- Local News for Southern Sailors - November 2001 Next Story
Single-handed tricks — advice to the lonely from a solitary cruiser
By Bruce Van Sant
I hate tennis.
Probably because I play it poorly. Watching it gives me a crick in the neck. Except once when I sat mid-court and watched Martina Navratilova play. My head never turned from her. She had what the Greeks knew about athletic beauty. When she left the court I sat as though in the wake of a stunning symphony. If you have Martina's physical power and endurance, you needn't read further.
Still with me? Then you shall enjoy hearing about the other time I didn't get a stiff neck. I sat looking end court on and watched an old man beat the caulk out of two young women while hardly himself moving. The elderly gent startled me with his play. He never wandered more than a step or two from center court. He lazily swatted the ball to exactly where he wanted it in his opponents' court. The young ladies dodged all over the place, straining to just get the ball over the net in fair territory, mostly within the senior's reach.
It came to me that I played the same game as a single-handed sailor, and later as a seaworn wrack. I substituted smarts for sweat. I had to. If you want to control both the ball and center court on your boat, I have some tips for you.
The boat's way However you do it, whatever you do, do it the same way every time. And insist that guests do, too.
While visiting in the United States I took friends for a daysail off Fort Lauderdale. Both couples had long experience cruising blue water. One couple worked long distance deliveries for a blue-chip yacht builder.
Against my custom, I had let the delivery skipper raise sail on our way out. Returning to port, I parked the boat in front of the causeway drawbridge and began to lower the main. I had a way of cranking rudder against current, mizzen against wind, and she'd sit dead in the water like a duck while the other Sunday seabuoy sailors buzzed busily about in circles just to maintain controlled way.
Normally I coil the halyards in bigger-to-smaller loops and latch it loosely to the cleat with a half hitch. To douse sail I simply lift the coil and drop its large loops down on the deck, and down zips the sail. This time I stepped to the mast, lifted the coil and dropped it on deck, and up zipped a snugly tied off gasket coil, which jammed under the spreader. The half lowered sail bagged in the wind, and the boat lost her balance. I stood dumbfounded and disoriented while my whole world gained way and trundled off toward the lowered bridge.
My guest had violated the first principle of boat handling: Don't do it "your" way; do it the boat's way.
I had a coffee cup whose handle had to stow toward a given corner of the shelf. Only that coffee cup, and only that shelf. I instructed my charter guest on this cup's peculiarity.
"Men are all alike," said the charter guest. "You not only don't know how to organize a galley, but you are so petty about details on your boat."
Just then the boat heeled sharply on a rogue wave, followed by the sound of sundering crockery from the shelf in question.
"Don't do it your way or my way; do it the boat's way," I ranted.
All my boats have used a full clockwise turn with a half hitch on every cleat. When freeing the line I easily push off the hitch, and I still have enough purchase to hold the Queen Mary. My coastguardsman son, though brought up sailing with me, got reprogrammed by his bosun to wind endless figure eights counterclockwise around the cleat. When Son One comes aboard I inevitably get Dacron burn after unwinding the last half turn of all those eights as the line under tension tears through my hand. He knows the boat's way, but he says it helps settle scores with me for a deficient upbringing.
Anchor drill Make a slow ballet out of anchor drudgery‹ a sort of T'ai Chi. Start by not "dropping" the hook, as they say. Instead, lower the anchor until you feel the crown gently kiss bottom, flukes downwind, just as the boat gathers sternway. When weighing anchor, keep slack in your chain, and let the catenary pull the yacht forward, not the "coronary".
Morning anchor drill can mold the day in gentle accord with nature, rather than mark the onset of another 24 hour endurance test. When I weigh anchor, I sometimes have to make it a two-cupper: two cups of coffee while I let the chop unglue the anchor on its taut rode. Then I interleave the drill with a dozen other tasks. While I flake the chain out to dry, while I tuck in a reef, while I wake the cattle egrets and get them off their mangroves and to their jobs delousing the cows and salvaging their drool. Not all cruisers see anchor weighing as a quiet time with nature, however.
Once a guy they called Animal stormed aboard uninvited and rushed to the bow where I sat plucking up a few slack links at a time, a cup of coffee in my idle hand.
"Here!" he shouted, shoving me aside, "let me show you how to put some'ass' into that thing." While I was still trying to figure out what hit me, he popped the anchor up right through the teak grating on the bowsprit. Satisfied, he hopped back into his gofast dinghy beside his admiring surfer girl and sped off, waving at me over his four-foot wake with a big grin on his stupid face, while Jalan Jalan, untimely loosed, drifted broadside toward a pier with her bowsprit platform in splinters. Animal could really weigh anchor fast.
Line handling Of course, the single-hander has to have all his lines ready to deploy before approaching a dock. Bow, stern, and just in case, both springs. Place each line eye-end outboard, the standing end led around stanchions or under life lines, clear of fenders and cleated. The body of the line lies coiled flat on deck, big loops down, smaller loops up, so the thrown coil doesn't foul. Secure the eyes to the dock and tend all lines from onboard ship. Since you have no one at the helm, all this must get done while still beyond the entertainments of channels, sea marks, and converging boat traffic near the dock.
I don't do docks well, but single-handing forces forethought of current, wind, fenders, and lines. If you pass a day drinking beer at a busy dock, you shall no doubt value the difference in deck preparations between crewed and single-handed yachts. Though not necessarily so, the single-hander at least looks more competent.
Speed Do everything in slow deliberation, especially in emergencies. When you turn aft from the pulpit, thinking all secure, and you hear 200 feet of chain burst clattering out the hawse pipe, don't race for the windlass. You may step in a bight of chain and have your leg chain-sawn off at the hip. Resign yourself to the problem and deliberate its solution. It shall always prove simple and easy, such as motoring up to vertically hanging slack before grabbing the running chain.
Or perhaps an
unplanned morning swim to recover the bitter end. Rushing around on deck stubs toes, if it doesn't break bones. And stubbed toes do lead to broken bones, because you tend to favor the toe instead of the deck work at hand.
You don't run horses to the barn, do you? Neither then your sea steed. I have found it pays to enter all harbors, even your home port, at dead slow. It certainly makes backing off ground a lot easier.
Similarly, never use reverse gear as a brake. This forces you to approach docks at a speed commensurate with stopping the vessel by hand. And with the momentum of my 52-foot LOA ketch, this meant
s-l-o-w. Of course, you've got to beam innocently at the crowd of monkeys on the pier screaming all kinds of raucous advice because they think you don't know what you're doing. But you must get used to that, especially, I'm afraid, if you belong to the growing class of female single-handers.
Exhaustion Passage-making, the actual doing of a voyage, as opposed to a sail, requires prudent navigation, sea-readiness, competent seamanship and unrelenting vigilance. The last can destroy your mind. Exhaustion can and does kill. My sea crossings have taught me I need three good days of gaining sea legs before anything goes right. The Caribbean doesn't have such crossings, thank goodness. Therefore I island hop in the Caribbean.
Both single-handers and older sailors have a problem with stamina. Sleep can fall like the curtain of doom when least expected, but always at 0430 in any case. In anything less than three days at sea, exhaustion can creep up on little cat feet, even without any strenuous activity. Decisions which seem sensible turn disastrous. A while back a couple lost their boat because they hove to on a tack which fore-reached toward the reefs rather than toward open sea. Given the motion of the sea and the rigidity of their minds at the time, it seemed the right thing to do. It may seem sensible to fault them, unless you have experienced exhaustion at sea yourself.
Hallucinations My favorite hallucination stood to his belly button in hip boots, fly fishing many miles off the Venezuelan coast. I spotted him way forward and followed him out of sight astern. Afraid of losing him, a startlingly realistic delusion, I didn't flinch an eyelid. I wanted to know just how much detail my brain would fill in, if I permitted it to do so. Yet a tingle of superstitious doubt lay under my curiosity. Suppose spooks really existed and he reached out and pulled me overboard? More probable, suppose my mental experiment drove me overboard to join him in his fly fishing?
The boat ghosted toward him until he stood within 15 feet of the beam. I carefully lifted the binoculars. Among the trout flies pinned to his hat he sported a button whose slogan I read in the moonlight. It read "Wilkie for President!"
Real passage-making need not occur between North and South America nor among the Pacific's vast fields of islands. You should sail these areas with relatively short hops, chiefly because passage-making among reefs and islands draws a rhumb line to destruction. From Bimini to Venezuela you get only twice out of sight of land, and even then only for about six hours. Don't go hunting my fly fisherman. He and his like gatekeep Hell.
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Here you have a true gift of a tip. Carry a John Philip Sousa cassette or CD. Play it when you need to crisp yourself up, like approaching harbor. Really puts snap in your step. But when entering harbor, kill all music and talk. VHF channel 16, of course, stays on loud.
Picking weather windows Sailors new to cruising often become so hyped up on getting "out there" that they look for huge windows in which to do it. Long periods of balmy weather in light winds and seas rarely occur in nature. Like fish, large windows appear rarely, but the little ones swarm in their multitudes. They can get you from here to there a lot sooner than you will find a big one. In other words, the shorter weather window you can accept, the more windows you shall net.
Considering the danger of passage-making through reefs and islands, look for weather windows of two to three days. That's a day to ensure you really have the window, a day to use it at its most stable state, and a safeguard day. With today's ubiquitous forecasts: faxes from the Tropical Prediction Center in Miami, offshore forecasts verbally from NMN Coast Guard, and by telex from NAVTEX four times a day, or from ham sources like the Waterway Net or Caribbean George (7241 LSB at 1115 UCT), interactive forecasters like Herb Hilgenberg for the Atlantic (12359 USB at 2000 UCT) and David Jones specializing in the Caribbean (8104 USB at 1230 UCT)ŠI could go on for a full pageŠno one needs to get surprised by the weather.
A truly golden tip: When you listen to Herb or David or other weather nets, listen to the whole show, even if you think it doesn't pertain. You'll find that after you normally would have switched off, a "fill" for your area often comes by a later reporting station, or you get more detail of a situation to weather of you. Have you something more important to do? After all, you live and die by the weather. And, of course, copy your weather at the same times of day, every day, so as not to miss a beat and offset your sense of progression.
Many cruisers get enamored of long passages from reading the tales of Pacific cruisers. Single-handing in the Caribbean I often pass these people by harbor hopping each day a few hours around dawn. Having giant-stepped through reefy islands, they hole up in a lousy anchorage because they couldn't get any farther in their weather window. They, of course, passed by the best waiting hole one anchorage back. Then they express shock at their final destination when they find me already there at anchor, having slept all my nights and dawdled all my days at secure little coves.
In the larger islands and along the U.S. coast, you can find a couple of hours of calm, scraps of leftover night lee, each and every morning with which to hop to windward without strain‹often during adverse forecasts.
The chain of islands from Bimini to Grenada makes a ladder. Skipping steps while climbing up and down a ladder you'll eventually break a leg. Why do it out there?
When do you? The old sailor's query of when do you reef sails has the answer: the first time you think of it.
When do you heave to and sleep? When do you go below to inspect bilges? When do you eyeball the engine room? When do you stand up to scan the horizon behind a blind spot? When do you bear off from wind or sea? When do you let out more rode? When do you set another anchor? When do you put the anchor back down and stay in port for another day?
Answer? The first time you think of it. Never any deliberation here.
The guest aboard sneered when I tacked early coming into Isle des Saintes' harbor, because my mind had asked itself if I should tack. I had to explain the principle of always leaving a spare tack between the boat and the rocks just in case you screw up the first tack. Single-handers sail their home, their whole world, past rocks a little differently than the club team squeezes by the windward mark.
Getting off ground I would rather kedge off ground single-handed than use all the resources of New York's harbor tugs. This simple exercise performed all alone in the wilderness of the Far Out Islands has Zenful beauty. But it outdoes a Keystone Cops episode when other cruisers rush to gather about. Everyone has an idea, each of which, no matter how nutty, you must brook or get damned by the local cruising community. Should you have the misfortune to go aground while crewed, your crew shall flap about, asserting your incompetence to one and all, and your refusal to have listened to their sage counsel from the ranks.
God help you if you accept a speedboat's offer to pull you off. They'll pull out your bitts, or their own transom. And don't stand behind the strained nylon when they pull. Nylon stretches to near 33% of its length without damage, but it can do severe damage if it lets go. Little David never had such a slingshot. Every 10 minutes or so take in another few inches. Another slow ballet, this process may take time, but it always works.
If you've done a public grounding, remember the centering exercises at Yoga class‹you know, the one you hoped would introduce you to sexy new crew candidates? You can practice the art of centering amidst the grand huzzah of a fleet of cruisers who "only want to help." Pretend with all your might you stranded solo on Hogsty Reef, but remember the guy in the paper hat working the dinghy crowd selling beer.
First, find where deeper water lies and carefully plant a heavy anchor a few boat lengths into it a little aft of the beam. Though extreme examples can befall, no boat drags well aft nor forward, and you don't want to break your rudder. No matter your keel configuration, however, all boats like to pivot.
Second, set up strong and constant tension on the anchor from the foremost point of the yacht. Deploy chafe gear on your rollers or cheekplates as needed. If you have sturdy bow eyes, go through them. With all chain rode, take in a link or two at a time with each sag of the catenary, using a chain hook, or a rolling hitch on Dacron line (not nylon or poly) led to your windlass, or aft to your halyard or sheet winch. Strong and constant tension means a bar taut chain or dangerously stretched nylon rode.
If you haven't any chop, you need to make some. You need to get bights of slack in the taut rode in order to sweat some in. Set up rocking of the boat, even a 20-tonner, by madly running the beam, or churn about with your dinghy in snowplow mode. If you have a two-horsepower hard dink, you can't do this. Take the lesson and get a gofast inflatable before you do Florida, the Bahamas, or the Caribbean.
Any powerboats who normally roll your spreader tips into the bay on a Sunday shall now march at funereal half-step past your predicament. Your contortions communicating the tidal waves you want them to produce shall get read as dead slow commands. If your eager salvors still mill about in their dinghies like Dodg'em Cars, they'll love the exercise of making chop. If you hear snatches of sage counsel from them between the oaths and alarms they bandy during their collisions, ignore it, stay cool and carry on.
Tremendous forces hide in wave action, time and tide. Your quick response in laying out a tense kedge to pivot you toward deeper water should not have waited while you examined tide tables. You wanted to do that whether the tide rose or fell, so do it after setting the kedge. Reckon both the tide and any expected change in current or wind. Mayhap you shall get saved by tide and time. If you draw a falling tide, assert tension in the slackening rode every inch you get. At low tide, go below and read a book. When the tide again rises, you shall gradually pivot toward deeper water without lifting a hand, provided you kept the rode humming tight while it went down. If high tide doesn't get you off, redeploy the kedge and go again. You'll read two books and get that much smarter for next time.
When finally laying fair to wind in good water, take an icy gin and tonic and go to bed. Deduct the day from eternity. Never try to recover it by hurrying on or planning a larger leg the next day. That probably answers why you went aground in the first place. And don't forget the guy in the paper hat. He owes you a commission.
The aging cruiser There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. There are no old and bold pilots.
This old saw applies to pilots of the sea as well as to the aerial sort. No matter your age, if you want to get older, take a lesson from the old tennis pro in center court. Deliberate, planned moves. No rush. And if you don't worry about something, ask yourself what you forgot.
I suppose more mayhem has come to sailing vessels by the stubbed toe and the torn toenail than by any acts of nature. Favoring your toe while trying, in the dark and on a wildly pitching, yawing and rolling deck, to lasso a parted stay, a broken halyard, a loosed boom, or worst of all, a snatching chain, will do you in for sure. And oh, yes. Take this old pilot's word for it: Always wear deck shoes on deck. They call them deck shoes for that reason.
Simply because they have no one else to depend on, single-handers depend on things going wrong and then see to it that they don't. Managing alone, single-handers often have the best of the cruising life just therefore.
Bruce Van Sant is author of Gentleman's Guide to Passages South, A Cruising and Watersports Guide to the Spanish Virgins, and the forthcoming book Trades Tricks. He cruises mostly single-handed out of the Dominican Republic.
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