Giving thanks for boats

I’M SITTING HERE on Thanksgiving eve, twiddling my thumbs and wondering who we should give thanks to for inventing boats. It’s a naive thought, of course. Nobody can know who first had the idea of hollowing out a log and sitting in it to cross a river or get to an island too far away to swim to. There’s not much point in pursuing that train of thought, so another train quickly blots out the first one. I wonder how much I’ve spent on boats in my lifetime? There’s a sobering thought for you.

Some people are clever enough to make money from boats, but I’m not one of them. You have to admire sailors such as Lin and Larry Pardey, who found a way to make money by sailing around the world enjoying themselves. They are professional sailors and part-time writers. I’m a professional writer and an amateur sailor. I’ve never sold a boat for more than I paid for it, and that’s not even including the time and money I’ve spent while owning it. But I’ve never begrudged a penny of it, and I’ve never tried to add up what it has cost me. God, no. I’m scared my wife might read this and start realizing why we have a 12-year-old car and the very basic television service.

Nevertheless, to get back to my first thought, there is a lot of thanks to be given for boats by a lot of people. They sure bring a lot of weekend pleasure into the lives of people with humdrum office jobs and they introduce the element of adventure into all kinds of boating. Sometimes trying to start an outboard motor is an adventure in itself. Then there’s the business of docking your boat in front of a critical audience, or diving over the stern to free a propeller from a rope you stupidly backed down onto. You might not realize it at the time, but these are things to be thankful for. They brighten your life and sharpen your wits and make your mate appreciative of the wonderful knack you have for getting out of messes of your own creation. Boats are especially good at helping you create messes like that.

Perhaps if I hadn’t been interested in boats, I would have found  some other way of spending money hand over fist. Maybe I would have built a marvelous stamp collection or bought one of those fancy recliner chairs that gives you a massage and hands you a gin and tonic every 15 minutes. Maybe we would have a car whose back bumper isn’t chipped and dinged by all those idiot drivers in the grocery parking lot.

But that would mean we’d have missed out on some of life’s most wonderful treats. I don’t have to tell you about them. I’m thinking of the glorious surge of an ocean swell, or a peaceful anchorage after a hard day’s sail to windward. I’m thinking of sitting in the cockpit, tiller in hand, and marveling at the beauty of white sails swelling in the breeze. The hiss of a million bursting bubbles in the wake. Sailing at night under a brilliant full moon. Catching a nice salmon on a trailing lure. Sipping drinks with sailing friends in the cockpit at sunset. You know what I’m talking about.

Give thanks for boats. And to hell with the cost.

Today’s Thought

It was dramatic to watch my grandmother decapitate a turkey with an ax the day before Thanksgiving. Nowadays the expense of hiring grandmothers for the ax work would probably qualify all turkeys so honored with “gourmet” status.

— Russell Baker, NY Times, 27 Nov 85

Tailpiece

“Where did you get that nice new anchor?”

“Well, I was going to the boat yesterday when this beautiful blonde came along carrying a 25-pound CQR. When she saw me, she threw it to the ground, took off all her clothes, and said: ‘Take what you want.’”

“Ah, good choice. The clothes probably wouldn’t have fit you anyway.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

A better way to race

EARLIER THIS MONTH we were talking about Ken Read’s plea for simpler racing. Mr Read is president of North Sails. Now it has been pointed out to me that U.S. Sailing, the big boss of sailboat racing in the U.S.A., is also concerned with simplifying matters.

They’re suggesting a plan for what they call golf handicaps. That’s basically a system of helping regular losers, and handicapping regular winners; a system designed to prevent the same boat from winning all the time and discouraging other entrants.

This is what John Collins has to say about it on the U.S. Sailing website:

Performance handicapping (PHRF) obviously works best when there is a small handicap range in each class. That is fine if you have many boats. If, however, you have few boats with sailors of wide-ranging abilities, and boats with a wide range of speeds, the racing will be dominated by one or two boats. This leads to unhappiness.

A possible remedy, at the local club level, is to institute golf handicapping. PHRF golf handicapping works just the way that golf handicapping works. The PHRF handicap is adjusted after each race, or regatta, based on the race performance. This should only be attempted in small fleets. It should not be used for large regattas or for large fleets sailing in several areas.

The way it works is to pick a reference boat, say the boat that corrected out 40 percent of the way down the fleet. Then figure out the seconds per mile that the other boats either beat this boat by, or lost to it. Take a small fraction of this delta, say 10 percent, and lower the faster boats’ handicaps by this amount and raise the slower boats’.

By taking a small percentage you do not make radical changes to a boat’s handicap. If the boat corrected significantly faster or slower than the reference boat, say by 50 seconds per mile, do nothing with these boats. There has to be a reason for this large delta like good or bad luck. You don’t want to contaminate your adjustments with such races.

The golf handicap scheme is very simple to apply at the local level. It can help a small fleet. Over time it will tend to even things out. It will still allow the better sailor to win overall. 

Ø See more at: http://www.ussailing.org/racing/offshore-big-boats/phrf/golf-handicaps/#sthash.Ochdb4xX.dpuf

Today’s Thought

Golf is not a game of great shots. It’s a game of the most misses. The people who win make the smallest mistakes.

— Gene Littler, golfer

Tailpiece

Press release from the Washington Legal Aid Society:

“A new partner recently joined the firm of Button, Button, and Button. His name is Zipper. He replaces two Buttons.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Hunting and pecking for a living

ONCE IN A WHILE somebody will ask me how many words I have written during my career as a professional writer. I can honestly say I don’t know. Millions, certainly. Maybe even millions of millions. But I don’t know. Only amateurs count the words.

For 20 years I wrote a 1,000-word newspaper column six days a week. I seem to remember that came to about 5,000 columns. At the same time I wrote editorials for seven years. That’s somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 editorials. Then I wrote editorials full-time for another paper for two years, six a week. That’s an extra 600 or so.  

Then I wrote books about boats. Twelve or so were accepted by publishers. Three or four never did find a home. In between, I wrote articles for magazines. I never kept count of them, but there were certainly scores, possibly hundreds. And these days I write columns for my blog. I’ve done more than 900 so far. So what I say to the people who ask is “Go ahead, you do the math.”

The second thing they ask is why I never learned to touch-type. They see me hunting and pecking at the keyboard and jump to the conclusion that I was never taught properly. Well I was, as a matter of fact.

One of the subjects we studied at journalists’ college was touch-typing. We were all young men, then, of course. Women newspaper reporters were very rare at that time. I don’t think our editors trusted them to know what news was. We certainly didn’t have any women cub reporters at our college.

We took lessons in typing from a rather nice middle-aged lady who wore a resigned look on her face. She knew what would happen. She knew the young male reporters bursting with testosterone and awash with hormones would never want to be seen touch-typing in the newsroom like a bunch of fairies. Real reporters pounded their typewriters with two fingers and swore at the keys when they got stuck.

We didn’t actually wear fedoras and trench coats, and we all did pass our typing exams because we had to, to keep our jobs, but as soon as we got back to our respective newspaper offices we all abandoned touch-typing and regressed to manly hunting and pecking.

For one thing, it made our stories more concise, which endeared us to the copy editors. They had great power over us. They could change our spelling and our grammar and cuss us out in front of everybody. We were very scared of the copy editors.

The other thing about two-finger typing was that it slowed down the communication between the brain and the fingertips. That was a good thing because it gave you a chance to criticize your writing. When we did eventually get a woman in the reporters’ room she was hated by the copy editors because her stories were always three times as long as they needed to be, and filled with useless twiddly-bits, as if she were chatting idly to her next-door neighbor.

The problem, as we figured it out, was that she was a star touch-typist. She typed at the speed of a blazing comet. She didn’t have to think about where to find the m or the n or remember when to hit the caps lock or anything. Her fingers flew to each hidden key surely and automatically, and there was nothing to stop the steady stream of words from her brain flowing straight out of her fingertips, no time to assess the true sense of the words that flowed like Niagara out of her typewriter, no chance to do a modicum of self-editing as she wrote.

In the press club bar in the evening, the poor copy editors who had the dreaded task of cutting her copy down to size would order large whiskies with shaking hands and we young-blood male reporters would shake our heads solemnly and commiserate with them. We actually bought them drinks when we could afford it. It was always a good thing to keep in with the copy editors.

I still hunt and peck. I am still an atrocious typist. But what the heck. Who cares? I don’t have to worry about copy editors any more. And, glory be, the keys don’t get stuck together now, either.

Today’s Thought

He wrote for certain papers which, as everybody knows,

Is worse than serving in a shop or scaring off the crows.

— Rudyard Kipling

Tailpiece

There was an old lady of Worcester

Who was often annoyed by a rorcester.

She cut off his head

Until he was dead,

And now he don’t crow like he yorcester.

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

A paean to the trade winds

ONE OF MY FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHS of my wife shows her sitting in the cockpit of a 30-foot sailboat we then owned. She is reading a book, with her sunhat pulled down over her eyes, and she is the picture of peace and serenity. Meanwhile, a few feet away in the background, a large white foaming crest runs the length of the boat. She doesn’t turn a hair. She is absorbed in her novel. For this is the friendly trade wind, the southeast trade in mid-South Atlantic, where the water is warm and deep blue, and the sky is dotted with little puffs of cotton wool clouds.
The trade-wind belts must be proof that God loves sailors and wants to make up for all the storms and hurricanes that He creates in other parts of the oceans. There is a magic to the trades that no landlubber can experience, a fair breeze that speeds a small boat along on her course for weeks at a time, surging and dipping in a welter of foam as the sails swell with power.
The square rig was the ideal one for the trades, of course, and I often think that modern sailors who try to run downwind in the trades with goosewinged mainsail and jib are either too lazy to do anything special for the trades, or else are simply ignorant and therefore condemned to suffer the rolling and jibing and chafing of the damned.
In the middle of the last century, the big names in small-boat cruising mostly used twin jibs for trade-wind work. They rigged them on the forestay and poled them out from the mast. They ran the sheets aft to the tiller and discovered to their delight that the boat would steer herself. If she strayed off course, one jib would pull more strongly than the other, and automatically move the tiller to correct the course.
This rig is still widely used, especially on small under-crewed boats, and I have sailed many thousands of miles with a refinement known as the twin-staysail (twistle) rig. The twistle has the advantage that it allows the twin jibs to lie farther ahead of the forestay in a deep V, which counteracts the rolling motion normally associated with running dead downwind. The self-steering action is even more pronounced in the twistle rig, of course, because the sailplan’s center of effort is so far ahead of the center of lateral resistance. The boat feels as if she is running on rails and doesn’t even need a rudder.
The trades have a reputation for being constant, both in force and direction, claims that are false in both cases. The “reinforced” trades can sometimes blow as hard as 30 knots, but they normally confine themselves to between 12 and 20 knots. And, of course, this is all downhill work, for nobody in their right senses plans a long passage to windward in the trades. As for direction, the trades often vary 20 or 30 degrees from northeast or southeast, but that causes no great bother for most rigs.
In many cases, the trade-wind route is the long way to anywhere, but it’s still the fastest and safest. What’s more, a trade-wind passage is a wonderful experience. It’s about as close to Nirvana as any ordinary sailor is likely to get. 
Today’s Thought
And winds of all the corners kiss’d your sails, To make your vessel nimble.
— Shakespeare, Cymbeline
Tailpiece
There was a young lady of Natchez
Whose garments were always in patchez.
When comment arose
On the state of her clothes
She admitted: “Where Ah itchez Ah scratchez.”
(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Full keel versus fin keel

IN THE EARLY STAGES of falling in love with sailing, the question most frequently asked is: “Should I buy a boat with a full keel or a fin keel?”

The answer is that it depends on whether you want to do serious deep-sea sailing, out of sight of land and well away from sheltered waters. That’s when you need a full-keeled boat. If you’re doing coastal sailing or round-the-buoys racing, a fin-keeled boat will do you fine, and it will probably be faster, nimbler, and more weatherly.

So why buy a full-keel boat at all, especially since there aren’t many of them being built nowadays? Well, in short, they’re better at handling storms at sea if you’re short-handed.

The eminent research scientist Tony Marchaj, a champion racing sailor, tells us that a boat at sea is part of a dynamic system. The large surface area and shape of a traditional, long-keeled underwater hull can damp rolling better than the small surface area of a fin keel. This difference becomes marked when the boat is stopped in the water.

When the boat is stationary, after a few rolls the water in which the keel is swinging back and forth becomes filled with random eddies and swirls that offer less resistance to the keel. But if a boat is moving forward, the rolling energy (that is, overturning energy)  can be dissipated more efficiently into a much greater area of less confused water.

That’s why it’s usually necessary to keep a fin-keeled yacht running in heavy weather, whereas a boat with a full-length keel can lie hove-to, or ahull, and still dissipate the wave energy that is trying to roll her over through the greater area and superior damping qualities of her underwater shape.

Racing boats with fin keels usually carry crews large and skilled enough to man the helm at all times in heavy weather, and they can therefore benefit from staying on the move. But mom-and-pop boats must often stop while their crews cook, navigate, or get some rest. A full keel will then be more of a safeguard against getting rolled over than will a fin keel.

In other words, a traditional long keel will look after you when the boat is dead in the water; but a fin keel needs to be kept moving. Nevertheless, Marchaj points out that even a full keel will have more damping action if it can be kept moving. “In a survival situation, active rather than passive tactics are usually successful,” he says. “Those who are able to maintain some speed and directional control fare better.”

Ø If you’re interested, there’s much more from Marchaj, and a primer on how to handle storm conditions in a full-keeler, in my book, The Seaworthy Offshore Sailboat (International Marine).

Today’s Thought

When clouds appear, wise men put on their cloaks;

When great leaves fall, the winter is at hand;

When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?

Untimely storms make men expect a dearth.

— Shakespeare, Richard III

Tailpiece

“They tell me O’Riordan stayed up all night to see where the sun went.”

“Oh did he now? And what happened?”

“It finally dawned on him.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

How much water you need

 

I SEE THAT Californians affected by drought are now having their fresh water rationed. They’re restricted to 50 gallons per person per day. And they’re complaining of hardship. Poor babies.

 

People who cross oceans on small sailboats mostly use less than one gallon of water a day each, even in the tropics. In fact, if the California ration were applied, a boat doing a non-stop 30-day transatlantic crossing with four crew would need to carry 6,000 gallons of water weighing about 19 tons. An impossibility. Those whining Californians don’t know how lucky they are.

 

For drinking only, about half a gallon (two liters) per person per day is adequate to maintain good health, but one whole U.S. gallon (3.78 liters) is preferable as a minimum in hot climates, especially if it’s the only potable liquid.

 

You can, and surely will, get by on less, depending on the outside weather and temperature. But providing between a half-gallon and one gallon a day for each person for the projected duration of an ocean passage automatically assures you of an emergency reserve. You should figure out the number of days to allow for by dividing the distance in miles by 100. You’ll almost certainly cover more than 100 miles a day, but that’s the figure to aim at for planning purposes.  

 

Good water will remain sweet for at least six months in tightly sealed opaque containers stored in a cool place away from bright daylight. Don’t forget that it’s important to divide your water supply among separate tanks or containers in case some of it should go bad or leak away. There’s hardly anything worse than running out of water. As any Californian can tell you.

 

Today’s Thought

Water, water everywhere

Atlantic and Pacific

But New York City’s got them beat

Our aqua is terrific!

— Edward Koch, Mayor of NYC

Tailpiece

“You’ve got to lose weight. “I’m putting you on lettuce, carrots and green onions for a week.” “OK, doc. Before or after meals?”

 

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)