Samantha Ring, my first sailing instructor, has continued to pass tips on to me from time to time. It was Samantha who taught me how to tack my boat easily by myself (I talked about that in the entry titled "How to Single-Hand Your Boat in a Pinch").
From her I learned some very basic things, such as tiller steering: to turn the rudder in the direction you want to go, you have to push the tiller handle in the opposite direction. In other words, to turn to port, you push the tiller to starboard.
She has also shared with me how she backs her boat into her slip very reliably every time.
It's so simple. I mentioned it to some sailors online who thought the very notion was absurd, but I discussed it with a true master sailor, and he explained that he still uses it, especially if it's a large boat. (Remember that I have said more than once that you should double-check every bit of advice you're given by others, and this is a perfect example.)
What Samantha does is simple: before she enters the marina she turns the boat around. She then faces the stern of the boat instead of the bow, and puts the boat in reverse.
Since she has a tiller, this requires a quick adjustment in thinking. Now the stern of the boat moves in the direction of the tiller.! The bow still moves to starboard, but since she's facing the stern, the boat now essentially steers the way a car does.
It's a little hard to see in the photo below but if you look carefully, you will see a sailor facing the stern, pushing the tiller to starboard. Sam makes a starboard turn to back into her slip. It's much easier to steer in reverse when you only have a few feet of boat in front of you.
This approach helps solve a number of problems. First of all, you have to deal with "prop walk" when in reverse. Prop walk is the frustrating tendency of a motor to pull the boat to one side or another, usually to port, when in reverse. When you only have to worry about where the few feet in front of you are going, the difficulties of dealing with prop walk are diminished. Ditto for the effects of both wind and current. All you have to do is get the stern in, and the rest of the boat will follow. When you're facing the direction you're moving in, it becomes much easier to adjust for all the forces acting on your boat.
However, people get set in their ways sometimes, and so some people think this approach is nothing short of ridiculous. Samantha actually heard someone shout to her once, "Did you know you're going backwards?" But Samantha let me try it, and I think it's brilliant.
Few things are scarier to new sailors than bringing their boat into the slip stern first, and being able to face the direction you're moving in really takes all the terror out of it. Wherever that stern goes, the bow is going to follow, and you will only have to make judgments about the few feet of boat in front of you instead of sitting with feet toward the bow, alternately looking over your shoulder and then the whole length of the boat, and havng to judge all that distance to your bow, along with whether or not wind, prop walk, or current will take your boat into another boat or a piling.
Don't try this for the first time in the marina, however. Like any skill involving maneuverability, you're much better off practicing in open water first. Just tie a fender to your spare anchor and drop it over the side. If you want to practice with great precision, put two fenders over the side to mark the width of your slip.
If you have a boat with a wheel, you can still use this trick. However, with a wheel you think about the wheel just as you would if you were facing forward.
There is a "negative" to this approach, and that is that the boat will have a lower maximum speed in reverse than in forward. But you don't want to move any faster than you want to hit the dock anyway, so that's a small limitation. You do have to maintain enough speed to have steerage, but that feels safer when facing the direction you're going in as well.
And don't forget -- now you will put the boat in *forward* instead of reverse to slow it. But since when you face the stern, reverse looks like forward, and forward looks like reverse, it doesn't have to be a complication. Just don't over-think it. Relax, take a deep breath, and you'll get that boat in the slip like a champ.
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