Messing About In Sailboats

Pitchpoled by guest writer Peter McGrath

A friend rings.  He's chief mate on a tug, working to bring the cash in to get his boat tarted up ready for his circumnavigation.   Stormbound.  Bored.  Missin' his woman.  Ring McGrath.

He yarns about last years transat and some of the characters he met, and mentions that he's upgrading his standing rigging to 10mm stainless.  His is a 40-foot steel meanie, a tough boat but 10mm?  That's gonzo rigging.  He tells of meeting a boat that had been in the wars, a 45 footer, steel and with a curiously kinked mast.  They were, he said eccentric in their habits: it had a center cockpit (center cockpits are higher than aft cockpits) which they thought a perfect place to stow a 60 gallon fuel container.  (Only do the stability sums on this if on the heads.)  And it was a mess - lots of loose stuff lying around within.

None of which suggested for a happy outcome when they hit heavy weather trying the North West Passage.  Somewhat beaten up, the crew decided to leave it in the microchip hands of the auto-pilot and retire below.

They were pitchpoled through 360 degrees. 

The deck was swept clean - bolted, strapped or lashed down, didn't matter.  Gone.  The inside went mental as crew, galley contents and kit were tumbled about in reckless abandon.  However, as well-found boats will she came upright, her rig standing but her mast kinked.  The secret of the rig's survival?  The skipper puts it down to the well-set up 10mm standing rigging. My mate will be spending his spring re-rigging his cutter with 10mm stainless in anticipation of his circumnavigation.  He has invited me down for a 'catch-up'.  I suspect much of that catch up will be in form of sitting in a bosun's chair hauling 10mm up the masthead on gantlines....

Something for the boat with everything

In one of those email conversations one has, Adam asks me why I think a yacht is naked without a heavy machine gun.  Here we go…

Somewhere in the Baltic.  I am second mate on a big steel ketch delivering it to the Tall Ships Races.  We’re barely three months into the commission and already the skipper and first mate loathe each other.

Still, it’s light winds so we’ve got the asymmetrics up: cruising chute, full main and mizzen staysail.  My mate Mike is on the helm.  At the time, he doesn’t have much sailing experience, but has hangliding, windsurfing and dinghy time.  He’s wind aware, knows his collision regulations, is calm and, well, he’s a good helm. 

We’re on starboard tack, the downwind boat and we’ve got hard to tack sails up.  The black-hulled schooner is on a converging course and a steady bearing.  We’re stand on, by every rule of the road the German schooner has to give way.  Then there’s another ketch motorsailing into the mix.  I know the skipper of this one: knows his onions but she’s an unhandy boat

Ignorance is Bliss

I know this guy. Lets call him Steve to protect the innocent. Steve is one of the most interesting guys I know. He was brought up in Ireland and came of age in the late 60s. He built a successful career in the music business among other things working with Jimi Hendrix as a tour manager and then founding a very successful independent label in the 70s which he sold to a big international label.

Steve is never one to do anything you might call orthodox. That would be boring. Sometime in the late 90s, he was visiting a friend in Amsterdam who had been a drummer for the British ska band Madness. This drummer lived on a canal boat.

Steve took a shine to the boat and became enamored with the idea of living on a canal boat in London. He could picture long weekends pootling up to Henley, exploring the East Coast of England. On a whim he bought the boat you see in this picture in Holland. The thing was that Steve had no experience of boats at all. The second thing was that he had to get it back to London.

Somehow he got the boat through the canals to the Dutch coast. Knowing Steve, probably using a road map. Then he had the small matter of the Northern end of the Channel to cross. I asked Steve how he did it.

"Well, I waited a couple of days till the weather seemed good enough and then I just followed the ferries."

Unknowingly, Steve had crossed one of the busiest, stormiest, sandbank strewn , miserable patches of water just by following the ferries from Ostend to the English coast.

To this day, I don't think he quite knows how lucky he is.

Too drunk to find my dinghy

Anyone who has sailed the BVIs will know of the Willie T in the Bight at Norman Island. It's an institution. The Wiliam Thormton aka Willie T is a 98' schooner converted into a two deck floating bar.

 As I was sitting on the train coming home yesterday a smile slipped across my face as I recalled one of the funnest evenings of my life about 10 years ago spent at the Willie T.

My wife (not her in the pic. This is a random pic to protect the innocent) and I were in the Caribbean for the first time and at the end of a Learn-to-bareboat course with Steve Colgate's Offshore Sailing School (Offcourse as my wife calls it). It was an excellent week under the supervision of central casting charter skipper, Capt Tom. Tom was a gruff divorcee from Florida who looked a bit like a pint-sized Magnum PI with a beer gut fueled on Mount Gay and Ginger

There were two boats in the course: My wife and I on one boat with a jolly single lady from Connecticut. The other boat was a mixed bag: A couple who looked like Meg Ryan and Harrison Ford but were dull as crap and spent most of the time locked in their V-berth; a Canadian nurse and a plonker who thought he knew more than the instructors. We named him Captain Giblet Bag as he spent most of the day in a Speedo swim suit that looked like..well pull the giblet bag out of a roast chicken and ...er the name fit.

This hurts...

Adam has been kind enough to post some of my scribbling and make me a guest author.  The last piece was about my sailing Dutch Uncle, and his new boat.  Well, this evening we went for a sail on said new boat.  If it was a horse I'd have it shot.  Where do I start? The thing looks right.  It looks tough, purposeful, it looks the boat we both thought it was when he bought it: perfect for a sailor of a certain age who has just had two knees replaced, is not as spry as he was and needs some ease in his sailing.  We climbed aboard: the previous owner had been a bodger.  The interior was capacious, well appointed.  The stuff that counts was a Greek tragedy. We motored down river waiting for the swing bridge to open.  The tiller slopped around without much appreciable change in the boat's direction.  The throttle position bore no relationship to engine revs.  The outer harbour, we rounded up and set the main: a roller-reefing 'mechanism' has been tacked to the back of the (wrongly-placed) mast.  The main is ill-cut - I think it was cut with garden shears - and sets like washing on a line.   It sheets backwards from the boom end and has no traveller.  You can set it, you can't shape it.  Crap. We motorsail out of Whitby's historic piers, the North Sea tide hits us, Dutch Uncle is a sailor, we unroll the jib, kill the engine.  The jib is cut badly, the botched rig means we can't get luff tension, the sheet lead... She doesn't get close to the wind.  She doesn't tack, we tried everything, she doesn't tack.  Hard to gybe, too.  We'd sheet in, put her daft stern throught the wind, and be ready for the gybe...the main would stay ungybed way beyond the laws of physics.  Einstein, Feynman, explain this, explain a supernova...wham, the stupid boom and bag o crap main finally comes across.   On a beam reach she's alright.  Not good, alright,  But that's it.  She's a dog. The disappointment in DU's eyes is obvious as we motorsail back to the harbour.  We've sailed together so long we don't need orders as we motor up the harbour to the mooring: the bag o shite main skulks away, the fenders are out, the mooring lines ready.  I've had some hard sails, I've never had such a disappointing one.  On the way home, we discuss the boat's shortcomings. Is DU going to sell?  'I'm going to fix that rig.  We're going to get that boat sailing properly.  Then I may sell her.'  I'd cut the rig off with an angle grinder and lob a burning flare in her, burn her to the waterline.  You see, as DU went towards his car I'd met someone who knew the previous owner.  'Sailed it?  Sailed it?' As though I'd asked had he flown it to Mars.  'No, in the twenty years he had it he never sailed it, he just came down every day to read the paper, drink coffee and get away from the wife...'

A great end to a great day's sailing

One of my happiest sailing moments is captured in this picture. It was at the end of a great day's sailing in Turkey on the Carian Coast.

We sailed from Torba to Gumusluk in frisky conditions, me, the missus, my son (seasick as ever poor bugger) and his friend. Most of the day was spent in 20-25 kts, wind on the nose trying to get round a bloody big island.   Crap navigation on my behalf meant that we never went out far enough to clear the island on the return tack and had to tack back out gain much to my son's dismay. "Are we there yet?"

Towards the end of the day and still not having cleared the island, seemingly spending more time going in the opposite direction, the crew (and me too I confess) started to worry that we would not make Gumusluk before sundown.

We finally cleared the big bugger at 4:30 pm and then it was one of the most perfect reaches to Gumusluk. If you ever have the opportunity go to Gumusluk do it. In fact go now! It's one of my favorite places on the planet.

After 8 hours at the tiller in 20-25 kts, getting wet and salty with no foul weather gear, first order of business was a nice cold beer,. After that to the barbers right on the dock. This was a once in a lifetime experience. First a haircut, a massage, a clean shave including plucking. The best bit was at the end the barber took a smoldering taper and singed by ear and nose hairs. Sounds scary and not something you want to do to yourself but it was awesome.

I have been trying to find a barbershop that would replicate this but all I ever get is weird embarrassed looks as if I were a little nuts.

Situations vacant: sailing Dutch Aunts and Uncles • By Peter McGrath

My uncle sidled up to me yesterday. ‘Look at this,’ he pressed a survey into my hand, ‘let me know what you think.’

As it happened, I thought he’d bought a corker. 26 feet with a pilot house, helming positions inside and out, lines led back to the cockpit, aged but lovingly maintained. Deep, comfortable cockpit, lots of instruments inside, hefty new batteries to power them and well-kept two cylinder auxiliary for punching the North Sea swells, winds and tides. Scandinavian built, with a fibreglass layup that would stop a six-inch shell.

I’ll look forward to sailing it with him: I’m a commercial yachtmaster who’s just spent a season in charge of big ketches, so I think I’m pretty good. But on this boat, I’ll sit back and be deckhand, do as I’m told. Because the owner isn’t my blood uncle, he’s my sailing Dutch Uncle.

My first experience of sailing was being told by people I now recognize as racers to **** off when I asked how to sail, could I sail with them? Generalising from this, I thought all sailors should be hurled into pits full of poisonous snakes – not very poisonous, I didn’t want a quick death for them - until I met DU.

He taught at a special school and one day needed bodies to help on a days sailing with some of his kids – Wayfarers. Remember that epiphany the first time you’re in a boat that gets up on its toes and you know you want to sail? Well, that was the day, gloriously made better by watching our school’s head boy, pompously skippering another boat, sail it into the embrace of a fallen tree.

Pause to re-live that happy memory.

The Mighty Jeru

Peter McGrath of Project Beagle fame shared this with me. It's a painting of his Foxcub in Whitby Harbor. Read on. It's one of the best yarns about a boat I have read in ages.

If you enjoy it, please donate a "Jackson" ($20) or a "Darwin"  (10GBP) to Project Beagle.

Better yet, blogroll and/or link to him so that we can spread the word about this fanstastic endeavor

Pete, you're a bloody good storyteller, mate!

The Foxcub 18 was designed by Uffa Fox, ex choirboy and all round 
iconoclast who designed and launched boats from a decomissioned ferry 
in the River Medina, Cowes, Isle of Man, which is sailing central in 
Britain.  He was a  terrific racer, who knew the heavily tidal waters 
of the Solent well.  He found inshore eddies, and dipping into these, 
hurling through arse-puckeringly shallow water won him many a race, 
to the chagrin of his competitors,  Until one noticed  how he judged 
it: his wife was seen up to her knees in water, acting as a human 
tide gauge and racing mark, watching her husband hurtle by.

Competitor, let it be known that he knew Fox's secret and come the 
next race, Fox was toast.  Sure enough, Mrs F was there, up to her 
knees in water, so the smart competitor went for the shallow inshore 
eddy.  And went aground in a welter of falling rigging, oaths, 
ridicule and ignominy. Then Mrs Fox got up off her knees in the ankle 
deep water while Uffa, with his usual 6 inches below his keels ailed 
to victory.

Mine, Jeru, is named after the name Miles Davis gave to baritone 
saxophonist Gerry Mulligan after the Birth of the Cool recordings.  
Growing up during the 70s, brains turned to mush by glam rock, I 
remember coming across an LP of four American guys outcooling the 
French in Paris, 1954puttng it on the family's mono record player and 
thinking, 'Now this is music.'   So when I bought the Foxcub, Jeru it 
had to be.

Whitby, on the north east coast of England is a frustrating place to 
sail, a great place to live.  The mobile date of Easter was decided 
here, as was the vexed question of priest's haircuts at the Synod of 
Whitby in 644.  It gave the world James Cook: yes that James Cook, 
the one who finished his life being eaten in the Sandwich Islands, 
and after his death it was said there were no terra incognita - no 
undiscovered lands.  He learned his sailing here.  So did I, in the 
rough, tidal, murky waters of the North Sea, and off Tate Hill pier I 
moored Jeru,bursting with pride and joy.

You see, Tate Hill Pier is where, in the book, Dracula landed.  
Forget Hollywood, Van Helsing, James Woods Vampires.  Dracula came  
into Whitby harbour  on the Varna, helmedthrough the storm by a dead, 
cross clutching man lashed to the helm.  Dracula, in the form a black 
dog leaped into Tate Hill Pier before embarking on his career of 
neck-munching.   Jeru's was a floating mooring, so I had to row out 
to her in a small tender ('Walkin'  Shoes', my fave Mulligan track), 
so small that when I got in her she had about 4 inches of freeboard, 
and my 400 yard row used to regularly bring the harbourside footpaths 
to a standstill, so precarious seemed my progress.

One evening, one sunset, force three evening I rowed down the harbour 
for a snatched dusk sail on Jeru.  The harbour was dead calm, the sky 
was that deep blue shading into gold that you can't describe, far 
less paint.  I was dazed with the beauty of it all, looking forward 
to my hour reaching up the coast as the sun set oner the Yorkshire 
Moors  Then a cigarette-roughened voice bellowed across the harbour: 
'Where yer goin?'  A - er - lady, 40's, stout, red faced with a pair 
of aged parents.

Me, rowing on, reverie shattered: 'I'm going for a sail.'
Lady: 'Tek us with yer!" (Us means 'me' in this context)
Me: 'Sorry, no room.
Lady: 'I'll show yer me tits if yer do!'
Me: 'Sorry, still no room.'
She pulled up her jumper and showed me anyway.  Grizzly.

Anyway, Jeru is a good little sailor.  I sometimes sail for a living: 
skippering 50 - 80 foot youth sail training ketches with peak and 
throat halyards, twitchers, topsails hoist and trimmed by entire 
fishing nets, four jibs requiring travellers, bead blocks, 
preventers, whole bloody snakes honeymoons of ropes. Lovely under 
sail, but o my god how complicated.

Jeru has one kicker, two sails, three sheets, two winches and one 
toppling lift. I can sail her on my own sometimes and give badly 
trimmed 26 footers a fright (thanks Uffa).    And, when the wind 
ain't bad, I can sail her off her mooring, usually with an audience 
of tourists standing on Dracula's pier.  And as I prepare to slip, 
back the jib and drop away from the pier before sailing into the 
offing that Cook saw, I just think, well, look at the header of this 
blog: 'There is nothing, nothing finer...'

It can happen to the best of us

My wife and I recently had dinner with some sailing friends who own a Feeling 36, made by Kirie in France. A really beautiful boat that they cruise out of New Jersey. They used to race her and the skipper, Ted, is a veteran of several Round The Island races (The Long one next to the Big Apple that is not the small one southwest of Pompey). It's a 2-3 day race involving offshore racing in the Atlantic, some tricky currents and long reach back down Long Island Sound (here is a map). Over dinner, he told us a great story from one of his Round the Island adventures.

For this race, he had lined up a 8 other crew including 4-5 guys who could helm. Unfortunately 2 of the more experienced crew were no-shows so they started the race with skipper + 6. The initial sailing down the south side of LI was rough going and the 2 other guys who could helm got very seasick so it was left to Ted to stay permanently at the helm.

The wind died to 2-3 knots toward the end of day 1and the whole fleet slowed to a crawl. Ted being a canny man of the salt figured that he could do some catching up on the bigger boats in the light airs. The crafty bugger put his spinnaker out on the leeward side making it into a giant Genoa. It worked a charm and by the time they had reached the tip of Long Island, they had overhauled most of the fleet. They made "Plum Gut" (the short channel between the North Fork and Plum Island) in time to catch the height of a 6 kt current that took them and 4 other boats into Long island Sound.

The winds were still very very light. In fact so light, that at one point going through Plum Gut, Ted's boat was going sideways at the same speed as the other 4 boats were going forward. The current was actually the only thing keeping the boat moving and the sails full.

As they turned West into the Sound, fog set in. Great! By this time, Ted has been at the helm for 36 hours and the race was fast losing its allure. Through the fog, Ted could make out another boat on an opposing tack coming towards them. As Ted was on a starboard tack he called rights but the guy didn't let off and came slowly across him and then disappeared into the fog. Ted had had enough and told one of the other guys to take the helm for a couple of hours while he got some sleep.

About an hour and half later, one of the crew shook him awake with a look of panic on his face. According to the depth-meter they were shoaling fast. This made no sense. Ted had set them on a course up the middle of the Sound in 300 ft of water. It was still foggy so he couldn't tell by looking around what was going on but a quick check of the GPS showed them to be 10 miles East of the position they had been when he went to sleep and we're about to run aground. East?!! What the ... They were supposed to be about 20 miles west of their current position.

It suddenly all dawned on Ted. As they entered the sound, the current was running 6kts east. With almost no wind, they had been going backwards and East for two hours. Ted realized that the boat that had crossed his bow without giving way was in fact anchored. They had drifted backward behind him but he couldn't tell in the fog.

They bit the bullet, turned on the engine and quit the race.

The moral of the story is get some sleep and make the puking buggers tough it out at the helm earlier.