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.

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I had removed my Baby Blake sea head from my 1951 8-tonne Gauntlet over 10 years ago, to replace it with a modern design. Now that this was not working, it was time to restore the original heads!

It had languished in a plastic bag, neglected in a corner of the back garden and was totally seized, with only the lid moveable. But I was motivated to attempt a restoration, to retain the authenticity of the original fitting on a vintage yacht, and on the discovery that a spare kit was available for all the perishables, such as the rubber seals and washers.

But first I had to dismantle, ease and clean all the individual parts that make up the loo. The biggest task was to remove some mild corrosion from the bore of the waste pump. This was done by wrapping wet-and-dry paper around a 10-inch paint roller of a diameter slightly larger than the bore of the pump. The fluffy material exerts enough pressure to rub the paper against the sides. Once it was shiny and smooth, I could reassemble the loo.

Some of the old bolts sheared when I tightened them. However, help was on hand from Spares Marine (sparesmarine.co.uk), which stocks all the individual parts of the complete range of Blake toilets, including the ceramic bowl. The bronze parts were given two coats of Hammerite paint. The Bakelite seat and lid came up spotless with Renapur Balsam and now the loo is ready for action.

Editorial Note: Spares Marine stock parts for all sorts of things, including two of the most venerable yacht fitting of the 20th centurh – the Baby Blake (above) and the beloved and hair-raising Taylors stove! Preserving items like this is key to a yacht’s originality.

The post How to restore a Baby Blake sea head appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

The Pocketship is a 14ft 10in yacht designed by John for his firm Chesapeake Light Craft, which sells plans and kits for small boats – “the best boats you can build” as the slogan goes. The Pocketship is a little beauty, but quite a serious build project. But this lovely galley box could, with a few tweaks, be used in all sorts of dinghies and small yachts. John was snapping away with his I Phone while he built it, and has created this step-by-step guide. Thanks for letting us share it John!

Final thoughts:

This lightly-built box isn’t strong enough to be a step, so if you plan a lot of coming and going through the companionway, either at anchor or under sail, lift it out and stow it away in the cabin.

The Iwatani stove came with a nice compact case, and I always stowed the stove and the galley box separately. Likewise, the butane cartridge pops out in a second and I was careful to stow that with its cap on.

No, I did not have a problem with the stove heating up the adjacent wood. All the heat goes up, not sideways, and after many uses the wood never got more than lukewarm.

Note there are no “fiddles” or keepers for the pot. Yes, in a rough anchorage the pot could surely slide off the stove and ruin your day. However, PocketShip’s small size and shallow draft mean that calm, protected anchorages are always on my itinerary. Throughout three hot dinners and three hot breakfasts last week, not once did I worry about the pot sliding off. It would not be difficult to rig sturdy metal pot-holders sufficient to keep a pot in place if a powerboat disrupts your anchorage. But if you really need to cook in rough conditions, common sense dictates something like a gimballed “jetboil” stove.

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The post Build this simple galley box in two hours appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Antarctic exploration is about as tough as it gets, particularly in a classic boat, says Shackleton Epic’s Seb Coulthard.

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Shackleton Epic Expedition had to equip a replica of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s lifeboat, the James Caird, for a perilous voyage across the Southern Ocean in January 2013. Here expedition bosun Petty Officer Seb Coulthard RN FRGS, discusses some of the essential pieces of equipment that saw the 23ft  Alexandra Shackleton safely across the most tempestuous ocean on Earth. Read more about the expedition at the official website.

1. Lifejacket

Kru Sport Pro Lifejacket, £130, 1.5 kg

A comfortable and compact waistcoat-style lifejacket offering superior 180N buoyancy. It has been designed for all weather conditions and comes fitted with two of the most underrated piece of marine safety equipment: crutch strap and spray hood. Sold by www.oceansafety.com

2. Thermal Protection Suit, Guy Cotten TPS Survival Suit, £780, 3.6 kg

With water temperature below two centigrade, and surrounded by icebergs, Seb Coulthard swam 200 yards from ship to shore whilst at anchor off the coast of Antarctica.  The suit was a warm confidence builder – a total game changer when abandoning ship. Sold by: www.guycotten.co.uk.

3. VHF/AIS/DSC Radio, Standard Horizon GX2100E Tranceiver, £300, 1.5 kg

This compact combination of Class-D VHF and AIS brings two important safety and communication features into the hands of the classic boater. This versatile radio was put through 12 days of abuse. Sold by: www.jgtech.com

4. Tracking Beacon, Yellowbrick V3 Basic, £400, 305g

As well as buying or renting a Yellowbrick, you pay a rental fee (about £8 per month) or buy position reporting credits (12p for 50). It can transmit more than 2,000 plots before the battery needs recharging and can be used on land and sea. Please visit: www.yellowbrick-tracking.com.

5. Electrical Power, EFOY Comfort 210 Fuel Cell, £5,500, 8.2kg

This whisper-quiet power generator is scarcely audible, even when fitted under your pillow. With an incredible charging capacity of 210Ah @105 watts, the EFOY fuel cells converts pure methanol into electricity by magic! Purchased from: www.fuelcellsystems.co.uk

The post Shackleton Voyage: the kit they used appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

1  Run the engine in fresh water, ideally after every use in salt. If this is not possible, put a length of 3in (76mm) hose-pipe to the outlet hole and empty a gallon of water through the cylinder block to backflush the system.

2  Shut the fuel tap as you near your destination. It saves fuel, and ensures that the float chamber is empty and won’t leak in the boot of the car.

3  Seagull Outboards should start by the third pull. If it hasn’t, don’t keep trying.

4  Wipe the motor with an oily rag after use.
It develops a protective, oily patina.

5  If you have an older model with the piece of string, ensure there’s no one standing behind you, or they will be hit by the knot as it flies off the wheel. See Don Street’s advice if you have lost your string!

6  Half-throttle or just over will punt you along almost as fast as full throttle, but more thriftily.

7  Don’t leave a Seagull Outboard idling too long. The pump needs speed to circulate water. Rev it every 30 seconds or so till water comes out.

8  A Seagull’s ejected cooling water should never be too hot to put your hand under.

9  If you need to take the flywheel off, check the FAQ on John William’s website. It is easy to get this wrong.

10  Check the gearbox oil regularly.

11  Assume a 10:1 fuel mix on early models. Most engines can run on a lower mix. Again, the website has full details.

12  Fine-tuning the revs: moving the tiller up increases the revs, and lowering the tiller decreases them.

13  A 1930s handbook advises time alone to learn the engine, so as to avoid embarrassment!

14  A Seagull should be wintered upright.

15  The gold-leaf transfers cannot be made now; apparently nobody can remember how!

For more information on Seagull Outboard motor engines:

Read our guide to Seagull Outboards

Visit John William’s website: www.saving-old-seagulls.co.uk

The post Seagull Outboards Maintenance and Running Advice appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

On passage from Gibraltar, Richard Toyne found that his new battery – a 105Ah maintenance-free Delphi Freedom – had stopped holding a charge.

After testing, it turned out that there was nothing wrong with the battery itself- the problem was that it had become fully discharged: a powerful, manually-controlled charger was needed to replenish it. To avoid this

complicated shore-based procedure, the sensible thing is to prevent a battery reaching this state in the first place.

Try the following two guidelines:

Firstly, never let the battery become more than 50 per cent discharged. As long as this rule is followed, conventional charging systems such as an alternator will be able to fully replenish the battery. There are gauges available in chandleries that can show the state of charge, but if you don’t have one you can calculate how much power you are using. For example, a 12-volt 6-watt bulb will draw half an amp of current. This means that every two hours of use will drain one ampere of charge from the battery.

Secondly, when you recharge your battery, charge it for double the amount of ampere hours that you want to end up with. For example, if our 105ah battery is 40 per cent discharged this means that we have used 42ah.

Our battery charger delivers 4 amps. Normally we would assume that by dividing the ampere hours required by the current we would obtain the required charging time, in this case 10.5 hours. We now know that, in order to ensure a full charge we need to double this and charge our battery for 21 hours.

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The post How to keep your battery rechargable appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

How to make a wooden tranducer mount, in 8 easy steps:

1 Select a block of wood
wide enough to accommodate the head of the transducer and draw an elongatedpear shape.

2 Drill a hole the diameter and depth of the transducer lobe in the widest part of the pear shape using a bench drill. Now drill into the centre of this hole the same diameter as the threaded bolt position of the depth sounder. Check the transducer fits.

3 The transducer needs to be vertical and at a low enough point to remain in the water when heeled. It also needs to be located with comfortable inboard access. The angle from the vertical of the turn of the bilge needs to be measured. A plumb line can be held in place while the angle is measured. Transfer this angle to the ends of the block of wood and saw. Retain the off-cut for later.

4 Trim, shape and fair the block. A pear shape with a large radius as the leading edge offers less resistance and gives a clean flow of water.

5 Now glue in place using a screw at the narrow end, propping the wide end, being sure to fit it within the middle of a plank.

6 Once set, drill through the hull using the hole in the block as a guide, then prime bare wood.

7 Run the depth-sounder cable in from the outside and bed the transducer in
butyl rubber.

8 Use the cut-off to provide a horizontal surface on which to set the nut of the transducer bolt tightly.

The post How to make a transducer mount appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Get rid of inappropriate, expensive repeaters and fit an old echo sounder.

If you’re uncomfortable with digital displays and repeaters cluttering the cockpit of your lovely old boat, why not settle for a model that works along the lines of the old Seamaster echo sounders of the 1960s? Add a lump of wood, a hinge and a length of bungee and the need for a repeater vanishes altogether.

In this case a Stingray Classic Echo Sounder is used, mounted on a hardwood offcut, and attached just inside the companionway by a brass hinge. It can be used at the chart table, then swung out to the cockpit for use in shallow water. Most of the time it’s out of sight. A brass catch holds the back board against the bulkhead when the device is inside, and the bungee, when tensioned through a jam cleat, holds it in the outward position. It’s a slight obstruction when you’re going below, but if you brush it, it just yields. That’s the main downside.

So, what are the other disadvantages? OK, it’s not lead-line technology, so not deep tradition. But surely it’s more traditional than digital displays festooning the cockpit? It’s cheap as there’s no need for a repeater. Since the device is not permanently fixed in the cockpit, it doesn’t suffer weather deterioration. And, from a security point of view, it can easily be removed from the boat (by the owner!).

The post Depth Sounders appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Although clogged with paint and firmly screwed shut with the thread of the dome seized in the deck flange, prospects for restoration seemed fair because it had been cast in bronze to resist the rigours of the marine environment.

Early attempts to free the thread proved ineffective, however, as I resorted to increasingly desperate persuasion with various grips and wrenches. The solution turned out to be chemistry rather than brute force, using the dismantling lubricant PlusGas Formula A.

The maker, English Abrasives and Chemicals (EAC), claims this fluid works in seconds with just a few drops. That wasn’t the case here, but after dousing the threads and leaving them to soak overnight, when I gripped the flange in the vice and applied a modicum of torque to the dome I was greeted by the pleasant graunching of threads turning for the first time in years.

PlusGas Formula A is a blend of hydrocarbon distillate and mineral oil with surface tension about one third that of water – similar to solvents like acetone and ethanol. From the moment it is applied you can see it racing through corrosion by capillary action. Anyone grappling with seized nuts and bolts in the marine environment would find this product useful. A 250ml can with applicator is around £4.95 at hardware stores.

The bronze mushroom ventilator itself is not only elegant in operation but looks the part on a traditional deck and, as proven here, will stand the test of time. Typically it is used for ventilating a lazarette or fo’c’s’le.Although prone to snagging the odd line and not totally waterproof, it rings as delightfully as a bicycle bell when struck. Equivalents to this 4in (10cm) example are available from traditional chandlers for around £80-£90.

The post Restoring a Mushroom Vent appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

The engine on Sigfrid has been fitted as far aft as possible to maximise cabin space.

The result is a very short propeller shaft, supported by a cutlass bearing where it leaves the hull. It then runs through the hull, and bolts – without further fastenings – to the drive on the gearbox. The inside end of the stern tube is kept watertight by a rubber deep-sea seal.

This set-up means that if the coupling between the shaft and the engine is disconnected, the inboard end of the shaft is unsupported.

When we replaced the engine mounts, we had to realign the engine. This meant that we needed to find a way to support the inboard end of the shaft and hold it in the middle of the stern tube.

To do this, we used a little purpose-made jig, designed by Sigfrid’s previous owner.

This jig is simply a small collar – split in two halves – that could be placed around the shaft. The inside of the collar exactly matches the diameter of the shaft, while the outside has been machined to a very slight taper, which allows it to be wedged into the tube. As long as the two parts of the collar are inserted the same distance into the tube, the shaft is held in its correct position.

This simple but ingenious little device worked well in practice, holding the
shaft firmly and securely, making it comparatively straightforward to adjust
the engine mounts to obtain the correct alignment.

The post Fitting a Shaft appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.