Other ways to start engines

JUST A FEW days ago I overheard a cruising sailor bemoaning the fact that he could not start his very expensive diesel motor because his comparatively cheap starter motor had failed. It reminded me of a column I wrote several years ago pointing out that cruising sailboats are rarely pure sailboats these days. There are very few that do not carry engines of one sort or another. The reason for this is that, even if you normally keep your boat on a mooring, sooner or later you’re going to have to maneuver in a harbor or marina, and small-boat harbors and marinas have become so congested that most are not navigable under sail in anything much over 20 feet in length.

It is actually possible to maneuver a boat in a crowded harbor by warping and kedging, or even sculling, as sailors have done for centuries, but we have either lost the skill or the will, and certainly the patience, so we now find ourselves far too dependent on the engine to get us out to where we can use the wind to sail.

And to get the engine started in the first place, too many of us are dependent on the electric starter motor. It would be a great relief if we could start our engines by hand, instead of having to rely on electricity, and indeed a few inboard diesels can be started by hand, but they are necessarily of low horsepower and fit only for small yachts.

Now, there are other ways to start engines. One way is to use a small hand pump to pressurize a tank of air that will spin the engine vigorously for a couple of minutes. Think what a blessing that could be when your battery is flat or your solenoid has passed on to its final resting place. There are clockwork engine starters, too, that you can wind up slowly and easily before releasing them to spin the motor over.

But these mechanically simple starting aids are not common and they are therefore expensive, so the great majority of sailors are stuck with electric starter motors. They are obviously not ideal for boats, but because most boat engines are derived from the ones landlubbers build in huge numbers for their cars, tractors, and generators, we are stuck with their method of starting them.

The one thing you can say for electric starters is that they don’t draw much energy from your battery. Surprisingly little, in fact, if the engine is working properly. For example, starting a medium-sized diesel will draw about 4,800 watts. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but even if you crank away for 20 seconds you’re taking only 2.5 amp-hours from your 12-volt battery. That’s about half of what a dedicated CD player would consume if it were running 4 hours a day. And even with a modest 30-amp charge, your alternator will replace that energy in less than 10 minutes.

Nevertheless, this is not the best way to start a marine engine. Salt water and electricity don’t get on well together, and most of us could well do without that sickening feeling in the pit of the stomach when you turn the key and nothing happens but a little “click” that foretells all kinds of trouble and frustration to come.

Today’s Thought

Simplicity, most rare in our age.

— Ovid, Ars Amatoria

Tailpiece

“Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”

“Yes. Do you have medical insurance?”

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

Curing pre-cruise scruples

I HAVE NOTICED to my astonishment that there are still some old-fashioned women who insist on being given a wedding band, or at least an engagement ring, before they will embark on a cruise for two under sail on a small boat.

It therefore behooves every male skipper to keep handy a medium-sized ring of some metal resembling gold, fit for the wedding finger of the left hand of a female exhibiting a case of pre-cruise scruples.

In addition, the well-prepared skipper will keep handy the following script, which is to be read aloud in the privacy of the saloon before the cruise starts:

“Now hear this; now hear this. To all whom it may concern, let it be known that under the powers invested in me by the Merchant Shipping Connubial Bliss Act, as captain of a vessel engaged in peaceful commerce and flying the flag of the United States of America, I do take this woman, Flossie Splendide, to be my lawful wedded wife, with all the duties that implies, for just so long as this voyage shall endure. I may now kiss the bride, etc.”

The skipper should sign and date this script. It would be as well to make a copy for the lady, too, in case you are boarded by the Coast Guard, so she can demonstrate that everything is above-board. Once a lady has caught the scruples, she needs all the paperwork she can get.

Today’s Thought

If a man wants to leave a toothbrush at my house, he can damn well marry me.

— Michelle Triola Marvin. (On winning a court case against common-law husband Lee Marvin.)

Tailpiece

"How’s you love life been lately, Ethel?”

“Terrible. Either I get a man who’s so slow I want to scream, or else a guy who’s so fast I HAVE to.”

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

Never mind the creases

IT SEEMS TO BE very fashionable these days for cruising yachts to have loose-footed mainsails. That fashion arises from the fact that racing boats invariably have loose-footed mainsails.

Some people say a loose-footed main is easier to trim to the desired belly, and tightness of leech, but I am not one of them. I have sailed on racing boats with mainsails firmly attached to their booms in slotted tracks, and mainsails with zippered folds in the foot to give more belly downwind, and those boats gave nothing away to other boats with loose feet.

The mainsails of all my cruising boats have had their feet attached to the boom, usually with slides running in the internal boom track, for one very good reason: An attached mainsail is easier to control when you’re singlehanding and need to furl the sail in a hurry.

If you’re up on the cabintop dropping the main in any decent kind of breeze, a loose-footed sail falls all over the deck. The slippery folds of Dacron create a treacherous foothold. But if your main is attached to the boom, it’s the work of a moment to grab the leech a little way up from the boom and pull it tight, away from the mast, to form a temporary pocket. You then stuff the mainsail into the pocket, twisting as you go, until you end up with a slim sausage of sailcloth inside a nice tidy, waterproof sheath of Dacron. Slip two or three gaskets around the bundle on top of the boom and Bob’s your uncle. You can be finishing your first beer while the man with the loose-footed mainsail is still sliding around the deck trying to gather and contain his wayward folds.

My naysayers and detractors will point out that a mainsail thus used will be crushed and creased and therefore less efficient next time it’s raised. To which I say “Tough titties!” There is altogether too much racing boat influence in mollycoddling the main. It’s the racing influence that seduces people into buying loose-footed mains in the first place. Let the mainsail crease, for goodness’ sake. It’s a working sail not a work of art. What’s more, the wind and rain will smooth out those creases quite nicely next time you’re out. Your good old cruising boat will never notice the difference.

Today’s Thought

Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken.

— William Hazlitt, Conversations of James Northcote

Tailpiece

“O’Flaherty, what are you doing here? Your brother called and said you were sick and wouldn’t be coming to work today.”

“Ah begorrah, the joke’s on him. He’s not supposed to phone until tomorrow.”

An Olympic anchor light

THERE WAS SOMETHING very familiar about the picture of the Olympic flame being flown on an airliner to Rio in four special “security lamps.” Those lamps were the same as the one we used for a kerosene anchor light on a voyage from Durban to Fort Lauderdale aboard our 30-footer, Freelance.

In fact, the Olympic flame traveled in four Welsh miner’s Davy lamps which, like ours, were fashioned from shiny brass and glass. The same lamps were used in 2012 when the Olympic cauldron was extinguished after the opening ceremony. The miner’s lamps conveyed the flame to its place at London’s Olympic Stadium.

We chose the miner’s lamp for our anchor light because it is low-tech and totally windproof and weather-proof, although it was a bit of a nuisance because the little screw-off kerosene container had to be refilled every 24 hours or so.

We were also a bit sceptical about the visibility of the little flame, but we were reassured when we found out that a half-inch wide wick will support a flame that can be seen for two miles in the darkness. In any case, nobody ever ran into us at night.

The flame in our lamp, as in the originals, was separated from the outer atmosphere by a thin sheet of metal gauze which would prevent the flame from causing an explosion if a miner encountered flammable gas in a mine shaft.

Our lamp lives at home now and is only lit on special occasions. But I guess I owe it a good polishing now that I know one of its brothers was used to fly the Olympic flame to Rio.

Today’s Thought

Sport begets tumultuous strife and wrath, and wrath begets fierce quarrels and war to the death.

— Horace, Epistles

Tailpiece
Two homeless men helped a limping nun across the street.
"What happened to your leg?" asked one.
"I twisted my ankle in the bath," said the nun.
After she'd gone, one man asked: "What's a bath, then?"
"Don't ask me," said the other. "I'm not a Catholic."

Sailboats are slowing the earth

DID YOU KNOW that the earth is starting to spin more slowly, and that sailboats might be at least partly  to blame?

I was first made aware of this fact by a letter from a reader, who said:

I read in the paper that scientists are worried because the earth's spinning rate is slowing down. Days and nights are getting longer. But that's not the major concern. The big problem is that the earth is spinning like a top, and as it slows down it will start to wobble.  The poles will tilt nearer the sun in their arcs, and all the ice will melt.

The seas will rise and become diluted with fresh water.  Lots of land will be inundated and no longer habitable for humans. Lots of marine plant life and mammals will die out completely. In short, it will be a disaster.

Now it occurs to me as I lie here staring at the ceiling that is it perfectly normal that the earth's spinning should slow down as it gradually loses the energy that started it spinning in the first place. But, as usual, Nature has been compensating. Gravity has been moving the high spots of the earth down to the low spots of the earth ever since the Big Bang.  So the radius of the earth from mountain tops on one side to mountain tops on the other side has been shrinking.  Thus, as a ballerina spins faster when she pulls her arms to her sides, the earth has gradually tried to spin faster to make up for the slowing down caused by waning energy.  And so  the rate of spinning has remained more or less equal in all the earth's life.

But now, quite suddenly in cosmic terms, the earth is slowing.  And I believe I know why. Let me explain. As you know, the earth spins from east to west. As it spins, the surface of the earth encounters resistance from the atmosphere.  Once again, over the eons, this resistance has been lessened by gravity's habit of smoothing out mountain tops and generally sanding things down nice and smooth.

But in recent years this resistance has increased because of windmills and yachts.

Never before in the history of the earth have there been so many manmade things sticking up from the surface of the earth, all of them designed deliberately to encounter the atmosphere with force.  Never before have so many wind farms and private sailboats offered resistance to the atmosphere.  The surface of the earth is now fatally roughened by these foreign protrusions

which, in extracting energy from the atmospheric winds, also serve to retard the earth in its spinning.

If we are to save our dear earth for future generations, it is obvious that both windmills and sailboats must be banned.

Oh yes, I can imagine the chorus of protests from rich yachtsmen who don't give a damn for the rest of us as long as they can pursue their sybaritic pastimes without restriction, but we are talking survival here.  I have already contacted my senator regarding having yachting made illegal in my state and I expect other states to follow suit once my discovery is made general knowledge. The future of the human race depends on it.

Yours in great apprehension etc.

Lifer,

Washington Sate penitentiary.

Today's Thought

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

— Carl Jung.

Tailpiece

"My neighbor kept banging on my door at 2:30 this morning, can you believe that?"

"Wow, 2:30 a.m.?"

"Yeah, luckily for him I was still up playing my bagpipes."

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

It's a wonderful feeling

ONCE IN A WHILE someone asks me if sailing at sea is boring. That’s a reasonable question because it might seem to the uninitiated that the ocean beyond the horizon is dull and featureless, not to mention very, very same-ish. But to tell the truth I have never found it so.

Like many amateur sailors (who, in the true sense of the word, go sailing for the love of it) I used to become totally absorbed and fascinated by the business of guiding a small ship across an ever-changing ocean.

There was never a time, when I was lying in my bunk below or propped up in a corner of the cockpit, when I couldn’t feel the hull surging and slipping through the water. I knew instinctively how she would react to a strong puff of wind. I could sense when a sail was not pulling properly and needed to be trimmed. I didn’t need to look at a wind gauge to know when to reef.

Anyone who has been sailing at sea for a while will feel this oneness with the boat, particularly if she is a reasonably small boat — say 40 feet or less in length. It’s like riding a bicycle. After a while, you don’t have to think about what you need to do, your muscles just do it automatically.

It’s a wonderful feeling, and highly addictive. When your little ship is heeled over, and rising and falling among the breaking crests and rolling swells of the open sea, your mind experiences nothing but deep pleasure. Many sailors succumb so entirely to the lure of blue water that having to close with the land and enter port becomes an irritating interruption to the real business of sailing. That is what happened, very famously, to Bernard Moitessier.

Beware. It could happen to you, too.

Today’s Thought

Description is always a bore, both to the describer and the describee.

— Benjamin Disraeli, Home Letters

Tailpiece

“Blanche, were you faithful to me while I was away in Iraq?”

“Of course, Bert — lots of times.”

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

Something you'll never regret

ONCE UPON A TIME in the West Indies I met an ex-airline pilot who was also a sailor. He insisted that cruising in a sailboat was far more complicated than flying a passenger jet.

“As a cruiser, you have to know so much more in so many different areas,” he said. “A pilot doesn’t have to fix the engines or make sure there’s enough food on board. A pilot doesn’t have to know how to repair or maintain anything. A pilot doesn’t have to worry about finding the right bottom paint. He need know nothing about electrolytic corrosion or the difference between deep-cycle batteries and starter batteries. He doesn’t have to worry about the anchor dragging.”

I dare say he was right. One of the many charms of cruising is the way you find yourself learning all the different skills you need to be self-sufficient. It’s a feeling that takes modern men and women right back to the days of the great explorers under sail. Nothing daunted them.

When they were shipwrecked on a foreign shore they felled trees, built boats on the beach, somehow fashioned the thousand-and-one things they needed, and then carried on exploring. They went ashore for months at a time. They cleared land and sowed their seeds. When the crops were ready, they carried on exploring.

The world has changed, and modern cruising won’t make a whole Renaissance man or woman out of you — but it might get pretty close. For that reason I always advise young people to go cruising, even before they settle down in college. I tell them to cruise as far as they can for as long as they can and I assure them they’ll never regret it.

They need to do some homework first, of course, and they need to decide on a definite cruising objective: something we’ve talked about before. Then they should sail away. They’ll find help and friendly people everywhere. They’ll travel vast watery areas of our pretty planet where the voice of mankind has never been heard before, and maybe never will be again.

“Go cruising,” I tell them. “Nothing is more fascinating than cruising. Maybe nothing’s more important.”

Today’s Thought

I been a wanderin’

Early and late

New York City

To the Golden Gate

An’ it looks like

I’m never gonna cease my

Wanderin’.

— Carl Sandburg, folk-music lyrics recalled on his death 22 Jul 67

Tailpiece

“What are you specializing in at medical school?”

“Obstetrics.”

“You’re nuts. By the time you graduate some other doctor will have found the cure for them.”

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