A rumor to disregard

I DON’T KNOW who starts these things, but the rumor about sailing under jib only has been pretty persistent over the years. The rumor, of course, is that sailing under jib only will cause dismasting.

I have no idea why sailing under a jib only should cause dismasting. Like many others, I have sailed hundreds of deepsea miles under jib only.

One of the lovely things about the lone jib is that the center of effort is so far forward that a windvane, which normally struggles on a dead downwind course, is much better able to function properly. You can huddle down below in a gale, for example, nice and warm and dry, with your hands wrapped around a mug of coffee and rum, while your boat flies downwind like she’s on rails.

The only problem with this rig is that if your course is deeper than a reach, your boat will roll from gunwale to gunwale. But all dead downwind work is pretty rolly, anyway, unless you know how to fly twin jibs in a deep V forward, so they act like a cone and resist sideways movement.

Some sloops and cutters will reach wonderfully and even beat under jib only, making good progress to windward. But on the run you need to pole the jib out, of course, and there’s a clever way to do that. I learned it from the Pardeys. The trick is to have a track running up the front of the mast as high as your pole is long. The car that runs on this track accepts the inboard end of the pole. You then hoist the pole up alongside the mast and stow it there.

When you need to deploy the pole, you attach the jib clew, or the sheet nearby, to the bottom, outboard, end of the pole. Then you simply let the pole slide down the mast. As it comes down, the sheet, and the clew of the jib, automatically gets pushed out into position. You never have to handle the weight or awkwardness of the pole.

So don’t be put off. Fly that darn jib on its own if you like, and to heck with the rumor mongers.

Today’s Thought

Rumor travels faster but it don’t stay put as long as truth.

— Will Rogers, The Illiterate Digest

Tailpiece

Our local school officials recently gave eighth-graders a test to see what they were best suited for.

It was found that they were best suited for the seventh grade.

The path to bliss afloat

THIS IS A QUESTION for the men: Do you have a female partner who is not a mad-keen sailor herself? If so, I have good news for you. I have been handed the answer to inter-gender bliss on board.

First, and most importantly, you must remember that she is not your crew. She is your lady love, the light of your life, your dearest darling, and you are taking her for a nice ride. Consequently, accept that you are singlehanding. Yes, it’s true. You have a passenger. But you are singlehanding.

It’s also true that if you go cruising and find a beautiful quiet anchorage, she will probably offer to make supper, especially if you first serve her drinks in the cockpit at sunset. But you should not rely on her to bring you back if you fall overboard — not because she doesn’t want you back (although, sadly, that may be true in some cases) but because she honestly doesn’t feel capable of getting the sails down on her own, finding the Lifesling, starting the engine, and avoiding running over you with the propeller. That’s not why she came sailing.

She did not come sailing to be shouted at, either. She is not your crew. She is your passenger. Do try to remember that. So you can’t shout at her. You can give no commands. You can give no orders. You’re on your own, remember. She is an ornament. She is your treasure. Treat her accordingly. (True feminists might find this a bit sickening, but let’s pretend it’s okay for the purposes of our argument.)

Thus, you should set up your boat for singlehanding. Invest in an autopilot and a self-steering wind vane if you’re going offshore. Don’t expect your darling partner to grind winches like a deck ape, or reef the gnarly mainsail in Force 8.

Having accepted this arrangement with good grace, you might be surprised when she does spontaneously offer help from time to time, when she takes the fenders in of her own accord, or shortens the dinghy painter when you’re about to back over it, without being asked. You might even be surprised by how much she actually does know about sailing, and how competent she would be in an emergency. But nothing should be taken for granted. You should not expect it, or require it. Let it be a surprise when it happens. And for gawd’s sake show gratitude when it does.

It should also be no surprise to anyone that my wife dictated this column, though I have to say she has stuck with me lo these many decades. I recall only one occasion when she threatened to jump overboard, and that was during a dinghy race when she had more than her usual amount of difficulty with hoisting the spinnaker and she took exception to the valuable advice I was giving her. Otherwise, apart from the remarks about Captain Bligh that escaped on occasions, we have got on very well together on our boats.

Of course, I realize that advice like this is easier to hand out than to follow, but if it helps prevent a split in the partnership it’s worth persevering with. And while the path to marital bliss never was smooth, you have it within your power to smooth out the sailing bumps. You’re singlehanding. Just accept it.

Today’s Thought

There are only about 20 murders a year in London, and not all are serious — some are just husbands killing their wives.

— G. H. Hatherill, Commander, Scotland Yard, 1 Jul 54

Tailpiece

Beware of the man who insists he’s the boss on his boat. He’ll probably lie about other things, too.

Earning luck at sea

EVERY NOW AND THEN we hear of a bad storm at sea that affects a fleet of small yachts. Sometimes, they’re racing, sometimes they’re cruising, but all too often some are lost, while others survive. There are always a slew of reasons why this happens, of course, but I always fall back on my Black Box Theory for an explanation.
I’m not going to repeat the theory in toto here because I hate boring people, and many of you know it well enough already anyway, but for the benefit of the new sailors who keep coming along, here is a summary to excite your interest:
I always imagine that every boat has a secret black box that collects the Brownie points you earn for every seamanlike action you take. Every time you check the oil level on the engine, no matter how awkward it is to reach the dipstick, you get a point. Every time you buy a real paper chart of an area you want to explore, you get a point. Every time you get up in the middle of the night and go on deck in the rain to check your anchor bearing, you get a point. For that matter, you also get a point for even having an anchor bearing to begin with. You get points (quite a few actually) simply for imagining what would happen on deck and down below if your boat were turned turtle by a large wave, and doing something about it. And so forth, ad infinitum.
As I’ve said before, good sailors don’t live in the moment. They anticipate what’s ahead.
Now, it can happen to any boat, no matter how well found and well handled, that a time will come when human skill and effort can do no more to rescue it from a perilous position. But if you have points in the black box you can spend them to ensure that your boat will survive. Actually, you don’t have to withdraw the points. They expend themselves automatically as necessary.
Other boats battling the same circumstances as you, but lacking points in their black boxes, are less likely to survive. Those who don’t understand the mysteries of small boats sailing on big waters will say you were just lucky. And, depending on how you define luck, or good fortune, they may be right. What they don’t know is that you earned your luck.
When Virgil said fortune favors the bold, he wasn’t thinking about the sea. On the contrary, good fortune on small sailboats favors the cautious, the organized, and those with enough imagination to wonder what the hell can go wrong next. Because it will.
Today’s Thought
Shallow men believe in luck . . . Strong men believe in cause and effect.
— Emerson, Conduct of Life: Worship
Tailpiece
A playboy is a man who summers in Maine, winters in Florida, and springs at blondes.

At a loss for words

WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG and still learning the language of sailors, I was shanghaied to crew on 38-foot wooden racing sloop, a 30-Square Meter, with a bucking jib. To this day, I don’t know how a bucking jib differs from an ordinary jib. The skipper was a crusty old salt who could get over-excited on occasion, so I never found the courage to ask him. Not that I would have known what to ask, in any case.

But I did know that it wasn’t just an ordinary jib, because every time we came charging up to the stone jetty at the yacht club after a day on the water, out of control as usual, he would jump up and down in the cockpit and shout fiercely: “Don’t just stand there, boy! Get that bucking jib down.” Which I did, every time, with great promptitude, fearful of his wrath.

Thinking about this recently made we wonder about the language other sailors use to get their sails down. I mean, you can lower the jib or you can strike it. You can douse it, drop it, take (or haul) it down (or in), and furl it.

A phrase such as “Strike the mainsail!” has a fine ring about it, but I fear not many present-day sailors use it. According to my trusty dictionary, to strike sail meant “to lower one or more sails suddenly, as in a sharp maneuver, approach of a squall, or in token of surrender; also as a salute to a superior ship, a sovereign, etc.”

On any boat I’ve owned we just dropped the sail, but I have heard other skippers use the word “douse.” The dictionary describes douse as: “To suddenly let go, strike, haul down, lower, or take in, as a sail ...”

You’ll notice that once again there is a hurriedness about it, a sense of urgency. There simply doesn’t seem to be a sailor’s word for those occasions when you don’t care how long it takes your wife to get the main down, those nice gentle days when you’re just slipping along quietly with everything under control, and no squalls, sovereigns, or superior ships causing you anxiety.

What  is needed is a sailorly word or short phrase that indicates to your crew that she can just ease the sail down slowly, gently flake it on top of the boom, tie the gaskets nicely (taking all the time in the world to get the reef knots with their sweet little ends sticking out right) and put the mainsail cover on over everything, laced up and smoothed down, before she rushes down below to pour your gin-and-tonic, start the stove, and get supper ready.

You’d think we’d have a phrase for it by now, wouldn’t you? But no, I can’t think of one. “Ease the main” is already taken and means something else in any case. There’s something unsuitably suggestive about “Gentle the main,” while “Take down the mainsail at your leisure, darling, and fold it gently” is too long and sissy-like.

I simply can’t imagine why no-one has come up with a suitable verb or phrase in all the years that have passed since women were allowed to crew on boats. It’s high time somebody did.

Today’s Thought 

I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.

— V. S. Pritchett

Tailpiece

“And how would you like your hair cut, sir?”

“Off.”

“Yes, sir, but what style?”

“What are your prices?”

“Haircut $15, shave $10.”
"So okay, shave it to a short back and sides."

Freak waves and tide rips

MOST OF US by now have come to realize that freak ocean waves are not really freak at all. They are real and quite regular, though the chances of meeting one in a small yacht are quite remote. They are the result of waves in regular trains riding on each others’ backs.

In any sea state, there are many wave trains present, each with its own speed, height, and direction. They constantly get into and out of step with each other, and every now and then it just happens that a number of these components will get into synch and produce an exceptionally high wave. The same conditions may also produce an unusually low trough, incidentally, and large ships have often reported dropping into huge holes in the ocean without warning, mostly with severe damage.

As a matter of interest, the probability of occurrence of exceptionally high waves may be calculated mathematically:

Ø It has been shown that one wave in 23 is over twice the height the average wave in a sea state.

Ø One wave in 1,175 is over three times the average height.

Ø One wave in over 300,000 exceeds four times the average height.

But what is not so well known is the fact that it’s not only the deep ocean that can produce “freak” waves in generally moderate conditions. If you’re running in from the sea, and you pass over a shallow bank, you can meet some quite alarmingly large waves.  It doesn’t seem right that larger waves should form in shallower water, but it comes about because a wave “feeling the bottom” is slowed down by friction, and therefore the distance between crests is reduced. The energy in the waves remains the same,  but it’s being compressed into a smaller area, and that energy has to go somewhere, so it extends upwards. In other words, the waves get bigger and steeper. It’s like pushing a carpet along the floor from one end.

Over shallow banks, and, of course, at the beach, the wave activity can be more dangerous than it is farther out in deep water. The same thing happens when waves run into an opposing current, as we know full well around here in Puget Sound, with its various tide rips. It’s interesting to note that a wave will be stopped completely by an opposing current traveling at one quarter of the speed of the wave. That wave literally hits the wall and rears up as a frightening cliff of water.

The Scripps Institute of Oceanography has shown that waves entering an area of opposing currents can quite easily have their heights raised by 50 to 100 percent in currents as low as 2 to 3 knots, creating breaking waves even in the absence of local wind.

The lesson to be drawn from this is that skippers of small yachts cruising for pleasure in coastal waters, and even in comparatively calm waters such as those of the Salish Sea, should keep a good watch for unusual patches and shadows on the water. Stay well clear of them, and keep away from charted overfalls and tide rips. They can be deadly for small boats.

Today’s Thought

Out of sight of land the sailor feels safe.

It is the beach that worries him.                                                  

— Charles G. Davis

Tailpiece

“Won’t your mother be angry if she sees you in that skimpy swimsuit?”
"Yeah, I guess so. It's hers."

The heater that iced up

THEY SAY THAT IF you have a heater on your boat, you can extend your sailing season by six weeks or so at each end. I have never been swayed by that argument. Having spent most of my life in the sub-tropics, I have no love of sailing in the cold. Or the cold-and-rain, as happens around here. So I reckon there’s no need for a heater on a boat in this region.
There was one on a little Cape Dory 25D I once owned. We found her on an island in the San Juans, and sailed her home one bitter-cold day in February, when there was ice on deck. We had an overnight stop in a marina in Anacortes, where we ran into an old sailing friend. He offered us an electric heater because he said a cold night was forecast, but we scoffed and turned him away. “We have a nice Force 10 heater installed,” we said.
After a meal ashore, we came back to the boat and lit the heater. It had started life as a kerosene model, but the previous owner had converted it to gas. A small can of propane screwed onto the bottom.
We soon noticed something strange. It didn’t seem to be producing a lot of heat, and what heat it did produce rose to the top of the cabin and stayed there. What was even stranger was the fact that the can of propane was collecting a coat of ice. If we stood up in the cabin, the air was luke-warm from the belly-button up, and freezing cold from the belly-button down. As the layer of ice on the can grew thicker, we shut the heater off, fearing that it was actually producing more cold than heat on average. Our bunks were below belly-button level, so we spent a very cold night aboard, having brought only light-weight sleeping bags with us.
One of the first jobs I did on that boat was to convert the Force 10 back to kerosene heat.
It was a fairly easy job once I’d bought the right tools for flaring the copper tubing and so on. The new burner put out a lot more heat and never tried to make ice, but the hot air still hung around above belly-button level until we bought a 12-volt fan and mounted it where a reading lamp used to be. That stirred the air up nicely, distributing warmth all over the cabin from head to toe.
But we rarely used that heater because the fan used electricity, and I was scared we might flatten the battery overnight and not be able to start the diesel engine on a cold morning.
I have learned over the years that very little is simple on a boat, and the less you have to go wrong the better off you are.
So we never had a heater on any other boat since. And our belly buttons have been very grateful.
Today’s Thought
What is true, simple and sincere is most congenial to man’s nature.
— Cicero, De Officiis
Tailpiece
“Who gave you that black eye?”
“My wife.”
"I thought she was out of town.”
“So did I.”

In love with a Vertue 25

PEOPLE CAN BE SO CRUEL. Even people who know you well. Even people without a harmful bone in their bodies. The trouble is, they just don’t stop to think how something might affect you.

Two good friends of mine, Sue and Jere, out cruising in the Salish Sea, have sent me an e-mail picture of a gorgeous little wooden boat they came across in Pages’ Resort Marina on Gabriola Island in British Columbia.  I recognized her as a Vertue 25, a British design by Laurent Giles.

She looked brand new, sparkling in the Canadian sunshine with gleaming white topsides and faultless brightwork, but I discovered she was built by the Bent Jespersen boatbuilding firm on Vancouver Island in 1985.

She’s called Sarissa and I fell deeply in love with her at first sight, as, I suspect, my friends knew I would.

What can be more cruel than unrequited love? I can’t afford to buy her, I can’t afford to maintain her, and as far as I know she’s not for sale anyhow. The simple act of sending me her picture has broken my heart.

I’ll get over it, of course. I always do. This isn’t the first time. But each time it takes a bit longer.

I have drooled over the Vertue 25 ever since I first read Humphrey Barton’s book, Vertue XXXV. He singlehanded her around Cape Horn, of course, the smallest boat to double the cape at the time, I believe. And then there was the epic voyage of another Vertue 25 as detailed in that splendid book My Old Man and the Sea, written in alternating chapters by father and son, David and Daniel Hays. A wonderful read.

The Hays’s set out from Britain, sailed south and across the Atlantic to Panama, made their way via the Galapagos to Easter Island, and then plunged into the Screaming Fifties to round Cape Horn and head for home up the Atlantic again.

So what is it about the 25-foot Vertue that affects me so much? Hard to say, really, except that she’s simply a beautiful, sturdy  little heavy-displacement boat that has all the features I love. A transom-hung rudder. A full-length keel. A well-protected cockpit. Narrow beam. Three-inch bulwarks. A cocky doghouse. A simple sloop rig. A sheerline to die for.

Most people these days would describe her as old fashioned and outdated. I don’t care. I’m that way myself. Say what you like, but this is a boat that just wants to be taken to sea, and when you look at her you know that she’s promising to look after you in the bad stuff, tiny as she is.

As a final touch of cruelty, it occurred to me that if I did own a Vertue 25, I would feel compelled to cross an ocean in her. That, after all, is her purpose in life.  But I’m getting too long in the tooth for that sort of thing. However, when I mentioned this to another friend she said:

“I disagree with you, John. The purpose of owning a  Laurent Giles Vertue would be to have a boat that you loved, that made you recall previous ocean crossings, and  admitting that cross-ocean adventures are beyond you now, while enjoying short sails in the protected Gulf Islands. Would you like us to go and have a look at her for you?”

Thanks, Jen, but no. I’m suffering enough already.

Today’s Thought

It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing.

— Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters
Tailpiece
"I couldn't sleep a wink last night with those curtains wide open."
"Why didn't you close them?"
"I can't reach across the street."