Let others win

ONE MINUTE I'M BEMOANING the embarrassment of coming last in a yacht race, and the next moment I'm being admonished in print by a famous editor of 100 years ago. Look at what just popped up in my reading matter; it's by Thomas Fleming Day, of The Rudder in 1911:

It is no  use getting up races if men won't enter them. Many men plead the foolish reason for not entering that they cannot win. Is winning the sole incentive? I think not.

There is pleasure, there is experience, there are a hundred things to compensate the man who goes in like a sailor and a sport, and takes his boat over the course, win or lose. This is especially so in the long races over unfamiliar water, to new ports, where you meet and make new friends.

Besides, do you owe nothing to the sport, or the club, or to your comrades, or to the stranger who comes to race under your flag? He at least should be given an opportunity to show what he can do against the best of your fleet . . .

One way to get more entries is to give every finisher something to show that he has been in the race. The best thing is a small bronze plate to screw up in his cabin. These can be had for a small sum, and are greatly appreciated, as they are an ever-present excuse for a yarn and a drink.

Also, more prizes should be offered; if seven start, at least three prizes should be given, not necessarily expensive ones, but something. A prize is a prize, no matter whether, second, or third.

It's extraordinary that Mr. Day should have anticipated my complaint 100 years before I complained. Perhaps he was what they call prescient; or perhaps sailboat skippers have always been the same.

I have certainly known men who completely destroyed local one-design racing classes because they just kept winning and nobody else ever stood a real chance of walking away with the top trophy. The perpetual losers just got thoroughly discouraged, sold their boats, and went looking for another class where they had a better chance; or else they bought boats that could be raced under rules like the CCA or IOR or PHRF, where a small bribe for the measurer might assure one of a more favorable handicap.

The message is quite plain. Even if winning is not the sole incentive, it is a mighty powerful  encouragement to keep racing, and if you wish to promote a healthy competitive class you must convince the perpetual winners to throw races occasionally, pour encourager les autres. Just let them win a few minor races, and then suddenly astonish them with your skill and expertise in the season's major final regatta. Yes, yes, I know it's sneaky, but it's for their own good, really.

 Today's Thought

Virtue and cunning were endowments greater

Than nobleness and riches: careless heirs
May the two latter darken and expend;
But immortality attends the former,
Making a man a god.
— Shakespeare, Pericles.

Tailpiece

“My wife has been using one of those flesh-reducing rollers for nearly six weeks now.”
“Oh yeah? Has she had any results?”
“Yes, the roller is much thinner.”

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

On coming last

CAN THERE BE ANYTHING WORSE than coming stone last in a sailboat race?

I had finished way down the list before in all sorts of boats from 30-Square Meters to sliding seat canoes,  but never, ever, had I come last.

But there we were on a perfectly normal day, a nice warm northeasterly blowing 10 to 15, no tide to speak of, flat water in the protected bay and a decent start at the windward end of the line — and everybody started to come past us.

It was the brutal simplicity that attracted me to the Mirror class. My boat weighed a little over 100 pounds, and there were hardly any strings to pull, just a gunter-rigged mainsail and a tiny jib with fixed fairleads.

What it boils down to in international one-design classes like this is the skill of the helmsman and crew — basic  human cunning, strategy, and experience.  It's like a cross between chess and poker on water.

We had always done well before. Won the offshore series outright, in fact. Came second in the nationals. Now this.

A boat skippered by a man we all called The Bumbling Idiot came up astern, then pointed up unbelievably high and promptly started to overtake us to windward.  I luffed him immediately, of course. Pure reflex.  He didn't respond. I hit the moron amidships and shouted "Go home!"   He smiled and shouted, "It's OK, John, don't worry about it. Carry on. I won't protest." 

HE wouldn't protest. For God's sake, HE wouldn't protest! I couldn't believe my ears.  I couldn't believe my eyes, either. He was disappearing ahead of us.

They all came past us on that first leg to windward, singly and in groups, going faster and pointing higher. The last one to overtake us was manned by two very large men, 250-pounders at least. Their jib was sheeted so tight it couldn't possibly contribute to forward drive. Their mainsail was backwinding at the mast and flopping all over the place at the leech. And still they came past, foot-by-foot they came past to leeward , two fat men laughing and chatting to each other and drinking beer out of tall cans, and when they hit our lee they simply bore off, gained speed, got ahead of us, and luffed up again to show us their transom.

By now, things were pretty desperate. "Sheet in the jib," I cried to my wide-eye crew. I slacked the mainsail until it, too, was flogging uselessly like the one ahead of us.  But nothing helped. We fell farther back. We finished last, five minutes behind the boat ahead, when the committee boat was already weighing anchor.

To my dismay, I never found out what went wrong that day. We checked the daggerboard and centerboard for plastic bags and seaweed. Nothing. The sails looked the same as they always did.  We weren't carrying any excess weight. It was a total mystery.  For a long time I  suspected the intervention of some supernatural power. Maybe someone like The Bumbling Idiot had consulted a witchdoctor and put a spell on us.

But it never happened again, I'm happy to say. We eventually won the nationals, and The Bumbling Idiot became the Class Secretary and learned some of the basic rules about overtaking to windward, and best of all we never had to luff him again because he was always behind us.

Today's Thought

If you go directly at the heart of a mystery, it ceases to be a mystery, and becomes only a question of drainage.
— Christopher Morley, Where the Blue Begins.

Tailpiece

“I see your husband finally gave up smoking.”
“That’s correct.”
“It must have taken a lot of willpower.”
“Yes, I have a lot of willpower.”

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

The overhead problem

PEOPLE CONTEMPLATING buying small sailboats often ask: "Is standing headroom necessary?"

And my answer to that has always been: "Necessary for what? Your question is incomplete."

As is the case with most things to do with boats, it all depends. It depends on what you want the boat for. At least, it mostly depends on that. If you're looking for a boat to live on, and entertain your friends, then of course you need headroom. What would your glittering dinner parties be without full standing headroom? How could anyone pass the Grey Poupon without dipping his tie in the pâté de foie gras?

But if you're wanting a daysailer for pottering around the bay and picnics ashore, you don't need headroom. Unfortunately, though, these answers are often too simplistic because normally sane sailors sometimes fall prey to over-ambitious thoughts. "What if . . .?" thinks the owner of the 22-foot daysailer. "What if I wanted to sail her to Hawaii?"

I once owned a pretty Santana 22, one of Gary Mull's sweet little club-racing one-designs. I tarted her up and fitted her out for cruising, and told anyone who cared to listen that she was now a sport cruiser, with a bow roller for the anchor, reef points in the jib, and a proper white-oak Samson post on the foredeck. Her sleek lines allowed only sitting headroom down below, of course, and then not even that when I made the mistake of replacing the old 3-inch foam settee cushions with 4-inch ones. But my wife and I went exploring in her quite happily for weeks at a time for several years.  (Quite happily being a comparative statement, you understand.)

The younger you are, the less need you feel for headroom. But even then, I have to admit, it was tedious down below at anchor in bad weather. There was a lot of crab-like shuffling when you wanted to move from one settee to the other. Cooking sitting down, facing sideways, was difficult, and trying to put your jeans on required some rather ungraceful calisthenics.  On many small sailboats there is also an overhead problem in the head itself.  Several manufacturers provide opening hatches above the toilet, so that when you are ensconced on the throne to attend to your business you may stick your head up through the open hatch and survey the foredeck and the far horizon.  This becomes interesting in crowded anchorages in the early morning, when heads pop up all over, trying to look inscrutable, avoiding each others' eyes and feigning interest in some far-off bird or animal. A few coarse old hands will inevitably have the nerve to wave and say hello to friends straining nearby, but they always seem to be men. I've never seen a woman with her head out of the hatch pretending to be checking the weather or looking for lost children.

People will tell you that headroom isn't important at sea. They say there isn't any headroom anyway when the boat's heeled over and you are stretched out sideways.  But I don't believe it. I find it even more difficult to move around in a heeled boat without headroom. You have to scrabble around like a spider in a bathtub.

Headroom is not needed for seaworthiness, nor for speed, of course. And it's questionable whether it's necessary for safety. But it's certainly needed for comfort, and the lack of it can limit the duration of your marriage.  So my advice is to put up with lack of headroom in small boats that perform well under sail.  Go ahead and sacrifice headroom for looks and sailing thrills. Above all, don't buy a small boat with an ugly, unseaworthy hump of a cabintop added simply to gain standing headroom.

But if you really must have headroom because you feel life just isn't worthwhile without it, the answer comes down to money. Buy a bigger boat. Something around 25 or 27 feet will do it, unless you make your money by playing basketball, in which case you might need to start at 35 feet and work upward.

Today's Thought

If you need to stand up, go on deck.
— Uffa Fox

Tailpiece

“Doc, my stomach hurts.”
“Let’s see ... hmmm, yes, you’ll have to diet.”
“What color, doc?”

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After-dinner thoughts

WHEN YOU'RE STRETCHED OUT on the couch after your Thanksgiving dinner, and all your blood has rushed to your stomach to sate itself upon the newly arrived turkey and cranberry sauce, your mind does strange things. Mine asks: "How has evolution affected boats sailed for pleasure?"
    This is not the time for such questions, of course, but the mind is strangely insistent. "Are they any better than their predecessors?" it wants to know. "Is Nature on the right track?"
    Well, a few days ago I was reading a Patrick O'Brian novel in which Dr. Maturin comes across a very rare butterfly whose normal markings are completely reversed. This is how evolution works. It occurs with diversions from the norm. Genetic mistakes, in other words. And if the mistake works better, it becomes the new norm. If it's no good, the new species dies out. In nature, "good" refers to the ability of something to reproduce itself, and to eat other things in the food chain, and the ability to rise in the food chain. Or, in the case of plants, the ability to smother your neighbors, to steal their food in the ground, and their sunlight.
    In the butterfly's case, it was immediately pounced upon by Dr. Maturin because of its rarity. ("Oh well," Nature sighs with a shrug of her shapely shoulders. "That didn't work. Too bad. Let's try something else.")
    So how do yachts fit in here? In theory, bad yachts will sink and remove themselves from the gene pool. Or they will be so slow and clumsy to windward that their owners will take an ax and chop them to bits.
    But what distinguishes a good sailboat from a bad one? I can think of seven areas: ease of handling, seaworthiness, comfortable accommodation, seakindliness, speed, weatherliness, and affordability.
ØEase of handling? Lighter, stronger fabrics for sails and lines have made handling easier (along with fancier winches and line stoppers).
ØSeaworthiness? I'd call it a slight improvement.
ØAccommodation? Definitely better.
ØSeakindliness? Probably no improvement on the whole.
ØSpeed? If we leave aside the ultra-lights and multihulls, perhaps just a little improvement.
ØWeatherliness? Much better, through rig and keel design, and better sails.
ØAffordability? Yes, more affordable now because of mass production.      
    So I think we have to agree that on the whole sailboats have indeed evolved for the better. They're living longer, too. Fiberglass is turning out to have a very long life, despite a few outbreaks of bottom pox here and there.
    (Okay, brain? That enough for you? Can I have my snooze now?)

Today's Thought
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species.

Tailpiece
Blessed are the pure in mind, for they shall inhibit the earth.

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

Giving thanks for boats

WELL, HERE IT IS, coming up to the end of November, and what is there to be thankful for? The usual, I guess. Wives. Husbands. Turkeys. Beer. Football. Television. And boats. Ah yes, boats.

When I was rummaging around in a 100-year-old copy of The Rudder magazine recently I came across a delightful little paean to the sailing ship. It was written by the editor, Thomas Fleming Day, and it was naturally a little one-sided and biased — faults totally eclipsed by the man's passion and his command of the language. I think it ought to be inscribed on a bronze plaque and put on display in a prominent pace to remind everybody, not just the sailors among us but everybody, of what we have lost, and what still remains that we can be thankful for. But judge for yourself:

"Unquestionably the sailing vessel is the most majestic and perfect creation of man. It above all his works embodies those perfections of detail which, taken as a whole, form a beautiful and inspiring object. He has never wrought in any other line a fabric which in its actions so mimics the graceful and delighting movements of a symmetrical and buoyant living thing. It seems to embody the very spirit of enterprise that created it. It confers beauty upon the element that it traverses and takes from every change of the seam sky and air a fresh grace and a more enchanting appearance. And when we realize what it has done for mankind: how in the shadow of its sails empire have sprung up and grown to greatness, how cities have flourished, races been nourished and houses in plenty and splendor; how it broadened the world only to bring its widely parted lands closer together, binding all in the golden bands of trade. When we recall who have trod the decks of these ships, who built, navigated and fought them, the master men of the ages, the welders and shapers of our present civilization. Thinking of these things we cannot but regret the passing of the sailing ship."

To which I can only add, 100 years later, that ships under sail still have not completely passed away, especially small ones, and for that we should be truly grateful.

 Today's Thought

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
— Samuel Butler
 
Tailpiece
A Seattle sailor has invented a combined corkscrew, can opener, and bottle opener. It saves losing them overboard separately.

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

Engines of a by-gone era

From The Rudder, 1911

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, when Thomas Fleming Day was the renowned editor of the equally renowned yachting magazine, The Rudder, there was a lot of interest in maritime engines for launches and sailboats.

Internal-combustion engines for yachts were still in the early stages of development in those days, of course, and manufacturers were springing up all over the place. There were literally scores of different makes of yacht engines to choose from. They weren't shy about proclaiming the merits of their wares, either. It's fascinating to read some of the claims they made.

Here are the texts of two advertisements from a 1911 copy of The Rudder:

u SPEEDWAY GASOLENE ENGINES

No material purchased is too good, no workman is too expert, and no improvement device is too small, not to be utilized in building.

The engine is the heart of the launch, and heart disease in Motor Boats is most frequent, insidious and ofttimes appalling.

In owning a Speedway Engine, you fortify yourself with reasonable insurance against the malady, and

WE CAN PROVE IT

(Gas Engine and Power Co. and Charles L. Seabury & Co., Morris Heights, New York City)

u LAMB ENGINES

("It Always Goes and Keeps Going until I Stop It")

(They) Are Ideal Yacht Engines

They are silent and powerful in operation and one of the surest and simplest engines to start and run.

While some men enjoy hearing the trip of steel rods, the snap of springs and cams, the smell of burning oil and grease--to one not accustomed to a roaring racket it takes all the pleasure out of cruising.

The nerve-racking moving parts have been eliminated in the LAMB--that's why it is an ideal yacht engine.

The absence of noisy or exposed moving parts is a revelation to many present engine users.

 (Lamb Boat and Engine Company, Clinton, Iowa/Lamb Engine Company of New York)

Today's Thought

Progress is the mother of problems.

— G. K. Chesterton

Tailpiece

More sporting definitions:

Sumo wrestling: Survival of the fattest.

Fishing: The eternal try-angle.

Fencing: Getting a sword in edgeways.

Golf: Tee for two.

Surfing: A loaf on the ocean wave.

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

All about props

NOW THAT WINTER is nearly upon us and the water is getting colder, Old Wotsisname is asking every passerby whether he should reduce the size of his prop. This is typical OW. He's just showing off. He wants people to know how clever he is. He read somewhere that because colder water is denser, propeller diameter should be reduced about 1 percent for every 10°F drop in water temperature,  based on a "normal" of 70°F.

I believe this is true. I also read it somewhere. In one of my own reference books, actually. But I don't go around shouting about it. My natural modesty forbids it. However, there's no doubt that many sailors show a serious interest in propellers and many of them go to great lengths to match their propellers to their engines for maximum efficiency and miles per gallon.

If you're one of them, you might be interested in some more propeller bric-a-brac I've collected over a lifetime of frustrating engagements with marine engines and propulsion systems:

Ø Increased diameter absorbs more power than increased pitch.

Ø A decrease of 1 inch in propeller diameter will increase propeller rpm by about 300.

Ø A decrease of one inch in pitch is good for an increase of propeller rpm of about 200.

Ø On auxiliary sailboats, the minimum clearance round the tips of the propeller blades is 10 percent of the propeller diameter.

Ø Powerboats need 20 percent or more clearance to avoid vibration.

Ø After installing a propeller on a shaft, the thinner lock nut should be put on first. This allows the larger nut, with more thread area, to assume the load when it is tightened up against the thin lock nut.

Ø For the greatest efficiency, the pitch-to-diameter ratio should be less than 1.4 : 1, except on high-speed boats doing 35 knots plus.

Ø A large-diameter propeller is always more efficient than a smaller one, except on boats designed for continuous operation at 35 knots or more.

Ø There is disagreement about whether to allow a sailboat's prop to spin when you're under sail only. New York naval architect Dave Gerr says a prop creates less drag when it's free to rotate. British author Eric Hiscock says the opposite: "Experiments made by P. Newall Petticrow Ltd. have shown that a 2- or 3-bladed propeller offers less drag when it is locked than when it is free to spin, and that the drag of a spinning propeller is greatest at about 100 rpm." Another renowned American naval architect, Francis S. Kinney, agrees with Hiscock. 

I myself think it varies from boat to boat, and all you have to do is anchor in a current, attach a fishing scale to your rode, and put the (non-running) engine in and out of gear. (I also have a theory concerning rotor blades on a falling helicopter, which definitely encounter more drag when rotating than when locked, but it proved highly controversial and caused much ill feeling and backbiting on one bulletin board; so I won't dwell on it here.)

Today's Thought

It is the darling delusion of mankind that the world is progressive in religion, toleration, freedom, as it is progressive in machinery.

— Moncure D. Conway, Dogma and Science.

Tailpiece

Some sporting definitions:

Greyhound racing: The curs of the working classes.
Table tennis: The sport of pings.
Polo: Jockey hockey.
Weightlifting: Careless rupture.
Bull-fighting: He who hesitates is tossed.

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