sailing Archives - Page 3 of 3

“Boat shopping” has a new meaning…

By: Noah D.

I had a nice huge blog post written up, but before I clicked “publish” I had an attack of superstition. Okay, yes yes, nautical things are rife with superstition and such, but something made me feel as though I should hold off on posting some of my thoughts until things are more concrete. I refuse to jinx it.

But, here’s the gist: There’s a certain boat for sale at a certain marina that makes me swoon. It has a few issues, but… like any good relationship, you have to be mature about things and take the good with the bad. Just like some people make awesome spouses even though they snore, I feel like this certain boat is a lovely lady even though she need a few pokes and prods occasionally to straighten out those kinks. All things considered, a project boat she is not.

Boat shopping has taken on a whole new meaning now that I might have just photographed “the one”…

Now, if you’re able to identify the boat from this photo alone, I applaud you. Otherwise, you’re just going to have to wait and see… 🙂

Making progress on S/V ???…

By: Noah D.

Well, as promised by merely making a little webpage for a yet-to-be-bought-or-named boat, the time has come to start making some serious progress. By serious progress, I mean… all the research in the world means nothing, really, until you go out and start walking on boats that have FOR SALE signs and getting the bank accounts arranged.

Next week, I’m going to be making a little trip to visit a half-dozen boats.

Pardon me being so cryptic, but I’ll write up a massive post next week with loads of pictures, exhausting details, and perhaps even a video or two.

See you then…

A perfect sailboat… [Part 2]

By Noah

In the last post, I discussed things we are hunting in the interior of our sailing home. None of these are necessarily deal-breakers, but–as I mentioned last time–we are trying to decide what would we miss if we didn’t have it or had to deal with it not being there.

For this episode, we get to the serious parts of a sailboat. Not that a galley isn’t “serious” but you can sail without a galley… you can’t sail without things like sails.

Line leading is a bit underrated.

All sailing craft have sails. Somehow those sails are run aloft. And somehow those sails, once up there, are controlled. Some sailboats are a mess of ropes in the cockpit while others are spread around the boat strategically.

The mess of ropes cluttering the cockpit is usually a side-effect of all lines running aft. All lines running aft (at least somewhat) assumes shorthanded sailing. Honestly, I’m kind of okay with it. Maybe after 10,000 miles I’ll think differently, but for now, I’m really okay with it. In fact, I redesigned my little old boat that I rebuilt to have all the lines running to the cockpit. Primarily it was because the boat was small and didn’t have stanchions; but secondarily, it was because I was going to be doing a lot of shorthanded sailing with a tiller and no autopilot: I needed everything within reach.

Granted, that sort of boat has only a few lines and a 40 foot boat will have a dozen, but…

Sails.

The brand probably doesn’t make a huge amount of difference to me… but their layout does. Cutter rigs are going to be a real selling point for me. If for some reason we find a good ketch, I don’t really mind as long as it has those double headsails.

Why? My understanding of the physics of offshore sailboats is that it is a highly desirable feature to be able to quickly drop your surface area down in a gale. Roll up the genoa and leave the staysail. Another feature is that much heavier boats need a bit less wind with cutters. I’m not certain how much that is physical fact or fiction, but it can’t hurt.

A great topside.

This includes everything that can be walked on. As much as I love the idea of a nice wooden teak boat, I’m not really going to be distraught if I never have to do all that maintenance. I’m really not. However, I think it is only reasonable to expect the topsides to be usable. We’ve got to be able to walk around on the deck without feeling like I’m walking on a tightrope. And… places to hold on. Some of these boats have beautiful, clean-looking topsides, but if the boat was heeled a few degrees, there’s no place to hold on.

Secondly, but not secondary, is a good cockpit.

But, more important that a covered cockpit (that is really only usable when the boat isn’t underway) is a comfortable cockpit. Reading all manner of literature, it seems that having a cockpit that you actually enjoy spending time in makes spending required time (like long night watches) less painful.

That said, I think a dodger and/or spray hood is going to be needed. Since we will be living aboard, I’ve also found a few boats (Hunters, primarily) that have a really nice cockpit tent. I consider that a pretty good extension of the interior. Lynn and I are from the American south and we like our “outdoor” space… even in the winter we will use a porch. A cockpit tent sorta gives us that porch-y area.

Navigation, radar, and electronics.

I see practically no boats these days without some semblance of GPS or chart plotter. Also standards are things like radar, depth sounders, VHF, windspeed and direction, autopilot, etc. One that I’d really feel good about adding (if it wasn’t already there) is the AIS. We live in the North Sea and the English Channel, one of the most busy shipping lanes in the world. It would be insane not to have as much capability to be seen by these freight ships that are hundreds of meters long.

Another little fun piece of equipment is the depth finder. Fishermen would use them back on the lake that I grew up on to find fish. I don’t really care about the fish as much as seeing the bottom more than just numbers. That is really useful.

All of these I would feel pretty good having them readable from the navigation station. I’ve seen a boat or two in the past that had its only depth sounder out on the wheel binnacle. I guess it is more of a convenience than anything, but having multiple places to view important information just seems intelligent. I’m actually not a fan of those huge digital displays being outside. Putting such expensive technology outside–I know, I know, it is technically made for it–just seems like asking for things to last not quite as long as it would have inside.

An anchor.

Yeah, for real. A good one. Enough rode to circle the earth wouldn’t hurt, but anchor holding is more about technique and planning than anything. A good number of the horror stories I’ve heard from people who sail extreme distances are attributed to the ground tackle having some problem.

A usable tender.

A side-effect of the inability to get close to shore (because… keel) is a need for a good tender. I rode in a dinghy not too long ago with five people in it. Simple, tiny zodiac hauled nearly 1000lbs of people and a bit of gear a hundred meters or so. Now, the allure of too-good-to-be-true foldable boats (like Porta-Botes) just seem… too good to be true. It might take some trial and error…

Ready for heresy?

Things that don’t matter (to us).

Waterline. No matter what is said on the internet about hull shape and waterline/length ratios, there doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus. Anywhere. And I think it comes down to people comparing apples and oranges and trying to come up with a conclusion based on widely varying sea states, wind conditions, boat design, sailor skill levels, and a probably a host of other things.

Keel or bulb or wing or dagger. All I want to be sure of is that the ballast doesn’t fall off. We may do some shallow-water cruising someday, but I sincerely don’t feel as if one foot of difference will prevent anything. The weights and performance issues? I feel as though much of this, again, comes down to personal preference. I get it if you’re racing in the America’s Cup, but…

Hull material. Yeah… don’t care. Wood, fiberglass, aluminum, steel… everything has to be worked on eventually. Modern boat manufacturing has equalized the playing field. We may do some high-latitude cruising someday (higher than 51ºN, I mean) and I might eat my words; however, I’m seeing loads of people cruising in ice fields with 30-year-old Catalina, so I don’t really know what to think. For now? Meh.

-Noah D.

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The Discovery of Sail

By Noah

The brilliant blog Wait But Why wrote a piece not too long ago entitled “The Fermi Paradox.” It’s definitely worth a read if you have a few minutes. Basically it discusses a few heavy topics about space and time that might, at first, seem quite aloof and not slightly sci-fi. If you hold out for the whole thing, you might realize–like the author does–that this incomprehensibly massive universe is a lonely place. Not “lonely” as in “nobody wants to be my friend” kind of lonely, but absolute and total emptiness, devoid of anything. And here we are.

Well, that’s a cheerful start to the first post!

Of all the technology that you currently know of–from the device you are reading this on, the phone you use, the car you drive, the medicine you might take, etc–how many of those technologies existed 10 years ago? How about 50 years ago? How about 100? For instance, my great grandfather was a profound mechanic: he made a great living fixing Model A‘s and Model T‘s. Did his grandfather ever seen a car?

So, while the past 500 years has brought the ability to print and mass-produce books, writing itself and the ability to communicate by written characters is clocked at about 5000 years, attributed to the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia around 3200BCE. Considered the “official” beginning of recorded history, the writings from that time are quite basic: most are not exactly “histories” as much as they are records of things.

Go back 3000 more years before that. This was the dawn of the sailboat. Though boats were likely used in prehistoric times (since prehistoric civilizations have been found to have lived on remote islands) the earliest record of a sailboat is from around 8000 years ago. So which of these is more shocking: the fact that most Egyptologists aren’t sure if wheels were used in the building of the Great Pyramids of Giza… or the fact that sailing is twice as old as the Pyramids! (BTW: Here’s an interesting article about ancient Egypt and their papyrus boats.)

Aswan, Egypt - 2008 — Aswan, Egypt – 2008

Besides basic tools those used for cutting and pounding, the basics of sailing and the technologies involved with sailing have existed longer than almost any other technology. Who wouldn’t want the boat to push itself, right? And, until the rise of the airplane, the world has been conquered and empires have risen and then they, too, have been conquered… exclusively by sea.

Now, let’s take technology forward. Your cell phone was “old” after how long? Could you guarantee that we will still be using cell phones in 100 years? They were still using horses in World War 1; I bet every man in the American Civil War (50 years prior) would have bet everything they had that horses would always be used in war. How many of the people reading this blog–written on a laptop that is .7 inches thick at its thickest part–took typing classes on a typewriter when they were growing up? How many remember rotary phones? Whoever it was that thought, “Hey, let’s put up a big sheet in front of that boat and let it pull us!” invented something that literally has been done for 8000 years.

So I think I’ll do that.

Reading the following list, you might think I’m some sort of hipster: I like notebooks and pens; I prefer manual transmission vehicles and steel frame bicycles; I’d rather listen to a vinyl record all the way through to get to the song I like than jump to it on Spotify; and travel/living by sailboat is one of the finest of lives. I’m not stuck in the past or claim that one “works better” than the others. All of them work, most of them are relatively inefficient or downright frustrating, and I’m too much of a nerd to shun technology.

What do all of these things have in common? All of these things give tactile feedback to the user. I watch my notebooks pile up on shelves and in drawers, reminding me with their tattered pages and water spots that I did, indeed, travel there and record it. A manual transmission vehicle feels like I am driving it rather than it driving me. A steel frame bicycle flexes with the rider and any load you put on it and it is fixable with little more than a wrench and a welding torch. A vinyl record pops and crackles and is literally a needle picking up physical scratches on the surface of plastic. And a sailboat…?

Well, a sailboat is a direct connection to everything I cherish in a thing: a bizarre amount of history, the natural world, the wind, and the ocean. It represents a tactile feedback to all these things. And it represents a physical bridge between Point A and Point B in which you cannot just fly past or around the storm, you must go through it. Or you cannot zap yourself from here to there as if flipping channels, you must stay the course and have a longer than 17-second attention span. If properly prepared, all things to remedy the problem are within reach. The answer is here, you must only figure it out. Sailing simplifies and clarifies and–just possibly–purifies.

A friend of mine accused me once of being born in the wrong generation because, as a professional photojournalist, I have no problem using film. Maybe I was. But when it comes to sailing, it doesn’t matter what generation I was born in… because it has always been done.

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