Promises, Promises

Sailing season a quarter gone and here I am, still immersed in assorted boat projects… just what I’d promised myself wouldn’t happen this year. Weekend rain, thunderstorms and family commitments are what I’ll remember June for, and even though we got out a couple of times, quite frankly the desire doesn’t burn as bright when you’re cringing in the cockpit waiting for a bolt from the blue to zap you on the masthead.

So, I occupied much of my down time with planning boat improvements. I’ve known people who enjoyed working on boats much more than they enjoyed sailing them, but I don’t count myself among that sawdust-covered group. The fun for me lies in making the boat more efficient, both as a sailing machine and as a floating vacation home.

The machine gets goodies like new sails, a backstay adjuster, genoa cars that are adjustable under load, a mainsheet traveler that can be hauled to weather by a child in 20 knots of wind, a 3-bladed feathering propeller, an inner forestay, a retractable bowsprit.

The home gets shore power, new plumbing, a water heater, a cockpit shower, a gravity-drain holding tank, LED lights, a battery and monitor upgrade, solar ventilators, new upholstery; perhaps, one day, a fridge.

There are times when I question my own sanity, pouring all this effort and money into a 35-year-old boat. There are other times when I think it keeps me sane.

Anyway, right now I have several projects on the go and in various stages of completion. One is the installation of a retracting bowsprit, which involves the drilling of nine holes in my foredeck. As you can guess, drilling holes in one’s pride and joy is not to be taken lightly; it’s much easier to bring yourself to do it on a 35-year-old boat than a nice crisp new one, though. I haven’t actually drilled any holes yet, but that’s only because I can’t fit into the tiny space in the anchor locker to get the backing plate and nuts on the three bolts that’ll be located right up in the bows. That procedure requires the willing assistance of someone younger, slimmer, and more flexible, ie
Mrs Nielsen.


I did pluck up the courage to drill three other holes, for the padeye to which the inner forestay will be secured. Then I plugged them again while I went to drill matching holes in a sturdy stainless steel backing plate that will be linked to the anchor locker bulkhead via a spare turnbuckle and some anchor chain. Since the foredeck is cored with half-inch aluminum plate (those Swedes didn’t mess around) this should be plenty strong enough to take the rig loads.

I’m enthused about the inner forestay, because I’ve gone over to the fiber rigging side for this item. I didn’t like the thought of a length of wire banging against my new mast, nor of a hefty stainless pelican hook clunking around on deck.

So, instead of the length of 5/16 wire that’s coiled and waiting in the basement, I’m going to use 7mm Dynex Dux, a pre-stretched braided Spectra line that’s made in Iceland. This will be not only be sturdy enough to stop the mast from pumping when used in conjunction with running backstays (also Spectra), but will carry a staysail (the old #4 jib) and storm jib, which will be secured to it with Spectra “hanks.” I’ll tension the stay with a 4-part tackle. First, though, I have to actually bolt the padeye into place…

That makes two works-in-progress. The third is the VHF installation. In the interests of safety, I decided last weekend to replace the ancient VHF radio with a new DSC-capable model complete with remote microphone. After spending a sweaty half-hour with a handheld drillsaw enlarging the hole left by the outgoing radio, I finally managed to coax the gleaming new one into place.

Time was short by the time I’d finished, and so was my temper. I figured the delicate job of making the relevant NMEA connections to allow the GPS to talk to the radio could wait for another day, and just hooked the radio up to the antenna and power supply. Reception was loud and clear, but – guess what – when I hit the transmit button to call the launch, there was no response. Nada. Nope, the launch driver said when we’d finally flagged him down, he hadn’t heard us at all. We were, electronically speaking, mute.

“Hmmm,” said the maker’s tech support guy next day. “Could be the radio, could be the antenna. Best thing to do is hook up another antenna to it and see if it works. If it doesn’t, send the radio back to us.” So, my next Saturday morning is already mapped out: buy emergency VHF antenna (handy to have anyway), try VHF. I’m hoping the set itself is the problem, because it’s a lot easier to replace that than the antenna. Then there are the other projects to attend to. Sunday, I’ll go sailing. And that’s a promise.

Power to the People

Funny old game, boating. The boat goes in, if the yard’s to be believed, this week. I had been promised it would go in the week before Memorial Day, but anyone who knows boatyards knows that line is right up there with The Check’s in The Mail. So I spend the weekend doing yard work, and never went near the boat – no reason to, as she’s ready for launch.

What a contrast to last year. This time last spring we had taken our first steps down the Road of No Return… that is, we’d stripped everything removable from the decks and cockpit, portlights and hatches included, and were prepping the boat for new paint, new grabrails, new ventilators, and a new rig.

The latter process involved enlarging the hole in the cabintop that the mast passes through (the hounds), fitting a new mast step, and installing a deck ring. Doesn’t take long to write it down; but what an agonizing process it was. I’d never done anything like it, and it was fairly critical; if I screwed up, the mast might end leaning one way or the other; the location of the mast step itself was just as critical.

With the help of a couple of wise old heads in Joe Grenier, the rigger at Hawthorne Cove Marina in Salem, and Scott Alexander, sales manager for mastmakers Selden, I contrived a measuring jig that involved taping vertical straightedges to the chainplates and carefully measuring the distances between them; then we rigged up a laser level across the midpoint of the cutout and shone the beam down onto the mast step. To cut a long story short, it worked. The mast stood as straight as we could we wish when it was finally stepped, raked a desirable 3 degrees aft with enough latitude for adjustment.

In amongst all this I filled and sanded a couple of dozen dents, holes and gouges in and around the gelcoat, filled in a 14” x 6” hole in the cockpit footwell where I’d removed the old hydraulics panel, took off the winches, and generally sweated blood over that and a dozen other jobs. Then, grunt work complete, my wife took over and painted the cockpit and decks.

That accounted for all of April and May and most of June; when we finally got the boat launched it we found we didn’t have a headsail that would fit the new furling gear, and so we spent a few more weeks sailing with a blown-out #4 jib whilst awaiting the new genoa.

Anyway, that seems a lifetime ago. This year we’ve almost had the opposite problem. There is still a hell of a lot to do, but only one thing that would have interfered with the operation of the boat – dead batteries and an antiquated charging system that looked as though it could fail at any time.

After killing off the house battery over winter (see State of Charge, below), I leapt (well, slouched) into action early in April. I relocated the engine start battery to make room for a second house battery, and bought two new Group 27 flooded batteries from West Marine. This doubles my house capacity to 180ah; low by most standards, but since I am replacing almost all the domestic and running lights on the boat with LEDs, and there is no power-greedy fridge, it should serve us well enough.

Spanking new cables in attractive red and ABYC-compatible yellow replaced the cracked, greenish items that had been on board for a generation or more, and I connected these, via a new Blue Sea Dual Circuit Plus battery switch, to a Blue Sea ACR 7160 automatic charging relay that automatically diverts the full alternator charge into the house battery bank after the engine battery is topped up. This means I never again have to worry about forgetting to click the switch to ‘both’ so both banks get charged; the switch keeps starting and house circuits separate, while the ACR combines batteries for charging and isolates them when the engine’s turned off. This is small potatoes compared to some of the electrical systems I’ve seen in boats costing 20 or 30 times as much, but it’s as close to state of the art as we’ll ever get with this 35-year-old boat.

I need to know what this whizzbang system is doing, so I also added a Microlog battery monitor that shows me the voltage on both banks as well as actual current input and draw. I now know that the stereo draws nearly half an amp, and that my minuscule solar panel is putting close to two-tenths of an amp into the house battery at high noon. This was a weekend well spent; the project was surprisingly easy, and extremely satisfying. There’ll be a full account of this makeover in the October issue of SAIL.

While I was fiddling around with electrics and dabbing paint on the bottom, Pip was replacing the tired old vinyl hull liners and redoing the cabin overhead. Then, suddenly, there was nothing pressing that needed to be done… and that’s a feeling I’ve never had around a boat.

Antigua and All That

Team SAIL went to the races a couple of weeks ago. Along with colleague David Schmidt and a gnarly crew recruited from the waterfronts of Marblehead, Mass, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Annapolis, Md and New Orleans, I’d chartered a 50ft Beneteau from Sunsail at the mecca of all warm-water regattas, Antigua Sailing Week. I had been surprised to discover that charter boats made up a healthy proportion of the fleets in the Caribbean regatta circuit. In fact, of the nearly 300 boats entered in the Heineken regatta in St Martin back in March, 130 were spread through seven bareboat classes. When nearly one in two boats in a regatta is a tubby cruiser, you know you’re on to something. Here is a way for Everyman to race at a competitive level alongside some of the hottest boats in the world, in some of the best sailing areas in the world.

You might think the average charter boat is more fun at anchor than under sail, and up to a point I’d agree. If you’re one of that small contingent who only sails hot racing boats you won’t find much to whoop and holler about on a boat with five toilets and bunks for ten vacationers. But for us mere mortals, the thought of punting a 40 foot Jeanneau or 51 foot Beneteau through warm Caribbean waves seems pretty attractive.

And it’s not as if people don’t take this kind of racing seriously. I’ve seen anchors and chain piled up on the docks, stoves and tables removed and stashed ashore, water tanks drained. The leeward mark roundings can be pretty hair-raising; no wonder the charter companies ask for a hefty racing deposit – 5,000 Euros in our case. There are even ways around that. We met one skipper at Antigua who had insured against his deposit being lost. Thankfully, he was in a different class. Crews tend to come back year after year, often chartering the same boats. Some even have sails made just for the regattas. It’s not easy to win a bareboat race.

Most of our competion was European. The boats weren’t decked out in corporate logos the way they were in St Martin, but the crews generally sported team uniforms that matched down to the Speedos. Some also evidenced an unfortunate predilection for getting naked at every opportunity, chief among one boat full of middleaged Germans that we found anchored next to us on a couple of occasions. You can carry the bareboat concept a bit too far.

I won’t tell you how we did on our Sunsail Beneteau 50, because the report’s in the July issue and I don’t want to spoil the surprise. Suffice to say we learned a few things, not least among them that the bareboat class is a wonderful way to check out the hot boats. We started before the fast guys and they usually caught us before the leeward marks, so we got to see plenty of spinnakers and some interesting takedowns. We even got asked kindly to move out of the way, once or twice.

We did our best to sample some of Antigua’s legendary parties, but only got to two of them. The other nights we kicked back on board, grilled steaks, and drank a bit too much Wadadli and Carib beer and rum laced with Ting, a local soda. I had never realized that Wadadli, the island’s national beer, was actually brewed in Denmark, while the maltier Carib is made locally. Luckily, neither was proof against aspirin.

In spite of these temptations we emerged at the end of a solid week’s racing happy, tanned and more-or-less healthy, if you discounted the inevitable boat bites and cruises. Winds had been unusually light, not topping out at much more than 20 knots, and more often around 12-15. The five races were all around 20-22 miles long, favoring the beautiful south and west coasts. By the end of the week we were starting to get the hang of the place.

This was one of the best weeks of sailing I’ve had in years. To top it all off, I got home to find that my wife had refinished all the floorboards on our boat. Truly, does life get any better?

That Sinking Feeling

How many times have you heard this statement: you should not abandon your boat until you have to step up into the liferaft. Sounds pretty facile, doesn’t it? Easy for you to say, if you’re not the one with a foot of water over the cabin sole in the middle of a black howling night a hundred miles from land.

The thing is, there are more and more instances of people abandoning boats that are then found weeks or months later, having drifted across large expanses of ocean. Only a few weeks ago a 36-foot cruising boat that had been abandoned because of an unspecified rigging problem during the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers back in December was found drifting off Antigua. Considering the crew had been aiming for nearby St Lucia, the boat did an admirable job of getting itself so close.

I could come up with many more examples, but you get the point. In this age of instantaneous communication, it’s only too easy to call for help when things get tough. Long gone are the likes of Blondie Hasler, the progenitor of the Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic Race (OSTAR), who, when asked what would happen if his boat sank under him, replied that he would “drown like a gentleman.” (That, for the record, is not the answer I gave my wife the first time she asked that question).

Anyway, I was intrigued by two incidents that took place recently off the coast of New Zealand, my old stamping ground. In the first, an inexperienced crew helping deliver a 25-foot boat down the west coast of the North island decided they’d had enough of the 25-knot winds and 10-foot seas (fairly typical Kiwi sailing conditions) and pulled the pin on the EPIRB – against the skipper’s wishes.

Now, the skipper was adamant that there was no danger and that his boat was well able to handle the conditions, but even so he was ordered to abandon ship along with the three frightened greenhorns when the rescue helicopter arrived. The uninsured boat, Air Apparent, was left to drift and for all I know may be still sailing in circles in the Pacific; her unfortunate owner thought the mutinous crew should cough up for a replacement, but I doubt he’s had any luck.

This incident stirred up a huge debate among Kiwis, who generally have a low tolerance for wimps and little sympathy for people who get themselves into situations they can’t cope with. The contrite crew impressed by making a large donation towards the cost of the rescue, but so far the luckless owner is no closer to getting a new boat. Remember the Perfect Storm book and movie? The poor skipper whose green crew pulled the same stunt, and who was taken off his boat – which survived the storm on its own, and was later found, still afloat?

Two lessons here are that a boat can often take more punishment than its crew; and you should choose your crew very carefully. Being offshore in a small boat – and in that context anything shorter than a maxi-yacht is a small boat – is not for everyone. Ocean sailing is wonderfully rewarding but it can get uncomfortable and scary out there, and if you don’t have the mindset to deal with that you should stay home. The uncomfortable, scary parts are, of course, just part and parcel of the whole offshore experience that many people find addictive.

Calling for outside help should be a last-resort measure, taken when you are in actual and pressing danger, not just scared, wet, and cold. Putting a helicopter crew at risk just because you’d rather be at home in front of a fireplace than stuck in a small boat in a storm is irresponsible and inexcusable.

Now, here’s a great story that shows how real ocean sailors cope with misfortune. A husband and wife, each sailing their own boats on circumnavigations (it’s a long story), were 700 miles off the New Zealand coast when the husband’s 27-foot plywood boat Galennaia was damaged during a gale and began taking on water. Did Tony Curphy set off his EPIRB? Did he hell. He radioed his wife, Suzanne, who was 150 miles away on her 40-foot ketch, So Long, and started pumping. Two days later, she arrived and the two hooked up a towline to Galennaia. Eight days later, they pulled into Nelson, on the tip of the South Island.

Now that’s an example of the right stuff. And an example of the kind of crew you never need to worry about – no crew at all.

A century of excellence

Olin Stephens turned 100 last weekend, and that’s a birthday worth noting even if you’ve never owned a Sparkman & Stephens design. The old boy’s life spans the history of yachting as we know it – or indeed sailing as we know it. He’s designed some of the loveliest and most enduring yachts ever built, and stamped his influence on cruising, racing and even motorboating. From bulletproof cruisers to America’s Cup winners, graceful yawls to blunt-nosed workboats, Stephens had the kind of magic touch that most boat designers would kill for.

The roll call of famous S&S boats would take too long a time to get through, so I’ll restrict myself to one of my favorites. I was living in Australia during the early 1980s when two remarkable voyages took place. A likely lad called Serge Testa built himself a 12-foot aluminum boat and sailed it round the world. But I digress – this was no S&S design, it was all Serge’s own handiwork, and a finer example of never letting a lack of cash stand in the way of a great adventure has seldom been seen. More on that some other time.

The voyage I really mean was that of Jon Sanders, a sheep shearer from the dusty hinterland of Western Australia. I was a long-haired, bewhiskered editor of a motorcycle magazine in Melbourne in ’81 and ’82, the years in which Sanders circumnavigated Antarctica – twice, alone – in Perie Banou, his Aussie-built S&S34.
I wasn’t interested in sailing per se in those days but I was interested in adventure, and since I knew people who knew Sanders I followed his exploits keenly. He had already made a name for himself by placing second in the 1979 Parmelia Race, from England to Fremantle, on the same boat (another S&S 34). Back in the mid-70s, he’d circumnavigated with stops, and with crew. In between, he’d criss-crossed the Pacific and Indian oceans numerous times and made a dozen or more transits of the southern Australian coastline, and raced a few Sydney-Hobarts.

Later in the 1980s, Sanders traded up to a bigger boat and circumnavigated another three times without stopping – twice west-east, once east-west, covering 71,023 miles in 657 consecutive days at sea. I have a feeling that’s a record that’ll stand forever; Sanders later said: “Normal people would say ‘you’ve got to be mad,’ and I’d think, yup, and if I’m not, I’m sure it would be helpful.”

Mad or not, Sanders trusted his little 34-footer enough to dodge icebergs alone for nearly a year. The S&S 34 was conceived in the dying days of Britain’s RORC rule, and its design was influenced by both that and the new International Offshore Rule (IOR). Olin said at the time: “We hope and believe that the S&S 34 will make a good all-round boat, so as to demonstrate in a fairly small package that a good boat for offshore racing will also be a good boat for cruising.”

The 34 had all the characteristics of what we now identify with those early IOR days – a hull that was diamond-shaped when seen from above, with fine bows and a pinched stern, a short waterline, long overhangs and a generous dollop of tumblehome that meant the person sleeping in the windward pilot berth was further outboard than the rail monkeys sitting above. The skinny-main, big-foretriangle rig set the tone for the decade that followed.

This is the style of boat that leads people who have never sailed one to pontificate about downwind death rolls, lack of stability, poor build quality, bad seakeeping and lord knows what else. Some later IOR boats did for sure give the whole generation a bad name, but many early examples were and remain excellent, solidly built sailing boats that are still rewarding to sail today. Note to people looking for cheap, tough, well-mannered cruising boats – you could do a lot worse than an early IOR racer.

The 34 made its bones when British prime minister Ted Heath won the 1969 Sydney-Hobart in Morning Cloud, and for the next five years S&S 34s won or placed highly in that tough ocean classic. It gained a rep as an excellent heavy weather boat, and even now, beating into a stiff breeze, it would give nothing away to many modern designs. Sailing conditions around the Australian coast are as tricky as you’ll find anywhere, so it wasn’t surprising that the boat proved so popular there. The Aussies soon began building S&S 34s, and believe it or not you can still order a brand new one, built the modern way with resin infusion by the Swarbrick yard.

Following in Sanders’s wake, Aussie youngsters David Dicks and Jesse Martin also circumnavigated alone on S&S 34s, and these little boats have carried many other sailors safely through adventures on the world’s oceans. A few years back I tried hard to find one to buy, but the only example I could track down was a tired old warhorse in California that had way too high an asking price.

They don’t design boats like the S&S 34 any more, because people don’t buy them. Like the Contessa 32 – another ‘70s cult classic - a 34 was a big boat back in the ‘60s, but compared to a modern 34-footer it feels like you’re in a closet. At sea the lack of interior volume is a blessing rather than a handicap, but in port you need to set your sights a bit low in terms of cruising comfort. This isn’t a boat for big crews, which may be one reason it’s so popular with singlehanders.

Even though it doesn’t have the cachet of Dorade, the beauty of Finisterre, or the high profile of many bigger S&S designs, the S&S 34 epitomizes that sweet blend of form and function that made Olin Stephens such a great designer. It looked right, it was right, it still is right, and it’ll always be right. There aren’t that many boats you can say that of, and a good many of those took shape on Olin Stephens’s drawing board.

State of Charge

Up here in Massachusetts, the boating season seems a long way off. There’s been a layer of ice on the car windshield the last couple of mornings and the weekends have been write-offs. Daytime temperatures were consistently below freezing from November until the first weekend in March. I hadn’t been on board the boat between mid-December and then; partly because it was too cold to do anything anyway, and partly because I’d done a lousy job of setting up the cover. I arrived in mid-January to find it had sagged over the cockpit coamings and in front of the hatchway, forming twin pools that collected enough snow and rain to turn into a pair of 150-pound blocks of ice that effectively blocked access to the main hatch. The forehatch was locked from belowdecks. It was too cold to do anything about it, so I went home, after stabbing a few holes in the tarp for drainage when the inevitable thaw arrived.

In February I went back, and found the pools had grown to the point where a small boy could have ice-skated on them. Fearing their immense weight would damage something, I arranged for the boatyard to attack the ice floes with hammers and cold chisels.

When I did eventually get on board a couple of weeks ago, after ripping the collapsed framework and tarp off the boat, I found some good things and some not so good things.

The good – I’d dreamt that the bilge had filled with rainwater until it lapped at the cabin sole and then frozen solid. Irrational, I know, but there you are. It was actually dry as a bone, bar an inch at the bottom of the sump that the pickup tube hadn’t reached. Knowing that a keel-stepped mast is an invitation for water to enter a boat, I’d emptied a gallon of RV antifreeze into the sump back in November, and left the bilge pump switched on. The antifreeze kept ice from fouling the float switch and everything did its job. What I should have done at layup time was pull the depth transducer so trapped water could find a way out before it rose above the sole.

Also good – the interior smelled dry and sweet, with not a hint of mold or mildew or rust anywhere. Obviously, enough light had penetrated the white tarps to keep the two Nicro solar vents whirring away all winter.

The not so good: Friends who borrowed the boat last year had left a full winecask on board, and I’d forgotten to take it home. The contents had frozen and expanded enough to burst the bladder. When it thawed… you can guess the rest. Thankfully, it was white wine. Sauterne in the bilge leaves a much less distinctive odour than a pinot noir or merlot.

The bad: I thought I had switched the forward electric bilge pump off back in December, but it turns out I hadn’t. It sits in the forward bilge, ahead of the mast, and is one of those that turns itself on momentarily every few minutes to sense the water level, and then pumps the offending H20 into the main bilge. Over the space of two and a half months this, combined with the occasional draw from the main bilge pump, had sucked the house battery dry. It was stone cold dead. Battery electrolyte won’t freeze unless the battery is more than 25 per cent discharged, which my battery obviously was; it scarcely registered on the multimeter, and wouldn’t even take a charge. Inspection revealed that the electrolyte (which I’d topped off last fall) in three of the chambers was below the top of the plates.

Not being as dumb as this makes me sound, I did have an automotive, supposedly automatic float charger hooked up to the house battery. I suspect this was my downfall. The charger had, I think, failed to switch itself off, and had overcharged the battery, leading to electrolyte loss and something horrible called plate sulfation. The battery discharged and froze solid. In short, a combination of carelessness and bad luck had ruined an expensive battery. On the other hand the starter battery, which I’d left disconnected from everything, still showed a relatively healthy 12.5 volts.

So, I’m down $120 for a new Group 27 deep cycle battery. Two, actually, because this spring’s main project was going to be expanding the size of the house battery bank. Maybe I’ll just switch over to LED lights instead. ..