Taken Advantage Of ...

I wish I could tell you the name of the company, but I can only tell you what happened. Those of you in the St. Petersburg area will at least know to pay attention. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, this problem may not be exclusive to St. Petersburg.

The St. Petersburg Power and Sailboat Show will take place December 4 - 7 of 2014. It's an annual event, one I have enjoyed. In 2012 I worked at the show on behalf of Boca Ciega Yacht Club. All the volunteers had some time off to visit the other booths. There was a rope vender across the path and west just a bit west of BCYC's booth in 2012, and the prices were too good to resist. I talked with another member who has the same boat as mine, and then went to the rope vender and bought 120' of 3/8" line, at what seemed like a very good price, to use as a spinnaker halyard. I told him what it was to be used for, and he told me he had "some" halyard line left. I want to be clear here; the vender presented himself as knowledgeable regarding lines for sailboats. He assured me that he had a small amount left, just enough, and that he would set it aside for me.

A friend installed this line as a spinnaker halyard for me. I don't have a spinnaker sail; I intended to use it to move heavy things, such as the air conditioner, on and off the boat. It didn't work very well, though. It was extremely hard to raise the air conditioner even a few inches so it could be swung over to the dock. Then I tried to use it to raise my storm sail over the roller furler, and it simply wouldn't do it. Friends took a look at it, and noted the same thing I did: the halyard seemed to run freely until there was any amount of appreciable weight on it. Then it simply wouldn't budge. However, when it had no load, it ran quite freely through all hardware including the sheave at the top of the mast.

Today someone figured out why the line was so difficult to use under load. This supposed halyard rope was not that at all. It was ... polypropelene! It was covered with woven threads, but it had a polypro core. It's cheap line that can't take much strain and that stretches until it breaks. Today's helper noted that as we pulled on the halyard (with someone sitting in a bosun's chair at the end of it to provide load), the line stretched significantly without raising the bosun's chair at all. I had thought it was just me, not as strong as I used to be after being laid up for a while, but three different strong people had not been able to raise it under load. We cut the end to examine the core.

It's really quite scary. In a storm I would have counted on that halyard to keep the storm sail up, and it might not have been up to the task, leaving me in a storm but with essentially no steering, no ability to either heave to or point the boat into the wind.

To me, selling such line to a sailor pretending that it would be suitable for a halyard borders on sociopathic behavior. I would not say that if I knew the name of the company, but I have tried and have not been able to trace it down. Since I can't provide the name of the company, all I can do is describe the danger presented by such sales behavior.

Stretch is not always bad. It's good to have a little stretch in one's dock lines, for instance. Polypropelene can also be useful, as it floats. But it isn't nearly as strong as other lines, and it's particularly susceptible to UV damage. Diameter for diameter, it's a weak rope. Between its weakness, its vulnerability to UV rays and its marked ability to stretch, it's a terrible choice for a halyard.

So all I can say is, "Buyers beware." Venders with Swiss cheese for consciences can spot a beginner from a mile away.  You really can get some great deals at boat shows, but if you aren't 150% certain regarding what you're looking at, bring a more experienced friend along.

Nobody Wants a Clogged Head!

But ... Why does it happen? I think I know.

Or, A Tale of Two Toilet (Hoses)

I'm no plumber, and at least partly because of that, for the 3 1/2 years I have lived on my boat, I have lived in terror of the thought of a clogged head. The male sailors in my club, who will say just about anything in front of a woman, get vague ... and disgusted ... when they describe what they've been through.

But here's the thing: no one who has told one of these smelly, dirty stories lived on his boat.

Except for one person: he lives on his boat and gets his boat pumped out regularly. Due to mechanical problems, he had not sailed his boat any distance in some time, but he finally had everything fixed up and ship-shape, and he went on a short cruise. Far enough from shore to be legal, he decided to pump overboard and discovered that his sanitary system was clogged. Oh no!

If it was clogged, though, how come he had been able to use the toilet and be pumped out until he went off shore?

The hose that was clogged was the one that went overboard. It hadn't been used in a very long time, and apparently something got left behind. He had to dig a hardened chunk of toilet paper and other things best left unmentioned.

Well, here's what I think, and as I prepare to move off the boat, I'm going to keep it in mind. As I lived on my boat, all the hoses except the overboard one got used regularly. Nothing ever had a chance to get stuck and dried, because something else was already coming up the "freeway." Sometimes it was a little harder than others to pump, but everything always went through.

I think when I move off the boat I will be very careful about flushing completely. I think hoses get clogged because the hoses aren't flushed completely, and then the bot sits in the slip for a month while things get dry and hard.

So that's what I'm suggesting you do. If you take your boat out, say, once a month, if the head has been used, flush it thoroughly. Then use a hose, fill the tank completely and pump it out. In fact, I would flush the tank a couple of times if the boat won't be used for a while. I think this might solve some odor problems as well. If you go out to sea and flush overboard, use plenty of water.

I can't prove any of this, and frankly, I'm not interested in trying to. But I throw it out as a possible solution to a very unsavory problem.

You COULD Go Over the Side -- Really! -- Lifelines

No smart cracks this time -- this is serious stuff

I have heard about lifelines from a couple of people ever since I got my first little sailboat. People are passionate in their beliefs about them.

For instance, there's a big debate about whether they should be clad in vinyl or not. Many owners feel the vinyl looks nicer, even though vinyl-clad cable is more expensive than bare cable. Others insist that it's extremely important to have bare cable, because vinyl can hide the first signs of rust, a sign that your lifelines could fail.

Oh my gracious -- then you could fall overboard, right?

Well, yeah, you CAN fall overboard, but it can happen if you have the newest, brighest, tightest lifelines possible.

How is that possible?

Just go stand on the side of your boat, and note where the lifeline touches your body. Unless you're a child, it's going to be WELL below your waist. This means that your center of gravity is WELL above that top lifeline (assuming you have two -- smaller boats will only have one). 

The lifelines can't save you, I don't care what the "experts" say. I know a true expert who calls loose or weakened lifelines "deathlines." He's been sailing for many, many years and figured out long ago that the lifelines won't save him, but it's hard to ignore that word -- LIFEline.

Well, you have to. Words don't trump the laws of physics.

So what are they good for? They're an OUTSTANDING visual guide. They make it very, very clear where the edge of the cliff is. But once you have realized that those lifelines won't save you (and could actually encourage you to topple over), you'll realize why you want to move toward the bow from the HIGH side of the boat. On the high side of the boat, if you do fall, you'll fall toward the center of the boat -- not into the water.

What else can you do? My boat is 100% netted. I even made a frame with netting on it that lashes to my gates when they're closed. I have a coordination problem (talked about in a much earlier post), so I'm more likely than you to go over the side. Not everyone wants netting but I think it's wise for me.

The other thing you *must* do is make sure you have good handholds along the edge of your cabin top. You often see these made of teak. My boat also has a stainless steel grab bar that runs across the beam. We hear the saying, "One hand for yourself and one for your boat," and that's exactly what it means. As you move forward, you should always be holding on with one hand, and you shouldn't be holding the lifeline. You should be holding something closer to the center of the boat.

If the boat is sailing and you need to do something at the mast, move to the mast from the high side of the boat, where gravity will tend to push you toward the boat, not away from it.

Wear nonskid shoes. I don't care how many macho men tell you bare feet are best: if you break a toe, you're going to be significantly hobbled. Test their grip on your deck periodically, as the grip-holding tendencies of your shoes can wear out.

Don't count on the "life" lines to save you. Do keep them in good shape, but they are last-ditch, and in my opinion, best used by attaching netting to them.



https://www.facebook.com/boldlygosailing?skip_nax_wizard=true

Aground and Comfy

     Or, Yes, it’s possible. 

You are more clever than you realize.

Fortune cookie

I actually had some pretty rough times with my first sailboat. Silver Girl was a 25’ Irwin “Citation,” only eight feet wide. She was a lot of fun to sail, but I was a beginner, and when I bought her I couldn’t imagine what scrapes I would get into, but I was sure there would be some.

I was right.

I’d learned the basics of sailing. The basics of using an outboard motor? That was more like a trial by fire. Hopelessly trying to save money, I had bought a used outboard motor. That proved to be disastrous, but I thought that motor was the exception, and bought a second used outboard motor to replace the first one. The unfortunate fact is that we don’t always learn from experience.

Exiting from the dock about 3PM on that day, we had wind from the east and a very high sandbar just to the west of us. Now, I knew that sandbar was there. Unfortunately the outboard motor died just as I was alongside that sandbar, and the wind immediately blew us aground. To make it worse, the deepest draft on my boat wasn’t the shoal keel but the very exposed rudder.

The tide was going out quite fast, so I wasted no time and called Eckerd College’s Search and Rescue program (EC-SAR). They had a very short distance to travel and got there quickly, but the water was already halfway between their feet and their knees, and still dropping. They walked around my boat with a depth pole, determined what my best path out would be, and took my anchor out. By now the water was so low that all they had to do was stomp it into the mud with their boots to set it.

They took my companion back to the dock to limit the amount of extra weight on the rudder. They made sure I had not only food and water but also a book and light to read by. They told me it would be a long wait. They were unwilling to tow my boat off because of the risk to the rudder, and they urged me to not let anyone else tow me off, either. They said something about 2AM. I thought, “OK, I’ll have to come back in at night.” I had battery powered green and red lights, and crawled carefully up to the bow (didn’t want any weight to shift on that rudder) and attached the running lights. The boat was already listing severely, but fortunately it seemed that the side of the boat was supporting it, and not the rudder.

So I read, and ate the prepackaged tuna fish and crackers I had on the boat, watched the sun set, and read some more. The boat kept listing further and further, and I thought, “How the heck am I going to be able to sleep?”

What I finally did was take a cockpit cushion and put it abeam in the cabin instead of pointing fore and aft. It stretched between the two settees below and was supported in the middle by a companionway step. Lying with my head to the high side, I was reasonably comfortable. I set my phone alarm for 2AM to bring the boat home, and drifted off to sleep.

Well, 2AM came. It was a glorious night with a full moon. I looked around the boat … and saw mud in every direction for at least 50 yards. I wish I had had a camera, because the scene was spectacularly beautiful. But -- EC-SAR had been telling me when LOW tide would be, not high tide.

This boat is almost as severely aground

as my poor Silver Girl was.

The tide had gone to Alaska. What could I do? I went back to sleep.

I had already bought line and a weight (a round zinc), and in the morning I made a sounding line. I put a knot in it every foot, with a double knot every three feet. I was able to see the water slowly rising. High tide was at noon that day, and at 11:45 AM, my boat FINALLY floated free.

LESSONS LEARNED: First, go ahead and make plans if you must, but always have a Plan B. Carry more food and water than you think you need, and be ready to tolerate long waits in good humor, because sooner or later, the act of sailing is going to cause you some major delays. If you’re due to arrive home on Sunday and absolutely have to be at work on Monday, you might want to plan on returning on Saturday instead. Sailboats are fundamentally undependable modes of transportation, and a big cushion of time is a good thing.

Second, when you first start to sail your own boat, look at tide predictions carefully. Mother Nature can change what the real high or low tides are for a given day, and the only way to judge that effect is by being familiar with what is typical for your area. I experienced an extreme low tide on this sail caused by the moon and the sun being lined up along with a fair amount of wind. Weather can also make tides either extremely high or extremely low.

Where I live, typically there is about  a two feet difference between high and low tides. Occasionally it’s as much as three feet. When Tropical Storm Debby came through, she blew a lot of water in front of her, and for three days, high tide was so high I couldn’t safely get off the boat. “Low” tide was what we typically experience on a very high tide. There was only about an hour in each tidal cycle where I could safely get on and off the boat. For most people, that would make it impossible for them to go to work. If you’re thinking about moving aboard, consider whether the combination of tide and weather will ever keep you from reporting to work. Most employers wouldn’t be happy about that as an excuse for not showing up.

OTHER LESSON LEARNED: The great majority of sailors simply do not sell an outboard motor they have found to be reliable. There are exceptions; I sold mine because it was just too big for my dinghy; but most of the used outboard motors out there are well past their prime. Shop cautiously!

*Source for photo: http://yachtpals.com/sailing-sailboat-aground-9100


Go to our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/boldlygosailing?skip_nax_wizard=true 

DON’T FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR CHART PLOTTER

      Or, Where DO these channel markers come from, anyway?

"Not all who wander are lost." 

JRR Tolkien

 Last spring at the end of sail school, all the sail school students were invited for a sunset/evening sail on Boca Ciega Bay. I was one of the host boats, and took some delightful people out.

One man in the group in particular was interested in learning everything he possibly could on this sail. So he got a fair amount of time at the helm, with me by his side since this was his first time sailing a boat of this size. He did a great job, too. He was a fast learner and I’m sure he’s still learning all he can.

As we were going in, I showed him how the chart plotter displayed the red and green channel markers so accurately that you could use the chart plotter to guide you through in pea soup fog. He stared at the chart plotter, watching the little icon that indicated my boat.

As we approached the entrance of the channel, he spotted the red marker on the chart plotter and stared at it intently. He had already heard about “Red right returning,” meaning to keep the red markers to the starboard of side of the boat when returning through an access channel.

And he was, indeed, approaching the channel with the red marker on the starboard side of the image of my boat on the chart plotter.

The problem was that he was not paying any attention to where the green marker was, and it’s a narrow channel.

So as we approached, I said to him, “Where’s the green marker?” He pointed it out on the chart plotter, not realizing that unless we changed course, and soon, we would hit that green channel marker. I took the wheel and pulled it to starboard, and then he saw what I was talking about. He saw it on the water first, and it made him gasp.

I told him – “Don’t fall in love with your chart plotter. Make sure you visually spot what you’re seeing on the screen."

The electronic gear can be fascinating. It’s kind of cool to watch how the depth changes as your depth sounder reads it. You soon learn that the ocean bottom is nothing like a road on land. Water depth can vary a lot in a very short distance. As long as your keel doesn’t touch any of it, it doesn’t matter, but it is interesting to observe.

Unfortunately we may (may, the inquiry hasn’t been done yet) have recently seen a case of what I call “electronics hypnosis” with tragic results out in the Seattle area. A 25’ sailboat and a very large, very fast ferry were on a collision course. They did collide, and although the man single-handing the sailboat survived, his sailboat is now at the bottom of a channel. We don’t know yet what happened except for one thing the sailboat skipper admitted to: he had recently been in some fog, and was focused on his radar screen.

He made a poor choice, choosing a channel that commercial ferries use at high rates of speed to double-check his electronics.

C’mon. We all know that the electronics tools are more than “gadgets” and can give us crucial information, but when you put a new one on your boat, get yourself out into open water before exploring it. Even then, set a kitchen timer to ring every two minutes so you can look around and make sure some boat isn’t gaining on you, on a collision course.

In fact, while you’re out there exploring your new chart plotter or whatever you got, take the time to explore it thoroughly, so when you are in heavy traffic you’ll only have to give it a quick glance. You wouldn’t drive down the road with your eyes intently focused on your rear view mirror, and you should use your electronics in the same way. If you need to dig through menus, make sure there’s no one around you, and if you have someone on the boat with you, put them on 360º constant watch so you don’t have to worry about playing bumper cars with your boat because you’re not familiar with your chart plotter yet. Even if the area is clear of boats, you still have to watch out for things like crab traps and lobster pots, which can make a royal mess of your propeller.

Tell your chart plotter: “We’re friends. I respect and admire you, but that’s all we can be.”

Go to our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/boldlygosailing?skip_nax_wizard=true

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.

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.