Friday funny

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

Ahoy, readers! Artificial waypoint dead astern!

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

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.

The real thing, as sold by the redoubtable "Maine Sail".

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.

Who left the dogs 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.

Prevailing winds come in here.

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

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 (a mere five knots of 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{I eventually purchased 5/8"
}), 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.

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.

Beta blocker at heart of refit

The Beast with Four Cylinders

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

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

How mine looked originally. Now beaten to a still-accurate pulp.

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.

The sextant is just to the left, behind the lead line and the cat o' nine tails. Y'arr. Etc.

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?

Sure, nice watch, but telling the time is not enough for me, and I would worry about thieves, pooping waves and just dinging the thing all the time.

"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.

For the record, this isn't good.

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. Recently, however, the crystal has a crack in it...hey, I live an active, minor wound-filled life...and it might be time for a replacement if it can't keep the moisture out any longer.

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

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:

I don't like single-use items, but these are cheaper than the batteries inside them and are great for dark corners.

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!

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

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

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

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....

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.