Wearing Gloves ...

or, Someone Really Could Die!

This happened in the marina I live in recently. A man was climbing up his very tall mast, with his wife on the halyard as a safety line.

I don't know what went wrong at the mast, but he slipped, and he needed that safety line to catch him. I also don't know what went wrong in the cockpit, but she did not have gloves on, and could not hold the line. It burned her hands and she had to let go.

He fell 70 feet.

What happened next was like something out of a movie. Instead of hitting the deck, he hit the Bimini. It gave just enough to cushion his fall. Then it split, and he fell through the Bimini to the cockpit, which hurt him more than the fall from the mast did. However, he was not seriously hurt.

I'm not opposed to wives handling the halyard when someone goes up the mast. I do it myself.

However: I always have gloves on, and I always hold the line firmly, with the assumption that this person is going to fall in the next split-second. I have his life in my hands, and that's how I treat it. 

But gloves aren't just for the tasks that are obviously hazardous from the beginning. Just about anything you do on a boat has the potential to become suddenly hazardous. Suppose you fall off your boat at the dock? It's remarkable just how common that is. If you have gloves on, your hands won't get cut by barnacles, and you'll have a much easier time getting out of the water. If you, say, broke an ankle going in, that could be important, especially if you're by yourself. 

I know someone else whose transmission on her smallish sailboat stuck in forward just as she was coming in to dock. She turned the engine off, and made her best guess about going in circles to slow it down before entering her slip, but she didn't get it *quite* right. Since she had gloves on, she was able to grab a line strung between the pilings and physically stop the boat. 

in a storm or rough seas, the stresses on the sheets multiply You can actually pull harder with gloves on than without them. Try it some time. As I've pointed out in other articles, weather can turn sour very quickly. If you already have gloves on, that's one less thing you have to do in the precious few minutes you may have before the ship hits the fan.

And ladies, shake the hand some time of an experienced sailor who doesn't wear gloves. Trust me -- you don't want your hands to feel that rough! If only for vanity's sake, gloves are the answer. They also help tremendously if the diameter of the line you have to pull on is small. My traveler would be an example of that, as is the line on many roller furlers.

While we're at it, I'm going to come down firmly on the side of wearing shoes -- and closed-toe shoes. Once again, if you fall in, you won't cut your feet on barnacles, and you'll have a much easier time getting out of the water. Now, I have a very dear friend whose opinion I highly respect, who can show you the research demonstrating that bare feet grip the deck best. That may well be, but that was only a grip test. It wasn't a "How many body parts can you injure in a storm?" test. I know someone who sailed to Key West in what should have been a good weather window, but he and his crew still got caught in a storm strong enough to knock them around. They came out on the other side of it with a concussion, cracked ribs, and a broken arm. Oh yeah -- the fellow in the open-toed sandals had a broken toe. They didn't have one person fit to sail the boat, although by working together they managed to get to a safe port.

Sailing gloves are like seat belts. When seat belts first came out, lots of people grumbled and said things like "You can't MAKE me wear it!" (Of course, now they can ...) but I was a young teenager, and my parents said, "Actually, yes, we CAN make you wear it." It became a habit, and now I'm not comfortable in a car unless it, and the shoulder harness, are on. I view sailing gloves in the same way. It's not something worth getting flapped over, and like my seat belt, they may never be the difference between life and death, but the restraint system in my car certainly was the difference between minor injuries and major injuries once. That's how I look at sailing gloves, and I urge you to make them part of your routine.

Why It Was Hard to Raise and Lower My Mainsail

      Or, Bigger isn’t always better!

April 29, 2013

     “Mine’s bigger!”

Some braggart

  Ever since I bought this boat more than two years ago, it’s been difficult to get the mainsail up and down. Even using a winch, it took a lot of muscle power to get the sail up. When it was time to come in, I had to go up to the mast and tug the sail all the way down.

I have “lazy jacks” on my boat. These are lines that pull out of the way to the mast when not needed. However, when you want to lower the mainsail, you tighten them by pulling on one small line on each side of the mast, and three lines spread out on each side like a basket. They catch the dropping sail, which should drop like a stone when released.

So dropping the sail should be a piece of cake. It’s quite convenient when single-handing, because you don’t have to try to both manage the boat and secure the mainsail with ties immediately so it won’t flop around and block your vision all at the same time.

But no matter what I did, the sail never dropped easily. It would drop a few feet, and then stop. I would have to go up to the mast and manually pull the sail down. That’s what you call inconvenient.

Someone put lubricant on a paper towel and forced it to slide up the groove in the mast where the slots that hold the sail to the mast travel. It didn’t help. I sprayed the slots with silicon spray. It didn’t work. I tried other lubricants, such as WD-40 and PB Blaster. Nothing worked.

Then one day about six months ago, someone said, “Are you sure this is the right sized halyard for the blocks in your mast?” Not being Superman, I lacked x-ray vision, couldn’t see inside the mast, but as we looked at the line, it looked “fuzzy” –- it had been rubbing on something. This wasn't degredation from UV rays; that part of the halyard had been protected in the mast.

So I put a new halyard on the mainsail, one size smaller than the old line. Immediately, the sail dropped like a stone any time I released it. That’s all you have to do on my boat now when coming in –- tighten the lazy jack lines and release the mainsail, and it drops like a stone, perfectly contained and under control.

So then I started thinking about my traveler. It was also hard to work, and its lines were fuzzy also. So I looked at the blocks (unlike my situation with the mast, they are all visible on the traveler), and sure enough, two of them were quite small. The line was much too big for the smallest blocks it had to move through, causing a lot of unnecessary friction. This is actually fairly serious, because one very good strategy if you get hit with a sudden gust of wind is to depower the mainsail by releasing the traveler.

I had done all the same things to the traveler that I had tried with the mainsail – lubricating everything with multiple lubricants, with minimal or no improvement. Now I have smaller line on my traveler, and it works reliably and with ease.

It also turned out that the headsail sheets –- the sheets you use to tack your jib or Genoa – were too big. I had self-tailing winches that couldn’t self-tail because the line used was too big. I’d found that mistake early on because its effects were so obvious, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the previous owner might have oversized other lines as well.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that “bigger is better” –- even safer –- than smaller lines, but particularly when it came to the mainsail, the opposite was true. Someone had to go stand on the cabin top and reach way up to pull the sail down. Even holding on with one hand, that’s an inherently unbalanced position. The cabin top of my boat has multiple levels and curves, and it’s easy to take a misstep.

Your mainsail halyard, especially if it moves through the inside of your mast, has to make a number of turns. This is increased if your mainsail sheet comes back to your cockpit, and you need that if you’re going to single-hand your boat. My personal opinion is that all small and mid-sized sailboats should have running rigging that allows you to single-hand. Maybe you never intend on doing that, but if your sailing partner sprains an ankle, you’ll have a much easier time getting back in if all your running rigging comes back to the cockpit. You’ll also have your crew in a safer position than standing at the mast to raise and lower the sail.

Since this happened I’ve heard similar stories from a number of other sailors. So if you find the lines on your boat seem to fight you, first trace them to make sure they’re not caught on something (mainsail halyards, for instance, are notorious for getting caught on things like the steaming light), and then consider whether the line is actually the right size for the mechanical parts it must travel through in order to do its job.

You should always wear gloves when sailing. You’ll be able to grip the lines better and pull harder, without worrying about a rope burn. But in addition, gloves also make it easier to get a good grasp on smaller diameter lines. Bigger isn’t better. The line that fits the hardware it will travel through is the size you want.