SAILING TIPS
Ideas to make your cruising safer and easier
ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL
The guys on the owners’ site for my Mason 44 are a switched-on bunch. Recently, we’ve had a long thread about domestic battery replacement and the conclusion came as no surprise. Life is simple though sometimes dimly lit if you only have a single domestic battery. Where there are two or more and you suspect you have a dud, don’t bother to replace single units. Ditch the lot. That was the message. My contribution was to forget high-tech power pack “solutions” and replace the whole bank for next season with inexpensive lead-acid deep-cycle batteries from a reputable manufacturer. They’ll last at least five years if looked after, and you’ll never again have to chase a flaky cell that’s pulling the rest down. Go on. Shake out your wallet. It’s the only way to happiness.
TACKING A CUTTER
Tacking is the biggest downside of the modern cutter rig. Unlike traditional cutters with their bowsprits, high-cut yankee jibs and minimal overlap, today’s ver- sions are really masthead sloops featuring an inner forestay and a staysail. This means less of a gap between the stays and a bigger genoa to coax through it. On passage this isn’t much of an issue, since the boat doesn’t tack every five minutes and the genoa can always be rolled up a little to help it through. For a full-sail tack, however, a really good answer is to leave the staysail aback as you come head-to-wind. That big, awkward genoa then slides across the backed staysail without trouble. Once it has been sheeted in, the staysail can be let draw. This trick works beautifully, especially when you’re shorthanded.
GETTING OFF
Here’s a situation none of us would enjoy. This boat is pinned to the dock by 35 knots of wind on the beam. It's time to leave. She has no bow thruster. Even if she had one, it wouldn’t help much in these conditions. Shoving off is a waste of time. If the skipper tries to crank his bow out by motoring astern against a stern spring, he'll be fighting his boat's natural inclinations, and he’ll get no help from her rudder. The best bet by far is to rig a bow spring with a couple of fenders up forward, then motor hard ahead against the springline while steering toward the dock. The prop wash against that big rudder will be effective and his boat wants to weathercock with her stern upwind anyway. When he’s sprung her out far enough, he can slip the line and give the engine the beans astern. His righthand prop will walk the transom to port as the wind blows the bow to leeward. This is what he did, and he waltzed off the dock as easy as kiss your hand.
KNOW YOUR WAY AROUND
The most common cause of en-gine failure at sea is blocked fuel filters. A bit of a chop on the water and last winter’s sludge is stirred up in the tank, it's sucked through the
lines and you experience the silence of impending doom. On many boats, it’s easy to change a filter element. This one’s builder and engine maker have done the owner proud. All he needs is a hefty rag, a good grip or maybe a filter strap wrench (cheap from all automotive shops) and a screwdriver to bleed the air from the system after the new element has been screwed into place. That’s the trick. Do you know how to bleed your engine through? If not, the time to find out is not when you are blowing down onto a lee shore. Follow the fuel lines from the tank and find the bleed points before you need to. s