CRUISING TIPS
Ways of making life easier on board
READ THE MOON
It doesn’t take long to learn how the moon’s phases affect the tide in your area. If you are casually planning a weekend passage while you drive home from work and you have an area of current to deal with, you might well want to know which way the stream will be running after breakfast on Saturday. First, remember what the moon was last night. A day or two after full moon equals spring tides, ditto the half-moon means neaps. All you need do is learn approximately when the stream turns for these main tides and you’ll be able to interpolate the others approximately in your head. If the neap ebb starts at local HW -4 hours and the spring ebb at HW +2, a three-quarter waxing moon will pump that ebb away at HW -1, and so on. Fishermen used such observations from the time of Noah until the last 50 years or so. Learn your basic local rules. They’ll never let you down, not even when the almanac blows over the side.
WASHBOARD SOLUTION
Here’s a tidy answer to the everpresent question of securing washboards for heavy weather. The arrangement is from an old Hallberg-Rassy, which has an aft cockpit with a full-height companionway and no bridgedeck. The bottom board is permanently secured at sea with a fitted rod. The upper ones are held in place with clips on Dyneema or Spectra line, each to the one beneath it. The sides of the companionway carry rings to keep the lines on when not in use. The lines are measured for a snug fit. They hold the boards should the worst happen, but carry enough slack to detach the clip conveniently.
BACK TO THE CLEANERS
If you don’t have a wire coat hanger on board, maybe it’s time you got one. Nothing else is so flexible yet so rigid when you need a hook or a prodder. It can clear limber holes, grab something lost in a deep bilge and make a swivel for a burgee stick. There’s no end to its uses. Last week, my daughter lost sea-water circulation in her single-cylinder Yanmar. She and I followed the system through, starting at the seacock: lots of water there. Next, the strainer: no problem. Now the Jabsco pump: water gushing out when disconnected. Bad news, because now came the engine block. No flow out of the entry spigot, so the daughter produced her ritual coat hanger and worked it 6in up the spout. When she withdrew it, an engine-full of water followed. Problem solved, for free.
SCOPE FOR ANCHORING
Each of us has a rule for calculating a suitable scope of anchor rode. Whatever our own may be, we all decide the length of cable to lay out by relating it to some multiple of the depth of the water. However, the rode is not suspended from the waterline, but from the bow roller, which might be anything from 2ft to 6ft above the surface. If it’s 3ft, a depth of 15ft becomes 18ft, a 4:1 scope increases from 60ft to 72ft, and so on. The significance fades as depths increase, but in the shallows it might prove critical. s