Sam Llewellyn
A week devoted to reanimating sailing skills
This year, as most years, we will be having a no-engine week. The idea is to climb on to sailing boats of various sizes and use only the wind and the tide to perform the usual manoeuvres and some unusual ones. Its advantage is that it slows the pace of life, reduces the carbon footprint and puts the sailor in touch with the spirit of the ancestors. The disadvantage is that you tend to bump into things.
Marinas have been the death of engineless manoeuvring. The prospect of T-boning a million quid’s worth of Sunseeker after an innocent miscalculation has encouraged the use of diesel in close-quarters situations. So has the spectacle of marina managers sprinting down the pontoon waving and screeching. Experiment far from the marina, then, preferably on a pontoon outside a pub in which you can seek consolation after one of the inevitable wrapups.
This is not the place to discuss the basics of picking up and dropping moorings under sail, which have been discussed ad nauseam elsewhere. It is enough to suggest that all you need is plenty of sea room and a state of spiritual development in which you can just let everything go.
Recovery involves pointing the boat in the desired direction using a backed jib until you are moving through the water fast enough for the rudder to bite. The backed jib will also lever you off a pontoon, and is invaluable during the heaving-to process, vital for the peaceable manufacture of cups of tea on passage, which is for many the true object of cruising.
As no-engine week draws on, advanced manoeuvres suggest themselves. I have fond memories of entering a deep lock in a 55ft cutter built in 1922, powered only by the jib topsail which stuck up far enough above the surroundings to get clear wind to slide us in – a trick derived from Thames bargemen who did it all the time. Not everyone has a jib topsail, admittedly, but a small hanked jib run up a spare forestay with a long strop to the bow roller might work if you insist on trying.
Many sloop owners swear by hanking a small jib on to their boat’s backstay and sheeting it in to stop it wandering round an anchor, and giving it some extra sheet to use it as a reverse gear.
Both these things become easy if you are lucky enough to have a mizzen, which can be cranked in or pushed out, according to choice. Furthermore, in a ketch or yawl the jib-and-jigger-no-mainsail rig will cart you beautifully along while sloops are chugging for cover as hard as their fuel will take them. A mizzen will also provide the facilities for a mizzen staysail, an excellent turbocharger for the reaching two-master. Anchor the tack somewhere abaft the mast, run the peak up a halyard on the mizzen, sheet the clew to a block on the end of the mizzen boom, and watch the rest of the fleet blench as you surge past. Any old sail will do, and can be launched from a sailbag in the cockpit without spilling your tea (see above, cruising, object of).
Some sails are a matter of fashion. Not long ago, no ocean wanderer worth his salt would go to sea without a squaresail. These were normally flown from a yard that when not in use was stowed parallel with the mast, and were deployed when the wind was well abaft the beam. They are still fun, if you are an unvoguish sailor with a decent crew. A tarpaulin laced to the spar at the sail’s top and with a sheet at each of its bottom corners will do nicely.
There are also signs that the downwind twin-jib rig, comprising a genoa to leeward and on the windward side another foresail flown from a spare forestay, is gaining popularity – particularly with short-handed sailors who cannot face the traditional sweat-soaked mano a mano with a cruising chute.
With two jibs and a lashed helm the boat will just about steer itself, freeing the navigator to make yet more tea.
By the end of the week chances are you will be reaching along under jib, staysail, main, watersail under the boom, mizzen staysail and mizzen if worn, perfectly balanced, blind to anything except that glorious cloud of canvas, making that cup of tea. And the chances are you will sail crunch into the pontoon. With any luck there will be a pub at its inshore end.
‘The disadvantage of no engine is that you tend to bump into things’