How Far Have I Got?
This will be of no interest to anyone sensible enough to sail a 20-footer, but if your yacht is a long one, you’ll have had similar experiences to me. You’re coming into a strange berth—head-up box berths are the worst—perspective has foreshortened, and you’re unsure how far you are from the harbormaster’s woodwork. I recently asked one dockside loafer to call it out. “Ten feet,” he announced. On I came, and a second later I T-boned the piling. It turned out he’d been looking at the waterline. What hit was my pulpit. On my raking bow, it’s a full 8 feet forward of where the stem cuts the briny. Next time there will be no ambiguity. It’ll be, “How far from my pulpit to the wall?”
Sweeten the Heads
My Raritan head’s pump was getting a bit stiff last season, and I was just about to pour a helping of the galley’s extra virgin olive oil down the pan when a lady from the next boat taking tea with my wife watched me disappearing forward with the right stuff. She worked out what I was up to and suggested I tip in a capful or two of fabric softener at the same time. I knew she ran a tight ship so I gave it a go. Sweet happiness was my portion. Try it. It costs nothing, and you might be surprised.
Spick and Span
A while back I was in the market for a used boat. I viewed dozens and most of them looked as though the owners had lost interest and left them for dead. Unspeakable horrors lurked behind closed fridge doors, varnish peeled, bilges were floating with diesel, sails were left in a heap to moulder. The list goes on. People selling houses are more savvy. They make the beds, bake bread, and brew coffee. A yacht that looks loved with everything shipshape will invite someone else to fall in love with her. Against such opposition, who would buy the poor abandoned waif in the next berth?
Reefing Downwind
I’ll bet that like me you’ve read in text books that a boat must be, if not head-to-wind, at least close enough to it to spill all air from the mainsail before reefing it. It is true that with some mainsail systems the sail must spill wind, but anybody who’s ever tried to turn a running boat into half a gale in a big sea won’t want to do it again. One of the many benefits of a proper slab reefing arrangement—and this does not include single-line reefing—is that the main can be reefed safely on a run like this:
• Don’t top up the boom. Take the full weight on the topping lift instead, pulling against the vang.
• Don’t let the vang off, ease any preventers a foot or two and sheet in a little, just to get the sail off the shrouds.
• Ease the halyard carefully while heaving down on the tack. At the same time, take up slack by pulling on the pennant to keep the leech off the shrouds. If you have reefing tack lines led to the cockpit—and why wouldn’t you?—this is a breeze.
• Snug the tack in, then winch down the last of the pennant, making sure to flatten the foot of the sail right out.
• Job done. No stress. No banging about.
April 2025
