Dealing with heavy weather

THE WAY OF A SHIP in the sea is not as great a mystery as the Bible makes it out to be. Most of us can understand that a boat left to its own resources in heavy seas will tend to adopt a position that’s roughly broadside on to the wind.

Most keelboats will settle that way, and be quite happy, when all sail is taken down. Often, there’s a tendency, especially with sloops, for the bow to drift downwind a bit, which causes the hull to gather way and forereach. You can counteract that by lashing the helm to leeward, so that every time she tries to go forward the rudder will point her up into the wind and stop her in her tracks.  This is known as lying ahull, and works fine until conditions get so bad that your boat is being lifted by large breaking waves and hurled bodily down to leeward.

Most of us can also understand that things would be better if the boat could be made to lie with the pointy end facing the oncoming waves. Then she’d be presenting a much smaller area to the force of breaking waves, and she’d be much more difficult to overturn.

The question is how do you keep her facing that way in heavy weather without the help of an engine?  If you can keep the bow still in the water, then of course she will lie downwind as if she were made fast to a post. The sea anchor, made fast at the bow, is designed to do that, to act as a post, although it’s a post that actually moves very slowly through the water. But while it works well for boats with even, shallow draft, the sea anchor won’t keep a normal keel boat pointed into the waves, no matter whether it’s a fin keeler or a full keeler.

The Pardeys, a well known and very experienced cruising couple, claim to have kept their 29-footer pointing more or less into the waves by setting a sea anchor from a bridle, with one end of the bridle attached to the bow and the other to the stern. By taking up slack on one end of the bridle or the other, you can  of course alter the way the boat lies.

I’ve never tried this, but I have serious doubts whether normal people could manage this trick. For a start, I can’t imagine how I would be able to drag a sea anchor with its mass of small lines and its 25- to 30-foot spread of parachute material across the deck and over the side to windward in a heavy gale.

So I have never tried to lie bow-on to the waves in heavy weather. My method, in a full-keeler, is simply to lie ahull with the tiller lashed to leeward, until things get too dicey, and then to run off downwind under a storm job or bare poles. You need lots of sea room to do that, of course. A fin keeler is best kept moving at all times, but this needs a fit crew.

Some boats will lie about 45 to 60 degrees off the wind with the help of a special storm mainsail. It’s cut so that a lot of its area is aft of the boat’s underwater pivot point, the center of lateral resistance, so that it tries to point her up into the waves all the time.  But most boats these days don’t come equipped with a storm main, and few of us realize that using a third reef in the working mainsail instead doesn’t cut it, because that actually moves the sail’s center of effort farther forward, instead of aft where you want it.

 Anyway, the only real way to sort out this problem is to go out in bad weather and experiment with your own boat. The best way would be to persuade some experienced sailor with a sister ship to take you offshore, hunting for a storm, and watch what he or she does to cope with heavy weather. But I’d say your chances of pulling that off are rather slim.

Today’s Thought
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

— Charles Dudley Warner, Editorial, the Hartford Courant, c. 1890

Tailpiece

Overhead at a Boy Scout meeting:

“Did you ever have one of those days when you felt just a little untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, discourteous, cowardly, and antagonistic toward those wretched old women who always wait for suckers to help them across the goddam road?”

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

 

Thoughts on lying ahull

SOMEWHERE IN Rich Wilson’s book about the Vendée Globe race he makes an offhand reference to the fact that it’s not safe to lie ahull in a sailboat in a storm. I was surprised by that statement because Wilson is one of the most experienced sailors in the world.

In his book, Race France to France — Leave Antarctica to Starboard, he tells how he was the only American competitor in the 2008/9 running of the non-stop race around the world for singlehanders. At age 58 he was the oldest of the 30 skippers in the race, and he finished in 9th place in his Open 60 class boat, Great American III. It was a magnificent effort that placed him among the absolute elite of ocean racers.

But he obviously didn’t know that others in his elite class, some who went to sea a long time before him, did use lying ahull as a storm tactic. It was, in fact, standard procedure in the days when round-the-worlders sailed in boats with deep full-length keels and wine-glass sections. Wilson’s storm experience presumably has been in modern multihulls and fin keelers, which need different handling in storms.

Lying ahull, of course, is a passive and very simple tactic. You simply douse all sail and lash the helm to leeward.  A boat with a full-length keel will drift slowly sideways-on to the waves. As the wind drags her through the water like a barn door, she leaves an area of big eddies and swirls to windward. When a top-heavy swell hits those swirls, it tends to break and expend its energy before it reaches the boat.

Of course, when the seas get so big that they pick up your boat and hurl her bodily sideways, it’s time to change tactics and run off before the wind, but most boats plying the trade-wind routes at the right times of the year never face such bad weather. And meanwhile, lying ahull in a “normal” gale is a safe, approved tactic for most boats with traditional keels — always allowing, of course, for the fact that all boats react differently.

Fin-keeled boats do better in bad conditions if they are kept moving, so that the keel moves through a greater area of water in which to expend the energy the boat accrues from abnormal wave action.

 Anyone needing a more thorough explanation should read C. A. Marchaj’s fascinating book Seaworthiness: The Forgotten Factor.

All of which goes to show how even the most experienced sailors can’t know everything about sailing and seaworthiness. It is indeed a vast subject, and we can all learn more every day.

 Column No. 1,000

THIS IS a special day for the Mainly about Boats column. This is, in fact, column number 1,000. Many thousands of words have gone into these columns, some sucked out of the air, some the product of grinding teeth, many forged in panic with a deadline approaching.

Three columns a week for seven years adds up to about two-and-a-half full-length novels. All 1,000 blog posts are stored in the archives, on your right, for you to fossick through at will.  Sooner or later you should find something there that interests you, or amuses you, or possibly even educates you. That was the plan, anyhow. I hope it  worked.

Fair winds and good landfalls.

Today’s Thought

While the spoken word can travel faster, you can’t take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader.

— Kingman Brewster, President, Yale

Tailpiece

A friend of mine thinks he’s going to make a fortune. He’s working on a dog food that tastes like a mailman’s leg.

(Every Monday, Wednesday, Friday — a new Mainly about Boats column.)