the skipper (I almost wrote "the operator"). The waypoint (WP) is a designated lat/lon often selected because it's proximate to a nav aid like a big shiny buoy, something even the newest sailor might recognize. The current doesn't matter...the AP will steer unerringly to the designated point. Very nice.

And yet...

If the wind shifts, you could gybe as the GPS instructs the AP to turn "more to starboard!" If the wind dies, the GPS could lose "lock" because they do not do well in the lower half of boat speeds (sub 3 knots SOG, in my experience). This could cause radical steering corrections. Also, one wouldn't wish the MFD (multifunction display) to go wonky, or not to have a separate control panel for the AP. But that is the way some of the newer systems are set up: black boxes and leads going to a display unit or the "master black box".

For the insider's view on how getting gadgets to play together nicely can be a chore and then some, I refer you to The Marine Installer's Rant blog. Aspiring boat rebuilders can learn a lot from this guy.

The systems I am envisioning for Alchemy are stand-alone AIS, RADAR, depthfinder and autopilot, all of which can have their displays or their numerical values going to a PC-based solution. I am encouraged testing out cheapish, low-draw "netbooks" running OpenCPN, although I wouldn't object to running something like Rose Compass or others if they were a better choice.That is key to understand here: it's not a money issue...well, not entirely. I would buy the best solution if I thought it was the best solution, but to me, that solution is about flexibility and redundancy, not necessarily centralized control and monitoring.

As we have a pilothouse, I intend only to have a cheap weatherproof plotter outside as a sort of slave display/backup; the real setup will be, I hope, largely out of the weather. Because I have easy and immediate access to the engines and tankage, the sort of "command center" console displays found on the flybridges of million-dollar fishing boats is of limited interest to me, as is the ability to know at the tap of a finger the exact RPM of the engine or the internal temperature of the alternators. "Integration", where I set the AP to sail to a GPS-determined waypoint, would be possible, and desirable, if I was in an open ocean current, for instance, and wanted to motor with the least amount of leeway made, but generally I would prefer to "steer to wind" or just trim properly to make the AP work the least.

My contention in the online forum I'm on is that integration, while a boon to, say, the single hander who is presumably an excellent seaman to begin with, puts the unlearned or inexperienced sailor in the position of having several sources of information appearing in a realistic format, but which itself is only a representation of an idealized chart, and not necessarily what's in front of the boat.

Here's a "clip" from today's discussion:

Poster ColemJ said: Again, seamanship and good practices have NOTHING to do with electronics, autopilots or how they are integrated. Nothing.

I am not meaning to be argumentative or personal with you Alchemy, it is just that I remain confused and confounded why the seamanship argument keeps being made.

To which I replied: Integrated electronics allow stupid people to look smart until they hit something easily avoided, perhaps killing themselves or others in the process.

Integrated electronics are part of the process of turning a skipper into a "passenger".

Integrated electronics also discourage a stupid person, or rather an ignorant person, from educating themselves into competency. A boat with a tiller and a compass and a Windex and maybe a VHF (90% of boats until maybe 15 years ago) is a relatively mute thing. It gives you messages in ways by which you can't help but notice the nuances of wind, waves and weather. The "Star Trek" helm, by contrast, will allow even a near-blind child to steer the boat, but that child will not necessarily learn anything in the process.

So I am not impugning the skilled and seamanlike sailor for whom integration is a convenience only and is merely an extension to the existing and familiar boat operation aids, but I will and do impugn the growing number of boaters who rely on such gadgets because they know very little seamanship.

Those people are trouble for the sport, trouble for the SAR and a bonanza for those who know how to fix boats. We get reports here and elsewhere about sailboats calling MAYDAYs because they've run out of fuel, or going out without doing a weather check, or running into nav aids because waypoints weren't understood, or being unable to dock because the bow thruster's busted and they have a boat with grotesque windage.

Like the stories of people dying in the wilderness because "the GPS told them to go this way", individuals, to paraphrase Franklin, who give up their autonomy in order to secure a little convenience deserve neither.

See, told you I'd gotten ornery! Half the guys who taught me how to break down engines and do CN are already dead of old age, and the number of bozos at the helm continues to be high where I live. These days it's bozos texting on smart phones as they enter basins. I use the horn more than I used to, just to pry their eyeballs up from the glowing screens.

Sailing should be learned in electronics-free boats, in my view. Once you understand on a visceral and seamanlike level which aspect of boat operation the electronics mimic ...and the limitations of that mimicry...fine, go nuts, turn the helm into Mission Control. If you know how to sail safely, it's no matter to me. But I find that is not always the case, and guys in driveways seen fixing their own cars have just about vanished from North America. As has in some respects the experiential method of acquiring seamanship via, you know, actually sailing by hand and eye.

Colemj said: Yes! In fact, that's how we use ours 80% of the time (non-integrated - simply steer to compass).

I am just having problems with the conflation of lack of seamanship and integrated systems.

I replied : I think we are essentially discussing the same thing from two ends. You are advocating the use of integration as just another tool available to the already skilled seaman, and I am saying that integration aids and abets the presence of underskilled skippers and crew and unseamanlike behaviour in conditions that can turn unpleasant rapidly.

The fact is that I've used integration of the "patch it in as needed" type myself...and liked it. But I have also seen it break, as I've seen windvanes break offshore. Stuff happens: Seamen know how to get back to basics because they've experienced such basics. It seems of late, however, that people are dying or requiring rescue because their electronics-laden boats break in the real ocean, and they have no knowledge base from which to extract themselves from danger or distress.

Now, I could be wrong on all this, and I could be persuaded otherwise, but when you see people, as I do in my car-free lifestyle literally stepping off curbs into traffic or literally walking into planters and utility poles because they have their noses in their iPhones, it makes me think that it would take a sort of discipline to avoid staring at the screens and instead to stare at the sea, as one should. That's one of the reasons why I would have something quite minimal at the helm, plus a compass...it's distracting. Going below to the pilothouse is fine for bad weather and consultation with the LCD oracles, but really, even when the boat's on auto-pilot, the prudent seaman should be scanning the horizon, listening for changes in the wind or waves, and sniffing for better sailing weather.

I'm not convinced further automation of the sailing experience will encourage that tendency. One might as well take the bus...or become a jet pilot. I'm no Luddite, but if stuff breaks at sea...and it does...why make life harder by putting all one's nav aid/boat operation eggs in one basket? If I had a little boat going distances, I would probably for reasons of space and power opt for the all-in-one MFD, all-singing and dancing solutins...and it would probably be Furuno with Maretron black boxes...but for the moment, I would rather have stuff I can use when needed and "integrate" on an ad hoc basis.

The great levelling, or six degrees of remediation

2011-10-24T01:31:00.001-04:00

"A certain sinking feeling" is something no sailor wants to experience, and yet during Alchemy's extended stay on land, that has been a increasingly common perception. Perhaps it was the rainwater pooling in the self-draining cockpit, or flowing past the scuppers to leave grubby puddles by the gunwhales, but it was clear that the good ship's attitude was getting low, specifically down by the bow.

I attributed this to a combination of soft ground (it's just backfill, really, as the whole club property is entirely artifical and not particularly well-draining) and to a slight, but critical, misplacement of the boat when laid to rest, making it a tad heavier than needed on the forepart of the cradle.

The result can be clearly seen even from the spring: The whole operation is trying to make like a lawn quoit and sink into the gravel. I had to lash things, including the new engine, to the rails and bollards to keep them from rolling or shifting forward. While this was annoying from the view of painting and walking near open hatches, it wasn't likely critical or dangerous...until the time approached for putting in the engine. "Zeroing" an engine on its stringers and mounts so that it is very, very close to having its rear coupling mating firmly and evenly with a similar coupler on the non-propped end of the shaft is the key to avoiding wear on the transmission, shaft, prop and important, moving and expensive bits of the diesel...and it makes the boat considerably quieter. The tolerances involved are near those found in getting a new crown for a tooth...hundredths of a inch. Now, the use of a CV coupler joint mitigates this need for exactitude somewhat...but you still have to be close. Having measured the pitch angle of Alchemy at sixdegrees and likely advancing, I thought that trying to line up a seven-hundred pound engine and a five-foot steel shaft would be problematic...so I thought I'd move the boat by hand.

Don't giggle now: this actually worked for a bit. It's a 20-tonne hydraulic bottle jack (due to the shape), and it moves a sturdy piston up by tiny amounts with each manly crank of its inadequate handle. The problem was that the boat's at least 15 tonnes, and wants to get closer to the core of the Earth when out of the water. Cranking on the handle basically drove the jack into the yielding ground and especially into the various planks and boards I shoved under it to spread the load. I was able to get in a few steel shims, but even after I started to have better results after lobbing a sack of marble-sized gravel under the boards, I didn't like the alarming noises everything made, nor the extreme leisure with which things actually happened due to the ratio of arm-pumping to real-world lifting. Note that the theory was sound but the execution lacking, and let that be a lesson to all sailors.

Eventually, this past weekend, I prevailed upon my club's "Haulout" committee to fix the problem properly by hoisting Alchemy upwards a few feet and pulling the whole cradle out of the hole it had dug for itself, forward a couple of feet to improve the balance of the boat over its pads, and onto some strategically placed lengths of lumber.

The difference was immediate and gratifying. Water long trapped on deck gushed profusely out the stern scuppers and off the side decks. The "lifts" on the front of the cradle did not immediately sink into the ground, probably because the cradle move rolled a lot of my gravel forward in a helpful fashion.

While the whole operation took a crew of volunteers and plenty of semi-learned discussion before and during the cradle repositioning (which took place on a cold and damp day at dawn as the first hoist of a busy day for the club), it was executed perfectly. Nothing inside the boat budged, although I had made attempts to brace toolboxes and paint drums adequately.

This shows how far forward the cradle moved. The boat went up and down largely in the same position.

Evidence of success. The boat is now about one degree high at the bow...but I fully expect it to sink a few millimeters, which will put me where I want to be.

The new attitude: Up, up and aweigh anchors.

So here again is another learning opportunity. What I know about levers stopped at the see-saw I last rode as a tyke. But basic principles properly understood gave me a workable, if tedious, answer (the bottle jack, which I will use in the engine installation and elsewhere to lift really heavy things small distances), but also showed that the lift was a safer and much, much faster option, once I had worked out, in consultation with other amateur engineers among my club friends, the best way to shift 15 tonnes of beached boat.

A process of recovery

2011-10-24T00:39:00.003-04:00

One of the things I've noticed about the boating game is that the prospective voyager has to possess, if not expertise, then a passing familiarity with various trades. This is not only so that one may perform the endless and varied tasks to keep the vessel afloat and in good repair and reasonable comfort, but so that one can recognize when outside help is doing a decent job fixing what is beyond one's own abilities.

So I've had to become handy in ways I've never had to be handy before. I may have mentioned in older posts that I never took "shop", as "Industrial Arts" was once known (is there still Industrial Arts? Given the dire prevalence of TV fix-it shows and the cultish admiration of hammer-wielding tradesmen, I suspect not.). Instead of lathing a newel post (would be nice for a binoculars bin), or dovetailing a lovely map chest (for a map chest), I was in theatre class, trying to impress high-breasted, long-legged and usually disinterested-in-me females.

Well, at least I learned blocking, which sounds vaguely woody.

After school, I continued in the arts field with a series of wordy or word-friendly jobs involving fast typing and smart-assery, but very little call for wielding of hand tools. Problems in the rental units in which I lived much beyond changing a light bulb were referred to the landlord, as was good and proper. My hands were soft and my head empty of all things mechanical, electrical, motorized or fabricated. I didn't even own a car. I had a moped when I was 16, but that mostly involved a level of engineering only slightly above servicing a bicycle.

Then in short order, I bought a creaky old house and a creaky old sailboat. Fear of Having to Call Someone This Time caused my wallet to seize shut. I had to get skills, and I had to get them quickly. Particularly, it must be said, when I blew up my first Atomic 4 by neglecting to open the cooling water intake.

It hasn't been easy, and the process is continuing. Thirteen years after buying an 1890-built house and 12 years after acquiring a 1973 sailboat, I no longer consider myself absolutely feeble. My screw-ups and ignorance have been (and in some fields continue to be) the foundation on which I've built a Temple of Near Competency. I even seem to have a knack for small motor maintenance and minor fabrication, and can glass, shape aluminum, make a crude but functional cabinet and can grind, router, wire, hoist, chisel, sand, mount, drill, unseize, hammer, wedge, bolt, saw and buff without threat to maintaining an even number of fingers. Yes, I now sport some minor, if lurid, scars and my fingernails are rarely entirely free of some industrial-strength goo, but it appears at an embarrasingly advanced age that I have become Officially Handy.

Just as well, because I couldn't bloody well afford to pay people. I will, however, recognize when I can't do the job properly (like welding...yet) and will hire when needed.

More often, however, I will simply try out the task myself on something innocuous...a practice run, so to speak, in order to see if I can combine a (usually) economically-oriented idea with non-idiotic execution. Such was the case with the breakfast nook chairs.

Dire, isn't it? I bought these shave-above-IKEA chairs about 25 years ago in a quest to uplift my station in life by not eating off furniture salvaged from either my parents' basement and/or the 1960s. That tatty blue rag is covering the original shredded seat cover and its crumbling foam filling.

The table top I had sanded and coated with unused Cetol, a marine-style wood varnish-type liquid that goes on exterior teak bits. The chairs remained nasty and increasingly brutish. Cabin Boy is seen applying small but keen arms to the task of removing the nasty and likely Swedish buttock buffer.

I replaced this with 3/4 inch thick closed-cell insulation I purchased for about ten dollars. Cut into sized rectangles, it provided a firm, if somewhat Calvinist, bedrock for bums, and would logically wear better than the dusty, nasty stuff it replaced. Covering that and carefully using little galvanized tacks gave a pleasing, if neutrally coloured, result.

The bonus is that the insulation will go nicely in the pilothouse roof. The second bonus is that I learned a little bit about recovering furniture, which will come in handy when I redo the aft cabin sleeping arrangements. The third bonus is that the fabric covering was free to me as it is burlap carefully cut from large sacks for roasted coffee, kindly rendered for the asking from the nearby cafe where I buy my beans.

I think it's cute and "urban", but then I would, wouldn't I? Worn-out chairs are suddenly "found design". Would that boat stuff was so cheap to fix.

Anyway, that's another minor skill of which I can claim I'm not completely ignorant...and I didn't cut myself this time.

Fun advertisement

2011-10-17T19:07:00.003-04:00

I don't drink Chivas, but I like the "spirit" of their sailing-themed TV ad.

Quite a number of posts in the pipeline, but it's a busy few weeks to come. More soon!

Frigate (insert own rude pun here)

2011-09-06T11:55:00.002-04:00

While it's logical and indeed expected to note that the majority of my readers are American, some of them might not instantly recognize that I, my family and our boat are not. After all, we appear to speak a common language, and over large parts of the land mass that we share, after stealing it from the natives, it's often difficult to distinguish in a physical or geologic sense where one country ends and the other begins. Indeed, a bone of contention among some of the previously mentioned aborginals of North America is that they don't much care to flash passports at the Canada-U.S. border as in many cases their traditional tribal lands are on both sides of the imaginary line, much of which remains unfenced, and despite various security initiatives, unwatched.

Living in Canada and writing in English on the internet means a lot of contact with Americans, who, when they think of Canada at all, do not see us as a particularly belligerent bunch, as a sort of self-deprecating politeness seems to be our collective sociological trait, where we can be distinguished from Minnesotans or Vermonters at all (save for les Quebecoises, I suppose, whom Americans sometimes think are found everywhere in Canada in large numbers).

And yet like many other Commonwealth countries like Australian, New Zealand and even the Gurkhas of Nepal, we have been and continue to be quite a feisty bunch. The current debate about fighting in hockey in Canada would be unlikely to happen elsewhere, as apart from MMA and boxing, there are very few sports in which out-and-out brawling is considered part of the game. Even rugby is arguably less violent.

Which brings us to Canada's often-derided armed forces. We possess a vast country and a diffuse population, which, while wealthy on the scale of nations, is not really numerous or threatened enough to justify the sort of army, navy and air force that would impress a middle-rank dictator. Indeed, more than one American has alleged that Canada gets a "free ride" in terms of our own military defence, although one might say "a free ride from the enemies of America, perhaps", but that wouldn't be true, either.

The truth is that our compact military has been at it for years at the a large human and financial cost since the Second World War, during which Canada fielded disproportionately large navies and armies. We once had an aircraft carrier, for instance, but it has since made more sense to have frigates. Recently, as a "last day of summer holidays treat", we saw one of our own, HMCS Montreal. (The other treat was a honking fast sail in Valiente.)

Montreal and two smaller minesweepers are currently patrolling the Great Lakes...for what is not precisely clear, but I'm sure the crews appreciate not being in their usual Atlantic patrol areas in September.

Our son, Mr. Cabin Boy, appreciated the opportunity to see large red buttons reading "ARMED" and "FIRE" and to field-test the rigidity of the deck gun. For a non-taxpayer, he has some firmly held ideas on what constitutes value.

Dad, meanwhile, appreciated those aspects of a 480 foot frigate that have application in his own steel hulk of approximately 1/12 the length...and it's more than one might think. Their liferafts look bigger, but are still recognizably liferafts.

The ground tackle, while impressively sized, was also not radically different in design, although the forces involved in holding something this massive and lofty exceed my imagination.

The "devil's claw", used to secure the chain and relieve strain on the windlass (I guess "capstan" is more appropriate).

It's adjusted with this hulking turnbuckle thingie.

Which is in turn "adjusted" with a Navy-issue sledgehammer.

And the chain goes out via this suspiciously well-polished hawse pipe. Modern warships seem to favour a centerline chain deployment and anchor stowage.

Possibly the only compass I've seen that's nicer than our Ritchie Globemaster, but mine still has the hilariously named "compensator balls". The balls on this one must reside below decks, one assumes.

And clearly, one would prefer to "operate" this part of the ship. Alas, no.

As for navigation, I was gratified to see that they are no better equipped than ourselves in the paper chart department:

...although their RADAR is a bit more elaborate.

...and so is their plotter...

My favourite bit was spotted as we were leaving...HMCS Montreal has an interesting approach to deploying fenders:

No doubt effective!

While not personally particularly militaristic, I come from a family in which active military service has played a role, and I respect the work of our armed forces who are frequently given tasks at home and overseas for which our federal government seem unwilling to finance. The sailors aboard were courteous and well-informed, and seemed to welcome the opportunity to mingle with the public that pays for the ships. Given a world in which future conflict is likely to persist, I hope "big city visits" like that of the Montreal and her sister ships inculcates a willingness to maintain an effective armed force for Canada.

And that's how the "Solar Stik" was made obsolete

2011-08-20T12:30:00.002-04:00

A few years back, a company producing a solar panel mounting system called "Solar Stik" came in for some good-natured ribbing about its claims of maximizing solar panel output, which is often sub-optimal on boats due to angles and shadows from masts, etc.

Many solar-panel-equipped sailors, of course, have made for themselves various methods to optimally angle their expensive panels. It's not rocket science, after all: The "smartest" mount would track the sun all day, as the "equatorial mounts" on the better sort of telescopes move to keep a given celestial object in sight for long photographic exposures. Even better would be a way to tilt the panels relative to the sun's height, which varies with the seasons, and would make the tracking at the constant right angles at which most (but not all) solar panels produce the most amps.

Some people, of course, just bolt panels for "morning" and "afternoon" on their cabin sides, or on the lifelines when conditions permit, and accept that 1/2 of total output is better than a kick in the diesel tank.

This kid decided to approach the problem using 800-year-old mathematics and by observing the growth of trees. Perhaps the key to fostering genius in the young is keep from them what is considered impossible. The Fibonacci sequence is, like Fermat's Last Theorem and Pythagoras's Famous One, among the oldest notions in Western math. And yet this young fellow figured out how a tree was better than a solar array when you don't have 300 acres of desert to lay it out in.

So, he may be onto something, but whether it will find application in the way sailors use solar energy remains to be seen. "Sun Tree on the stern? Sure!" One wonders if very light, flexible panels could be hoisted partway up the mast without coming apart in the wind, or maybe another solution would be to make flexible panels part of the mast itself.

Tank battles

2011-08-11T10:56:00.007-04:00

Meet Starboard McStainless, the 100 gallon water tank I hauled out yesterday. Nice piece of work, yes? Inspection port, threaded outlets and inlets, an internal baffle, very little in the way of scratches or rust. Why would I want to yank such a nifty tank out of the bilges of Alchemy, one might ask. And, with dimensions of 48 x 24 x 20 inches, and an engine room hatch of 48 x 24 inches, would I perform Moebius-strip contortions to get this beast out? (Not to mention the removal of the pilot house roof and the use of a truck crane?). It came out, in the end, fairly smoothly, although grabbing the thing in yesterday's high winds as I yelled instructions to the invisible crane guy via another guy on the side deck was quite stimulating.

But why? Well, here's the deal. The sibling to this tank, Porty McStainless, is identical, save for a top end hose barb that takes the deck fill hose, which snakes torturously through a tool locker to reach the break in the deck. The fill routine consisted of filling this port tank to overfilled status, at which point a hose would fill the starboard tank. When were they both filled? When the boat stopped listing and water came out the starboard vent.

The shortcomings of this method were many. Worse, however, from my point of view, is that these tanks are (or were) mounted on angle iron a good two feet off the hull. Filled tanks, or worse, ONE filled tank, actually made my steel boat a trifle tender, because the weight was too high. In somewhat heavy seas in 2007 (yes, Lake Ontario can throw up the occasional eight to 10 footers if it's been blowing 30 knots all day from the east or south-east), these tanks BOOMED as they flexed and sloshed as the boat pitched forward and back.

The baffles, they did nothing.

Lastly, those fine inspection ports were on the TOPS of the SS tanks...within one inch of the underside of the pilothouse deck. Unless one was willing to unbolt the tanks, take apart the hoses, remove the engine and yanks the tanks under the hatch, nothing was ever going to get inspected.

Well, that's not going to work, is it?

So I decided that I wanted to improve my boat's "stiffness" by getting the water tankage (which is the better part of one tonne and is "non trivial" in terms of ballasting the hull) lower, resting just off the hull in through-bolted angle iron supports (the bit I liked), and placed between the frames. For ease of handling and management and even for trim purposes, I'm opting for four approximately 50 gallon water tanks, made of HDPE, ideally. They will be small enough not to require baffles, and low enough to keep the weight where it should be, as close to the keel as is possible.

Something like the above, times four. Inspection ports are at knee height, all hose fittings are accessible, there is now air above for hanging awkward light stuff like fenders, pipe and lengths of hose (all secured, of course).

Why four tanks? Aside from the insurance that if one tank goes "bad", there's three others, we intend to get a smallish watermaker. The idea is that one tank will hold collected rainwater for "wash" water, water used to clean the boat, flush the head (a Y-connection allowing a freshwater flush or three of the head will get rid of many of the critters and sediments that would otherwise clog the works...apart from the usual traffic that can clog the works...), and do the onboard laundry.

The other three tanks would contain either trusted "municipal" water, or water we make ourselves while motoring in clean seawater. One of the reasons for having a double PTO on the new engine is to run twinned alternators to charge maximally the house bank when underway for the weekly holding tank pumpout, for instance. (Note to self. Make fresh water AWAY from pump out zone...ewwww....)

I will install two water fills (there is evidence one used to be on starboard, but is mysteriously under a welded plate), and will rationalize the tank vents so that even a capsize would be unlikely to put salt water in the tanks. I will also plumb these tanks so that I can pump water between them to keep the weight either high side on long reaches in trade winds, or to keep it in the forward two tanks for better balance.

Lastly, I will have foot pumps (I like the Whale type) plus pressure water in the galley. The galley will have the existing "domestic" tap set (pressure hot potable water from the hot water tank and the Flojet pump) and potable foot pumped water, and lastly, a hand-pumped seawater tap for "utility" wash ups.

It sounds complicated and expensive, certainly, but the decision to go with plenty of water tankage (it's the same amount in a different configuration, really), and a watermaker was not taken lightly, and is prompted by the same "shore-independent" set up that is driving the multiple charging sources design and the somewhat oversized battery bank capacity.

Everything's relative, of course. I understand 840-1000 Ah is not, in fact, as big as many folk with more amp-greedy gadgets than I plan to install already have.

Like this times three:

I just want to run my fridge and make the occasional SSB foray and netbook charging for five cloudy, windless days at anchor without thinking "damn, I have to fire up the diesel to make amps".

By the same token, 150 gallons of drinking water is considerable for three humans, even in the tropics. The ability to make it from the sea using amps made from the wind and the sun? Priceless.

Now, to get Porty out...

UPDATE August 22, 2011: The fine fellow who purchased the starboard tank phoned me to ask if I would trade it for the port tank (identical in size but the mirror image in plumbing fixtures).

So up it came. "Identical" in custom-made boat gear is a relative concept, as the tank proved about a quarter-inch wider than the hole in the pilothouse floor. Snug wasn't the half of it.

Anyway, using brute strength, 3D mental visualizations, and the Amazing Folding Wife, we managed to crane out the thing standing on its end, and away it will shortly go.

Now, to find a buyer for a starboard SS water tank!

They're like seatbelts...for your boat!

2011-08-09T23:25:00.004-04:00

On both my 33 and 41 footer, even though they are quite safe boats in an absolute sense, I usually wear my auto-inflatable PFD. While I make it optional for adults, all children under 18 must wear the foam type, of which I have a variety of the manual and autoinflate vests, plus a number of the foam type in a range of sizes for the kiddies and visitors.

Plus a bag of the obligatory old foam types used mostly as cushions, but which allow me...legally...to carry about nine adults.

Not that I do. But then I don't race the boat. Others have, and that's why there's a bag of untouched cheapo legal foam types aboard.

In addition, we have tethers and carry knives, Fox 40 whistles and the occasional strobe.

I won't even mention the waterproof VHF, the ACR personal locator beacon or the hand flare in a baggie I bring on deliveries. Let's just say I'm personally drowning-averse, as one is. And yet people drown across Canada, and elsewhere, with alarming regularity.

Let's just say we will be fully equipped...and fully habituated...to boat rules like "mandatory PFD wearing on watch, mandatory tether on watch, mandatory clipping on jacklines when working forward and no leaving the cockpit without waking a crew". These were the rules on my first Atlantic delivery, and, having nearly slipped out of the cockpit at 3 AM when we slid off a wave, only to be stopped by my tether, I see no reason to modify them in concept or practice.

Does this mean a full, awake, daylight crew in an angel's fart breeze on a tropical beam reach requires full time PFDs? Maybe not, if you can outswim the boat. It'll certainly leave interesting tan lines given the clothing-optional nature of passagemaking!

Now, when I sail alone, or when I am in either my Portabote or my sailing dinghy (about 10 feet each), I wear an old purple and yellow kayaker's vest. Why? Because if I'm alone, off or out of the boat, and *unconscious*, the bulky, unfashionable, hot and slightly stained foam vest will keep my head out of the water. I know this, because I've jumped off the boat and even when I relax, I can't easily even put my face in the water.

So even though I realize I might drown or freeze anyway, the vest means that if I am merely stunned, I might "come around" without aspirating water, which is perhaps the difference between a bad situation and a fatal one.

I've seen this new, "not USCG-approved" system by Spinlock called the Deck Vest, and I like the fact it's a PFD with crotch straps, with an integral harness and plenty of reserve buoyancy, and yet it fits closely. A crew, a Canadian army major, wore one on an Atlantic delivery and he was a pretty large guy as am I and he remarked on its comfort and utility. And of course if you are tethered, the crotch straps keep you in the PFD if overboard, and allow you to rotate yourself from an inverted position, as can happen.

If injured, but conscious, it would also aid crew in clipping the tether end to a line reeved onto a block on the boom, so it can be considered an option in a retrieval system.

You can't always save yourself or be saved on a boat...or off it...but thinking about why it's clever to wear a PFD when underway increases one's chances. Also, if you like to boogie on deck, PFDs protect you from inconvenient obstacles, like the mast.

On the rode again

2011-08-05T14:25:00.008-04:00

I have, as I believe I've mentioned, obtained a nifty 15 pound aluminum FX-23 from the fine folk at Fortress Anchors. It's designed for 39-45 feet LOA boats, like what my currently beached Alchemy is, and is therefore oversized for Valiente, my 9,000 lb., 33 footer that is the "operational" part of our Swiss navy.

C'est la vie: Nobody ever resented an oversized anchor that weighed 15 lbs. My nine-year-old can hoist it into the cockpit if I don't mind buffing out scratches. My compact spouse can haul away without resorting to the seaman's vocabulary.

The existing 13 foot chain and 200 foot rope rode on Valiente is three-strand 7/16" mated to slightly larger chain and shackled to a 22 lb. steel Danforth High Tensile anchor of indeterminate age, if relatively good condition. Certainly, it's the classic "lunch hook" and we've been using it as such. It has held in every unchallenging case we've thrown at it, which is to say it might as well have been a cinder block on 12 gauge wire for all the holding power demanded of it.

In testing the larger, if lighter, Fortress on this modest rode, however, we found it impossible to veer out in reverse under power, "under power" in this case being understood to mean a direct-drive Atomic 4 (about 17 HP) in reverse spinning an 11.5 x 8 inch Gori folding two-blade prop at 1:1 gearing in six knots of wind...not exactly a tractor pull. Nonetheless, we were concerned that the new, grippier anchor and the old rode were not a good match, so off to the marine store I went (And Princess Auto, like a marine store, only cheaper).

Not only did I want the security of a right-sized rope and chain (and shackles) rode for the Fortress's size, I wanted the opportunity to splice. 12 years of boat ownership, and it's never come up, even though I have sewed patches, reeved all sorts of line and have sealed, whipped and knotted many, many things. I have yet to SCUBA, too, but that's another post.

Obviously, more practice is required. I did test the thing, however, and 'backspliced' a full 18 inches, with three tucks before trimming instead of two. My biggest challenge was keeping the taped strands similarly twisted as they preferred to undo into a sort of yarn-like limpness, hence the somewhat irregular braiding. I suspect that this will actually look a bit better after use, and next time, I'm going to heat-shrink the ends instead of taping. The brown bit of leather is covering a spot of whipping I did to cover over the last pokey strands, and I did the recommended touch up with the recommended hot knife. It took about 90 minutes. I know, because that's how long my son whined "is it done yet?" from the shady, beveraged-filled cabin while Daddy paid court to Madame Melanoma in the sun-drenched cockpit, the scent of burning nylon vying with the smell of dead carp. Sailing: Come for the glamour, stay for the slaving.

The new rode is 200 feet of 5/8" three-strand with an 18-inch back splice (as this is my first, it's a little lacking in art and is untidy) to 15 feet of 3/8" chain. Shackles hold the anchor to the chain. This gives us 7:1 scope in 30 feet of water with a little left over, which is going to suffice 90% of the time in the Great Lakes and pretty close to 100% of the time in Lake Ontario.

I will leave the Fortress unshackled from the rode as they are awkward to move together. I also have made provision for the lashing of a light line leading to a float to go on the crown of the Fortress as an anchor buoy and, if ever needed, a trip line if we snag a log or something. I have not yet had a problem, however, merely driving over the anchor as I haul in rode and just yanking the anchor directly up. It comes up cleanly and the chain/rope/anchor combo is, I would say, less than 40 pounds...not a big deal for us and there's no budget for a windlass!

Note the expression of the crew when hearing the familiar refrain of "no budget for that".

We will likely use the existing "nothing wrong with it and it fits the anchor hangers" Danforth for a lunch hook, and bring out the Fortress and this new rode for overnight and heavy weather. As I intend it to be the lunch hook for Alchemy, it's certainly sturdy enough, and we anticipate sleeping soundly at anchor when we go down the lake in a couple of weeks.

Look out, Portabote

2011-07-28T17:43:00.003-04:00

I recently helped a friend sell a PVC Zodiac inflatable and a 15 HP Mercury outboard. Not much remarkable about that, but upon inflation and inspection, the Zodiac proved to have a rotten (as in "transect with poking finger") transom and more than one hole in its various parts.

The buyer, another, unrelated friend, was quite understanding and is endeavouring to salvage the Zodiac, while was just about worthless at time of sale. The engine worked fine, thank goodness.

My friend the seller had never used the thing, but it made me think of the damage, largely invisible in this case, that was done merely in storing a significant piece of boat gear between uses. As one does. Apparently, moisture was also stored with the rolled up Zodiac, and rot was the result.

Extrapolate this to the concept of a lift raft case mounted on deck in all conditions, and the concept of "what happens at sea to gear we want very much the one time we really want it". Stuff like "emergency tiller/tiller head", "parachute flares" and "hand powered water maker" come to mind, also.

Our choice of nesting dinghy and folding Portabote was in part influenced by such considerations. One can be fixed via familiar epoxy repair and the other with glue and plastic, but both are fundamentally stronger than an inflatable (unless they come in Kevlar, I suppose). The point here, however, is that they are going to be used regularly; problems will hopefully manifest in a small way subject to easy remediation rather than in the "wasn't that supposed to inflate?" way that may be the last words uttered at sea for some unfortunates.

Well, although it's more toy than watercraft, some clever buggers have made an origami plastic rowboat.

Made from a single sheet of plastic (excepting the oars, I gather), the boat was designed in a paper-folding workshop that focused on generating 3D forms out of 2D drawings.

I would suggest they succeeded, although how stable the thing is remains to be seen. What it does demonstrate is that even the very clever and increasingly popular Portabote folder might be yet improved, lightened or made dimensionally more compact, which I would image those who see some compromises with inflatable may judge as a Good Thing.

Of course, there are other ideas on how to get to shore without getting one's feet wet (or semi-wet). I don't see these as practical for any place beyond a mill pond, but they do show innovation and that all the good ideas haven't been thought of just yet.

Consider the Shuttle Bike. It's a way to convert the average mountain bike into a water taxi. As someone likely to bring bikes along when cruising, this holds some appeal.

Or how about an Amphibious Bike? (Shh, it's only a model...)

Or if you can't ride, make like Jogging Jesus and stride across the wavelets.

How many of these concepts are applicable to the cruiser? Maybe none. Maybe I'll follow the herd (and not the Pardeys) and opt for a "soft" over a "hard" tender. (Note to foreign readers: "Hard tender" is one of those nonsensical phrases, like "jumbo shrimp", that litter English. Nautical English is particularly confusing.)

But we shall see, and in seeing, shall learn.

Friday funny

2011-06-17T10:17:00.000-04:00

This seemed to be of nautical interest in this morning's paper...

Ahoy, readers! Artificial waypoint dead astern!

2011-06-11T12:40:00.005-04:00

Sometime over the last 24 hours, this little "fixing a boat" blog, which was started in late March of 2007, crested 10,000 "distinct views".

OK, Steve Jobs, I am not.

There's a number of hobbies, fetishes and political/religious viewpoints of which not one of those 10,000 patrons has likely ever heard of that are more compelling and worthy of perusing. Reading traffic stats of websites is not exciting, but it's revealing, and "boat restoration/prep for cruising" is not remotely in the same league as watching reality TV or even translating Buddhist chants from Tibetan into Latvian. Nonetheless, I continue to post, as it's a diary of successes, failures and "teachable moments" for me and the crew, and the interaction with readers is something I've come to value greatly.

I do believe, however, that for such a protracted and specialized narrative, that the experience of blogging has grown from "cheat notes for the inevitable cruising book" into a sort of meditation on What It All Means via Boat Repair. You can spend time, money and sweat equity in fixing a boat, particularly when you start with such a poverty of manual skills and technical know-how as I, the boy who quit shop class for theatre because all the girls weren't in shop, possess in such modest amounts. But as I acquire, painfully in some cases, these skills, I am finding that my attitudes toward the work, the trip, the adventure and in some senses my own culture is changing. We have never been particularly materialistic in my family...not being rich will have that effect...but a sharp consideration of life aboard for years at a time has tailored expectations even more. What we really need is a fairly short list; what we would like to have has to pass a number of filters, such as cost, energy needs, maintenance cycle and spaces required.

In 2008, we weren't going to have a watermaker. Now, we will. We were going to rebuild the engine, now we have a new one. And so on. Charting the evolution of opinion and mindset both within and around the perimeter of "the project" is simple when rereading this blog, and even if it's only of personal interest to me, I have found it revealing and instructive.

As for what has proven popular, the fine folk at Blogger make that tally easy. Doom, realized or in potential, brings in the eyeballs. My entry on the 2010 Lake Ontario 300 race and its brief if intense, sail-rending squalls have been the most read post to date, with 507 "pageviews". Next is this post from 2009 about how realistic it is to recover a COB (crew overboard) in bad conditions. Over 400 readers found that sufficiently interesting, which confirms to me that nothing brings a crowd like a good accident.

After that, things tail off considerably, and it is clear that I am not writing for an audience. Fair enough...I am surprised to have had 10,000 reads in the first place.

My sincere thanks to my readership and to all those who have taken the time to comment and to inform.

And so the journey continues.

Bright and butyl full

2011-06-09T20:09:00.004-04:00

No, this is not a duplicate post of this one from last fall. It is, however, an illustration of how outside forces can derail certain aspects of the renovation schedule. Above you see a completed installation of the fab Newfound Metals portlights, for which I was grinding larger holes late last September. I had actually dry-fitted them as ye olde post describes, but I ran into a run of work, had to pull the other boat out of the water, had to secure permission for further time on land, made a fairly critical bit of ligament in my left arm n0n-functional trying to hand-lower big batteries off the boat (note to self: Warm up muscles first, then purchase small crane.)

Then we had an appalling winter and an appalling spring. Despite arm protests, minus the problematic waving, I managed to do a little work aboard, and replaced the plastic sheeting over the gaping portlight holes four times, and the tarp I keep over the pilothouse roof until I can find a replacement for the Atkins and Hoyle gasket that doesn't cost fifty bucks, a total of three times.

The good news is that not much else leaks. At the moment. We've had so much rain this year that if it did, the bilges would be awash. Awash, they are not.

I was able to prime the holes in April, but I only got time, sunshine and heat enough to mix up the Endura two-part epoxy paint I use for touch-ups this week. It was also an opportunity to paint over some scraps and dings, and, I suppose, a glimpse into the future, when I expect a weekly "hour of touch-ups" will be on the activities board of international travel.

The butyl pun, of course, refers to butyl tape, a humble and venerable synthetic rubber compound with the consistancy of bubble gum, a tendency to self-adhere, and a great ability to keep water out. Having found, while doing various repairs, gobs of "still alive"...as in still flexible and damp-feeling...butyl used as bedding and sealing material on the nearly 40 year old Valiente, I grew to appreciate butyl's qualities, which are somewhat passe in this age of more modern and glamorous polymers, compounds and sealants.

Nonetheless, I've decided in concordance with other boat fixers (a secretive and possibly inebriated clan of misanthropes for the most part) that butyl would be the way to keep the sea out of the pilothouse portlights, assuming, of course, that the negligent crew had remembered to dog down the lids when the wind piped up.

I wrapped narrow, snot-like strings of butyl on the trim rings (the outside SS rings through which the body of the portlight passes), going inside and outside the 1/2 inch little stubs into which the mounting bolts went. Then I pressed slowly and firmly on the rings until they stuck to the recently dried epoxy paint. You can see a little bit of extruded grey stuff above, which I will trim with a little Exacto knife...apparently a Canadian term, so for my southern readers, think "artist's boxcutter", I suppose. I used Sikaflex 291 on the bolts, using a "twirl around the middle of the bolt shaft" techniques I've found keeps the threads dry and yet allows removal if needed.

I created a second gasket around the sort of flange that pokes out of the boat a bit. Then I spent about a hour gradually tightening with my largest socket wrench the rather unusual 6 mm bolts I had to travel by bike to Etobicoke to obtain. The whole assembly, crudely cut "spacer" rings and all, is now practically welded together, and if leaks appear, they should be immediately obvious, as restoring insulation and panelling and wood trim that will bury that crudely cut ring is one of the last jobs I'll tackle pre-departure.

Note the little chain thingie at the top of the photo. That's the little clip that holds the portlight open as needed. I drilled a couple of boltholes in the aluminum roof "underflange" to mount them, but that area will also one day be restored to a more shippy, woody look and they'll probably go into a piece of glued wood at that point. Today's point is that tomorrow's rain will not enter the pilothouse, and the next time I'm there, southerly or northerly breezes will suck the heat out better than previously, previously being 1/2 inch clear circles of Lucite, bolted with 30 little bolts.

A last word on butyl: The aforementioned aluminum roof is, of course, through bolted to the inward top flange of the sides of the steel pilothouse. I have already repainted that flange, but will likely create nylon bushings and will apply goo of the galvanically isolating kind to keep the SS bolts from reacting with the aluminum roof, through which I have run and will run again considerable numbers of volts and amps for the various pilothouse gadgets, sensors and lights. In addition, I will use thin strips of both bedded HDPE plastic and a special sort of butyl used in roof sealing called EPDM rubber in order not only to electrically isolate the metals, but to keep the sea out effectively if we take a wave. I have found evidence that the bead of 5200, while personally challenging to my sabre-saw blade budget, was not entirely good at keeping out the water, which is not my idea of proper to a voyaging vessel.

Rode work ahead

2011-06-06T22:29:00.007-04:00

Even though I continue to repair and refashion Alchemy, it doesn't mean I don't tend to the needs of the old sloop Valiente. Getting her in fit fashion this year in the face of bad timing, daunting weather and the need to make money in Non-Boat Land has taken some time, but I finally got the ground tackle sorted.

As can be seen, this involved putting on a short bow roller (salvaged from a C&C 35!) and a hawse pipe hinged cap (found in the "spares" locker at my club, and putting in anchor hangers (alas, I had to actually buy these). One club workshop-fabricated backing plate made from a length of genoa track later, one garage-fabricated U-bolt and backing plate installed in a bulkhead for the bitter end, and everything looked like it had been on the boat for ages. Mainly because it's old.

The hawse pipe (please ignore the dirt) can only contain the rode, unless I take apart the short length of chain. This is not necessary unless I am leaving the boat for some time and want to remove the anchor itself. This anchor, by the way, is a steel "hi-tensile" Danforth knockoff from (likely) the '70s. I will keep it as the "lunch hook". The "main" is of course the thing I didn't take a picture of, the Fortress FX-23:

That's the anchor we actually tested for the first time today, in admittedly benign (5 knots wind, firm sand and grass bottom) conditions.

What benign conditions resemble:

Lacking foresight, means and a sense of nautical decorum, we simply used a fender to buoy the anchor, in case the somewhat modest rode parted due to the mighty backing down power of a recently tuned Atomic 4 engine with a wee prop, or the aforementioned sheer age of the thing.

But all went well. We let out 80 feet of rode in about 15 feet of water, which was, to be sure, only just over five to one scope instead of the recommended seven to one, but the anchor is sized for a boat 12 feet longer and the wind consisted largely of angel farts, so the recklessness continued unchecked.

In short, we held just fine. Veering hard in reverse did nothing...once set, the Fortress did not break free when subject to a mighty churning aft. Not fancying my chances with the rode, however (which I will size up to perhaps 1/2 inch or 9/16ths or something beefier, I think), we merely pulled in the slack by hand and, when directly over the anchor, a half-hearted yank upwards freed it and it was soon on the deck looking suspiciously clean.

So that test went in the right direction: sticking firmly when deployed, and easing out cleanly when hoisted.

Lurching into a crowded anchorage with 30 knot gusts and a square chop will no doubt prove more educational, but I suspect this anchor will rise to the challenge as it sinks into the bottom.

I will play further with the "as found in bottom of locker" steel Danforth to contrast and compare. I have a 33 lb. CQR and a 33 lb. real Bruce I could fling off the front as well, but it's best to invest in more robust rode first, I think.

Obscure? Yeah, obscure.

2011-06-02T20:19:00.002-04:00

Sometimes making the right pun takes real Endurance.

Busy with boat stuff, but it's not particularly picturesque or interesting...just necessary. So you get a picture of South Atlantic penguin bouncers.

Launchables

2011-05-11T16:54:00.000-04:00

If I have any long-term readers, they might be aware that I have a second boat, which is actually the first boat I bought, and from which I have yet to part. Behold Valiente, a 1973 Viking 33 sloop.

The shine is thanks to my aching shoulders and Meguiar's No. 2 Fine Cutting Liquid, or something. Jeff Cooper, last year's boat partner, did such an outstanding job of cleaning up the topsides that I felt compelled to maintain as much as my not-entirely-healed shoulder could bear. Jeff now has a CS 36 needing lots of TLC to keep him busy, but as we are on the same dock, I expect we'll be going back and forth, borrowing cups of oil, cans of beer and other sailorly essentials.

Note the favourable cloudy day comparison to a similarly aged vessel named unpleasantly in Latin.

Ooh, 30% less chalky oxidization one year older than my wife! Feel free to clap, despite the fact that I ran out of patience to wet-sand that brown "mustache" off the lower part of the waterline stripe.

I spent the winter in a zero-amenities waterfront parking lot called Pier 35, a charmless and filthy industrial wasteland abaft a garbage depot with its attendant smells and pungent dusts. I haven't even got to the incontinent raccoons and feral cats. Luckily, the price is right and the manager is flexible...to a point...about launch and haul out times. Good thing, too, as my boat was buried behind a load of future charity donations.

Still, after much rearrangement, it was time to move my now blazingly shiny old sloop to the water's edge. What the yard's masterminds lack in witty conversation, they make up for in brute efficiency.

Boat only a couple of inches narrower than the gap available? NO PROBLEM!

And onward we trundle, all 4.5 tonnes of fast cruiser/outdated racer.

Down the tortuous pathways to the crane, with only a trucked in massive pontoon houseboat to avoid.

Backing in? All the cool kids are doing it.

At the point of slinging, I got called in to help arrange them away from vital and/or easily crushed parts. My hands still smell funny thanks to the years of encrusted lake slime present on said slings.

After a spray-filled motor to the marina where I'm splitting the costs with "the new guy", Clive, Valiente is once more afloat and ready to get properly masted. The exciting part was not that the engine started first try (I had fixed it to do exactly that), but that the nice sunny day was accompanied by about 20 to 30 knots of easterly wind, which made for exciting adventures in docking as I was alone and a touch fatigued. Can't see it well here, but there were whitecaps in the Inner Harbour (not common) and a lake frieghter went a little squirrelly trying to dock at the Redpath Sugar factory and it looked like it had to suddenly anchor to figure things out. Whee!

And so begins the season and/or my likely sole recreation away from Alchemy, the main focus of this summer's labours.

Beta blocker at heart of refit

2011-05-03T12:40:00.005-04:00

Terrible pun, I know, but when our new engine finally arrived yesterday, I thought "that's a very expensive block of cardboard". And so it has turned out to be, but only 10% more expensive than rebuilding the old Westerbeke W-52 it replaces, and with eight extra horses, much improved fuel economy, easier access, custom fittings like two grooved belt power take-offs, easily accessible fuel filters, built in oil change, a beefy ZF-25 hydraulic transmission, two alternators, a remote oil filter for ease of service, and all in a smaller, lighter package. Throw in the wildly appreciated Canadian dollar, and the beast was actually cheaper than the repair.

Let's review: When we last looked at the good ship Alchemy, she was buried behind other, some might say lesser, boats. Gutted, cold, with only intermittant power and the flap of cautionary tarping to keep her company, she awaited the spring.

Note the still-uninstalled circular ports in the pilothouse. I actually had these thing dryfitted in November, but it got too cold for the two-part matching paint (Cream 92 or something) to kick, and here it is MAY and it is STILL too cold and rainy to get it going. The next three days are supposed to bring "less crappy" weather, but it's been brutal. The operation of getting my new engine aboard occurred in a three-hour window of dry between morning and evening rain.

This is Mark Bird of Boatman Nautical Services. He's the local Beta Marine rep and has been subject to my waffling and largely unsolicited questions regarding a new engine purchase for some time. He also is a member at my club. It took a fair bit of discussion to weigh the pros and cons of which model of Beta to get (once I had ruled out for various reasons other, more common engines), and further yakking to learn of and then to justify the various mods and extras I wanted. He was a great help in filling in the gaps of my knowledge, because it's not like what I ordered added significantly to the cost, but it did give me the flexibility going forward to have the ability to make plenty of power when I wanted to (meaning I don't foresee needing a separate genset), plus the ease of access and ease of acquiring spares that should make life easier on the engine servicing front. Above, Mark is sorting through the various bits and pieces that came with the engine, like the swanky instrument panel...

...and the various bits and pieces I will fit after the engine's in place, aligned and bolted down.

As we are some time from that, the engine, which has been "preserved" in a special oil coating on its interior surfaces, has to live somewhere, and that somewhere is my foredeck. I have to rehab and convert a keel tank to diesel, and make a thrust bearing for the AquaDrive, and paint the engine bay, and put in four water tanks before I go mucking with the engine. So up, up and away it went.

First, a look-see to grin in admiration and mechanical lust. Ain't that a beauty? Yes, indeed, it is.

Then, a check of the hydraulic transmission, a part I thought a better idea because of the four-bladed VariProp already purchased. Capt. Matt of Creeation has a similar set-up with an AutoProp and the "reversing" of feathering blades can wear on mechanical transmissions.

The club purchased a "Polecat", a hydraulic hook crane, from a Nova Scotia utility a few years back and it's been a real boon in hauling cradles into stacks, hoisting bigger masts onto boats, and now, placing a 300 kilo engine onto my deck like a baby's kiss.

Key to this is the club's commodore, Henry Piersig, who is a very precise and skilled individual about as far from the blazer-wearing, peaked-cap doffing yachtie as one can get. He worked the levers with skill and speed.

A problem fitting biggish shackles led first to a fix and then a resolution to fabricate larger eye straps on the lifting points of the block. It is a known fact going forward that I will lift and lower this block several dozen times before it is properly in place, and it's a small matter to make beefier places for the shackles to attach.

The block takes flight...

Despite a somewhat unfavourable angle, Henry came very close to nailing the placement on the first attempt.

And down it goes, to be taped shut, covered in three tarps, strapped, bungeed and roped snugly against the elements.

A job well done and thanks to Mark, Henry and Mark's helper Adam for competence and speed as we got this done in about one hour flat.

Now the pace quickens. I have some prep to get Valiente running, launched and masted, but once she's in her summer slip and Clive, my new boat partner, has the keys, I expect my sailing to become only an appendix to more or less continuous boat work. My accountant wants to have a word with me about that "continuous" aspect, as he feels I should be, you know, making a living, particularly as I'm still burning boat bucks like hippie patchouli. But we wet Alchemy's hull next spring 2012, powered or not, Mayan Apocalypse notwithstanding, and all my "land needed" jobs must be completed by then.

Good thing my arm's nearly healed. Time to reinjure it.

Hooks, lines, but no sinkers

2011-05-02T19:04:00.004-04:00

Due to a history of being a self-help organization, my boat club remains somewhat unusual in our part of the world in that the membership launches and hauls out our own boats. While we rent the cranes, and big, complex, capable things they are, it's "all hands on deck" for the line-handling, the "pusher" jobs of keeping the hulls off the gritty concrete seawalls of the navigational channel into which half the boats either are lowered or raised, and even the safety concerns.

For those of you in sunnier, or at least not frost-prone, climates, almost everyone on the Great Lakes will put their vessels on dry land for five to six months of the year, as the weather is generally too nasty to sail recreationally. I myself have sailed on January 1 locally (on a steel boat quite able to crush a path through six inches of pan ice), and have sailed my own plastic boat as early as the first week of April and as late as the third week of November. But I like the wind and contend it makes the boat go, an apparently minority opinion. Also, thanks to the magic of climate change, one can increasingly find very pleasant, mild days well past the end of October, and really, wouldn't you rather be sailing? Just add more rum in the thermos of scalding coffee and tie down your tuque. What could be more Canadian?

This launch, as in previous years, I was driving the safety boat much of the time, with a primary job of hauling out people who might fall in (it's happened more than once and this water is 4-5C at the moment) and a secondary job of retrieving lost items, telling boat owners if they are getting water along with gouts of black smoke upon first starting their long-stilled diesel auxiliaries, and telling people that no, we could not give their engineless or dead-engined vessel a tow because we are supposed to be there if someone falls in, and with few members opting to wear a PFD while jumping on and off moving boats to handle crane slings, the odds are not particularly good that we will have an incident-free day. Also, the "crash boat" we use, oddly named Dragon Lady, makes a lousy tug, having only a few inches of keel and not much weight.

This is the boat that tows the other boats when they cannot move themselves. She's called Storm King, and dates, along with her Chevy engine, to sometime in the '50s. Patched, repatched, replated and rebored, she's been reborn more times than a naughty bodhisattva, and still plugs along at a steady five knots of torquey goodness. Steering impulsively, looking vaguely on fire and not overly clean, she's like the gin-soaked aunt at the wedding with the age-inappropriate stories about orgies in the '70s, and quite willing to show you her dents.

At one point, we had three dead engines in a row and a tow queue formed. It's a mercy the weather, if not particularly warm, was benign. I've done this job in 25 knots (the point where the crane operators call it a day) and it can be miserable, if a boon to the fibreglass repair industry.

Ah, the coppery blush of fresh anti-fouling! How soon will you be tarnished by ablation and lake goo!

On watch

2011-04-08T09:44:00.006-04:00

Among the pricier items the cruiser-in-utero can purchase is a fine timepiece. Back in the days when sextants were critical, the ship's chronometer was expensive, precious and accurate. If it wasn't accurate, it was "rated" via close observation so that its particular fastness or slowness was understood and was compensated for. Knowing the local time at an obligatory (and, if you care about the opinion of French astronomers, entirely arbitrary) spot on the Earth is the key to using nautical almanacs with sextants and lots of fiddly math to know your ship's position on the wide and briny.

These days, GPS rules the roost. A "fine timepiece" is not only unnecessary, but you'd miss it when it was torn off your wrist as you slid into a lifeline. Of course, we have various GPS devices, and sextants, and both co-skippers can use them if the satellites get turned off, the batteries all go green, or some group of malcontents sets up jammers. They are a backup, but they require accurate time. We have (and will have more of shortly) radio means of getting time signals, but counting down from where the radios will be out to a sextant-wielding crew on deck is a little awkward. Why not have something accurate on your wrist?

"Something accurate" could be a twenty-buck Casio, frankly. All quartz-crystal regulated watches are more accurate than mechanical ones, and aren't as prone to salt air corrosion (although their battery contacts may be). But I went for a mid-point option between something stylish from a regatta after-party, and something that looks like it comes in a Hello Kitty model.

I check against my country's "national time signal" about once a week on my Suunto Vector, a four-year-old "wrist top computer" still sold for about $200 for use by hikers that has clock, stopwatch, alarm, baro, altimeter, thermometer and compass functions. It also lights up with a dim, greenish light for 5 seconds (preserving night vision) and is waterproof to 10 metres...which I've proved the hard way by falling off a boat (OK, it's good to 3 metres...it was a long drop.)

Needless to say, this Vector supplies roughly 90% of what a sailor wants at a fraction of the "yachtsman's chronometer". On the Vector, the graphical way in which the seconds are tallied is particularly suited, I find, to working with a sextant (appearing, advancing and disappearing little squares). I also find, despite the fairly obvious division of the tropical day into rough halves of light and dark, that running the watch to display 24 hour "naval time" (i.e. "10:15 PM" is "2215h") keeps me in a logging frame of mind.

I suppose the ultimate version would have GPS on board and a heart monitor to tell you when you were having fun. Those functions are available on watches, at multiples of the price of the Vector.

I "rate" it by periodic "hack" type checks. I can never move fast enough to nail it, but I know it's currently four seconds slow, and when three months pass, it will be five seconds slow. I need to change the single coin type battery ($7) about once every 10 months. A method to nail the time within a second would be to pop the battery in at the top of the hour as per the time signal to get the "12:00" on the watch. Then, just adjust the hour to local time.

On board, I would keep a dual local/GMT 24 hour clock for general reference (how far in time zones from ZULU are we?), but the wristwatch is near perfect otherwise. The compass even works on the steel boat, as long as I hold it five feet or more off the deck, or I stand on the aluminum pilot house roof. The function I use more than any other is the barometer and its tiny but legible "trend meter"...a recording barometer is a useful thing to have on a boat, and on one's wrist, too, or so it's proven for me.

My only criticism of these class of watches is that they have Lexan watchface crystals that are too easily scratched. I buff it occasionally with baking soda toothpaste (an old furniture refinisher's trick) and this minimizes the scratches.

Anyway, since I bought it, I've gone from the sort of fellow who never wore a watch to the sort that regularly fiddles with the buttons to interpret the world around me. The time function is likely the least important to me, actually; I have used, however, the stopwatch to refine some windward/leeward sailing exercises (I am always interested in transferring race techniques to cruising, even though I rarely race now). As an unreconstructed weather geek, however, I am a little OCD about rates of barometric rise and fall, and regularly compare what my "nose" tells me with local pressure readings.

And yes, you can easily adjust your "sea level" for your local inland altitude. So by all means, go watchless if you wish: time sources abound in the most trivial of boat or communications devices these days...my MP3 player knows the time (not particularly accurately, however). Or get a cheap watch...Neptune has several of my cellphones and I know I should never own any cell that didn't come free with the plan... But if you want a multi-function timepiece that can survive aboard and tell you half a dozen useful data points, you could do worse than what I wear.

Light reading

2011-03-18T12:29:00.007-04:00

So last week I met with Tim Mackinlay and his wife Bice down at my club for a coffee and a chat about the wonderful world of LEDs. Tim builds and sells LEDs of the "warm white" variety; they aren't your Dad's (elder sister's, maybe?) "bluey" LEDs, but are easy on the eyes and have the ideal (for boating) quality of directionality and low-amperage draws.

Tim was kind enough to give me a couple of "bayonet mount" lights and a foot-long strip of ganged LEDs to play with as an incentive to buy. Frankly, his prices are very good, so if the quality matches the ding, he'll be receiving my custom.

I've spoken about the logic of using LEDs before (or at least I think I have). For sailboaters, who are not making electricity when actually sailing, unless they have a wind generator or solar panels (and it's full daylight), lights are among the biggest users of the usually limited power that the boat's battery banks can store.

We are so used to more or less unlimited access in this country to cheap...but steadily getting more expensive...electricity that my constant shout of "turn off the lights when you leave a room" is frequently ignored and our cities at night are ablaze with clearly illuminated, empty rooms.
With the incandescent 12 VDC "auto lamps" in use aboard most boats until the last five to ten years, you simply cannot leave them on for hours on end without running the engine, and its amp-producing alternator to recharge the batteries any more than you can leave a car's headlights on all day and expect the engine to crank. They convert 90% of their draw to heat to make that little tungsten wire glow, and heat up the boat (desirably, in some situations) in the process. Rare is the boater who hasn't overdrawn his or her batteries through miscalculation or mistake, and it can make for a sick feeling when the engine won't start...or starts in a dodgy fashion...because you've left the lights on too long.

The heat issue was solved in part years back via the use of 12VDC flourescent tubes and "C-shaped bulbs" that provided either a cold or warmer light, but without the heat output. I think they drew a little less, as well. Good as area lights, like for under-counter fixtures in the galley or the head or even the engine room, the flourescents, if not well-made, sometimes had the habit of emitting RF interference, leading to crackling static on certain VHF or SSB frequencies. Some alternators do this, too. It's sometimes due to shielding or proximity issues, but can be annoying. Also, some people just don't like the "office lighting" effect aboard. Maybe it's the atavistic impulse that sailboats below deck should be bathed in the cheery yellow glow of stinking oil lamps or even candle-powered "lanthorns". Or maybe it's because the last place you want to be reminded of "the office" is "the sailboat". Whatever...flourescents have never taken off, except as work lights where the shadowless "throw" of the light is great for finding critical little pieces you've dropped under the engine.
Alchemy has a real mix of lighting: incandescent nav lights of the "honking" type, which in this case means 25 W Aquasignals. These are oversized from a legal standpoint, and draw down the batteries, but if I'm motorsailing at night, I love the fact that they make us the brightest thing for miles. LEDs here, at 1/10th of the draw, if equivalent in brightness, would represent a huge savings in amps, because I would sail with the trilight on all night without thinking I was going to have to turn off the fridge for three hours.

I also have two 10 w lightbulbs in the saloon bulkhead fixtures, tube and C-type flourescents in the galley, head and pilot berths, a typical brass and faceted glass incandescent in the aft cabin, 10W halogens for aft cabin berth reading lamps and an Alpenglow red and white flourescent in the pilot house. There's even a blue LED with a switch for the fridge! Throw in the various LED flashlights, head lamps and work lights I own, the oil lamp I bought from that poor girl who died on the S/V Picton Castle, and short of an arc lamp, it's all there: the history of boat lighting in one hull! It's quite representative of the changes since Alchemy was built and I'm sure many a boat in the harbour contains the same mongrel mix.

I would keep a halogen for close work in the galley, like dish washing and cutting board work, and maybe for the "workshop" forward, for when I have to do soldering with a magnifying glass or clean out burrs from tapping aluminum. I also will keep the Alpenglow, which by some design magic is the flourescent fixture that looks the least flourescent of any I've ever seen, and has "dim" settings in white and red suitable for the nerve center of the boat. The rest? Swap meet.

Going forward, the goal of "independence from the marina and its Satanic shore power" is intimately tied to the concept of installing and keeping topped up a substantial house battery bank (the batteries used to power everything but the engine starting, by far the biggest, if short in duration, use of electricity aboard and customarily delegated to a dedicated "start" battery). Then, once you've got this quarter-to-half ton of sparky lead at 100% capacity, the idea is to use it as little as possible! One pulls this particular rabbit from the confines of its top hat by monitoring and reducing draws where possible. The fridge gets insulated with tranches of blue or pink closed-cell foam, sealed with gooey, waterproof, condensation-blocking industrial goo, and strict rules about opening the lid are posted. The idea is that the compressor should cycle as little as possible, because in the tropics, the difference between keeping things frozen and the temperature on deck can be awesome to contemplate and expensive from an amps-consumed viewpoint to achieve.

Lights are also amp-eaters. LEDs, not so much. Leaving an LED on for 10 days tends to equal the equivalent of leaving a lightbulb of equivalent output on for one day, and even drunken sailors are likely to notice a lamp left burning that long. So the advent of more "warm" and "less directional" LEDs is welcome. I have "first gen" blueish LEDs I bought some seven years ago on Valiente already, and they aren't nice, but I can't measure their draw with a one decimal amp meter, so they'll stay because they make great night lights.

Where LEDs have real potential, I think, is not in the "bright, warm reading and area light" market, where I think the corner has been turned on everything but price (still too expensive!), but in specialized, boat-particular applications where the LEDs are dim, directional and not even attached to the boat's DC power supply.

Years back, I got from one of my favourite surplus stores a single dim, red "blinking" LED, a 9V battery and a 9V battery connector. Some electrical tape and two crimps later, I had a weird-looking black Pez dispenser-like thingie that blinked steadily like it knew something. I clamped it to Valiente's nav station and sure enough, through the smoked Lexan of the dropboards, it looked like some sort of burglar alarm or other security device. It worked for about 14 months straight before needing a fresh 9V, which set me back two bucks. Did it keep the boat safe? Dunno. Did I get two bucks' worth of "peace of mind"? Yes, I did.

So I started to think: What if you wired an IR sensor, some sort of auto-off circuitry and the same 9V battery and the same dim red LED to the companionway stairs? On the blackest night, a light would illuminate the companionway steps...poorly, so as to preserve precious night vision...and then would shut off after three seconds? You could have the whole boat done this way, although you'd want to have a "daylight shutdown" to save power. A heaving boat at night can be tricky, and yet turning on proper lights can disturb sleepers. How much better would it be to have invisible beams turn on dim "here's where the cabin sole is" lights that self-extinguished as you moved through the boat?

Another use, already implemented in part on Alchemy, are magnetically switched little LEDs that click on when a locker lid is raised or when a cabinet door is opened, throwing lights on the contents. I would like to implement this idea pretty well everywhere not only because it logically shortens the time spent rummaging around in the dark (there's that "do not disturb" aspect again), but is also a safety element, because on a rocking boat, you don't want to have one hand in the locker, the other holding a flashlight, and no hand left "for the boat". I've worn headlamps on watch and they are the next best thing, but paradoxically are sometimes too bright. "Dedicated" locker LEDs down in the bilge stowage and inside cabinets and lockers could save time and be safer when all about is dark...and at night at sea can be like the inside of a cow.

Another aspect of LED and safety concern is what happens when the normal lights go completely out. Electrical failures of the catastrophic sort are rare, true, but lighting happens, corrosion never sleeps and fuses inevitably blow, any of which could find you searching in the dark, on a lee shore, with heavy air all about, trying to connect batteries you know were good three hours ago to nav lights that may or may not be still functional. If you were the Pardeys, you'd already have the oil lamps out, but we aren't them, and maybe you aren't, either. You want perhaps, some form of lighting that is self-contained and independent of the boats "mains", as our British friends call it.

The "self-contained" part is critical. Any situation bad enough to need self-contained lights is probably going to involve a breakdown of the boat's electrics, either via water ingress or flooding. I know I'd want the bilge pumps to work then, not the lights. I don't need a light to notice my feet are wet.

There's a little kids' toy you can buy at any dollar store that is a tiny coloured LED worn on a little piece of elastic on one's finger. Like so:

Well, you could either mod them for a white LED, or simply use them as is on your little finger to bring light RIGHT UP to the work in your boat! Clip 'em to a hat and you've got a map reading light. At a buck a piece, you could buy quite a few to brighten various areas up to see if the concept of "many points of light" works for your boat.

That's what I mean is a bit of a paradigm shift with LEDs. They are so cheap and plentiful that you start thinking less of "what light" and more of "where would I want light?"

Of course, all these little gadgets can be coated or siliconed to make them more water resistant, if not water-proof.

That's enough for now. Good grief, I do prattle on.

And to the bottom bind them!

2011-03-05T13:05:00.009-05:00

Sometimes, the difference between thinking you know nothing and knowing you know something is marketing.

In a previous employment iteration, I worked as a marketer. Chomsky's notion of the manufacturing of desire and consent was in full effect. The key to selling most of the unnecessary crap in our society is based on the accessing of that nagging feeling of self-doubt in the prospective customer...the idea that they have a knowledge deficit.

When it comes to something as relatively faddish in boating as "what's the best anchor?", this feeling is rampant and tied to the fear of making a faulty choice, leading directly to a fatal mistake.

Anchors hold boats to the sea floor, but actually, they enact the same sort of physics as a spring. Energy of the wind and waves on the available areas of the boat load the spring (the rode, made of chain or rope or a combination) which pulls irregularly at the anchor, buried in the best case in the (hopefully) firm bottom material and resistant (again, hopefully) to various angles jerks, pulls and strains.

A lot of variables there, aren't there? One constant is the length of the rode. More rode equals a greater length along which the sharp tugs at the bow (modified of course via the use of bridles and snubbers) can be distributed and modified before they manifest as a wrenching yank at the shaft of the anchor. Recall that a wrenching yank is how the thing's going to be pulled off the bottom during retrieval (yet again, in hope), and it's clear how much of anchoring is about the selective balancing of forces.

That nagging feeling can come about when years of successful anchoring with some "traditional" anchor, like the Bruce or the CQR, seem to fade into a cruel joke when the new, lighter, flukier (in a good way), roll-bar-equipped, lead-tipped Wonder Anchors of the Rocna, Manson, Bulwagga, Fortress or Spade types manifest. (There are others, of course...every tenth sailor seems to forge a new type of world's best anchor).

These new anchors offer better holding, at shorter scope, in harsher conditions, on a greater variety of bottoms (not weeds, though...keep an old fisherman's/Yachtsman's disassembled in the forepeak for that) than all their venerable predecessors.

It has led, in my experience, to hearing sailors with long and unblemished years of successful anchoring (as in "we didn't drag the anchor and we always got it back and we didn't swing into a more expensive boat, either) feel like they were anchoring know-nothings; that they were missing the boat, so to speak, by not relegating the "old hook" to the bilges in favour of some orchid-shaped, two-grand chunk of Big Scientific Anchoring, yo.

If you have successfully anchored without dragging in a variety of conditions, then I submit it to you that you do in fact know something. Possibly more than is justified for the outlay of The Holy Hook.

A lot of these arguments about "which anchor" seem to me to dead-end at a couple of points. The first is the marketing-driven contention or, less dogmatically, the suggestion, that there is, or could be, a single "do it all" anchor. Car drivers have (at least where I live) the habit of switching from "summer" to "winter" tires, and benefit thereby, even given the greater friction and lower gas mileage when running on winter tires. That's the price we pay for greater stopping power on slick, icy or slushy roads.

All drivers (except those who work for tire manufacturers) appear to largely agree that "all-weather radials" are a compromise best left to people who get two weeks of cold weather a year. The Quixotic quest for "the one anchor to hold them all/And to the bottom bind them" is equally a compromise. Even our colleagues and fellow-sailors from Fortress, Spade and Rocna will admit, grudgingly, that their products won't do any better (and perhaps a lot worse) in weeds and rocks and certain other sub-surfaces.

The second point is that some old salts (or just new salts who've been paying attention to old salts) seemingly "get by" with feeble, discredited older anchor designs, such as the Bruce, popular on the Great Lakes still, because they a) never anchor in bottoms where the Bruce's deficiencies will manifest, or b) possess proper anchoring technique of knowing correct rode length, the use of chain, the use of kellets, snubbers and bridles and even diving on the anchor to ensure it has set firmly.

In other words, how much of the vaunted superiority of the new style of anchors can be attributed to the fact that they are forgiving of inadequate scope, inadequate chain, generally lax technique and so on?

Could it be that sailors who know how to anchor properly and to the conditions can make any well-made and time-tested anchor work? Could it be that those who regularly drag, break free, fail to reset or drift down on their fellow sailors lack the experience or the initiative to lay out sufficient scope, to rig bridles or even to know that the anchorage is not safe and that they should run to sea?

Speaking of which: How often does "running to sea" get listed under "anchor strategies of known success". And yet it is an important part of seamanship, knowing when to bug out in the face of gear-destroying conditions. It's very much in the same realm of seamanship as "reefing early and often", as it is focused on reducing forces destructive to the boat or unsafe to the crew.

I do in fact think that the newer, lighter, broader, roll-bar-equipped designs have merit, and probably enough to persuade me to whip out the wallet when the time comes to equip the steel boat with a "dedicated primary". But I also contend that it is not always the inadequacies of previous long-standing (and long-holding) designs that is to blame, but the sometimes considerable lack of experience of the person standing over the anchor locker.

As for me, I'm going to transfer a couple of anchors back to Valiente this year and do some more experiments. You can never have too much anchoring practice, and my back needs a work-out!

Addendum, March 19, 2011: Looks like I'm getting a Fortress to play with this season. This will allow me to put the 'venerable' CQR (very common here, as are the Danforth for "lunch hook" and even the old Bruce (every second boat) to the test, or rather, just to see if I can duplicate the results I've seen elsewhere that shows the CQR failing to set quickly. They are going to look at me funny off Hanlan's Point, where the phrase "sandy bottom" refers to the nudist sunbathers rather than what the snorkeller reports.

Meanwhile, in the blogosphere, the bars and the bull sessions, the debate rages on and the slagging is public and intense....and not particularly illuminating.

The line between anchor and wanchor is about 4 mm of Dyneema, it seems.

I would, for my own purposes, simply like to establish baselines which have largely (but not completely) eluded my notice in this nearly decade long (has it really been 10 years?) bunfight over "who has the better anchor?"

Baseline 1: That the various "newer style anchors", such as Manson, Rocna, Sarca, Bulwagga, Spade, XYZ and any I've missed, are, due to advances in design and metallurgy, better qualitatively than the "old school" CQRs, Bruces, Danforth styles.

Baseline 2: If Baseline 1 is accepted (a big but arguably provable "if"), then I want to know if the new style anchors merely allow for worse technique (short scope, no kellets, bridles, insufficient backing down), or work as well when all anchors are judged with the same accepted 7 to 1 scope, bridles, snubbers, kellets, etc. My impression is that the newer style reset quicker and this obscures the fact that proper scope would not have required a reset in most bottoms.

Baseline 3: I want to know which anchors fail or perform worse in what bottoms. The quest for "one anchor" for all situations is false, I think, otherwise who would still carry a Yachtsman/fisherman's...but people still find it's superior in heavy weed and sometimes rock bottoms. The fact that it largely sucks everywhere else doesn't apply. Me, I want an all-purpose primary. Then I want a stern/bower/secondary for insurance/flexibility (like Bahamian mooring in tidal streams, or to counter expected wind shifts). So I want the second anchor to do OK everywhere, but particularly in conditions where it is known the first anchor is sub-optimal or merely "average".

It is difficult to test for such conditions, and it appears to be even more challenging to find anchor makers willing to talk honestly about their products that allows that it might not be perfect in loose silt during a Cat 5 hurricane.

Me, I don't need perfect. That's unreasonable. But if a CQR is as good as a Rocna at 10:1 scope on all-chain, with waterline snubbers and a bridle off the deck and a kellet on a messenger line suspended five feet off the sea floor, then why would I buy a Rocna?

Isn't it cheaper just to learn how to anchor properly? Why buy a product that merely compensates for one's ignorance of the physics of a catenary? People who regularly anchor, such as my esteemed commentator below, have the habit of actually diving on the hook, looking at the state of the set, the composition of the bottom, the proximity of other debris nearby and so on. The biggest problem doesn't seem to be the type of hook, but other boaters who drag because they seem unclear (or indifferent) to some anchoring basics.

Relativity and your house bank

2011-03-02T13:26:00.002-05:00

This is a cut and paste of an article recently posted in the Economist that some might find interesting. I don't usually do wholesale c 'n' p as a blog post, but I found this information new and thought-provoking. So much of our technology is prosaic in the extreme (the simple lead-acid battery would be an example of this) but often we "end-user" are ignorant of what fundamental physical laws and processess are being levered for our convenience.

Summary: The lead-acid battery is an old and well-understood technology, but you can't understand its basics without invoking Einstein...something I had not heard before.

From the article:

"ALBERT EINSTEIN never learned to drive. He thought it too complicated and in any case he preferred walking. What he did not know—indeed, what no one knew until now—is that most cars would not work without the intervention of one of his most famous discoveries, the special theory of relativity.

Special relativity deals with physical extremes. It governs the behaviour of subatomic particles zipping around powerful accelerators at close to the speed of light and its equations foresaw the conversion of mass into energy in nuclear bombs. A paper in Physical Review Letters, however, reports a more prosaic application. According to the calculations of Pekka Pyykko of the University of Helsinki and his colleagues, the familiar lead-acid battery that sits under a car’s bonnet and provides the oomph to get the engine turning owes its ability to do so to special relativity.

The lead-acid battery is one of the triumphs of 19th-century technology. It was invented in 1860 and is still going strong. Superficially, its mechanism is well understood. Indeed, it is the stuff of high-school chemistry books. But Dr Pyykko realised that there was a problem. In his view, when you dug deeply enough into the battery’s physical chemistry, that chemistry did not explain how it worked.

A lead-acid battery is a collection of cells, each of which contains two electrodes immersed in a strong solution of sulphuric acid. One of the electrodes is composed of metallic lead, the other of porous lead dioxide. In the parlance of chemists, metallic lead is electropositive. This means that when it reacts with the acid, it tends to lose some of its electrons. Lead dioxide, on the other hand, is highly electronegative, preferring to absorb electrons in chemical reactions. If a conductive wire is run between the two, electrons released by the lead will run through it towards the lead dioxide, generating an electrical current as they do so. The bigger the difference in the electropositivity and electronegativity of the materials that make up a battery’s electrodes, the bigger the voltage it can deliver. In the case of lead and lead dioxide, this potential difference is just over two volts per cell.

That much has been known since the lead-acid battery was invented. However, although the properties of these basic chemical reactions have been measured and understood to the nth degree, no one has been able to show from first principles exactly why lead and lead dioxide tend to be so electropositive and electronegative. This is a particular mystery because tin, which shares many of the features of lead, makes lousy batteries.

Metallic tin is not electropositive enough compared with the electronegativity of its oxide to deliver a useful potential difference.

This is partly explained because the bigger an atom is, the more weakly its outer electrons are bound to it (and hence the further those electrons are from the nucleus). In all groups of chemically similar elements the heaviest are the most electropositive. However, this is not enough to account for the difference between lead and tin. To put it bluntly, classical chemical theory predicts that cars should not start in the morning.

Which is where Einstein comes in. For, according to Dr Pyykko’s calculations, relativity explains why tin batteries do not work, but lead ones do.

His chain of reasoning goes like this. Lead, being heavier than tin, has more protons in its nucleus (82, against tin’s 50). That means its nucleus has a stronger positive charge and that, in turn, means the electrons orbiting the nucleus are more attracted to it and travel faster, at roughly 60% of the speed of light, compared with 35% for the electrons orbiting a tin atom. As the one Einsteinian equation everybody can quote, E=mc², predicts, the kinetic energy of this extra velocity (ie, a higher E) makes lead’s electrons more massive than tin’s (increasing m)—and heavy electrons tend to fall in and circle the nucleus in more tightly bound orbitals.

That has the effect of making metallic lead less electropositive (ie, more electronegative) than classical theory indicates it should be—which would tend to make the battery worse. But this tendency is more than counterbalanced by an increase in the electronegativity of lead dioxide. In this compound, the tightly bound orbitals act like wells into which free electrons can fall, allowing the material to capture them more easily. That makes lead dioxide much more electronegative than classical theory would predict.

And so it turned out. Dr Pyykko and his colleagues made two versions of a computer model of how lead-acid batteries work. One incorporated their newly hypothesised relativistic effects while the other did not. The relativistic simulations predicted the voltages measured in real lead-acid batteries with great precision. When relativity was excluded, roughly 80% of that voltage disappeared.

That is an extraordinary finding, and it prompts the question of whether previously unsuspected battery materials might be lurking at the heavier end of the periodic table. Ironically, today’s most fashionable battery material, lithium, is the third-lightest element in that table—and therefore one for which no such relativistic effects can be expected. And lead is about as heavy as it gets before elements become routinely radioactive and thus inappropriate for all but specialised applications. Still, the search for better batteries is an endless one, and Dr Pyykko’s discovery might prompt some new thinking about what is possible in this and other areas of heavy-element chemistry."

Here's a bonus link for those readers who, like me, have found how refitting a boat has been an exercise in the history of technology, i.e. no matter where you are aboard, some fluid needs pushing uphill for some reason. As a result, one learns about hydraulics and physics, AND one gets wet. Thought I might say "or" there? Wrong. The skipper get wet even when he doesn't screw up once. It's "Neptune's fee", I suspect.

Anyway, behold The Toaster Project: one man's quest to smelt a humble chunk of technology.

Main concerns

2011-02-15T12:03:00.003-05:00

I believe we have had automatic transmissions in cars since at least 1939 (GM's Hydra-matic...although there were many precursors). Until quite recently, received wisdom was that manuals were better for reasons of a) speed, b) economy, c) performance and d) the way you could start a battery-dead manual car by pushing it down a hill.

In the last 10 years or so, however, advances in sports car transmissions have given the edge in these areas to automatics. In small economy cars, the CVT is taking hold. The paradigm has shifted, to make a pun: It's now getting as hard to buy a manual shifting car as it is to get manually lowering windows.

Whether this is all a good thing or not remains to be seen. As a Canadian who has "push-started" more than one frozen car back to life down various rural roads in winter, I prefer systems I can repair or work-around. In the context of this discussion, slab-reefing, horizontally battened mainsails are "manual", and the various types of in-mast are "automatic".

I won't include boom-reefing, because, despite its seemingly ideal midpoint of utility, it hasn't claimed a large part of the mainsail-handling market, whereas many of the "name" boatbuilders have gone with in-mast, perhaps due to marketing rationales based on aging customers for bigger boats, or just out of "follow the leader" behaviour.
Whatever the tenuousness of the analogy, I do not at this stage believe that in-mast can, in most cases, match the performance of traditional, "roachy" mainsails. I do believe there are ways (stackpacks, jacklines, certain batten car designs) to make "manual" main handling more efficient. I also believe that, having sailed in-mast reefing boats in the heaviest winds I've experienced at sea, that they are viable, durable and dependable...not to mention very quick...methods of reducing sail.

While some focus on "not having to leave the cockpit" as a bonus of in-mast reefing, I discount this because everything but the reef lashing can be accomplished on a traditionally rigged boat from the cockpit, and also because I feel that if you can't work on the deck safely, you might have either the wrong techniques of harm reduction or may be not fit to sail in the sort of conditions requiring significant sail reduction. It has to be said: there are some sailors reluctant to swallow the anchor who may be taking on very large cruisers five years beyond their abilities. It's a bit reminiscent of 80-year-olds and driving: Some won't pass those mandatory retests, but the argument that getting half-blind, slow-reacting seniors off the road shouldn't apply because "it will restrict their freedom" doesn't cut it for me. So while the in-mast furling solution may extend the years in which an aging couple may sail, I'm not sure it's a lifetime pass for people who should really consider a trawler...or an RV.

Certainly, in the case of Alchemy, we are set up for slab/jiffy reefing, and the standing rigging is robust and heavily stayed. Our crew is young in the context of the general cruising community, and the purchase of a boat of this size was predicted on the realistic ability of my compact, if strong, sub-40 year old wife to handle all sails as they were rigged on the boat. As we sail conservatively, and as we have an arguably safer deck layout for handling halyards, etc., we see no advantage to changing, and many advantages to making a deeply reefable main, to installing jacklines, and perhaps even a "Dutchman" flaking system. Lastly, as a heavy displacement boat, we need all the drive and sail shape we can get, and that isn't currently found with either alternative main furling design.

Maybe one day we will see smaller boats all go in-mast. Maybe one day slab reefing will follow the hank-on foresail and the gaff rig into niche categories. But I don't see that we are quite at that point yet, and I don't see it's something I want to introduce into our upcoming voyaging plans.

Variations on a theme

2011-02-09T02:16:00.006-05:00

Now I realize how out of fashion the lowly and ancient magnetic compass is in light of the New Dispensation of GPS, but I still like to call myself Hornblower, crow out "helm's a-lee!" and refer to the little Plastimo compass in the cockpit with seamanlike purpose. In fact, I use it to, you know, navigate. I have bearings to my favourite destinations more or less memorized, which is what happens when you play with charts. The Ritchie Globemaster with the amusingly named Soft Iron Compensator Balls in the steel boat is, contrastly, almost too grand to consult...I feel like I'm taking penicillin to the Norwegian Resistance when I look at its sober, monastic dome. It's about the most professional gear aboard and it says This is the Vessel in Question.

Anyway, geomagnetism and its role in navigation continue to attract my attention, even more than "do you know how to rewire an alternator?". Which to be honest, is probably something I should pick up.

Nonetheless, on my local chart, the compass rose says, as they do, something along the lines of "10 degree W deviation (1994)". That means if I read 90 degrees on the compass, it's actually 80 degrees T. It also suggests that the last time someone was around here with a Great Big Azimuth Compass was pushing 20 years ago.

Unfortunately, the stately and predictable movements of our Magnetic North Pole are becoming...well, skittish, and the rate of deviation (also marked on most charts) is probably undervalued.

Does this affect the average sailor? No. When it hits 11 deg. W in my home waters is unlikely to affect my helming or pilotage as I can't steer better than a 5 deg. wobble most of the time. Nor would I want to.

But I have found it interesting that there are starting to be real-world effects due to the Wandering Pole:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-tampa-airport-runways-renumbered-due.html

"The primary runway at the airport is designated 18R/36L, which means the runway is aligned along 180 degrees from north (that is, due south) when approached from the north and 360 degrees from north when approached from the south. Now the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has requested the designation be changed to 19R/1L to account for the movement of the magnetic north pole."

My government has something to say about it, as well. "During the last century the Pole has moved a remarkable 1100 km. What is more, since about 1970 the NMP has accelerated and is now moving at more than 40 km per year. If the NMP maintains its present speed and direction it will reach Siberia in about 50 years." Oh, Canada, we've already given up on Hans Island...must we have our little lodestones pointing to a kleptocracy, now?

I point this out as a navigational curiosity and as a small token that the Earth doesn't really care what is printed on our charts.

It's very cold, windy and bleak here at the moment and it's hard to do much aboard. I pushed off a great deal of snow from the deck yesterday, but even with the anti-skid, it's hard to stay upright. The weather is forecast to go above zero C. next week, so I will try to resume refitting operations. The good news is that I believe I've found a way to "deroof" the pilot house without leaving the boat entirely open, and this method will allow welding on deck in dry circumstances.

The sound of truth....

2011-01-09T14:59:00.002-05:00

Who's heard a story that went like this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41QWZK9RBCo&feature=player_embedded

Funniest thing since sending a newbie powerboater to the chandlery in quest of "pushrope", and a good warm-up for the 2011 boat show. I'm going tomorrow, and will issue forth my inevitable spleen thereafter.

A product plug for a plug product? Or a future Dremel experiment?

2011-01-02T03:28:00.005-05:00

Now, isn't this a bit of cleverness?

You don't really have to explain it, really. You just look at it, and then you look at the collection of assorted power adapters stuck into a six-outlet thingie stuck into the two plug outlet stuck in your pilothouse...OK, my pilothouse, and you say "Oh...how obvious". Thanks to T he Incredible Hull blog, by the way, for this one.

I bet I can make one at home that's way more resistant to rust for use at sea...particularly in the pilothouse where if stuff isn't getting recharged, it's connected via USB to something else.

http://store.fastmac.com/product_info.php?products_id=458

That's the bit that interests me: a tidy way to have a "hub" that could be routed through an existing outlet so I didn't have to leave it flopping on the helm. In fact, I could see using a standard outlet that had maybe two 12 volt "cigarette lighter" DC sockets and two or three USB slots. Hell, throw in an SD card reader.

There are "helm" versions of a lot of charging/power sockets, but they are pricey and I don't actually want them. Steel boat and all...let's keep the electrics "inside", dry and out of the weather as much as possible. I don't even like the idea of outside speakers, really. Inside speakers with an IR remote to mute the stereo...sure. I love my music, but I love the music of the sea more, so I don't feel the need to "patio-ize" my aft deck. To each, his own.

But back to the AC plug box as a form factor for a variety of little connectors: Substitute "nav station" for "pilothouse"...the idea is taming the beast of a load of wires and low-draw chargers haphazardly connected every time you have the inverter running. "Sun's shining, wind's blowing, and we're motoring offshore to pump the tanks, kids! CHARGE UP!"

Let's not ignore the utility of having a sequestered laptop or little ITX box somewhere dry and out of sight, and being able to plug in a thumb drive from the helm to bring up different charts on a small monitor, or photos of what the reef looks like at different points in the day, or docs that are pre-loaded (Port captain goes off work at 1600h!). I can see plenty of plug and play reasons to have a hub, audio jacks (ship's intercom? SSB speaker relay?) or even a VGA socket permanently installed to some other networked resource or device that is perhaps already running and just awaiting a signal to access a flash drive or a webcam.

"Blank plates" cost about a buck, and a heavy gauge steel surround (suitably rust-proofed) might be worth experimenting with. That is, if somebody's hasn't already thought of it.

Another nautical milestone passed...or is that "mile buoy"?

2010-12-31T13:20:00.002-05:00

After considerable consultation and debate, I've purchased this engine for Alchemy. A fellow in my club announced himself not only as the Nanni diesel rep for Toronto (a French marinized Kubota), but as the Beta Marine rep (an English marinized Kubota).

This is the "keel-cooled" version used in barges and whatnot, but I'll have the usual heat-exchanger on it, but with two alternators, a ZF25 hydraulic transmission, the raw water pump relocated (perhaps) to the top of the engine, and the oil filter relocated off the block, rotated to the vertical and put on the bulkhead for ease of filter changing. This last "option" makes sense also because you can fill a vertically oriented filter with fresh oil and spin it on, leaving very little oil-free space in the circuit when you fire up the engine again. Also, you don't spill much, if at all. Makes sense to me.

The basic layout and measurement of the 60 HP block are here:

I will have to fab up a cardboard mock up to play with to determine motor mount positions, "risers", if needed and distance from the forward bulkhead. I have to include the space needed for the thrust bearing, the stern tube, the PSS (shaft seal) and the Aquadrive unit, all of which are aft of the transmission plate.

So there's a lot to figure out and no doubt a lot to measure, measure, cut. I'll keep my miniscule, if surprisingly international, readers apprised of our progress in the New Year.

Peru-sing South American Cruising

2010-12-28T12:26:00.004-05:00

This might be the first time I link directly to another blog's post instead of writing it myself, but Michael and Edi on Sequitur, a Canadian Hunter 49, have posted a reminder that it's not all barbeques and sundowners for the ocean cruiser; a large part of it can involve bribery, bureaucracy and extortionate fees.

What's Spanish for "I voted with my keel"?

http://www.sailblogs.com/member/sequitur/?xjMsgID=156150

A very good post from cruising grounds less familiar than most for many Northern Hemisphere sailors.

Climate change skepticism and the contemplative cruiser

2010-12-17T09:45:00.006-05:00

Ask sailors about global warming/climate change and count the number of sailors you've asked and add one. That's about the number of contrasting viewpoints you'll get.

I have never owned a car and choose to live downtown as a consequence. Or, perhaps because I get to see the tense, often angry faces of car drivers from my perch atop my bicycle, maybe I should say "as a benefit". I've made no secret that not owning a car has freed up what I figure is $6,000-$8,000/year for activities such as sailing. I'm not rich (in the First World, anyway); I couldn't have a sailboat in the water and one a-building on land if I also drove.

But I don't feel particularly virtuous about it. As a teen, I owned and drove with pleasure smoky little two-stroke mopeds as close to the 60 km/h speed limit for them as I could get away with. I in fact got a ticket once...for speeding...downhill.

I also don't hesitate to fire up either my woodchipper or my chainsaw in twice-yearly tamings of the abandoned woodlot I call my backyard.

I certainly wouldn't mind a car on those days when I'm moving vast sailbags or batteries to and from the boats. If they made a diesel/electric hybrid Honda Element or Nissan Cube, I would be sorely tempted, because basically I need a wheeled box to carry heavy and bulky "stuff" short distances. I essentially have two sets of tools (Boat and Garage) just to dodge towing 40 kilo tool chests in one of the several wheeled carts I have for my bicycle.

Still, with a waistline at least as old as my head, I derive physical benefit in the form of exercise via towing metal lumps hither and sometimes yon. I also get to experience what the heated garage types often do not: plenty of time in the open and frequently windy, damp and/or scorching air. Combine that with even the local sailing (not exactly a trackless vista, but still decent enough to see weather advancing rapidly), and I would say I get to look at the weather more than most, but less than, say, the average forest ranger or mountain guide.

I accept that in my lifetime, the climate is showing signs of change. I would say that the predictability of the climate, in terms of historical trends, is lessening and "unseasonable" weather (whether colder or hotter or wetter or drier than in, say, the midddle part of the 20th century) is increasing.

I don't know the reasons. I do know that we live in a country (Canada) where we are quite profligate in our use of fossil energy and also in which some of the more notable climate change events occur (such as permafrost thawing and the opening of the Northwest Passage). I also accept that "change" in this sense could include this sense of a widening of such historical norms and a lessening of the predictability of seasonal weather trends.

I am also a sailor planning a world cruise starting in a couple of years. It would be injudicious, to say the least, to disregard the role of climate change in our planned journey. My pilot books are established on these principles: that over some 200 years of data recording (mostly by the U.S. and U.K navies), it has been possible to discern patterns that exceed raw chance in terms of what sort of sailing weather one might expect in given areas in given months.

So while I encourage a healthy and indeed scientific skepticism over the causes (and by inference, the range of possible solutions) of climate change, I don't reject the premise that burning fossil fuels created over millions of years in a handful of decades, or widespread deforestation in favour of farting cattle has had a measurable effect on the planetary climate.

It would be surprising if it hadn't, given that we are pretty clear on what a single large volcano can do as a matter of historical record: Bugger up the summers for a few years.

I have been visiting a very popular blog of late that is critical of a lot of the current climate change science....and rightly so, I think. There's a lot of alarmism and conclusions drawn from too little data on what are, after all, extremely complex systems in which the effect of human activity is only a part, and to an as-yet unknown ratio. But while I do not accept nor encourage the sort of evangelical self-hatred of all man's works that some "greens" espouse, neither do I believe that the viewpoint of those who posit that "all climate change science is bunk; let's all hop in the SUV and drive slowly!" is particularly helpful, either. It's clear that at least some "deniers" have an interest in continuing to live carbon-profligate lives, and the consequences be damned as long as there's gas for the monster truck and propane for the hot tub. Some of the posters have a bullying tone I don't find helpful. Others are clearly still upset that The X-Files was cancelled.

And yet one of the reasons to go cruising in this decade is the rather disturbing notion that the next decade will see some potential locations either turned into sandbars, or the site of climate-change-fuelled civil unrest, or both. Last chance to see, and so on.

I welcome future illumination. Preferably with a warm, white LED, of course.

Wind makes the boat go

2010-11-15T00:26:00.003-05:00

There was a recent thread on a sailing forum I frequent soliciting advice on "heavy weather strategies". Now my experience of big air is both limited and local, although I've spent about two weeks on the Atlantic in the last three years in rather different situations. Anyway, I gave the following account of what I've learned since 1999.

"My strategies, such as they are, are different depending on my proximity to shore, the boat I'm on, whether I'm alone, with crew, or AM crew. Way back when I was an appallingly green sailor, I saw 40 knots solo on Valiente, my 33 footer, and got into trouble when a gust..a predictable gust coming out of a river mouth and clearly visible valley... laid me over on the lee side with no harness and no PFD on. I lost some finger meat releasing the main sheet and learned to be more careful and less caring if a fender rolls off the deck in half-gales. Repeat the mantra: It doesn't matter if it looks sloppy...do NOT retrieve the fender when the boat's on autopilot above 28 knots. Bad things will happen when you are on that sidedeck...particularly if you are concentrating on appearances and not on sailing the boat actively.

I have seen 30-35 knots with my wife and kid aboard on Alchemy, the pilothouse cutter, which has pipe-sized rails instead of lifelines, and which features cambered, dry decks, and, of course, a way to steer in relative comfort. I found in this case that having just a staysail up (hank on for simplicity) drove the boat near hull speed and yet gave plenty of control and balance...if little in the way of pointing ability. So "reduce sail toward the center of effort" is a good one in increasing winds.

Another one not in many books is the idea of preparing hot drinks and soups in thermoses, sandwiches, energy bars, anything you can stuff into your face with one hand quickly. You use up a lot of energy running a boat in big seas and wind, and you will stave off fatigue if you are properly nourished. These days, it is rare to get surprised by bad weather: even local squalls are preceded by signs in the sky that they MAY occur, so it's easy to get together food and drink at the dock if you think you are in for a stretch of heavy weather.

I have seen 30-45 knots as a delivery crew for protracted periods (meaning what they call "fully developed seas" of six metres/20 feet) in the Atlantic out south of Bermuda, and the logic was to keep a bit of jib out and a little bit more main (it was in-mast furling, which was new to me, but which worked well) to continue to drive the boat near hull speed in order to maintain control and to avoid pooping, broaching or the dreaded pitchpoling. This worked very well, generally, except when squall lines would pass with 40-plus knots and confused seas. This is when knowing where the handholds are is essential, because if you break an arm offshore getting thrown into the cabinetry, it might stay broken for a week...so there's no harm in crawling if it gets you to your station. Also, take care with normal life: getting pants on while keeping one hand for the boat in a squall is difficult and like playing blind rugby.

I saw 60-knot squalls in my home waters this last summer as race crew. At some point, most boats will have to suspend racing in dangerous conditions, if only to preserve their sails and rig. How that is to be accomplished is quite individual, as is the decision to slow down or press on. We tore our jib, a Code Zero and an assy. spin in the space of about 90 minutes in three separate squalls. The last time, we furled in most of the jib (we had about 20 seconds warning thanks to the sight of exploding spinnakers in the mist aft of us) and let the mainsheet go as we turned to face the wind. Then we more or less got pinned 30 degrees over in a sort of half-assed heaving to attitude that nonetheless was easier on the gear. This allowed us to resume racing when approximately one-third of the fleet of nearly 200 boats had to retire, many with extensive damage. So that heavy weather strategy was "know when to pause and take stock". Running ahead of wind can work, I am thinking, to a certain point, but that point will vary with one's confidence, the qualities of the boat, and the abilities (and strength) of the crew. A fully crewed race boat can push the issue a lot farther than a cruising couple.

For truly appalling, long-term heavy weather, like getting out of the way of a cyclone or a deep trough of heavy, cold wind, I would carry the Jordan Series Drogue over a sea anchor. My particular boat is better suited to running off at an angle, I think, although deliberate "testing" of this by seeking out loads of wind and trying to heave to or run off in an area where I'm not far from help if I screw up is advisable. Practice whatever techniques you choose before you need them: an example many people do yearly is getting under full sail and then suddenly chucking a hat or a life ring over the side and shouting "Crew overboard!" Whether the boat comes about and to a stop in an orderly fashion or not is instructive, to say the least.

Knowing one's boat seems to me to be key: The method that works on one might not work on the next, but generally, having the proper sails and the bulletproof means not only to reduce but to secure your sails, deck gear and all lines (because if it's sheeting down hail, you can't keep track of where that 100 feet of Spectra furling line went...over the side and into the prop, maybe?) are key tactics. Keep the decks clean and the gear lashed, because then if you have to go forward to deal with something, you won't get smashed or tripped while you're dealing with jacklines and flashlights. Because you secure jacklines at sea and you clip on whenever you leave the cockpit in heavy weather, and whenever you are on watch alone, which will be frequently.

I have much still to learn, but I do notice myself making fewer gross errors than before, which is progress of a sort.

What a difference a year makes

2010-11-07T16:47:00.002-05:00

I find it interesting to note that a year ago today, I was crewing on a Bristol 45.5 approximately where the "s" is in the current position of decaying ex-hurricane Tomas. I can only imagine the sea state at that position is much more severe than the conditions we experienced, and they were no daysail on a pond.

A year ago, we were being squeezed between a vast low-pressure trough and a decaying Hurricane Ida. Worse weather, according to nearby boats racing in the Caribbean 1500, was all around us (except in front of us!). Nonetheless, we were getting plenty of wind in the 20-35 knot ranges, with squalls better than 40 knots at times, and large, rolling seas in the 12-18 foot range (I'm guessing, because I sure haven't seen more than 10 feet on Lake Ontario). We made excellent speed in an inverted "L" shaped course from Virginia to USVIs skirting Bermuda, and while it was a fast passage, it was also rough enough to be "instructional". Cheers to skippers Bruce and June for giving me the opportunity...and I'm sort of glad we had weather, but not this much weather.

Grinding my gear

2010-09-30T10:19:00.004-04:00

I'm starting to address some functional and structural shortcomings on Alchemy as I progress on the boat preparation path. I've avoided to this point much in the way of cutting, grinding and otherwise irrevocably altering the metal fabric of our boat, partly out of fear of making a mistake and partly because slicing bits off the hull imposes certain time and action restraints when it comes to launching again in the spring of 2011.

One of the more minor, if finicky, job has been the removal of the fixed (Lexan) portlights in the pilot house and their replacement with portlights capable of opening.

The pilothouse is the nerve center of Alchemy and is where the crew will be spending a lot of time, either in staying out of heavy weather, taking a break from the sun, or making use of the navigational instruments, course plotting, radios or other gear. While there's a separate helm on deck (and when the new engine goes in, a second set of engine controls), the pilothouse is where the nominal "driver's seat" is, and yet it's like sitting in a steel and plastic greenhouse. Rigid insulation will lessen the heat transferred via a big flat aluminum roof, but the two rooftop hatches (about 7 x 12 inches) and the single opening forward window simply aren't enough to keep the air moving. At the same time, the wind or weather might argue against having the companionway hatch open. So a semi-sheltered way to get air through the boat was as much a necessity as a choice.

This is the "dry-fit" result:

"Dry fit" in this context means that all the pieces are bolted together tightly to conform to their permanent positions. Absent, however, are the final priming and painting of the metal made bare via drill bits, angle grinder (grinders, really, as I wore one out) and Dremel. Also missing is the butyl tape and bedding/caulking necessary to make all this as waterproof as possible, considering that at some point a few tonnes of seawater could whack it with intent.

If it looks nice (this is the view from the side deck, thank the firm New Found Metals. I had heard through the cruiser/boat repairer grapevine that this American firm did semi-custom castings and had a bevy of stock parts with the reputation for simplicity, accuracy and sturdiness that an ocean traveller seeks. After a chat with the firm's president at the Toronto Boat Show, I learned these portlights weren't, as these things go, particularly expensive.

Here's the SS screen installed. Bugs, I snort at your feeble attempts at ingress!

I won't go into the tedious details of making a circle X inches across X plus 3/4 of an inch bigger, except to note that I should really invest in ear protection and stop wearing sandals when I'm turning steel into splinters. That white surrounding 1 1/2" ring is HDPE plastic, a necessary "spacer" to make the "spigot" more or less flush with the "trim ring". My god, this blog is educational, I should provide diagrams. A fibreglass boat will tend to have thicker sides; my pilothouse's sides are by contrast, about an eighth of a inch (3 mm) thick. The "yachtie" turn would be to carve up a small section of teak trunk, and to use a coping saw to make a wonderfully boaty teak Life Saver. Well, apart from the fact that a chunk of teak that width and thickness (13 x 1.5 inches) would be more expensive and certainly more ecologically heinous than the portlights themselves, I just don't like wood much on steel boats. Odds are good that all this will be buried behind insulation anyway, and HDPE is cheaper and more rot-resistant than wood, and besides, we are talking about what is chiefly a great big plastic washer.

Perpendicular view, now with transparency!

Anyway, I've learned some shortcuts, and, just in time for winter, I can now have fresh air even when it's pissing down outside.

Thoughts on efficient sailing

2010-09-18T11:42:00.003-04:00

IN a recent discussion from a sailing forum in which I participate, the usual question of "what cruising boat should I get?" came up, and is usual with these sort of discussions, the merits and flaws of the more traditional, heavy displacement, cubic metres of tankage-style of cruisers came up, specifically the Island Packet line. Bob Perry, noted naval architect and writer (and designer of boats both heavy and light), noted:

"Listen, my pal with the IP 38 races it! He enters single handed events on the great lakes and he does quite well. He loves to tell me ( ad nauseum) about how he can beat a Valiant 40.
" Ok, so once you beat a Valiant 40 now shut up."

Making a boat go or not go is usually far more about the sailor than it is about the boat. Many IP owners are non racers and less than skilled sail trimmers. They could make the latest IRC racer go slow, very slow.
Sure the IP will not be as close winded as some boats but you can foot off a bit, sail the boat on the fat side and just let her roll along and you'll do just fine."--Bob Perry from anything-sailing.com

To which I replied: This is true. If I can make this thing sail at 4.5 in 9 knots apparent, anybody can trim any boat to its maximum potential, which may prove surprising not only to the guys on the race course, but to the skipper!

I consider it a truism that while not every boat is a racer, but any boat can be raced.

Most people, with the exception of racers, don't realize their boat's full sailing potential (and I don't just mean speed, but rather efficiency of the boat slipping through the water, making the minimum of lee, and having the ballast organized to provide the smoothest ride, among other considerations). Yes, some boats are inherently slower than others, measurably so. But technique and familiarity are key, and this is why I tend to cruise as if I am racing in the sense that I took all I learned in five years of flag-winning club racing (which is not all there is to learn, by a long shot) and transferred that to cruising.

Why? Because a boat sailed efficiently is a happy boat, with a happy skipper. It is fulfilling its reason to be.

Sometimes, the key to learning where to start is from crewing on the boats of others, or reading books or mucking around in dinghies or even looking at your own boat in a new light. About six years ago, I switched to a Gori folder and took about 300 pounds of gear out of my 9,000 lb. '70s racer-cruiser. The difference was noticeable and I found further tuning and sail trimming "fixes" that made the boat even more of a pleasure to sail than it already was. I transferred this knowledge to our newer steel "old shoe", and found similar "gains", although obviously to a different scale and degree. Still, it surprised more than one observer, crew or passenger to see such a big, heavy boat move in light air and manoeuver with something approaching grace.

Playfulness leavened with science will tell anyone more about their boats, even if it's generally thought to be a slowpoke. An example: My steel cutter [I]Alchemy [/I]is getting its batteries increased in weight by about three times, but they are moving forward to the CG under the mast. The new engine will be about 150 pounds lighter and about 1,200 pounds of lead ingots in the bow will be replaced by chain and tools, which are coming out of the pilothouse lockers. The water tankage remains the same at 200 gallons, but is moving down onto the stringers and frames instead of mounting beneath the side decks (this was a poor choice by the P.O.). Lastly, I'm putting on a feathering prop. My experience with both a folder and my friend "Cap'n Matt's" experience on his steel ketch with an Autoprop convinced me that a fixed prop, while mechanically simpler and much cheaper, created unacceptable drag.

I expect all these efforts to have a salutary effect on the boat's sailing characteristics and to increase both stability and "sea kindliness". Yet it is sometimes assumed that given that it's a 15-16 tonne boat, there is very little I can do that will have much of an effect.

That is not my experience. Any boat and any skipper can be improved. Sometimes it's about learning or relearning many of the basics of sail power; other times it's about removing heavy crap out of the boat or to a better spot. Skippers in the age of sail knew this about "ballast" intimately, because poorly stowed ballast could kill you if it degraded the handling of the boat or caused unacceptable losses of stability.

Two against the sea!

2010-08-30T20:44:00.002-04:00

After my kid spent a couple of weeks in "sailing camp" (see hot Opti beam reaching action above), I decided in my skipperish wisdom that it was time to test the Incredible Nesting Dinghy, Optimist Pram.

I make no apologies for the vile pun, as it was geared to amuse a (then) seven-year-old boy.

Anyway, I spent a portion of an unseasonably hot afternoon assembling and rigging the dinghy, not really aided by my son's queries along the lines of "do you know who Captain America married?" and my own lack of memory as to how I did it the last time. Eventually, sweat and lucky guesses mostly prevailed.

Sorry to say, but I was, until yesterday, a dinghy virgin. I cannot tell a lie: instead of messing about in boats for a tender age (pun intended) in Optis, 420s, Lasers and finally something really tippy and squirrelly, I in fact never drove a boat until the age of 38 and my purchase of Valiente, a 33 footer of the mostly non-tippy kind.

As I didn't dare take cameras or cell phones aboard (dinghies are indeed tippy, something my son decided to talk about ceaselessly while we were out, I don't have "action" photos. Instead, this is the little boat, sails stripped and charmlessly parked aft of a garbage bin.

Dinghies are, well, sensitive. I haven't had this much trouble with the concept of feel since teenaged dating. Eventually, with my son on the helm and me pulling various ridiculously undersized strings (or so it seemed to Burly Sailing Dude), we tacked and gybed with reasonable efficacy.

Mostly reasonable.

More study and practice is needed. As this is supposed to be the "sports car" (with the Portabote as the "van") of the tender pair to the good ship Alchemy, we will need it. But yesterday was a good start: We didn't tumble in and we sailed back to the dinghy ramp unaided. The thing's still a heavy bastard to yank around a parking lot, though (note to self: Inflate cart tires!)

A wee summer getaway on the Low Seas

2010-08-14T17:37:00.005-04:00

Last Monday, we decided to take a quick trip to Cobourg from Toronto. This is a mere 100 km. NNE, hardly an expedition, but we like the little town, and we like the well-serviced marina, and the boat was running well, if in "Spartan" mode. I'll leave what that means to your collective imaginations; however, no lake was harmed in the making of this voyage.

So here are a few pictures. This is my son in 2005 at said compact destination:

And here he was last week.

He'll be nine in a couple of weeks and has been sailing since he was five days old. Yes, that means the photographic proof predates digital!

As is so often the case on Lake Ontario in the summer, decent wind was NOT a feature of this trip.

Consequently, the Harry Potter Book Club held several meetings.

Yes, my kid can read, but he still likes being read to.

We did get a chance to throw up some sail...

...but even with my cruising spi, we could only make about 4 knots in 6 knots of wind. At least it was from the south east, a rare direction here. Getting "up lake", meaning to the south west, is usually a chore of beating long tacks.

Eventually we just motored...straight into fog. Also note why boats with worn gelcoat and child passengers need frequent cleaning...oh, the footprints...

About 30 seconds after I requested my wife to hand me the can of compressed air, I had to blow it at a drifting fishing boat that came out of the fog directly in my path...five miles offshore...(sailorly invective omitted).

Anyway, that was our mid-week getaway: 75% motoring in next to no wind with about five hours of actual sailing...sigh. Now, back to boat reno ashore.

Well, that only took 18 years

2010-08-02T23:23:00.002-04:00

After years of having other sailor types express shock and horror that I hadn't seen this fairly mild comedy about a dubious yacht delivery skipper and an uptight family who inherit a vintage ketch, I located it on DVD and myself, my wife and our eight-year-old son watched it tonight. It was indeed mild, but had a few laughs and not too many errors on the seamanship side. Kurt Russell's "casual sail0r" character reminded me of a few guys at my club, actually, who know a bowline, a long splice and the rest is instinct. And beer.

Sometimes that's not a bad thing.

Vintage winches feature pinches

2010-08-02T16:49:00.004-04:00

I recently received a pair of vintage winches, Lewmar 44ST (self-tailing) Wave Grip models from the '80s. I purchased them for $200 each from a fellow sailor on anything-sailing.com on the assumption that they had never seen salt water, and having now stripped, serviced and getting them going clackity-clack in a proper fashion (I have to earn the rum around here), I believe that they haven't been soaked in brine and will find a nice home as "backups".

Curiously, they have slightly different guts, although they are identical on the outside. The one on the right has some sort of two-part base with a kind of internal sleeve for the central post,

whereas the one on the left has a solid casting.

Anyway, they are built like tanks and show wear only in some superficial scratches and dings in the chrome. They will probably go on Alchemy as secondaries for drogue or warp use, towing or "big air" downwind stuff like running twins and will be mounted behind the current Anderson 40 primaries and Anderson 28 secondaries. The Andersen 40s are sized the same as these 44s...winch sizing is an arcane and arbitrary thing. Spares are still available, and I received, happily, full documentation.

I think this deal is almost as good as the $200 80-pound used CQR anchor my fellow sailor Maria P. scored down in Mexico last week:

Likely off for a short cruise next week. Frankly, we need the practice.

Squall aboard at the Lake Ontario 300 race

2010-07-21T11:36:00.005-04:00

Ahoy, maties, 'tis the Ancient Mariner back from t' voyage...a voyage that will pay for many a sailmaker's kids to go to college...

Short version is that everyone on my crew is safe and we came 2nd in our fleet on both finish and corrected times, which was very gratifying. That was after a very frustrating, if typical, early Tuesday morning that saw us ghost past the finish line at one knot of boat speed.

Saturday's start was fast and very crowded and which saw a boat not in our start fouling us over the line. We had two violent squalls in the first two hours, one south of Scarborough lasting about five minutes at what I estimate was 40-45 knots and one about 25 minutes later south of Oshawa/Whitby that took about ten long minutes to blow out and which clocked 50 knots on our vessel before we really were too busy to look anymore. We have reason to believe it went to 60 knots because a boat near us took a shot of their WSI registering 59.8 knots which we saw after we had finished. I felt a little funny seeing that, I can tell you. Certainly, I recognized the sound of the 45 knot squall, but the heavier one flattened the seas, had marble-sized hail and roared like several freight trains. The first squall saw two of our crew on deck trying to wrestle the sock onto our assy spin while enduring a fearsome heel and pelting hail. They were safe, however, if strained. The assy spin was torn and stowed, but it can be repaired.

About four miles further on, I was watching aft and saw a spinnaker explode on a boat about a quarter of a mile back before it disappeared in mist, which gave us about ten seconds to partially furl the jib and to release fully the main as we turned partially to the wind. This probably saved us more damage, as the boat was pinned at 40-45 degrees over for ten minutes as we watched several hundred grand in composite sails disintegrate on several boats we could see around us. The radio buzzed with abandonments and reports of damage and injury and a trimaran having flipped its four crew into the lake. They were all retrieved safely. Our damage was a torn leech line cover that meant we had to partially furl for every subsequent tack, a ripped up assy spin, a Code Zero with a hole chafed in it that we repaired with duct tape (how Canadian!), a damaged stanchion, a lost Dyneema spin sheet and some underwear, although I can't confirm the last bit. Later on, in the 25-30 knot following winds that propelled us the rest of the day, the barbeque on the rail simply sheared off, no doubt amusing some fish. We had a surplus light air spin of vintage years that we used pole-forward as a fake Code Zero in the middle of the next night, but it was only good to 10 knots and we had to douse it when faced with further, if only a measly sub-30 knot, squalls on Sunday night on the American side of the lake.

Proof we dipped the boom (!):

It was the biggest squall any of us had seen, and I was sailing with some experienced sailors. If the 60 knots of wind speed is true, and I believe it's credible that it blew that hard, that's bettering what I had in the Atlantic delivery I did last November by 15 knots. Here's what 60 knots does to sails on a racer:

Out of 198 boats, 59 "did not finish", 33 of those due to too much damage, injuries, dismastings or capsize, and the rest because they were frightened/exhausted and wanted to stop their suffering. I think that maybe 30 feet should be the lower limit for this race, because of the sort of exhausting wave motion I saw on the sub-30 foot boats. The exception was the 20 foot Mini Transat boats, which faired well, but are arguably made for such conditions.

Also, beating up the U.S. side is tedious work. I much preferred the downwind legs.

All in all a great trip, a great crew and a great experience in getting a fairly large cruiser to race effectively. Had we had a second A-sail, we might have won on corrected time.

A suit and spi affair

2010-06-19T20:33:00.004-04:00

My wife is working part-time at a local chandlery (yay, employee discount!), partially to make the money I don't make when I'm gutting the boat, and partially because if she has to have a job in retail, at least this one is educational for our future boaty endeavours.

So I was down there pawing through the sales racks and found something very much like this:

They are a set (bib pants and hooded jacket) of cheap (well, cheap enough) coastal-grade, non-miracle fabric foul weather gear. I went on delivery last November with only a pair of bib foulies; I just used my usual rain jacket by Banff that I use for cycling and on Lake Ontario. I knew that the center cockpit position was well-protected, and that I was unlikely to get continuously soaked by waves like I would in a race.

Still, I thought that with a smaller, wetter boat in the water, I should have something basic around here, so I picked up these for a hundred bucks, mainly because the jacket fit. My body-type is Lowland Gorilla, and when the chest fits and my arms are bare halfway to the elbow, I tend to buy whatever it is, knowing that opportunities for properly simian clothing don't come every day. Also, the foulies I intend to get before we leave are more, uh, technical, and run for four to five times as much. For sailing in the summer and fall rain on Lake Ontario, this'll do.

I was staring at the lurid colour of the things one night last week when I got a call from a fellow club member, asking me if I wanted to crew on his 47 foot Catalina during the Lake Ontario 300.

http://www.lo300.org/

Easily flattered, I said yes, not thinking how rusty is my spinnaker setting work and how, in a race, you don't really hove to for clever cocktails. Understand that I have raced, at the club level, and pretty successfully, too. In fact, I recommend club racing between rated boats to anyone who wishes to accelerate and/or consolidate their sailing knowledge...despite the yelling from the Cap'n Bligh A-type who frequently sail little boats against each other. You can learn as much from a horrible warning as from an avatar of civilized competition.

Anyway, looks like I'll be "going to sail the low seas" in mid-July. Y'arr, redux.

A Brace of Vikings

2010-05-31T10:11:00.005-04:00

Nice, isn't it? This is the lightly used main from a C&C 33 recut for use on the Viking 33, the elder boat in my half-landbound "navy". Really, it should have full and not half-battens, but we'll start slowly this year, shall we? Really...I should be working on the other boat, not sailing at all, but it was so nice yesterday!

We got the plastic boat underway yesterday in somewhat marginal light air that actually improved even as the temperature rose past 30C. For a first push-off of the season with the wife and kid, it was blessedly free of complications, skipper foul-ups and error, and we got in about four hours of decent sailing on a gratifyingly beautiful Sunday afternoon.

I've written about the old boat before, but to reiterate, it's called a Viking 33, a 33' 7" "racer-cruiser" drawn in the very late '60s by the C&C firm of yacht designers and builders. Bearing the distinctive (at least on the Great Lakes) C&C "star and stripe" cove line, the Viking 33 was built by Ontario Yachts (responsible for the Ontario 32 pocket cruiser and a few other well-regarded boats) for about eight years. Mine (Valiente) is hull #32 of approximately 150 constructed, and was built in 1973. I know of about five or six still sailing in my immediate area, including one, Sveeta, a 1974 model at my home club, and Ketchup, another 1974 at RCYC.

The owner of Ketchup is Mr. Dan Erlich, a fine fellow I got to know via an e-mail list about 10 years ago on the subject of care and feeding of the Atomic 4 gasoline auxiliary engine, a simple and reliable beast that, despite its more or less 1940s design, is the right size and type for short-haul movement of recreational sailboats.

Today, small sailboats tend to have either outboards off the stern (not great looking, too much weight aft and too exposed for my liking), or small diesels inboard (heavy, expensive and not suited to short operational intervals). A low-compression, gasoline inboard no more complex than a riding lawnmower engine makes sense for a sailboat that isn't going to need hundreds of miles of range, but engines like the Atomic 4, once the Number One auxiliary engine choice in sailboats under 40 feet, has fallen to the mighty, and mightily inappropriate for most sailors' needs, auxiliary diesel, which I find a pity, as to re-engine our classic plastics with diesels in 2010 makes no economic sense; a pair of sculling oars would be the more logical course, or perhaps putting a shaft on a sole-bolted exercise bike.

Needless to say, any engine that sits idle for six months of the year and which ceased production a quarter-century ago requires some sort of support system, and Dan is pretty clever at both obtaining increasingly rare spares and making them come to life again. Despite having near-identical boats (although I've opted for "stripped out" and Dan's got a comfort- and cruising-oriented family and hot-and-cold-running everything), we've never...until yesterday...run our respective darlings side-by-side. Dan was out yesterday with his mother for a nice cooling ride and so we "gammed" and ran parallel for about four miles to the west-south-west, "in front of the Island" as we say in Toronto.

What a great trip. We had near-identical sail sets and it was very interesting to see how closely the boats performed in "level" conditions. It was also a little odd to see what one's boat looked like from a distance! I rarely meet another Viking 33 actually sailing, and having both boats tracking within a boatlength on the beam was a great opportunity to check out variables, that while only of interest to the owners, were fun to observe.

The cheerful second helmsboy was also fun to observe:

Also, quite frankly, they are "hot", responsive boats, and I like tweaking the controls to get that extra 1/10th knot in close quarters...it's about as near as I get to racing these days.

New slip for an old boat

2010-05-15T11:22:00.008-04:00

Why, yes, I should be slaving away in Alchemy, engineless, with a pilothouse roof held on with bungees and a couple of bolts, and with a "to do" list stretching into 2011. But all work, etc., even if the "play" portion of that particular proverb is actually "more work on a different boat". When the result is this, however...

...I can forgive myself my quasi-dereliction. As related earlier, the "old boat" was launched (as opposed to languished in a parking lot) this year due to the serendipitous coming together of factors, plus a lot of elbow grease to ameliorate a few years of semi-benign neglect. Anyway, the boat was launched (into a 25-knot headwind) and after some tension surrounding the motor start (it chose eventually to burp into life), and a few days later an extremely rushed "masting" and more angst, the boat is ready for the application of sails and the true commencement of recreational operations.

Even Casey the dock dog was impressed, and, after a hot day inside our landbound "project" boat, I suspect I'll be, too, even if it's only to lay about the plastic boat's cockpit swilling semi-frozen ciders. A cooling evening sail will be a bonus, as my fellow skipper "Overboard" has rediscovered on her concrete canoe down in Mexico (www.againstallcods.blogspot.com).

Launching Sideways and the Skipper's Nerve Medicine

2010-04-30T10:05:00.003-04:00

I spent yesterday literally clearing the decks on Alchemy in preparation for our boat club's Saturday launch. We (meaning myself, my wife and the boat...ever notice that solo sailors say "we" when referring to themselves...and their boat?) are not launching this year as there is no engine aboard and extensive welding and tank replacements and prop pulling, etc. are to be done...definitely not water-work.

We will, however, be moving about 10 metres south and west in order to facilitate cradle storage. Owners have to be present during crane moves, and I have an "away" job on Launch Day, so my wife will be present to "supervise". Having had some unfortunate experiences during boat moves (see May 8, 2007 entry), there's always a little bit of nervous tension about seeing the boat out of its natural element (water) flying through one unnatural element (air) and flying over another (earth).

The deck clearing was prompted by the move. All tenders were attached to the perimeter fence to leave a clear field for the "sling guys" to position the crane slings at marked points on the hull.

I have attended Launch and Haulout some 20 times at this point, and I still am not entirely comfortable with seeing the boats most of us devote a lot of time, money and sweat to maintaining rotating at the end of a husky hoist some 30 feet in the air, to be "splashed" into sometimes rough waters. But it's a simple fact of life in Canadian waters (with the exception of mild British Columbia) that boats tend to spend half the year in cradles, and that means transfers via cranes or TraveLifts are a fact of the boating life here.

Most of the time, it's quick, safe and expertly done by practised volunteers and hired crane/yard operators. Most of the time.

Perhaps it's timely to list a couple of the skipper's tipple recipes. Owning a boat has actually restricted my recreational boozing significantly, because, unlike many local sailors, I rarely imbibe at any point in the day during which I can be expected to operate my vessel. I don't have a car, but I wouldn't drink operating one then, either, and not just because of the laws, but because it's easier to be stone-cold sober (rather than scraping "just under the legal limit") than to court the disaster of impairment. Boats are slow-moving, sure, but carry vast amounts of inertia once in motion, and the water can be a weird combination of monotonous sameness and infinitely distracting. Mowing down a kayaker or hitting a log would be easy, and even easier with one's drink on.

Nonetheless, when one and one's crew are tied to the dock, and the boat's "put away" and the dinner is served and the lanterns are guttering in the cool breeze, there are few finer moments than relaxing with a sociable beverage on deck. Wine aboard (a topic I will deal with in the future) with meals is customary, but beer or cider taste better if the sun's still up. After dark, however, I like gin or rum-based drinks, and these two have proven popular at home and aboard. One's a classic, and the other I think I may have invented.

The Bark and Stormy

Not quite Bermuda's national drink, but a reasonable facsimile we enjoy.

4 oz. Gosling's Black Seal Rum (Havana Club 7 year old may be substituted, but not amber or "spiced" rums)

12 oz. Canada Dry or Vernor's ginger ale (ginger beer is not always available).

Healthy dash of Angoustura Bitters.

Pour into a pint tankard over ice. Grate fresh nutmeg and/or cinnamon bark into drink to taste. Briefly stir and garnish with lime wedge. Serves one.

The more abstemious among you will note that this is essentially a "double", or rather two cocktails at once. This is because a) it is good enough that you'll want two, b) one wants to minimize the transfer of beverages from the galley to the deck, and c) England expects every man to do his duty, and this is far less damaging than the old grog ration that won Trafalgar.

The Corolla

Named so because it's an accelerator subject to recall.

2 oz. London Dry Gin (I like Tanqueray and Gordon's here, but you can use Bombay Sapphire to good effect if you prefer)

1/2 oz. Limoncello

Assertive dash of bitters

4 oz. of ginger ale or fizzy lemonade, or lemon juice and soda.

Mix in tall glass over ice and garnish with lime wedge.

This is more a "sundowner" and is very nice during hot weather. One can also pretend it discourages scurvy. I like the "gin and ginger" mix personally, but frankly it's the Limoncello that makes this drink work. Just remember that Limoncello is quite sweet and a little goes a long way.

Fleeting marine instrument industry note: Garmin, the well-regarded U.S. makers of plotters, GPSes and, more recently, radars, have announced a bid to acquire Raymarine, the venerable, if not always well-managed, British instrument makers. While I am aware of Raymarine and Garmin's respective reputations and market share in North America, I don't know how Garmin does in Europe, where I saw and continue to hear of a lot of Raymarine products on recreational yachts. I would say that Raymarine and Furuno were about evenly split in Europe, to judge from dock-walking and peering into various well-equipped cockpits, with the relatively unknown in N.A. Navman brand in third. I also saw a few NASA logos. NASA (http://www.nasamarine.com/) is the unfortunately named British firm that makes affordable AIS units and other instruments. I think they are aligned or owned by Si-Tex.

Anyway, we live in interesting times. I've seen too many balky or unintuitive Raymarine units to mourn much (I even own a Raymarine 420 plotter that came with the boat), but I'm not sure that Garmin, a newer firm lacking (perhaps undeservedly) a reputation for "oceanic grade" components, can capture Raymarine's loyal following. There are pluses and minuses for boat owners as the instrument industry consolidates down to three or so major players, but it remains to be seen whether more reliable gear at a less onerous price point will be the result.

Best practices for worst cases

2010-04-25T15:49:00.006-04:00

Photos: Guy Perrin.

Where we live on Lake Ontario, what inclement weather that exists in the six-moth saling season is typically brief, although it can be as intense, particularly during summer squalls, as all but the most brutal offshore weather. This can come as a surprise to saltwater sailors, but I think it’s generally acknowledged as true that sailing a well-found vessel on the Great Lakes in the heavy airs of spring or fall, or in the 50- to 60-knot storm fronts that can fall onto the Lakes like meteorological sledgehammers is good practice for oceanic passage making.

Having now spent time in salt and fresh squalls, I can see this point, even if I need ski goggles. Exercising safety tactics in bad weather is an easy one, but given that one can sink in a calm sea, preparedness should always be on the yachtie’s mind…that and a really good rum drink recipe.

By way of cultivating the sailorly version of what the police, rescue and military folk call “situational awareness”, I and about 300 other attendees spent a crisp Saturday recently in an auditorium near to Royal Canadian Yacht Club’s shore-side clubhouse.

RCYC was sponsoring a full-day “Safety at Sea” seminar in conjunction with US Sailing. Attending it would provide a Safety Certificate necessary to enter selected offshore races, and certainly wouldn’t hurt for the Lake Ontario 300 and other long Great Lakes races, but for myself and others, it would consolidate and fill in the gaps in gradually acquired sailing safety knowledge. Eventually, my goal is to take the RYA Yachtmaster Offshore (http://www.rya.org.uk/coursestraining/exams/Pages/Yachtmasteroffshore.aspx) certification course in the UK, and I'm about three-quarters of the way in terms of "sea miles crewed" for that. This one-day seminar is like crib notes for the more demanding RYA qualification.

A show of hands testified that the crowd was about 50/50 racers and cruisers, and although the presentations were probably more oriented to large race crews, the knowledge of gear, techniques, equipment and “best practices” was very applicable to single-handers and cruising couples alike. The co-hosts and keynote speakers were John Rousmaniere, famous for his books on seamanship and on the lessons of the deadly 1979 Fastnet race, and Capt. John Bonds, an avuncular and retired U.S Navy skipper with an engaging style, and a seemingly endless well of illustrative anecdotes to support his deep knowledge of safety skills.

While Rousmaniere and Bonds did the majority of the presenting, attendees also heard from speakers such as Herb Hilgenberg (who was of great help to S/V Ainia when I was crewing on her during a delivery last November, as told below) on weather patterns for the Great Lakes sailor, a speaker from the Canadian Coast Guard on the organization of search and rescue facilities and operations, a shipping company executive on why it’s not a great idea to “buzz” lake freighters, and Toronto surgeon and J-Boat racer Michael Chapman outlined the best ways to render first aid at sea. Certainly Chapman’s fairly graphic slides impressed the audience that it’s better to clip on than to injure oneself at sea. It was also made clear that there are real limits to the medical aid one can give aboard a small sailboat, and that evacuation may be necessary (if even possible), so the “how to bring aboard a harness from a helicopter” video came in handy, too.

Both Bonds and Rousmaniere were practised and humorous you wouldn’t mind having in a lift raft, if it came to that, but the emphasis was definitely on avoiding things coming to that. Speaking of lift rafts, one model was inflated on stage, and the various attributes were pointed out. This was the first time I had seen this, and it was much louder than the diagram, and made a deeper impression.

Another deep impression was made by the comparison of USCG-approved flares, PFDs and signalling gear (which more or less applies for Canadian safety gear) versus SOLAS-grade equipment. No, it’s not cheap and yes, I am convinced it’s the way to go when going offshore. Given the utility of the EPIRB and GMDSS systems, I find it bordering on foolhardy that sailors make passages without them. No matter what gear one chooses to carry aboard, the seas (even little Lake Ontario) are still very large, and the boats (even the newest one at our docks) are still very small: it makes sense to make use of every advantage one can to attract help should things go badly out there.

Did I learn a lot of new things? Not as much as direct experience has taught me, no, but attending a pretty comprehensive and multi-pronged seminar such as this was did consolidate a lot of safety knowledge I'd picked up in a fairly haphazard fashion, and it certainly reinforced a few opinions (like the worth of SOLAS-approved gear, the essential nature of EPIRBs, PLBs and similar devices at sea, and the need to take a higher grade of first aid course) I already had. Mostly, though, it helped to better sort my mental sock-drawer, so to speak, of partial and random safety factoids into a better and, I hope, never tested base of knowledge. Forehanded, as the seminar speakers might say, is forearmed.

Restoration era sailing

2010-04-21T10:20:00.007-04:00

Something a little different today: This post is not another product evaluation or status update about the big steel cutter, but something about deciding to share a boat with fellow enthusiast, and putting in a few hours in order to do that right. Yes, it takes away from the hours devoted to "The Big Project", but all work and no sailing makes Jack and myself a dull sailor, and I'm pretty dull already. This post is about shiny, or at least much less chalky, things.

A recap: Faced with an market for used boats so soft as to be vaporous, I decided to keep Valiente, my first and fibreglass boat, one more year until I could find either a buyer or a way to store it (in a shed? in a field?) for several years until we returned from the five-year trip we are two years from starting.

Having a "spare" yacht does not, in my experience, inspire sympathy, but just as the currently largely dissembled Alchemy is near-ideal in my mind for long-range voyaging, the 1973 vintage, 33 1/2 foot Valiente is ideal for Great Lakes cruising and even club racing. Its design by the venerable C&C firm is narrow, fast and light, with a notable "stiffness" conducive to cutting through the short, square chop of our freshwater seas, and while amenities are few on this pushing 40 vessel, the ride is indeed sweet. Life after a circ may be distant, but I can still see wanting to head out with beer and sandwiches on a nice, responsive tiller-steered boat like the one I fell in love with in 1999. So I am motivated, within reason and fiscal sense, to keep this old girl in some form and fashion. People with big boats say I will never go back to a smaller one, but if I do, I could do much worse than this.

Nonetheless, I can't afford to keep two boats in either dollars or time, and so I was resolved to pay good money to leave her moldering in a nasty waterside parking lot while I figured out what to do. A series of fortunate events put a former sailor in my life who wanted to ease back into sailing. This individual, who shall remain nameless (hence Ni, or "nameless individual") because I get the sense he's a private kind of guy, has brought a lot of practical experience and a strong desire to work to the partnership, and is interested in doing the kind of stuff that, while I like the results, have never found very compelling, like making the hull look nice or rationalizing the wiring.

Long story short, we decided to split costs on a downtown marina slip and get Valiente in running order again. Part of this isn't the usual hoses and gaskets work on which I tend to focus, but a more comprehensive restoration. What follows are a visual record of how an old, oxidized gelcoat topsides can be "brought back" via a few steps, the right product, and elbow grease. All credit to Ni here, as this was his "thing"while I was replacing valves and batteries and losing tools on the "inside".

Here's the hull after one polisher-assisted application of "Meguiar's No. 1", a semi-coarse rubbing compound in liquid form. It's already taken off much of the "age" of the 37-year-old gelcoat.

The view from the front. This was April 6th. We've had with few exceptions very good weather this spring in Toronto, allowing early starts on the boat readying front. As Alchemy isn't launching, the decision was made to "do it right" on Valiente, the sailing component of my cheap-ass navy. Oh, and those little chunks out of the stem will be fixed, and a bow roller I had made years back attached.

The folding prop, in need of servicing (lubrication and tightening of the Allen bolts), and a nice polish.

The finished initial polish on April 12th. Nice, no? But wait, there's more!

The finished second polish, with Meguiar's "No. 2", on April 14th. By this stage, Ni was getting excited. I think it's clear that he likes shiny things and finds polishing meditative in a way I obviously do not. This is actually a good thing in a boat partner...to have different priorities and experiences.

Ni "took the initiative" and cleaned out the shaft strut back to the bronze of several coats of filler, bottom paint and related goo. An area that looked like a pacifier for senile lampreys became free and ready for fairing.

April 17: While I started on what would be two cans and three coats of VC-17M bottom paint, Ni continued with the fairing and tidying up of the strut and keel root areas.

Now, the proper way to do all this below-the-waterline fairing and filling stuff involves Tyvek suits, wet sandpaper and excruciating attention to detail. If one is a racer, that is. We "just cruise fast" types resolve to see how a test of a concept works before getting into that time-pit. Not to mention expensive respirator filter elements.

Seriously, this is the most TLC the boat's had during my entire watch in the cosmetics department.

April 19th: Priming the strut prior to applying the last of the bottom paint. Nice work, Ni!

April 19: The final application and hand-polishing of "Starbrite" marine sealant/topcoat/whatever. Ni remarked that the gelcoat was "drinking" this stuff as its "pores closed", which I understand from a chemical point of view but still sounds like one of those dodgy make-up for forty-something commercials to me.

While there are some mechanical and maintenance issues to get at, we "achieved ignition" yesterday on the 20th and are more or less ready to splash the boat and make our way to the pricey but centrally located slip we've procured for this season. A pair of new batteries, a new seacock and various sealants, paints and compounds have been applied, and after a very well needed deck wash (did I mention that the canvas cover under which I usually store the boat was shredded by gales this winter, exposing the deck to the diesel soot and dirt of the adjacent recycling facility? No, I believe I did not), we'll have a boat that not only sails very well, but looks great doing it.

After a hot day down in the bowels of Alchemy, that will make for a very nice break, as well as keeping our infrequently tested sailing skills up.

Coming soon: The Safety at Sea seminar I attended recently, recommended rudder removal, and U.S/Canadian dollar parity and its affects on the self-equipper's budget.

More tender moments

2010-04-21T09:28:00.004-04:00

It's interesting the divergence in taste cruisers have regarding tenders...although I'm prepared to be "schooled" by our own reality on this, once we get into continuous mooring/anchoring mode. Perhaps I hadn't mentioned, but the only way the voyages of Alchemy are going to be economically viable is via the near-exclusive avoidance of marinas and docks. It's a free night at a reciprocating yacht club's visitors' dock, and reciprocity will likely lessen greatly the farther away from Canada that we sail, or the old (new) anchor into the briny to hold us close to foreign shores.

That means rowing, putt-putting, or even sailing to said shores in some manner of small, open boat, commonly known as a "tender" in the parlance of yachting.

As some may recall, we originally had a Zodiac 310 RIB (now in disrepair and needing a retube to something not PVC), and a Honda BF100 9.9HP longshaft outboard, a pretty robust combo that got us "on the plane", more yachtie lingo that refers to exceeding the usual six knot or so limit of plowing through the water and instead skimming at close to 20 knots over its surface, like a squashed Jet-Ski. We both motored about in this relatively stable and commonly found style of tender and when taking it in tow on the classic plastic Valiente (see the next post above).

When we acquired Alchemy, however, because of issues getting the 100 pound engine on and off in a seaway, and of getting the RIB aboard and stowed (even given our generous deck and robust boom/topping lift combo), we opted for a Portabote and nesting dinghy tender pair, with a single Honda 2 HP outboard that my strong but height-challenged wife can easily single-arm up out of the forepeak workshop, for both tenders. Both have oars, and the nesting dinghy has a generous Marconi rig for zooming about.

We chose this set-up for compactness, lightness, mechanical simplicity (the Honda is air-cooled, meaning that while it buzzes somewhat loudly, it doesn't require freshwater flushes to get the corrosive cooling seawater from its innards). I capacity, as the two tenders can hold more together than even our retired RIB. I personally also like the fact that a lashed Portabote on the rail and a lashed and stowed nesting dinghy keep my foredeck quite clear and preserves my forward view from the pilothouse. This was not the case with the Zodiac, which, no matter how it was secured on deck, presented plenty of pontoon in all views forward.

We expect the two-tender solution to be slow(er), wetter, somewhat more tricky in terms of boarding and exiting, but also more flexible and freeing, particularly as our kid gets more skilled with sailing (he's starting White Sail 2 this year), and having two tenders means we can all leave the boat and go to different places for different reasons. Within reason, I can even bring the Honda engine with me if the locale looks dodgy. Speaking of dodgy, something that looks like a plastic rowboat is, it seems to me, inherently less attractive to a thief than the expensive and desirable inflatable.

Needless to say, having a 15hp and an inflatable obviously suits the majority of cruisers for separate and different reasons, and I realize I am definitely in the semi-Luddite, Pardeyesque minority in fancying a rowing option. But it's interesting nonetheless, and it hurts no one to experiment. Inflatables and larger engines are so common that a switch-up would not be difficult.

A "PS" here: I've seen some intriguing use of those ski stowage boxes adapted to boats. It might be an idea for cruisers wishing to lock deck gear away without chucking it below.

http://www.sailboatrack.com/Rack_Accessories.html

Not dead...just attending to the necessaries

2010-03-29T23:31:00.002-04:00

Sorry to any remaining readers, but I've had a glitch in the working life that caused me to focus on getting jobs (I'm a freelancer) and doing other things than blog posting.

Normal patterns of blather, however, will soon be resumed. Plus, I'm going to a potentially interesting seminar on Safety at Sea on the 10th of April, which might merit some comment.

It looks also as if I'm keeping the "surplus" boat this year, which at the very least will give me a bit of respite from what I suspect will be a hot, grimy, sweaty and dusty summer doing organ replacement on the currently gutted Alchemy.

Lastly, I'll fix these missing pictures. Soon. Argh.

The Roadstead Less Travelled: A visit to the Boat Show

2010-01-20T01:25:00.006-05:00

I write for and am the editor of my boat club's monthly newsletter, though for how much longer remains to be seen as I must focus on boat repair as A Way of Life. In this capacity, I attend the a large annual boat show to gather pictures and to write up the event. Our club, with its typically aging and sometimes, sadly, dying membership, has a booth to inform and persuade new members in order to keep our docks and coffers full. No surprise there; most clubs are doing this as the boomer bulge passes the 60 to 70 year old mark and decides mucking about with boats may be not as much fun as it was back in the '70s. At least, that's the impression one gets from the older crowd.

Me, I am shopping for an engine and various, lesser items to fit out our boat. Growing experience and differing goals are taking me farther away from the purchasing ambitions of someone wanting a folding chair with the words "Skipper" emblazoned on it, or one of the larger sorts of Catalinas, for that matter. More power to those recreational sailors, but we are after different things and are on different roads, watery or not, and beyond the advances in electronics, such as the new VHF radios I saw with integral GPS and/or AIS functions, there wasn’t a lot of new stuff this year, nor reasons for me to attend. Prices seemed to be static or somewhat lower, with AIS units, handheld VHFs and LED fixtures and nav lights particularly cheaper. I ended up buying my SSB rig (show special!) plus a PYI packless shaft seal and yet another floating handheld VHF, this one with GPS. Now, I need to secure a couple of MMSI numbers.

Look, a moonlighting boat club member!

I did see, however, a “thrust-bearing-less” universal joint coupler that might be of great interest to fiberglass boat owners interested in dampening vibration and saying goodbye to misalignments. Reminiscent of the AquaDrive system, the Powertrain Marine Coupling was devised in Norway and is worth investigating if you've thought "gosh, that AquaDrive looks great, but I'd have to pull the engine and have heaps of money to glass in a thrust bearing the size of J. Lo's backside". Well, as I said, it's worth investigating.

I also had an interesting discussion with a "battery builder" about having semi-custom banks assembled for me in 2-volt modules (like the Surrettes, only more "industrial"). I'm having him aboard shortly to see if it makes sense to go this route...it's a decision I have to make soon.

As for the sailboats, I stepped aboard a few, including the massive Hunter 50, a new offering that I’m not sure would even fit the 45 foot docks at our club in the most literal sense. The trend to apartment-sized saloons is particularly obvious here, as was the absence of handholds and positive lock-downs on the dozen or so floor panels.I’m sure it’s a fine, if not bluewater, cruiser, but I guarantee it's a fabulous floating bar.

I spoke briefly with perennial ocean racer Derek Hatfield down among the Catalinas and Tartans. He was soliciting support for his campaign in the next Velux 5 Oceans race. He explained briefly the rather intriguing concept of the “Eco Open 60” class, which, contrary to trends, proposes to have “older” 2003 or earlier Open 60s enter the race as a means to recycle the boats and keep them out of landfills. It was remarked upon that given the toll the sea has exacted on some more recent models of Open 60 and America’s Cup racers, maybe a slightly heavier-built “good old boat” will last the entire race.

I accompanied sailing buddy Cap'n Matt to the unadorned Garhauer booth (there’s never even a sign…just tables full of shiny blocks, beckets and stainless steel) and once again had the pleasure of watching a fellow sailor order an elaborate, semi-custom traveler, and then look slightly guilty when told the unexpectedly reasonable price. Time and again, raised eyebrows and furtive glances signal “this price must be a mistake”, but no, it’s just Garhauer’s way of selling solid, basic gear for the non-racing sailor.

I also attended a compact lecture and picture show by circumnavigators Hugh and Heather Bacon (http://www.noonsite.com/Members/doina/R2004-11-08-1), who provided a nice reality check for the dreamers (I am apparently not one, resigned as I am to "boat maintenance in exotic locales") and a reinforcement of the notion that I'm not crackers and that a circ is doable at reasonable cost and without getting dead due to stupidity. I had a nice chat as well about the usual: ground tackle, engines, and "what didn't you find useful?" A nice couple and they gave off the air of calm, confidence and competence I am finding is the common denominator of successful passagemakers. As Hugh writes entries for the esteemed noonsite.com, I'm not surprised.

I’d write more, but the 10 kilos of catalogues, brochures and spec sheets aren’t going to read themselves, nor is all that gear I bought self-installing…

Cruising and the nature of work

2010-01-04T01:17:00.008-05:00

A new year brings new musings, and a chance encounter with a rather good radio show gave me occasion to think of the very different skills I am acquiring as an aspirant cruiser, versus the sort of skills that I have acquired in order to pay for our sailing enterprise in the first place.

Sailors do a lot of work, first to ready the boat and then to keep it in good order underway. It is home, castle, saferoom and transport, and the sea is a harsh mistress indifferent to the fate of even the stoutest vessels. So we sailors work and toil in conditions of frequent shortages of money, parts, the proper tools or easy access points. We contort, squirm and sweat, and often we have to jury-rig (a nautical term) a solution that must endure until we tie off to some distant dock. We must be resourceful, creative or rich. Sometimes and rich.

And yet it doesn't seem like work to most sailors of my fellowship. Part of that, I think, is that even more than on land, the relation of cause and effect, problem and solution, the fault and its repair, is quite immediate on the sea. You fix the thing, if you have the will, the skill and the spare, and you resume operations, with perhaps an extra ounce of rum in the evening's sundowner...assuming you're not on watch.

I have earned my living as a writer, publication designer of the desktop variety and, at various times, a marketer, a publisher, a media producer and so on. The last job I had that could be described as "working class" was as a bicycle courier at the end of the 1980s, and while that kept me fit and certainly honed my navigation skills, it was a stop-gap, a rent-payer, a commission job, and not a career, although I know of people, very lean people, who've done it for decades.

Everything in my social milieu suggested that white-collar, or at least "creative", was the way to go. Nothing in my experience, even having an ex-Merchant Marine sailor for a father, suggested that I should learn a trade or master at least one hands-on craft.

Getting a century house in 1997 and an aging sailboat in 1999 changed all that, primarily because economy and a lingering sense of unfounded pride led me to the "do it yourself" ethos. Now, this is easier for people who've inherited most of their furniture...I can't yet dovetail together more than the most feeble of carpentry projects...but I have had to learn plumbing, wiring, framing, drywall and insulating for the house, and winch maintenance, rigging, sail repair, engine rebuilding, more plumbing, wiring, soldering and fibreglassing for the boat. Throw in the various things steel boat owners need to know, including the somewhat occult topics of galvanic corrosion and isolation, and I am becoming, almost via osmosis, "handy".

I wasn't handy growing up. My late father wasn't particularly handy, or I would've noticed inheriting a less modest set of tools, or would've possessed memories of less haphazard maintenance in my childhood home beyond putting in the occasional light fixture or fuse. But I have to be handy, now and into the future, if that future includes going offshore. Pots of money for "marine labour" won't help me in the middle of the sea. Cruising sailors beyond the reach of a mobile phone have to understand and in many cases be able to repair (or work without) most parts of their boat's systems. And yet the gradual acquisition of whatever modest repair, diagnostic and related "trades" skills has not been onerous in the least, despite its dread necessity. It's been..engaging. Stimulating. Fun. I seem to have a knack, or at least, the ability not to lose fingers or eyes. Yet. The beer at the end of the day isn't for "stress relief"...it's because I earned it, and I am thirsty, and it is time to rest.

Coming to a necessary mechanical aptitude post-youth does evoke a certain pride and sense of accomplishment less common in my experience as part of a corporate or otherwise digitally-mediated process. Perhaps I sense the presence of the ghosts of my ironmonging, mining and otherwise callused ancestors, but hauling out engines, grinding steel and not often injuring myself in the process is both new and exciting in the way that a really bang-on InDesign layout job just...isn't.

So a philosopher-mechanic's ponderings on the joys of work-smeared hands found in me a great resonance.

Thank you, sailing lifestyle, for the pleasure of random labour. It is not, and will never be, without its frustrations, but I have discovered a tinkering, improving and repairing instinct I barely knew I possessed, the need to do much more than keep a bicycle greased hardly existing in my life before my late 30s.

I'm passing on the links should readers wish to hear them and to understand the above ramblings.

http://www.cbc.ca/spark/

http://feeds.feedburner.com/cbcradiosparklite

And here's a transcript of a book made free by the first interviewee, a fairly impressive fellow named Seth Godin.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/files/what-matters-now-1.pdf

I found the second interview, about the longing for work involving the hands and the value that our increasingly "digital" and, some might say, decreasingly physically competent, society puts on mechanical skills and how this can affect our personal sense of volitional "agency". This is not airy-fairy speculation, but rather the ideas of a fellow who left a Washington thinktank directorship to run a one-man motorcycle restoration shop...and then wrote a book about work and personal satisfaction

http://www.cbc.ca/spark/#matthewtranscript

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1594202230?ie=UTF8&tag=sparkblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=15121&creative=390961&creativeASIN=1594202230

The well-grounded anchor well

2009-12-30T11:39:00.009-05:00

Between the several dozen other, in-boat jobs I have to accomplish this winter, I also want to have the anchor well modified over the winter.

Some of you probably read that as "well-modified". Well, no. No anchors will be modified in what I have planned. The chain to which the anchors are attached, however, known in this instance as the "rode", will sink to new depths down the anchor well.

The existing well (yes, it's really called that) is three-sided and flat, or rather slightly cambered forward for drainage at the stem). The purpose of having a triangular pit instead of the customary lidded anchor locker plus hawse pipe leading down into a chain locker in the forepeak (or down into the bilges themselves) is twofold. The well allows working on the ground tackle (anchors, swivels, chain and nylon rodes, snubbers, bridles, chain hooks and cleats) and the foresails from a position lower and more protected than that of standing directly on deck. Bluntly, it should be harder to get washed off here, but of course we're all wearing our tethers secured to the jacklines at all times, right?

The other reason is that it is the pit that collects the chain, and not some dank, dark locker forward of the V-berth. This means that the most forward part of the deck doesn't require a hawse pipe in it. The hawse pipe, which routes the deployed or retrieved rode from the chain locker inside the boat to the outside, is a clever way to keep kinks from happening and to keep most of the water out. You can even cap them when not in use. But "most" isn't "all" and the ideal on a steel boat is to keep it as dry as possible.

Another ideal is to always have your anchors and related gear "at the ready", not all down below disassembled so as to keep the weight far back. While this is a real concern on boats lightly built, plumb-bowed or generally of a racing contenance, given the buoyancy of our bow, and its massive construction, there is no compelling reason to cut a hole there just to get the chain lower and/or inside the boat. The second chain, sure. But that's another story.

There is, however, quite a bit of logic in getting more volume into that anchor well, primarily to store flaked chain rode in an orderly fashion, and also to ensure that the chain brought aboard by the windlass pictured above doesn't pile up directly under itself.

So I'm going to ask Greg the welder, who did such a nice job on the solar panel arch, to see if he can build a well with multiple angles as seen above that will "slope" the chain forward and lower. I will not change the existing drain hole, but I will include a small hand pump to slurp out the majority of damp I bring aboard, and a small pet cock will be installed so that I can drain water from the bottom, much like a marine fuel filter does. Lastly, I will probably install a fibreglass "lid with a hood" that covers the entire well and protects the windlass from the sea (the windlass will also have the typical fabric cover). Here's a picture of the windlasses accessories and other bits and pieces. In a later entry, I'll describe how I intend to power the thing.

I hope all this will give me the ability to carry more chain on deck (but lower, which is better for stability and pitching) and will allow me to flake it without kinks, and without putting in an intrinsically leaky hawse pipe.

Lastly, here's a very interesting, informative and alas, unhappily ended tale of anchoring in bad conditions that made me think. It's from www.sailinganarchy.com, so consider yourself warned about the salty language: http://forums.sailinganarchy.com/index.php?showtopic=100772

Nothing Like the Real Thing: A November Atlantic Yacht Delivery

2009-11-26T19:39:00.005-05:00

I wrote about my first saltwater crewing experience in Portugal in 2007 (see archives). Both my wife and I have been trying to get in, separately for logistic as well as experiential reasons, as much “at sea” time as delivery crew as we can. As we plan to go offshore for a few years, any sea time we accumulate now will go into the fabled “black box” (see previous entry) of seamanship and preparedness.

Longtime readers (if you in fact exist) will know that my wife and I have already done essentially short, coastal runs in Portugal at different times on the same 12 metre race boat, Giulietta. This past June, my wife did a longer crewing trip on an Ontario 32, Veleda IV, between Eleuthera in the Bahamas and New York City. Due to several equipment problems, she had to bail out of that trip in Charleston, S.C., but managed to learn a lot nonetheless.

I received an e-mail in September out of the blue from Bruce Clark (www.onainia.blogspot.com ... and you can read Bruce and June's take on the trip now) asking if I fancied being crew aboard Ainia, the Bristol 45.5 sloop he and his wife June were taking south to St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands after a year of prep in Liberty Marina in Jersey City, across from Manhattan. I knew Bruce via the purchase of his old Portabote for Alchemy a couple of years previously, and he and I had stayed in touch via Sailnet.com and he was kind enough to think of me when a crewing opportunity arose. Things came together quickly: the recession had seen June “retired” somewhat earlier than planned, and so they figured they might as well get their cruising started sooner than later. Consequently, Bruce was under pressure to get their boat ready “enough” before pushing off, while postponing a few jobs for the tropics. This seems to be the norm for those embarking on the cruising life: if you get to 90% done, you might as well leave, because you’ll never entirely empty the boat job jar.

We departed Toronto, where the Clarks were wrapping up their affairs and getting some boat bits and clothing, on November 1 and drove to Jersey City to pick up our other crew, Burry Vanderveer . Burry, a major in the Canadian Forces on assignment in the States, has a boat of his own on the same dock as the Clarks, and was a great, experienced hand at sea. As the photo attests, he’s also a productive fisherman…this mahi-mahi was delicious, but was close to the last life we saw until the approach to the USVIs brought the return of flying fish, seabirds and even a curious, and perhaps lovesick, pilot whale.

After Jersey City, we drove south to the somewhat obscure if pretty Mobjack, Virginia, where Ainia waited at a tiny, eight-slip marina. A quick provisioning trip the next morning completed, we headed off into the Chesapeake. The pace was high, as Skipper Clark wanted to get in front of a deepening trough of low pressure. He was right: We rode winds from 20-35 knots all the way from the Bay to Bermuda and beyond, and dodged (or passed through) squalls and big seas for about nine days straight. The consolation (besides a number of days of 150 NM-plus passages) was that we never had dangerous weather, and we were hearing of boats behind us or relatively near to us that were having a rougher time.

We heard of this via the famous Herb Hilgenberg (South Bound II VAX498 - Ship routing and weather forecasting, http://www3.sympatico.ca/hehilgen/vax498.htm), the amateur radio operator and weather forecaster who provides custom forecasting in return for reports on local conditions. Needless to say, it would be a good deal even if his accuracy wasn’t so high, which it generally was. Listening to Herb’s late-afternoon roundup of reports (dubbed by the crew as "the Herb Show", possibly because it was our sole form of entertainment aside from paperbacks and each other!) to and from widely scattered boats across most of the Atlantic was a highlight of an otherwise radio and “news” free 12 days at sea.

Apart from a rather general weather fax out of Boston and a couple of other U.S. stations (which ceased to apply after we reached the lower latitudes), Herb was our sole link to the “outside world”…a odd situation for someone with as many subscriptions and internet bookmarks as myself! Herb’s sound counsel kept us going while less fortunate boats either had gales or had to pull into Bermuda, the only evidence of which we saw was a faint loom on the horizon one night. He told us to press on or face harsher conditions, and by the sound of other crews, he was right.

Avoiding worse weather (like the remnants of Hurricane Ida) meant pushing the boat: we were determined to stay ahead of the rather conflicted and (even for Herb) hard to predict weather if we could. While I don’t want to give the impression we had uninterrupted wind, we had more than we needed to move close to hull speed most of the time until about 275 NM north of St. Thomas, when the wind clocked right out of the south (what Trades?) and we alternated between long tacks and motorsailing into the lighter breeze. Even with that breeze, however, the foredeck never really dried off. Opening portlights and hatches for air was only possible on the last couple of days, and not always for long.

Bruce and June's Bristol 45.5, a stout Ted Hood design, features a centreboard we generally kept up until the wind was forward of the beam, and an in-mast furling mainsail that allowed quick reefing from the cockpit. While it’s true I’ve seen better shape on a main, the battenless sail certainly seemed robust enough (I estimate our greatest gusts during squalls was around the 45 knot mark), as did its uncomplaining furling gear. The safety and rapidity of changing the sail area was of great utility in the often fast-changing conditions when we were overpressed. One thing that didn’t change was our tack: thanks to the wind wheeling around with our course, we were on more or less the same point of sail and tack for many days. This goes a long way toward explaining why my right leg…and only my right leg…ached after a few days: I was constantly bracing it against the starboard heel.

Big air much of the way, to be sure, but it did provide generally fast passages, which made the skipper pleased and were gratifying to all even as we nursed our bruises from the “lively” boat motion. Well, I nursed mine. Lake Ontario, even in squalls, is scant preparation for sliding down ten to 15 foot waves at 30 degrees of heel. My most abrading incidents seemed to feature the donning of pants or foulies…hard in such situations to have “one hand for the boat”, particularly with one leg off the cabin sole.

Concerning clothing, I didn’t overestimate the need for it very much at all. While it was never cold, even leaving Virginia, the strong breeze sucked warmth from the body on the many night watches I stood, and having a few layers kept me comfortable. Purely by chance before I left Toronto, I found a pair of discounted Musto bib foulie pants for $69 at a local place. They fit generously, which is what you want to crouch and creep about if conditions argue against a manly stride up the salt-slicked side decks. Despite a center cockpit enclosed on three sides, I wore them right down to the “real” tropics., not because of the cold, but because we got spray often and green water occasionally back there in the squally, half-gale conditions that were a feature of many night watches. This meant I was at the helm sitting on soaking cockpit cushions as often as not.

I ended up wearing them with long johns, then shorts and underpants and then underpants. Over that I had a Goretex rainsuit jacket I use for cycling in Toronto (Banff Wear), with a fleece sweater and T-shirt below, with of course a PFD with D-rings and tether above. The fleece went off near Bermuda and then the coat, meaning I wore the bib pants with a T-shirt most night watches. Yes, I sweated a bit, but it was better than sitting in salty shorts and I didn't hesitate to kneel on deck or on wet lines due to the reinforced knees and seat on the pants. I almost always wore a canvas Tilley-style hat, even at night, because of the erratic spray, and I sometimes wore bicycle gloves for grip rather than warmth.

In the true tropics, I wore no shoes, but just shorts and a T-shirt with a plastic "crossing-guard" type of raincoat during squalls, just to keep the spray off. So I went for layers of mixed marine and non-marine gear over a "dedicated" set of foulies. This made sense to me given the latitudes and time of year, or had I been in an aft cockpit of a more open boat, but if I had had to do more foredeck work, I would've preferred the real deal.

While there were long stretches of crew idleness, or just “less blowy” times in which we could chat or read or contemplate fishing, there were also moments when we were all active, like during squalls or sail changes. After an initial bout of seasickness (I likely did not apply my Scopolamine patch early enough), I was fine and disposed of the patch after two days (I was told I couldn't drink beer if I was wearing it...imagine), although I rarely felt like eating much…so passagemaking might be the ultimate diet plan. June did prepare some nice meals, though: her Chinese beef and noodles was a treat. I ate a sliced meat sandwich at one point that tasted as good as I can recall, so maybe you eat less aboard and appreciate it more.

This trip was a real opportunity for me, and one for which I’m very grateful. I certainly learned a great deal that is difficult to experience on the Great Lakes. In fact, I recommend that any local sailor who wishes to improve his or her skill set consider a long (this was approximately 1,500 NM/12 days at sea) passage on a well-found boat. It’s the definition of a “working holiday”, but it’s external confirmation that one is either on the right track of seamanship, or that one might have some habits or notions worthy of review.

Among the things I’ve either learned, had reinforced or now need to discard:

1) Boats on the sea are in motion. Always. Just because it’s 18 tonnes doesn’t mean it can’t lurch sharply in random directions. Plan all movement ahead accordingly. This includes movements in the head.

2) Motion makes things break. We had four mounting bolts on the autopilot break, occasioning a night of hand-steering, and the Spectra lines controlling the wind vane chafed through and had to be end-for-ended more than once. We also made a habit of eyeballing the decks for pins, bolts and other evidence of chafe or wear. We found it, but nothing critical.

3) Even with adequate crew, one’s boat needs self-steering, preferably more than one type. Both can and did “break”, but both were restored with relative ease, thanks to plentifukspares, basic seamanship and sweat equity. My plan to have oversized and separate means of self-steering installed on Alchemy looks not only prudent, but essential. The “opportunity” to helm at sea will come during squalls, trust me.

4) Some say the day of the marine single-sideband radio is over and that satellite phones or expensive Immarsat setups are the way to go. I say that I was persuaded otherwise by my passage aboard this SSB-equipped (it was an ICOM M-710) vessel: The combination of weatherfaxes and the reports of other boats around us in a generally wind-filled Atlantic allowed the skipper to make informed decisions with the benefit of other crews to consider. Staring at a GRIB file or a downloaded synoptic chart in isolation provides less than a human voice relating the look of the waves and the feel of the wind 100 miles downrange.

5) If you think you’ve brought enough beverages, think again. Sailing over warm water is thirst-making, and I ran out of pop four days early. Lemon water and the occasional beer filled the gap, but I liked the watermaker water better than the Virginia well water. This made me think that even a small watermaker of the 12 VDC type was good as a backup or as a way to keep useful ballast. It’s also insurance: one water tank sprang a leak and we made a few gallons with the genset to cover the loss.

6) Wind…we had plenty. The wind generator was small but in the generally 20-40 knot conditions churned frequently (it had an auto-brake function that kicked in when the batteries were full, a feature I fancied). While our skipper had solar panels, they were stowed at sea and deployed at anchor. This convinced me that having both would in fact allow us to avoid using the diesel to generate power at anchor in all but protracted windless, cloudy conditions…at which point I might motor to someplace cooler, anyway. We had no problems keeping food cool. Keeping the boat cool was another issue, but that’s why they call it the tropics.

7) I need a better tether with the Wichard shackle that has a two-part release. The boat can lurch unpredictably and the need to release securely is as important as the need to avoid releasing unexpectedly. The same goes for the galley…you use different muscles to cook, clean and even stand at steep angles of heel, and a “galley belt” and plenty of handholds are absolutely necessary. So is ready access to tools and spares in drawers and boxes that won't take flight when you access them. I saw a very labour-intensive foam inlay in a typical sort of mechanic's tray type toolbox: every item was snugly nestled in its custom-cut place. I used to think that was a little precious, but now it looks smart to either do that or to bungee or lash every tool to a board, and to slip the board in a drawer.

8) Speaking of handholds, I have a lot of work aboard our boat installing them for our crew, which are separated by nearly two feet in height (although this will, I hope, diminish as my son ages!). “Getting my sea legs” was a big challenge, and I have the (now fading) contusions to prove it. Trial and error will show where to put handholds…either that or stage a drunken stagger through the boat while wielding a loaded powder puff.

I look forward to further deliveries of this type before we embark in the next few years, and I recommend them heartily to any Great Lakes sailor looking to broaden his or her horizons.

The last shot is Charlotte Amalie, the "capital" of St. Thomas. My only regret is that a hurriedly booked plane connection met we spent only a couple of hours ashore before I had to throw my salt-stained carcass into the somewhat dysfunctional U.S. air transport system...but more on that later.

The black box theory (maritime version)

2009-11-26T19:21:00.003-05:00

The black box theory is where maintenance and superstition meet and decide to tighten every hose clamp a quarter-turn. It's why I sniff the bilges and why I haul on the stays to check tension. Yes, even in Lake Ontario. Basically, the theory states that there is a "black box" of preventive maintenance to which the prudent mariner can contribute by vigilance and by keeping track of when certain parts of the boat were last observed critically. Withdrawals from the black box are made when the shackle works loose...but you moused it so it doesn't come completely apart, or when you have to run the engine at redline RPM for hours...but you changed the oil and checked the belts and shaft alignment early and often.

The theory posits that the sea is an inherently destructive place to the works of man, but that the destruction can be anticipated, forestalled and ultimately managed away from the realm of catastrophe and into the realm of "well, I'd better fix that before it becomes a nuisance." Anyone in what my fellow metal boat owner Cap'n. Matt calls "the sailing game" knows that there are people whose boats experience one damn thing after another, including potentially dangerous and usually expensive failures. Also known are the skippers who putter around, keep logs, have enough mechanical ability to fix (or at least not destroy through ignorance) most parts of their boat, and whose bilges are generally clean and whose boats are dry, comfortable and not prone to mysterious drips, noises or faint whiffs of burning.

They aren't "lucky". They are regular contributors to their black boxes.

It's one thing to be a survivor, but quite another to be a survivor who was put into the survival situation because of lack of foresight, lack of maintenance or lack of knowledge. While it's stupid and neurotic to think you can anticipate every problem, or avoid every bad situation, the simple fact that one does a reasonable job of checking pilots, forecasts and the state of repair of the boat means that when the crises come, you aren't thinking "did I forget to tighten Bolt 12754? Did I dog down Hatch G?" Instead, you're focusing on dealing with the events or processes that you can't control, like unforecasted weather or some random event.

Example of a random event:

Back in late September of this year (2009), I brought my old 33-foot sloop back to my club in order to get it ready for winter and, regretfully, to probably sell it in the spring (long, other story). After shutting it down, tidying up and securing the lines, I decided I merited a pint of Guinness. While sipping, the bar phone rang and some words were exchanged. I asked what was up, and was told that it was our club's race committee boat who had failed to raise the dockmaster (the young man who takes lines and drives the water taxi, actually). The committee boat, a 38-foot trawler design, was adrift and heading for the States. The last Wednesday night club race had to be abandoned.

I got involved when the dockmaster (whose VHF channel, 68, the committee boat perhaps had not been hailing) said that he was not qualified to run either the club's crash boat or our 1940s-era work boat. So my plans to get home in time for dinner were put on hold, as I have driven both boats. We hopped into the crash boat and zoomed through a horde of sailboats, some still obviously racing. We got to our committee boat to find that a 37-foot Peterson sailboat had her under tow already, but we hung around to "shepherd" the pair back in case the sailboat's engine got overworked, as the committee boat isn't light and sailboats, particularly racers, make poor tugboats. I hung around nearby in the crash boat in case the committee boat needed nudging under the crane.

Once safely back, I learned that the committee boat had anchored at the start line as per usual, and had started the race. They then hauled anchor and were preparing to move to establish a finish line when their prop was fouled...badly. It turns out that they had snagged an entire, mussel-encrusted, bottom-dwelling spinnaker trailing shackles and line with their anchor, and that the current had sent this surprise package streaming back into the prop, gumming it up properly. Result: dead in the water and drifting rapidly south-east.

Personally, while I've heard of fouled props and fouled anchors, I have never heard of this: dragging up an entire spinnaker straight into the blades. That's the sort of stuff the sea (or in this case, a Great Lake) can throw at a sailor (or in this case, a race committee). That's the reason you do maintenance, keep logs and listen to forecasts: one less thing to worry about!

Conspiracy plotting

2009-09-28T00:33:00.006-04:00

Advances in chartplotting technology in particular and navigation electronics in general are coming thick and fast in the recreational boating world. AIS that IDs distant ships and shows vectors; broadband RADAR that makes fewer amps see farther and better; 3D chartplotting displays that resemble flight simulators; FLIR displays that allow night vision that would shame a cat...it's all available in a bewildering array of standards, and an evolving array of hook-ups. The much-touted NMEA 2000 looks good, but there's still proprietary networking. All require the addition of large amounts of money, and all vie for the attention of the person at the helm.

To me, it seems a bit of a conspiracy to fulfill on the deck of a sailboat the childhood dreams of middle-aged men to fly spaceships. There's certainly an element of this in the ads: "bigger display", "faster refresh", "multi-function overlay" and "depth like you've never seen before". I mean you don't have to page Cap'n Freud: he's rafted up alongside contemplating your massive upgrades.

Now, if you are a voyager or just an aspiring one, you are probably aware that time spent at the wheel or tiller actually steering the boat is relatively low. I would say that on passage, 95% of helming is in fact autopilot or windvane, and that the 5% of active steering is in waters where you either have nav aids, bearings or other information. This is why I contend that a chartplotter at the helm is equivocal at best and a distraction at worst. The new ones are crowded with information, but with no guarantee that the information is particularly current or even accurate, as the chart datums from which the chartplotters derive their information can be stale or, if the area hasn't been surveyed for some time, "off". Many a glance at a radar display confirms that some plotters show land where it isn't, and vice-versa.

It's more prudent, perhaps, in such cases where one is approaching a tricky pass or a complex entrance to a rocky harbour, to advance slowly and in daylight to confirm the waypoints, visually identify the nav aids (if even present) and to manually confirm the daymarks or the bearings to certain features that are most likely not to have moved since the map was made. Oh, yes...have a map. You need it to plan a lot of this stuff ahead of time in order to approach Terra Nova. Who wants to discover "hey, the plotter says there are coral heads 200 metres ahead...CLUNK...SCRAPE..." Better to plan an approach, maybe plot a couple of bearings on a scrap of paper, and then send a crew forward or up the mast to look for stuff Captain Cook missed, or which has grown or sunk in place since Darwin's shipmates heaved a tallow-tipped lead line.

Overreliance on chartplotting is like mobile phone use in a car: you really should be paying attention to the outer world more than on generally irrelevant and possibly incorrect information. Now, many chartplotting programs allow amendments and can be offset to reflect reality as found. Others allow a radar display to be superimposed...these can be great helps to the crew, particularly in fog or adverse conditions when you are forced to make a run for shelter. But I still think they are problematic if you are watching a little screen more than the big water, because the little screen is a symbolic idealization of reality, and, unlike the crew, is pretty indifferent to whether it's working at the helm or not working thirty feet below the surface.

Before you picture our boat rigged with chip logs at the taffrail and the young lad swinging the lead at the chains, I do feel that a 12VDC outlet or two at the helm is very useful. You can rig a light to illuminate the sails or see awash objects in the water, and you can put in a handheld GPS for lat/lon, XTE and heading, which is quite helpful to determine set and drift, currents and ETA to waypoints (set, of course, sensibly away from one's visual target, like a nav aid). The information given is essentially text and minimal graphics (like a grayscale compass), and "the lack of shiny" means that one's attention stays on the environment and the boat instruments, with the GPS being purely supplemental. You keep a watch, not a watch of the GPS itself.

A chartplotter's best use is to help you integrate the sometimes partial clues from the environment and can provide a context. This plus a paper chart can fairly accurately help you to find yourself even in poor visibility, when the object isn't blasting in a straight line directly to the mark or to the port, but by giving obstacles you can't actually see a wide and safe berth.

People driving straight into jetties, breakwaters and buoys (or driving right onto the beach or rocks in some cases) is a function of taking the technology as gospel when really it's just crib notes for a paper chart, and maybe not even an updated one. Lessening the likelihood of getting truly lost is only part of prudent seamanship.

Recently, I read a discussion about the need "these days" to have a magnetic compass at the helm. What's the point, some were saying. GPS is more accurate and I don't have to deal with variation, deviation and keeping metal away from it.

We were lucky enough to have bought, along with the boat, a large Ritchie Globemaster with compensator balls (go on, get the jokes out of the way early) at the pilothouse helm of our steel cutter. I also have a rudimentary plotter there (a Raymarine 420 with no cards, so I use it like a big GPS), and a KVH AC103 fluxgate compass.

At the outside helm, I use a handheld GPS. Eventually, I will probably have a small plotter out there so I don't have to squint...but that will be mainly for GPS-type functions. Most "inshore" helming will be done from inside the pilothouse, just as most mooring/anchoring/docking helming will be done from the outside, so signals can be given and surrounding traffic better seen.

While I currently sail in Lake Ontario, where the need for advanced navigation is seldom, I do use all of my little array of gadgets about equally in conjunction with paper charts. I usually have a bearing in mind and a glance at the helm compass (the accuracy of which I know and the deviation of which is small due to those pair of manly shotputs) is a quicker, more intuitive confirmation of general heading than the GPS, or so I find.

Just as with my sextant practice, sometimes I will shut down all the electronics and work from DR plots, magnetic compass bearings and, particularly, soundings in order to verify my position at night or in fog. The point of having these pre-electronic devices and techniques is not that they are critically necessary, but that you still know how to use them if they become so, for instance during a complete electrical failure. I have yet to install an autopilot, and when I do, I will likely update the fluxgate compass to provide it with heading data.

My experience with GPS has included two episodes when what I was reading was obviously, even blatantly wrong: One time was when I was at a known, charted physical waypoint that I had recorded before (and which was correct on the chart) and the GPS reported that we were just over a mile off (it corrected some ten minutes later), The other was when I was using the GPS for COG and speed, not lat/lon, and my six-knot speed jumped for a few seconds to 60 knots and my lat/lon magically ended up 3/4 NM WSW of my assumed location.

These were using different GPSes. Obviously, "the system" is prone to technical hiccups or tweaking from the ground stations. A little investigation of the subject revealed that the "constellation" of GPS satellites is both aging and subject to failures from such natural events such as solar flares or even atmospheric drag (the atmosphere can expand due to heating and can "drag" at the satellites, requiring recalibrations). Also, some of the damn things are decades old and can't have uninterrupted up-time, or so it seems. Fair enough...I didn't pay for the things.

So while GPS is indeed a blessing, I keep the compass handy, visible and in good working order. Intrinsically, unless I go into the Southern Hemisphere or sail over a unknown magnetic anomaly (many are charted and it's fun to sail over some giant chunk of iron just to watch the compass spin), the compass is less failure prone than either the GPS reliant on ship's power or batteries, or the GPS system which needs periodic adjustment. I say this advisedly because reading the compass requires training and practice and knowledge of when it might not be accurate and why this might be. Grasp those aspects, however, and you too can be like Captain Bligh (not the best people person, perhaps, but a hell of a navigator) and steer with confidence to a reliable bearing.

Also, despite political statements to the contrary, don't think that the military of the U.S. will not turn the GPS system off (at least to civilian use) or make it less accurate if needed. It isn't actually for we sailor types: it's to aid one particular military establishment and their goals are always going to be concerned with finding the mooring before sunset so drinking may commence. Its use in several thousand civilian applications would very likely be deemed trivial in some kind of military crisis. Other GPS sources will eventually exists, as will devices able to read them, but today it's still the Pentagon's plaything, and assuming it will always be working as expected is perhaps a limiting strategy.

As a third party can't "turn off" the stars and the magnetic poles of the Earth (yet), I choose to keep my CN and pilotage skills in order, and that means a lot of peering compasses and plots on paper. I find the electronics make a nice back-up and a nice way of "looking down the road" to plan one's next steps, but I hesitate to place my self-interest and safety in something so easily crippled from either bad crimping on my end or unseen machinations at the other.

Hey, I found the recession!

2009-09-17T01:11:00.006-04:00

Instead of continuing to pull apart the rudder and its hydraulic arm, preparatory to removing it so I can pull the prop and shaft, etc. etc....

I was at home today with a nasty head cold I caught from the missus, and in an attempt to amuse and edify myself, I came upon this article:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1212013/Revealed-The-ghost-fleet-recession-anchored-just-east-Singapore.html#comments

It goes on, from a British perspective, of how the semi-stealthy mothballing of much of the world's cargo fleet off Malaysia is a real measure of the depth and persistence of world economic conditions than any "I'm feeling much better!" declarations from bank heads or world leaders.

Describing the anchorage as "the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history" and "bigger than the U.S. and British navies combined", the writer does sensationalize the slowdown of world trade and its knock-on effects in ship building, credit issuance and so on...but it's a real, as opposed to a conjectured or a wishful, piece of economic data when a vast armada of tankers and container ships sits idle for months for want of work.

Why should we care? Well, we aren't going to be making liquid our house and retirement funds to do this voyage (I certainly hope that's true!), and the state of prices and our post-voyaging investments will require at least occasional attention. But more to the point, I think the vast overcapacity in the world shipping fleet (new ships already ordered are still being built in South Korea for reasons that have more to do with, I suspect, keeping the workforce happy), is, like the oil-based economy, another flawed and possibly terminal aspect of The Way We Do Things.

I just finished an interesting book that, while it didn't tell me much that was new or surprising, consolidated many of my vague impressions with hard numbers and the shock of seeing so many inter-related predictions in one place. The book was Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, by Jeff Rubin, the former chief economist and long-time oil-industry guru at the bank where I pay my mortgage. Rubin's a proponent of the "peak oil" theory; that we are effectively out of the easily obtained hydrocarbons, and that while we are some distance from "running out of oil", we are quite close to "running out of oil cheap enough to in any way continue with our current habits". Cheap flights to Cancun? Ain't going to happen.

A review is here: http://www.getmoneyenergy.com/2009/07/why-your-world-is-about-to-get-a-whole-lot-smaller-jeff-rubin-review/

It's sobering stuff to think that the severely eroded North American manufacturing sector, largely ceded in the last 25 years to cheap Chinese labour and vast Asian factories, could rebound when the cost of getting those cheap products to our local markets exceeds the cost of paying North American wages for labour and locally sourced materials.

Now, imagine the price of your kiwi fruit when oil hits $200 a barrel. Our plan to use the diesel hard, but seldom and to have the wind and weather supply most of our amps is looking less pie-in-the-sky and more prudent with every day.

http://www.amazon.ca/Your-World-About-Whole-Smaller/dp/0307357511