The First Time I Went Sailing

      Or, Aren’t sailboats supposed to heel?

_______

May 1, 2013

     “You are not going to find the ideal boat. You are not
even going to have it if you design it from scratch.”

Carl Lane

Except for watching my first husband do all the work as he sailed the little Abaco sailing dinghies when we were on our honeymoon, I had never been sailing when we moved to southern Illinois for graduate school. I had always wanted to try it, however, so when he found a little 14’ sloop-rigged boat at a nearby lake for sale, I enthusiastically encouraged him to buy it. The Abaco dinghies were fun, but pretty tame stuff compared to this baby – two sails – TWO! A REAL sailboat.

I’m talking about a little boat, with a dagger board for a keel. We dragged it up on to the beach of the little man-made lake to store it. There was a small sailing club that had an area reserved for them, and no one bothered the boats there.

We didn’t do a test sail before we bought it. Perhaps we should have …

I waited impatiently for Saturday to come, and then we raced down to the lake to sail our little boat, which we named Daisy Mae after the wonderful sheepdog I had had as a child. I watched Dave putting the sails up, and climbed in. Our first sail on our first sailboat –- does it get any better than that? He took the tiller, of course; he had learned to sail at summer camp while I knew nothing at all about it. In no time we were scooting across the little lake. The boat was tipping, but I’d seen pictures, and I knew sailboats “tipped.” It didn’t bother me, but Dave kept saying, “This isn’t right … this isn’t right.”

“Dave,” I said, “I certainly don’t know anything about sailing, but I’ve seen pictures. Sailboats tip!”

“Not in this direction!” he said, and with that, the boat, with its sails out to starboard, tipped completely over –- to port -- and stayed there. HUH?

Well, she couldn’t completely turtle, because the lake was only 8 ft deep, but the mast got stuck in the mud. Meanwhile, I was in the water with the sail over me. I was frantically trying to swim out from under it to get air, afraid I would drown, when it dawned on me. I just poked a finger up, pushed the sail off the water, and there was air. So I calmed down. Dave dived down to the bottom of the lake with our throwable cushion and tied it to the top of the mast, and we managed to get the boat upright – but she went right back over again.

By then someone with a little outboard motor on his bass boat had come by and offered to tow us in. “OK,” said Dave, “but please do it slowly, because she wants to tip over again, and if she gets dragged with the mast down, it will snap.” Shallow water can be a problem!

So the man towed us in, with both Dave and me hanging in the water off the starboard corner of the stern to keep poor little Daisy Mae upright.

She was much harder to drag ashore than she should have been, and Dave finally figured out what had happened. The boat had “positive flotation” –- that is, the benches we were sitting on were air pockets. The port bench leaked, and had filled up with water, pulling her over.

I don’t recall what we did to fix it, but people from the little sailing club helped, and we had a lot of fun sailing that boat around the lake that summer (I say we, but Dave did all the sailing.) By the end of the summer, Dave had me convinced that if you put a mast in a bathtub, he would be able to sail it.

My first sail may be why I don’t really get scared when sailboats heel. I know, first hand, that heeling is a good thing. I really don’t like boats that flip you off into the water, but Daisy Mae only did it once, no harm was done, and I have forgiven her.

What to Do When Your Boat Runs Aground

 

     Or, If I’d only had one more day’s experience …

DISCLAIMER: THE SUGGESTIONS ON THIS BLOG (ALL ENTRIES, NOT JUST THIS ONE), ARE NOT INTENDED TO TELL ANY ONE INDIVIDUAL WHAT TO DO IN ANY SPECIFIC SITUATION. THEY ARE SIMPLY BASED ON MY EARLY EXPERIENCES SAILING, AND SHOULD ONLY BE A PART OF INFORMATION ANY SAILOR GATHERS ABOUT SAILING. FINAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ACTIONS TO TAKE OR NOT TAKE ALWAYS LAY WITH THE SKIPPER OF THE BOAT IN QUESTION.

_______

April 25, 2013

     "Only two sailors, in my experience, never ran aground.
One never left port and the other was an atrocious liar."

Don Bamford

It’s just a fact. If you sail, you’re going to run aground. Now, if you’re sailing a little boat with a centerboard, or a small boat like the 16.5’ Catalinas, you may be able to just pull the centerboard up, or get out and push the boat free (put an anchor down before leaving the boat, since you’re trying to make it move). But if you’re on a bigger boat, things may not be quite that simple.

You’ll find lots of strategies for getting your boat off a grounding in Sailing for Dummies. You’re not a dummy if you ran aground, though – you’re just a sailor.

Nevertheless, in my opinion many people take groundings too lightly. Groundings can damage the bottom of your boat. They can leave your boat stuck in a vulnerable place, such as a rough surf. If you’re on a falling tide, damage may occur to your boat later (ex: your rudder) as the boat leans more and more to one side. The lower the water gets, the harder it will be to get her off.

So take groundings seriously, while accepting the fact that – like some other things – groundings happen.

So what should you do?

1. GATHER INFORMATION

Check the inside of your boat for any signs of leak. If there’s any chance your boat is leaking, call for help immediately.

Study your chart and see what it says about the surrounding water.

Consider getting off and “walking the boat.”

Now, on a dropping tide, you may not have a lot of time to decide what you’re going to do. If you’re short on time, just get in the water with your clothes on. Don’t waste time changing clothes. You can always put on dry clothes afterwards (even if you don’t live on your boat, you should always have a couple of full changes of clothing on it for such situations).

Put on a PFD, and tie a long line to the boat. Tie it around your waist with a bowline. Don’t let yourself be separated from the boat in a current! You will find where the water gets more shallow, and where it gets deeper. You need to walk away from the boat as well as around it in order to find the deeper water. Consider your safety carefully as you consider doing that; your chart and chart plotter may tell you all you need to know. Don’t take unnecessary risks.

Put your waterproof hand-held radio in your fanny pack, and be sure the radio is secured to the fanny pack. Don’t hold it – wear it. It’s waterproof.

You don’t have to worry about anchoring the boat. It already did a dandy job of that itself.

2. DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT TO CALL FOR HELP

Did you find a good path out? Often the good path out is the way you came in. The day this happened to me, I had realized what was going to happen, and had managed to turn the boat around before the “thunk.” So although I was aground, I was pointed in the right direction.

Are you on a rising tide? If the tide is still going to come up a foot or more, Mother Nature may well float your boat off for you if you can be a little patient. That’s the safest way to get off. Put out some sodas and snacks for your crew (not liquor), and have a nice visit. 
 

I did call Boat US, because I was on a dropping tide, and I was near two busy channels. A big boat could have thrown a wake that would have banged my boat around in shallow water, and as I have pointed out before, that’s just a very bad thing.

3. EVALUATE WHAT THE RESCUE BOAT PLANS TO DO

When the first Boat US boat came to my boat, the driver refused my suggestion to pull me out in the direction I was pointed. He said, “No, I’m going to pull you abeam.”

If I’d had one more day’s experience I would have told him no. But although I had walked around the boat, I hadn’t walked away from the boat in any direction. If I had walked in the direction he wanted to tow me, I would have seen the water dropping lower and lower on my body, and I would have known that pulling the boat out that way was a very bad idea. But I trusted him (don’t get me wrong; the great majority of towboats are terrific).

So he dragged my boat across a sandbar, using a forward cleat. I’m fortunate that that cleat is in the toe rail and not fiberglass, or – backing plate or not – I’m sure this tow would have ripped it right out. My boat flip-flopped from port hull to starboard hull. It was bad, and scary, and then the rudder broke. No kidding. I had no steering. However, that tow was so badly executed that it could have broken a perfectly good rudder. It was just a very, very bad tow plan.

As it turned out, my rudder was already severely compromised, rusted through from the inside out. The best possible way for it to break was under tow. It could have broken in a storm or rough seas and left me in a very bad predicament, so in the end it was all good. The boat needed a new rudder, and the old one, although I didn’t know it at the time, was ready to go and just plain dangerous.

But YOU are the skipper of your boat, and YOU need to know what that towboat’s intentions for your boat are. Ask. If it doesn’t make sense, ask for an explanation. If it still doesn’t feel right, ask to talk to a supervisor. One of the reasons groundings are dangerous is that the person helping you may not have the best idea on the planet for your situation. Talk to lots of other sailors and find out how they have handled groundings. You need to know this stuff.

4. EVALUATE WHAT WENT WRONG

When it’s all over, take some time to figure out how it happened. In my case, I was at a point where two channels intersected, and I was steering for a red marker in the crossing channel instead of the channel I was in. I hadn’t paid attention the channel marker numbers, which would have told me that I was aiming for the wrong one. On my chart plotter, the zoom setting I was using did not give the marker numbers.

 On your chart plotter, experiment with zooming in and out, because at different resolutions you will get different pieces of information. I zoomed closer in 10 seconds too late to prevent the grounding, but it was the chart plotter that alerted me to my mistake.

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE DONE

Instead of letting the towboat pull me across a sand bar, I should have insisted that the towboat take me out the way I came in. I should have gotten out of the boat, walked to the sand bar and demonstrated the problem to him. Then I should have called a supervisor if he still refused to make a better plan.

This is what it means to skipper your own boat. Make sure you maintain authority over your boat – even in a grounding.

Your Boat Could Sink -- Really!

 

April 20, 2013

     Or, What hoses? What hose clamps?

     “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.”

Murphy’s Law

     “Murphy was an optimist.”

Murphy’s cat

About a month ago I heard about something that happened to a friend’s boat. Tied up in the marina, someone noticed that his boat seemed to be sitting low in the water, and stepped aboard to check. That person found that the man’s boat was filling up with salt water. He went back up to the club, got a pump, started pumping the man’s boat out, and gave him a call.

Most sailboats have “thru-holes” that go through the hull for all sorts of reasons. They let in water to help cool the engine. They let the galley sink drain. Three miles out, you can pump your head’s holding tank overboard, and that requires a thru-hole. There can be others as well.

These holes have hoses held on by clamps. On this unlucky man’s boat, one of the hoses had cracked, causing the leak.

Well, I didn’t want gallons and gallons of salt water in my cabin. No, sir! So, being a newer sailor, I had someone go through my boat with me to check all of this and show me what to look for.

Happily, all my hoses are in good shape. The one bringing water into the engine, is, in fact, very new. That’s the good news.
   

The bad news is that the engine hose was installed improperly. The wrong hose clamps were used –- probably automotive, not marine -- and in 18 months they had rusted so badly that they broke into pieces when taken off. While the fellow who installed my engine was very good, he must have slipped up. Those were not marine-grade hose clamps.

Automotive product used for a marine application,

almost always, a bad idea.

LESSON LEARNED:  As you can see from the next picture, the actual hose is new and in very good shape. However, it really doesn’t matter if the hose itself is in great shape if the clamps break and it falls off. Your boat is going to fill up with saltwater, and if not stopped, sink right in its slip. Or at anchor. Or wherever she happens to be when Murphy strikes. The clamps are as important as the section of hose and the state of the thru-hole valve.

Thing is, if you check these things, this is one time you can force Murphy to tip-toe away from you and go bother someone less vigilant than you were. Good job!

The picture below shows one end of the hose with new, marine-grade stainless clamps on it. As you can see, two were used. One goes around the hose clockwise and the other counter-clockwise. Of course, this was done on both ends of the hose. This is a place to not go cheap on your boat: get your hose clamps at a real marine supply store.

ANOTHER LESSON LEARNED: Think you don’t need to know about these things? You’ve got someone really good to work on your boat? The fellow who put in my engine is probably the best marine diesel engine installer for 100 miles in any direction, but I’m pretty sure he made a mistake and put the wrong hose clamps on a very important section of hose.

And while you’re at it, check all your thru-holes. Make sure all the shut-off valves work smoothly. Check all the hoses connected to them and make sure they’re not brittle and cracked or about to crack.

Anyone can make a mistake, and everyone is human. You may not know how to fix all the problems you find, but do yourself a favor and learn as much as you can about how things ought to be. When your boat doesn’t sink, you’ll be glad you did!