What with advances in technology, modern weather forecasts are at least 100 per cent accurate, if not more. And although dog walkers, keen gardeners, leisure sailors and anyone who goes outside may contest this, it is backed up irrefutably by the science, as I can prove. For example, when they say it’s going to rain it does, and to the very minute, as if commanded by some higher being; and when they say the wind will be northeast force three it will most certainly be, beyond any possible doubt. It is not the fault of meteorologists if dog walkers, gardeners and sailors happen to be in a different place from where the weather’s actually happening, or on a different day. In other words, it’s the weather that’s right and us who are wrong. 

The other problem with the weather is that there’s just too much of it, but thankfully now that the BBC has ditched its longwave transmission of the shipping forecast, there’s a little bit less. The resulting reduction of anxiety is worth the licence fee alone, and if only they’d also can the shipping forecast, particularly the one at 05:20, the whole nation would sleep more peacefully and be more on-side with the recent licence fee hike.

When I first started sailing there were only two weather sources I relied on. One was the three-hourly Channel 16 VHF announcements, which told you to go to another channel that was either silent, buzzing with interference or occupied by motor boaters asking each other where France is and what time the duty-free wine warehouse in Calais closed. 

Of course, these days there are myriad phone weather apps that allow you to choose weather suited to your liking and temperament. Though they’re all unerringly accurate, there is a spectrum of opinion among Maldon’s waterfront sages in the Queen’s Head as to which is the best; this is not dissimilar from the range of views on which greyhound-cross is the ideal lurcher for hunting, legal or otherwise. Those with a sunnier disposition tend to favour Wind Optimist, while those who spend more time in the pub swear by Wind Pessimist.  

It is, however, wooden boat sailors who are most keenly attuned to the weather. This is because before you go sailing you have to varnish your boat every spring, on a day without rain or sun in a temperature range between 11.7 and 12.3 degrees Centigrade and relative humidity of 40.3 to 41.2 per cent. This year that occurred between 2 and 3.15pm on the third Tuesday in April amid a frenzy of activity, as that’s a relatively narrow window to varnish and sand seven coats. Unfortunately, as some people were sanding while others were varnishing, a fight broke out. 

I avoided the fracas by varnishing the mahogany surround of the barometer attached to the bulkhead of my own wooden boat. Barometers, it should be explained, are operated first by tapping, followed by tutting, because whatever the needle does it’s bad news. If the needle falls that means rain and/or wind; a quick rise after low is a sure sign of stronger blow; and if the needle doesn’t move, it’s broken. Thus, a barometer not only measures pressure but creates it. Indeed, one of my heroes, Blondie Hasler, who came second in the 1960 solo trans-Atlantic race, eventually threw his barometer overboard because he realised there was nothing he could do to outrun the oncoming weather. 

When it comes to weather forecasts, and whether or not to go sailing, I rely on local oracle Adi, our boatyard manager, who not only tolerates berth holders, but is less keen on the ones who actually try to move their boats. Adi is in effect a one-man nautical care-in-the-community programme, whose range of advice services encompass everything from anti-fouling and anodes to unusual rashes of an intimate nature, or, as he terms it: “saving you lot from yourselves.” 

In my case he’s done it countless times, which I think may be something he regrets. Typically I’d ask him something like: “I’m thinking of going to Brightlingsea, what do you think?” He’d study the sky for a minute – possibly to avoid eye contact – and then say: “Go for it, Dave, you’ll be fine.” And to be fair, he’s never yet been wrong, as I haven’t died once, even though I’ve never encountered anything less than a Force 7 north-easterly. When I asked him if this was always the case, he replied: “No, Dave, it’s normally a 9 or 10 – I told you I was saving you from yourself.” That just made me appreciate all the more how lucky we are to have Adi’s kindly forecast guidance, knowledge and infinite wisdom. I did go out in a Force 3 once, but Adi was on holiday that week. 

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The post How to Read the Weather: Dave Selby’s Secret Sailing Forecast appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Put the issue of mousing to a bunch of dockside mariners round a pub table and as like as not Captain Blimp will insist that all hooks are to be moused on pain of the ship coming to a sticky end. He has a point of course, but what I’ve  discovered at sea is rather different. Received wisdom’s all right when hands-on experience is in short supply, but when you’ve had the chance to try a few alternatives, you find that things sometimes refuse to obey the rules. 

I’ve owned four gaff cutters and three of them have had halyard blocks fitted with hooks. The first was a 32-footer back in the 1970s. I moused all the hooks as I’d been told, and set off for South America. The trip was going so well as I rounded Ushant that I unwisely decided to leave my topsail up as the sun went down. The boat had a big rig and the topsail spread a significant area of canvas, extending the pole mast with a long luff yard. That night, as it happened, the sail was set on the windward side of the peak halyards with their newly moused blocks. It came on to blow a bit in the small hours and it was soon clear that topsails and darkness aren’t comfortable bedfellows. There was no moon and I’d no deck lights but it had to be dropped. It would need to be done by feel. 

If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have hove to on the other tack by simply shoving the tiller to leeward and leaving the headsail sheets where they were. Once way was off, the helm would be lashed to leeward on the new tack, the boat would have nodded easily into the sea with no hand on the tiller and the topsail would have been flying clear to leeward. I could let go the sheet and ease away on the halyard at my leisure while my mate controlled the downhaul to keep the yard more or less vertical as it came down. Even with no light, there wouldn’t be a lot to go wrong.

That’s not how it was. Instead of following this seamanlike procedure, I left my mate on the helm and struggled up the bounding deck alone. I let the sheet off, then tentatively eased the halyard. I knew what should be happening aloft, but all I could see up there was stars. Working the halyard with one hand while trying to maintain tension on the downhaul with the other, I’d won about four feet when the downhaul went tight. I gave the halyard a hefty tug to try and clear whatever was hanging things up, but the sail was stuck. Rather like the Grand old Duke of York’s ten thousand men halfway up the hill, it was neither up nor down. I don’t know how the Duke’s soldiers found this situation, but judging from the sounds and general flogging coming from aloft, my topsail was not having a good time. Action was called for, and it needed to be prompt.

For few seconds I considered climbing aloft to discover what was going on, but with the boat leaping along and the sounds of mayhem over my head, I gave up that idea in short order. Instead, I did what I should have done at the outset. I hove to, releasing my mate from the tyranny of the tiller. With two of us on the case and the boat stable, we carefully lowered the main and the topsail together. They came down readily enough, but the topsail seemed unwilling to let go of one of the peak blocks. I took a closer look, now with a torch in my hand. The topsail had got itself well and truly snarled up in the hook mousing which I had not frapped neatly enough. The wire had punched through the Dacron and caught it as securely as any fishhook going about its honest business.

We sat the night out as we were, then cleared up the mess at dawn. I thought about the mousings on the peak blocks, accepted that my wire-work might not always be perfect, and took them off. After all, the hooks would be permanently under load, so why would they let go? They didn’t. From that day I have never moused a hook that will stay loaded and after many ocean crossings I can look the man at the pub table in the eye and tell him there might be another point of view. 

This chain of thought was precipitated by events on my boat last week. In the tidy little Danish port of Lundeborg, I suffered an unwanted boarder by the name of Minnie Mouse. She announced her arrival on the following day’s passage to Svendborg by making a meal of a new loaf of bread. She had to go, and go quickly. Surprisingly, I thought, the Svendborg chandler didn’t sell mousetraps. ‘No call for them these days,’ she said glumly, but I unearthed a pack of three for £1.50 after a route march to an out-of-town megastore. I suppose you get what you pay for because they failed to spring two nights running, but the situation was dealt with on the third in an unexpected way. I had been softening some ancient leather in water to make up a chafing piece and the unfortunate mouse defeated all odds by somehow contriving to fall into the bucket. There, it tragically expired. We found it in the morning and committed its remains to the deep. My experience with mousetraps is limited, so perhaps I need the pub team to tell me how to get value from them but, as so often happens at sea, Providence stepped in to protect the innocent.  

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The post How Important is Mousing: Tom Cunliffe’s Top Safety Tips appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Have you tackled bad weather at sea?

When will it stop? The wind, the wind! It’s August, mid summer in the Highlands, a time of gentle breezes, moist warm days and, OK, midges, absent largely this year as only a midge capable of flying upwind in a Force 7 westerly would stand a chance here (and also the reason perhaps why the East of Scotland is no longer midge free.)

The club’s summer cruise was more like what is traditionally the end of season storm cruise. Sally and I wisely ducked out of the thrash up to the Summer Isles, despite the welcome promised by their owner. Instead she lay on a pontoon in the new harbour until the berth’s owner required it for his own use. Actually the conditions weren’t too bad, until that is Sally was moved on to a mooring outside the harbour. As if on cue, the forecasts began to show gusts of 40-50 knots, and from the South, the worst direction for Ullapool’s anchorage. 

What is it about her that she prefers to lie to a buoy in a gale than alongside a fully serviced pontoon? This time last year, with her mooring in Loggie Bay snarled and unusable, we moved her to the harbour until it could be sorted. Again, within a day the forecast was giving storm force winds from the south east, of a precise direction – the only direction – to cause mayhem in the otherwise snug haven. I woke to find a video taken at 3 am, posted in the local paper, of the scene that night. There she was, hanging to the pontoon at a crazy angle. I knew the ropes would hold, as did the pontoon. But it’s not the kind of sight you wish to wake up to. It was back to Loggie as fast as possible. She likes it there. Even in a gale.

Humphrey Barton, Laurent Giles partner, he of Vertue XXXV fame, was once asked what he advised when faced with bad weather at sea. “Avoid it.” Only lifeboats on trials go out voluntarily when it’s ‘orrible. I like the story of Pete Goss, in mid Atlantic getting knockdown beyond horizontal, cabin windows showing green, sails flat in the water. Before getting round to righting the boat, he finds his camera to record the experience, in case it ever happens again. Now that’s coolness in the face of. But then he was in Special Forces, I believe. 

It reminds me of the time I managed to reach a friend by satellite phone on a yacht in the Southern Ocean taking part in a round the world race years ago. Reefed down, storm spinnaker up, they were charging through the night en route to New Zealand. Craig was his usual self, until he stopped me with the immortal words. “Got a bit on.” And the line went dead.

I didn’t speak again until he arrived back in the UK, and one of the first things I asked was: “what was ‘on’ and was it really a ‘bit’.”? Well no, he explained. At that moment the call had come from the deck that two small icebergs, close together, had appeared on the radar, and were just emerging from the murk, and that it would be a case of threading the gap between them, for to deviate to port would mean a knockdown, to starboard, a gybe. In 40 knots. I love the understatement of “a bit on”, and occasionally employ it when I’m preparing a meal that needs maximum concentration and the juggling of precise ingredients. Well, no, that’s a lie. I’m a Heinz All Day Breakfast type of cook. Mmmm! I can just taste the beans, egg and sausage (in the form of a Scotch egg) on a blue enamel plate in the cockpit of Sally, riding (at anchor) in a secluded, Highland sea loch.

My round the world chum, by the way, is also the owner of a venerable and slightly older Harrison Butler, winner of many a classic race, driven as she was meant to be: hard by a seasoned ocean sailor. We first met on board the yacht from which he spoke that day, Intrum Justitia, trialling headsails in the Solent. It spawned a small piece in this magazine under the headline “My other boat’s a Butler”, a title that infuriated the designer’s daughter, Joan Jardine-Brown. Too late to batten the hatches I faced the storm: “She’s a HARRISON Butler, not a Butler!”

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The post How to Face Bad Weather at Sea: Adrian Morgan’s Stormy tales appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

We caught up with the Boat Building Academy at the Southampton Boat Show, who were showing off some of their latest student led builds…

The Boat Building Academy offers world leading courses in to professionals, while also creating brilliant opportunities for beginners and enthusiasts. Since 1997, when Tim Gedge founded the Academy, this Lyme Regis (Dorset) based school has trained over 2500 people, helping them go on to work in the industry worldwide. 

The BBA offer a 40-week boat building course, a 12-week furniture making course, and 1-15 day short courses. The 40-week boat building course incorporates the City & Guilds Level 3 Diploma in boat building, System Engineering & Maintenance (Advanced) (2473-03), but it also reaches far beyond the basics, helping students to develop a wide range of skills and methods, both traditional and contemporary, to take them into their careers. The course runs twice through the year – one starting in mid-February 2025, and the next from the start of September – both with a 40-week duration and 2-week break in the middle. The BBA also offers bursary assisted places.

From the Founder – Tim Gedge

‘My concept was very much geared to people looking for a new way of life, in other words a sort of change of career, and it’s been hugely gratifying to me over the years to see the numbers of people we’ve had on the boat building courses, and more recently in the furniture making courses, who have actually been snapped up by the industry who are getting decent good jobs. I’ve bumped into three people just walking around the show [Southampton Boat Show] now, who’ve done the course, and thanked me for teaching them into their new career’ 

‘A lot of people… who have university degrees… come and get their job out of doing the boat building course that they’ve done – not using their degree… there’s a message there.’

Latest BBA News

The renowned ocean rowing boat builder Justin Adkin has rejoined the BBA team as Master boat builder.

After a time away running his own successful business, this winning skipper in the 2005/6 Atlantic Rowing Race will be teaching full time from January 2025 on the 40-week boat building course.

Will Reed, Director of the BBA said: “I am delighted Justin will be joining our brilliant team once again. His calm, unflappable character and wealth of knowledge and experience across traditional and modern boat building is perfectly suited to teaching students of all ages. He also has a great sense of humour and is a joy to be around.

“We are extremely proud of our brilliant team of tutors, who are selected not only for their exceptional boat building experience and ability, but also for their extraordinary teaching and communication skills.

“If anyone is looking for a career in boat building or would like to sign up for a hugely rewarding challenge for the sheer joy of it, they will not do better than with Justin and the excellent team of tutors at the BBA.”

Interested in taking a course?

Visit the Academy Website and Meet the team.

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The post Boat Building Academy: Comprehensive Courses for All appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

For convenience, moulding planes may be divided into two groups. In the first group are planes dedicated to shaping specific mouldings, each one profiled exactly opposite to the concavities, convexities, fillets and grooves of a complex surface. The second group is made up of the simple yet infinitely more versatile rounds and hollows, each iron profiled to the sixty degree arc of a circle and projecting by a sliver through its matching round or hollow sole. Rounds and hollows used in combination with straight-edged rebate planes can shape an enormous range of shapes and sizes of mouldings, from the subtle ovolo softening corners of deck beams to the massive crown mouldings looming from on high in a steam yacht’s saloon. 

A modicum of mouldings applied to a yacht interior adds visual and tactile interest to otherwise plain surroundings, framing flat areas and finishing harsh corners with a softer outline. The changing light of day reflected off water and falling upon a moulding creates shifting highlights and shadow, bringing yacht furniture to life. A spindle moulder ripping through smooth surfaces would get the job done in a trice, but working with a hand-powered moulding plane is like pulling a skiff across open water, adjusting your stroke to wind and tide. Instinctively the hands respond to a change in grain with changes in speed and pressure. 

Here we see an ovolo being worked in a length of oak. Unlike dedicated moulding planes the hollows and rounds are not guided by fences nor do they have depth stops to prevent cutting too far, so some preliminary work is required. The face and edge of the wood was scribed with a marking gauge (left foreground), then the flat-soled rebate plane (on its side, upper left) worked down to the required depth before planing a 45 degree chamfer along the arris; this last step provided two points of contact for the concave edge of the hollow moulding plane, helping stabilise and steer it. All the while the worker must keep the plane at the correct angle to the wood, gauging by eye when the moulding is done. 

Naturally this engenders minor variations (some might say imperfections) in mouldings but perhaps that’s not a bad thing as ever more making is delegated to the impersonal high-speed blades of automated machinery. 

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The post Guide to Moulding Planes: Boatbuilder’s Notes for Traditional Tools appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Calling all boatyard managers, owners, DIY applicators professional applicators and chandlers… Antifouling does a great job of keeping hulls clean and is environmentally beneficial when preventing the spread of invasive non-native species and improving fuel efficiency. However, for these products to be government approved, they must be assessed for risk against the environment and human health. This is largely dependent on boat owners and marine workers using the correct procedures when applying the antifouling products.

Human and Environmental Safety

The British Coatings Federation (BCF) ran a survey back in 2015 to determine the extent people protect themselves with personal protective equipment. With a great response rate, the BCF, British Marine, the RYA, and the Yacht Harbour Association produced a number of leaflets with advice on best practices, to promote human and environmental safety.

• The “Protect, Collect & Dispose” initiative which focussed on environmental best practice which antifouling yachts and boats;
• the “Controlling Antifouling Washings from Shipyards” leaflet which focusses on best practice to prevent release of antifouling paints to the environment; and
• “DIY application of antifouling paints” which contains guidance and best practices on application of paints.

However, use of these paints may become restricted to strictly professional applicators due to their hazardous nature and concerns over risks. Antifouling manufacturers are keen to understand the how aware DIY applicators and boat owners are of the risks and need for protective gear, and the measures they take to prevent damage to their health and the environment.

Fill out the BCF Survey

Choose the antifouling survey that most applies to you:

• For Boatyard managers / owners

• For DIY applicators 

• For professional applicators

• for Chandlers

The survey will run from 4th September – 30th November 2024.

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The post Are You Antifouling Safely? Complete the BCF Survey appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Thinking of Buying a Smaller Yacht?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that… the smaller the [wooden] boat the greater the pleasure, and I would add, just as important, far less of a chore to fit out. It takes time enough to sand, fill, prime and paint Sally’s topsides, then I look to my right where stands, propped up in the yard, a yacht not many feet longer than my modest 25 footer, and I thank goodness for small boats. Z4s, Hillyards, Debens of various kinds, et al, the list is long.

Those hardy souls who camp in dinghies under ingenious tents, heating their rations on portable gas stoves, get even more of my admiration. It’s great to be invited aboard a big wooden classic, and I treasure my time racing the McGruer Kelana, or squatting on the aft deck of Moonbeam, but would not envy her owners the task of maintaining them every year to the highest standards. That’s like grooming an elephant, when all you really have the energy for is to stroke a kitten. One is exhausting, the other is relaxing. Up to a point.

I reckon 25ft is about as much as one person can maintain, allowing a day for each of the annual chores. A day to sand the topsides, another to strip the varnish, one to antifoul, and so on. Sally comes into that category, but even so, after a week which begins with despair at the task facing me, then satisfaction in seeing the work list slowly shrink, towards the final push to complete all by the time the yard want to launch her, I have lost much of the enthusiasm and just want to see her floating to her waterline again at her mooring in Loggie Bay, a spit opposite the yard where she has been for a couple of weeks.

That 34 footer alongside Sally is more like a three- or four-day per chore boat, and I would not want to be the one to have to tackle the towering wall of gleaming white enamel every few years. Besides, you’d need staging, not the wooden ladder up and down which I clambered these past weeks. And I can just about reach much of Sally’s topsides from the ground, and the higher bits by standing on a few keel blocks placed around her. 

Adding a few feet to a boat’s length increases the work at fitting out exponentially. I used to long for the day when, flushed with cash from a series of best selling nautical murder mysteries I could scribble a list of what needed doing and let the experts at the yard get on with it. I would write cheques, and appear at launching. In fact last year I tentatively asked if anyone might be free to lay on a perfect coat of Hempel’s Polar White, as I’ve seen the difference between my efforts and those of a professional. I was once given a badger haired – I think it was, or perhaps Madagascan squirrel – laying off brush, something I’d not come across before, by a painter of superyachts. Apparently you apply the paint, then quickly caress the surface with the fine. I tried it once, but never again. It’s hard enough to keep a wet edge without stopping to caress what you’ve just achieved with the neck fluff of an exotic creature. Nope, Sally’s topsides are again this year flawless… from a distance, and that’s the way they will stay, until a new owner familiar with the techniques of laying on brushes, and (the correct) thinners takes her on.

Don’t get me wrong; maintaining a small wooden yacht as best you can, given sunny days and plenty of time is a vital and mostly pleasurable component of ownership. Once a year you get the chance to pore over every inch of her, stroke her flanks intimately in a way that is more akin to the grooming rituals of the animal world. For fleas, read flaking paint and tangles, small divots. And this year, annus mirabilis, I may finally have managed to achieve what I am hoping will be the perfect waterline. Hoping, as she has yet to be launched as I write this. After nearly thirty years of ownership, perhaps this time…

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The post Advantages of Owning Smaller Yachts: Adrian Morgan’s Boat Scale appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

No Need for a Running Aground Masterclass

Like everything else to do with sailing, running aground is a lot easier than the experts make out. Of course, the experts are the true experts at it, and do it frequently and on purpose, purely to demonstrate the myriad techniques for getting off again for magazine articles that illustrate both their depth of knowledge and our lack of it in what is a relatively shallow field of endeavour.

Most of these ‘expert’ and ‘masterclass’ type techniques involve throwing everything that’s in the boat into the water – or what’s left of the water – including anchors, life rafts, cushions, outboards, ceramic loos and loo doors, flat-screen TVs, mobile phones, people and wot not. As a rule of thumb, if you manage to create a scene reminiscent of the aftermath of a particularly muddy Glastonbury Festival, you’re on the right track.

In truth, jettisoning the mobile phones doesn’t help much, but I’ve never once come across an expert masterclass that actually tells you to take them out of your pocket before jumping. On the other hand most sea-survival experts strongly caution against jettisoning hair dryers, particularly if the hair dryer’s owner is on board. This is for the safety of any married man on board who hopes to remain married and single ones who hope to reach retirement, and perhaps even form a meaningful relationship along the way. However, under no circumstances should you kedge a hair dryer overboard while it’s still plugged in. The consequences would be truly shocking.

After outlining any given scenario, experts cheerily conclude “if you’re lucky that’ll do the trick,” then proceed to describe 23 other techniques that might also do the trick.

Then, once all hope is lost, experts advise crew to pass the time by swinging off the end of the boom or other bits of rigging to provide amusement for passing boats and put maximum distance between yourself and the skipper. And here there’s an important distinction often overlooked by experts. Whose boat is it? If the boat isn’t yours, and if the ground is firm, simply walk ashore and leave them to it. Prior to that, if your mobile phone still works, it’s good practice to first ask the skipper the lat and long, and then call a cab before walking ashore. If, however, the boat is yours, you’ll have different priorities, mainly to explain to the authorities that you are not aground, but have “careened” the vessel for: a) a mid-season scrub and anti-foul; b) to replace the impeller; c) inspect the anode, prop, stern-drive, lower rudder pintle, gaping hole in the bottom of the boat etc; or d) to save face. In the last case we’d advise bringing along sporting equipment such as cricket bats, stumps and balls, or croquet hoops, polo mallets and ponies to lend credence and plausibility.

Become an Expert at Running Aground

And so you see, it’s not as complex as the experts make out. And in fact I’m something of an expert myself, as boats with lifting keels, like mine, are even better at running aground than bilge keelers. I’ve been so far aground I once nearly made it to IKEA; on another occasion I got a parking ticket.

In fact it’s reassuring to know that any novice can acquire a secure grounding in this field of sailing completely free of charge and without buying costly charts or going to the expense of night classes. Indeed, there’s nothing like learning from experience as demonstrated by those Learning From Experience articles, the enduring popularity of which ably demonstrates that we do indeed never learn from experience. And I can prove it.

My chums Mark and Dave, who keep a 24ft bilge-keeler at Orwell Yacht Club, invited me sailing – just once, as it happens – and within an hour we noticed that we’d stopped going forward. That’s not unusual in a bilge keeler, but some time after that we noticed we weren’t even going sideways, which is quite unusual in a bilge keeler. I was at the helm, but that’s not strictly relevant because I assumed they’d let me know where to point. They assumed, unfairly I thought, that I’d been looking at the echo sounder, but I’d assumed, fairly, they’d tell me where to point, then Mark said they’d assumed, just as fairly, that I’d been looking at the echo sounder, and I said I’d assumed even more fairly they would have told me where to point.

Then abruptly, our learned discourse was stopped in its tracks by a dazzling display of nature. All around us an impressive plateau was emerging, the receding waters uncovering oysters the size of base-ball mitts which, as they snapped shut, squirted jets of water skyward. It was like the fountains of Versailles or the Taj Mahal. Then more nature, like sunset and stuff, happened and we returned to bickering and Mark said: “Anyway, I thought you’re supposed to be an expert cos you write for yotting mags.”

“I am,” I countered. “I’m doing research for an expert masterclass article.”

“You should leave that sort of thing to Tom Cunliffe,” Mark replied, adding “I think you’re out of your depth, mate.”

“No I’m not,” I retorted.

“Too right,” said Mark. “That’s the problem.”

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The post Masterclass for Running Aground: Dave Selby’s Expert Warning appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Old-fashioned Sailing in a Sparkman & Stephens Yawl

My first long ocean voyage, a circumnavigation of the globe, had more in common with voyaging in the post-war years than it did with contemporary ocean sailing. My husband Seth and I made that voyage in the first years of the 21st century; therefore, if we had been much wealthier, we could have sailed in a style not greatly different from that which is common today. As it was, our experience would have felt familiar to such iconic voyagers as the Smeetons or the Pyes.

Our sloop was built in 1968, to a 1954 design. Specifically, she was an imitation of the famous Sparkman & Stephens yawl Finisterre (winner of three consecutive Bermuda Races), although she was a sloop rather than a yawl. Despite being 38 feet overall, and 27 feet on the waterline, she displaced 24,000 pounds. She had a relatively shallow-draught keel, with a centerboard that could be lowered for upwind performance. She was low to the water, had sweeping overhangs and a narrow stern, and a small cabin with a traditional layout. Her chart table was expansive and her bunks were narrow. Although her hull was constructed of solid fiberglass, she had a solid mahogany cabin, coamings, and toerail; her ports, stanchions, and most of her other fittings were bronze. Even her propeller shaft was bronze. Her engine was a Perkins 4.107 that leaked an embarrassing quantity of oil. The boat herself leaked, through the chainplates, coamings, winch bases, toerail, and many other places. We slowly but surely resolved all these leaks over the course of our circumnavigation, but they were there for a time, just as they had been for many sailors over the centuries.

Bit by bit, small upgrade by small upgrade, Seth and I did bring ourselves into the current century, or at least into the late 20th century. By the time we dropped the hook back in Maine, after four years of sailing around the world, we had solar panels, electric light, a Pactor modem for email over the single sideband radio, and even a minuscule refrigerator. But at the beginning, our only concession to modernity – or rather, the only piece of it we could afford – was a small black-and-white GPS. This showed us merely our latitude and longitude; the rest of our navigation we did on those large paper charts that today are pretty much relegated to wall decoration.

Our electrical capacity was limited to the very small battery bank we had, only 270 amp hours. We used this to power the little GPS, our VHF radio, and our navigation lights while underway. Those three little bulbs, however, drew enough amperes that we were concerned about the electrical draw on a long passage, especially on our Pacific crossing, a month at sea from Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands to the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia. So we went to the tremendous effort and expense of installing a small wind generator while we were in Panama. With this extra power, we were later able to install an electronic depth sounder (what luxury!) and then much later on, the tiny fridge, just big enough to keep any fish we caught from going bad before we could eat it.

A couple of years later, in Australia, we replaced the wind generator with solar panels, realizing that we disliked the necessity of anchoring in windy places, and also the fact that the blades had maimed at least one poor seabird. The increased reliability of our electricity, especially in sunny places like Queensland, led us to install electric cabin lights. Up until that point, however, we had lived as sailors for centuries had done, with an oil lamp to light the cabin after dark.

We had two fresh water tanks under the settee berths; for the first year we pumped our water at the galley sink with a hand pump; when we reached New Zealand, we upgraded to a foot pump. In ports where we could easily obtain fresh water, we would fill a “solar camping shower” bag with it, letting the black bag sit in the sun to heat the water and then washing ourselves with it up on deck. This was rather pleasant in deserted tropical anchorages, but was less enjoyable in colder locations, or in crowded harbors where we felt a bit exposed, even wearing our bathing suits. On passages we used our fresh water only for drinking and cooking; a shower at sea was a bucket of saltwater.

We rowed to and from the shore, aboard our eight-foot faux lapstrake solid fiberglass dinghy. We cooled our boat in warm places simply by opening the hatches; we warmed ourselves in cold places simply by layering on clothing or blankets. We always sailed. We used our oil-leaking engine only to maneuver into tight marinas or harbors; often we sailed right on and off our anchor, and we never motored at sea. We used less than 40 gallons of diesel fuel per year. If there was no wind – as there wasn’t for six days off Australia’s Northern Territory – we just drifted.

For the first year and a half of old-fashioned sailing, we obtained weather forecasts simply by looking at the sky and the barometer. Then, upon leaving New Zealand, we joined a single sideband radio net, on which a man back in New Zealand reported weather forecasts. Another year and a half after that, upon leaving for South Africa from the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, we finally upgraded to receiving GRIB files over SailMail, via a Pactor modem hooked up to our SSB. With the advent of our Pactor modem, we also finally had primitive, text-only email communication with the outside world. Before that, voice communication with other radio stations – other boats with SSB or VHF – had been our sole contact with the world beyond our little sloop. Indeed, on our Pacific crossing, we only had the VHF on which to communicate, meaning we could speak only to those vessels that came within 25 miles of our position. Over the course of that month-long passage, a month that just the two of us spent out of sight of land, we spoke with only one ship.

There is a certain element of difficulty in living in this way. There are times when you are very tired, or the wind is blowing strong, and you wish you had an outboard motor for the dinghy. Sometimes the dishes you washed in the light of the oil lamp turn out not to be all that clean in the light of day. Your hair itches after weeks of seawater bucket “showers.” Drifting out of sight of land, in a dead calm, in tropical heat, for a full week, taxes your mental stamina in way not familiar to most modern Westerners. Reading the sky and the barometer to estimate your own weather forecasts requires an attentiveness and observation power beyond what most of us are used to. Living without refrigeration restricts your diet in unpleasant ways. Sailing without modern aids like radar, AIS, chartplotters, and electronic autopilots makes for quite a bit more work and more vigilance. This is especially true in thick fog, even more so when that fog is hiding a busy roadstead like Cape Town, South Africa. Hauling a 60-pound anchor up by hand, especially in deep anchorages, when you have many feet of chain to haul up as well, requires serious strength. And making ocean passages aboard a low-freeboard, heavy displacement boat, especially in high winds and steep waves, makes for a very wet ride.

But it also provides a unique satisfaction. Like a lengthy mountain trek or climb, it shows you that you are capable of discomfort and effort beyond what you may have expected. Just as the author and pioneering aviator Beryl Markham found when she left home as a very young woman, it’s liberating and satisfying to discover that, “I never had less and I never needed more.” Combined with the marvelous experiences of offshore voyaging – the seabirds wheeling in the pink sky as the sun rises after a dark night of rain squalls; the flying fish shimmering over the waves; the delicious taste of a tuna you caught yourself; the feathery tops of palm trees at the end of a long passage; spinning yarns with fellow sailors; Sunday brunch with a local family on a remote island; the quiet stillness of a protected cove – sailing like this, in a style many people today would find primitive, provided Seth and myself with a unique joy.

Old-fashioned sailing: Connecting with the Natural World

I think that the true reason for this was that the simplicity of it necessarily connected us more fully with what we were doing, with the natural world through which we were moving. Creature comforts, as lovely as they are, in some ways form a barrier between us and our world. Finding a balance between the two is important: after all, Seth and I did not cross the Pacific on a raft, Kon-Tiki style. We had bunks with bedsheets, a gas burner on which to cook hot meals, and enough tins and dried food to last us for months. But we lived much closer to the elements than we would have done aboard a more modern, kitted-out yacht. It’s hard to feel removed from the ocean, and from the act of sailing across its vast expanse, when green water is coursing down the decks and drenching you on your watches in a gale. When we reached an island or a bay or a harbor, we would carefully nose around it before dropping the hook; hauling up the anchor by hand had given us a great appreciation of the depth of the water in which we anchored. Drifting in calms instilled deep gratitude for the gift of wind. The dim light of the oil lamp meant that our daily routines were much more in keeping with the rising and setting of the sun, and we appreciated full moon nights much more than we ever had before. Seawater showers and a poor diet offshore made the simple pleasures of bathing in fresh water and eating fresh fruit in port into supreme joys.

I think that slowing down our lives, reducing them and simplifying them, added enormously to the joy and wonder of our ocean sailing and the beauties of each new landfall. Perhaps the biggest contribution to this was our lack of communication with the outside world. Satellite communications back then – and I am only speaking about less than 20 years ago – were prohibitively expensive. Internet connection on a sailboat was unheard of, not even quite believable, a bizarre extravagance that megayachts were rumored to have. SSB radio with slow modems and text email service was as high-tech as it really got, and Seth and I didn’t even have that for the first three years. We communicated with those at home sporadically: via letters posted from a port with a post office; via emails sent from internet cafes; and sometimes via phone, in conversations curtailed by the expense of a long-distance connection from pay-phone booth. And so we lived much as people had for generations, socializing with the people in our immediate vicinity, making new friends when we went to new places. In short, we lived in each moment in the place in which we found ourselves. At sea, that meant with only each other, and the sea and sky and the wild creatures, for company. The simplicity of that, the slowness of it, the immediacy and intimacy of it, resets your mind in way, enables a degree of focus and calm that’s missing in the fast pace of the digital world.

And so, while Seth and I have upgraded now to slightly larger, cold-molded wooden sloop, with pressure water, an anchor windlass, and even radar, our floating home remains relatively simple. Thus, sailing remains the time and place in which we reconnect with the natural world, with the ocean we are sailing upon, with the wildlife we observe, with the people we meet, and with each other.

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The post Traditional Seamanship: Why Old-fashioned Sailing is Best appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Sinking in Plastic vs Wood

For sheer entertainment there is very little more enjoyable than watching a wooden boat sink. I know that sounds heartless, and that’s exactly what it is, because plastic boat owners like me are a soulless and heathenistic bunch. Now that I’m also a wooden boat owner, with soul, character, discernment, taste and a lot less money, I find it less amusing, particularly if the boat doing the sinking is mine and I’m on it at the time. And for the edification of you Tupperware louts – a hopeless task, I know – I would also point out that the correct nautical term for what you illiterates call “sinking” is in fact “launching.” 

Saving Snipe of Maldon

Snipe of Maldon, my 3½-ton Blackwater Sloop, had been out of the water, being varnished and painted in the very boat shed where she was built back in 1953. How romantic is that! The whole process took me about five months: that was six weeks choosing the right varnish; another six choosing the paint; and two weeks to do the work. I know that doesn’t add up to five months, but choosing the right brushes is trickier than you’d think… particularly if you’ve read that so-called ‘instructive’ Classic Boat how-to article titled “Choosing The Right Brush For The Job;” in which case I’d allow at least nine months for the job, as it’s devilish hard these days to get hold of top-grade unicorn hair. But, boy, was it worth it, because at the end of it all Snipe looked a picture – and almost as good as the results achieved by Photoshop in the pages of Classic Boat – with her subtle cream topsides over red antifouling, as she swayed above me in the air swinging perilously in the strops from the ancient Ruston-Bucyrus crane with a slipping clutch. 

As Snipe was lowered jerkily over the quayside, boatyard boss and shipwright Aidy told me to hop aboard, and as my pride and joy returned to her element I felt quite emotional, and even more so a moment later when I screamed to Aidy “she’s sinking,” while all the plastic boat rubberneckers fell about laughing. Next thing, Aidy cast me adrift – with no engine, no electricity to run the electric bilge pump and not even an oar. His son Sam, however, was on the other end of two long warps, and as Snipe settled lower and her floorboards started to float, he hauled her into her mud berth. It’s the most terrifying voyage I’ve ever undertaken, and it was only 100 yards. We made it… just.

Three Tides Time

The thing was, Snipe had been out of the water too long (for which I blame Classic Boat for giving me the false impression that I was capable of DIY) and was about as watertight as a venetian blind. This is all “normal,” apparently, so much so that Aidy, casual as you like, sauntered along the pontoon, stopping to give boat owners the odd estimate and quote and advice on varnishing and caulking, before passing down a generator-powered shore pump. Then he said: “You’ll have a long night, but she’ll be tight in three tides.” 

As the pump gurgled and chugged, it just about kept pace with the inrush spurting through the seams, and with the ebb, as Snipe took to the mud, the water inside was eventually drained, but not as drained as I was. I went home for a few hours respite and returned with a thermos, thermals and sleeping bag and noted with horror that the shore pump was gone. I plugged Snipe’s rudimentary electrics into the shore power and sat there with nothing more than a bucket, head-torch, hand pump and hope. 

It was a chill April night with a big, mocking moon that illuminated the menacing water creeping over the glistening mud to envelop me in my wooden sieve. As I huddled down below, the mahogany-slatted cabin sides that had so seduced me took on all the cosiness of a coffin. Then the gurgling began again as the two electric bilge pumps kicked in and weakly whirred. Every few minutes I worked the hand pump too. And Snipe shivered as she lifted sluggishly. It was a time beyond time. Whether it was seconds or minutes, I don’t know, but I sensed that the intervals between the electric slurps of the bilge pump were longer, my turns at the hand pump fewer and farther between, giving me time to read a bit of Classic Boat…

… Then I awoke – I didn’t even know I’d been asleep – but what roused me was new but distant sounds, the rhythmic occasional whirrings and sploshes of the pumps on nearby wooden boats… but not mine. I panicked. Had my pumps packed up? But no, just then a brief but urgent burst came from my bilge.

As Snipe settled back on her soft and welcoming pillow of mud on the falling tide I couldn’t bring myself to leave her. We rested together after our endeavours, my snoring more regular than the occasional snort from her bilge pumps. Then a knock on the cabin roof awoke me. “You there, Dave?” said Aidy. I poked my head out, saw to my amazement that we were afloat, and went below to flick the manual bilge switch, which gave only the shortest gargle then sucked air. Snipe was alive!

“I told you she’d take up in three tides,” said Adi, the wood whisperer. I pity plastic boat owners who will never know how magical, mystical and spiritual it is to return a living thing back to its element and nurse it back to life. You heathens!

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The post Trials of Owning a Wooden Boat: Sinking with Dave Selby appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.