Boat Plans Aluminium Australia | The sailors major virtue

Boat Plans Aluminium Australia

I MAY HAVE MENTIONED this before but you probably don’t remember it. Besides, it bears repeating: One of the most valuable assets a sailor can cultivate is patience, followed closely by serenity.
Imagine that you’re nicely tucked into a snug anchorage on the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island. You got in just before the wind really started howling, and now the rain is starting to pelt down.
The VHF, tuned to the British Columbian weather forecast, is relaying a doleful message:
“ ... mostly awful with occasional ghastliness ... periods of low depression followed by unremitting rain ... wind from the southeast at umpteen knots ... large-boat advisory for tonight and all day tomorrow ... wind-waves 15 feet ...”
Your course is southeast, of course. So, if you have any sense, you’re stuck.
Well, then, what did sailors do with themselves in the Great Age of Sail when they were anchored in open roadsteads waiting for the wind to change? How did they pass the time? If they were in the navy, I expect they painted the anchor cable and holystoned the deck. But how do people stop themselves from going crazy on smaller boats? What would you do with yourself while waiting out bad weather, especially in places where you can’t get cell phone service or browse the Internet?
You can only sleep or play Patience for so long before you go nuts. You might take the opportunity to change the engine oil or do some all-day job like grinding the valves — but what if the forecast is wrong? You wouldn’t want to miss a good sailing day with bits of engine spread all over the cabin.
You can’t spend days at a time doing nothing but listening to Beethoven or the Beatles, and if you spend all day cooking you’ll have to eat it all and you know what that’s going to do to your waistline.
I guess you could call the Coasties on Channel 16 but I suspect that even the nice, friendly Canadian Coast Guards would get kinda grumpy if you just want to chat and tell them how depressed you are.
You could make love, I suppose, given the right circumstances, but I’m told that the average is eight minutes, which doesn’t take up an awful lot of the day.
For these reasons, yachtsmen cooped up in port — and fearful of being criticized for wimpishness — often try to make a break for it despite the bad weather. And all too often that’s a very bad idea unless you have an exceptional boat and an exceptional crew. If you do that, you might find yourself talking to the Coasties again pretty soon, and not just for fun.
If ignorance and ill preparation are the parents of adventure, then patience and serenity are the parents of safe cruising. They don’t come easily. They have to be cultivated, like most other sailorly pursuits. Learning how to extend your love life might be a good way to start.
Today’s Thought Patience, n. A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
TailpieceMs. Smith, your work during your trial period indicates a standard of mediocrity, inadequacy, and chronic incompetence.” “Oh thank goodness. I had a silly feeling you weren’t satisfied with me.”

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Boat Plans At Mystic Seaport | Mischievous mice vs rubber ducks

Boat Plans At Mystic Seaport

ONE OF THE ASPECTS of sailing that has always fascinated me is the wide range of disciplines involved. Sailing as a sport touches on so many other facets of social and scientific life that it’s almost impossible to list them all.

Perhaps that’s why sailing has always fit in with my former calling as a newspaperman. Competent journalists must know at least a little about a very wide range of subjects, and a whole lot about at least a few. The same goes for amateur sailors.

And now it’s that time of year again when we have to remember how to thwart mice intent on turning rubber dinghies into Swiss cheese.

New Englander Carl Thunberg wrote an impassioned plea on the Cape Dory bulletin board. He said he owned a Cape Dory 30 called Leona Pearl. “Our very expensive 11-foot rigid inflatable boat is riddled with mouse holes,” he said. “Does anyone know of a reputable business that repairs holes in inflatable dinghies within a reasonable driving distance of Portsmouth, New Hampshire?”

And how do mice come to eat holes in a rubber dinghy, you ask? Well, many sailors in the Northeast haul their boats out of the water for winter. They deflate their dinghies and store them in garages or barns.

This doesn’t exactly explain why mice would want to chomp holes in them, but believe me, they do. Exactly the same thing happened to Carl’s previous rubber dinghy.

Perhaps Carl’s mice have discovered a new form of winter entertainment, sort of like a spooky fairground haunted house, in which you eat a hole through a layer of rubber dinghy, squeeze through, and run around inside the pitch-dark chamber until you have scared yourself out of your little mouse’s wits, and then you quickly eat your way out again.

Perhaps they have developed a genuine epicurean liking for salted inflatable-dinghy fabric, or maybe the dumb critters are hoping that by creating the holes the boat will magically turn into a giant Swiss cheese.

In any case, Carl’s experience is not unique. Other Cape Dory owners offered suggestions from their own experience, the main one of which is to strew the dinghy liberally with a fragrant fabric softener known as Bounce. Rubber dinghies that have been Bounced seem to be immune to rodent chomps.

There are other methods to protect stored rubber dinghies, of course, including barn cats, mouse-proof steel boxes, and, failing all else, the use of hard dinghies instead of rubber ones. But nothing is as cheap and easy as Bounce.

I must make a note of it. I wonder if it works on seagulls?

Today’s Thought    

Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal it is which never entrusts his life to one hole only.

— Plautus, Truculentus

Tailpiece

The problem with the person who has an hour to kill is that he inevitably wants to spend it with someone who hasn’t a minute to spare.

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Boat Plans Catamaran | Pity the poor otter

Boat Plans Catamaran

SOMETIMES, when I’m feeling emotional, I feel quite sorry for those of you who haven’t yet experienced the delights of the San Juan Islands of Washington state, and their northern continuation, the Canadian Gulf Islands. For some reason, we don’t hear much about this sleepy, largely undeveloped archipelago of state parks and cozy anchorages. It doesn’t generate the publicity some other parts of the country enjoy, despite the fact that boating is big business here. Some of the largest sailboat charter companies in the country are located in the fascinating area known as the Salish Sea, which, of course, includes Puget Sound.

Here and there you’ll come across bustling resort harbors such as Friday Harbor and Roche Harbor where you can refuel, reprovision, and indulge in highly civilized gustation, but in the main the mantle that lies over these welcoming islands is one of peace and tranquility. Here the stars actually blaze at night and the moon throws solid black shadows on the deck.

The air that drifts off the islands smells sweetly of pine. The aspect that greets your eye is almost exactly the same, in most cases, as it was hundreds of years ago, when Native Americans plied these waters in their dug-out canoes. They still do, as a matter of fact, but now only occasionally, and for ceremony and pleasure rather than for a living.

The roiling currents provide a fecund, fertile habitat for a host of sea creatures ranging from whales, orcas, porpoises, and seals to geoducks, mussels, and those famous Dungeness crabs.

We have seen ospreys and puffins, eagles by the dozen, seagulls by the thousand, and even the shy, dainty phalarope. I had wanted to see a phalarope ever since the late Alan Paton wrote a novel called Too Late the Phalarope, and one calm day in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, my wife June and I came across a small tight-knit group of them floating on the water, fluttering and agitated for no reason we could discover, except that they might have been in a feeding frenzy.

But the sight that sticks on our minds right now is that of a tiny otter living on the Canadian side of the border, near South Pender Island. We cruised up to within a few yards of him before we could make out what was happening. He was lying on his back, clutching to his chest a small fish, and trying to take bites out of it. But he was surrounded by half a dozen large seagulls, all floating on the surface, jostling each other, pecking voraciously at his fish and trying to wrestle it away from him. Time after time he would submerge with his meal to get rid of the gulls, but he couldn’t stay under for long and as soon as he reappeared the birds would fly over with great squawks of indignation and continue the assault with their strong, sharp beaks.

I don’t know how that particular battle ended, because we soon drifted away, but we couldn’t help feeling sorry for that sweet little otter, outnumbered as he was. It wasn’t a fair fight, but of course Nature knows nothing about fairness, only survival and extinction, so even if we could have weighed in on the side of the otter it probably wouldn’t have made much difference to the Great Scheme of Things.

It makes me wonder about seagulls, though. They’re such shameless scavengers; rats with wings, really. How is it that they were given such desirable gifts? They’re beautiful to look at. Their flying skill is wonderful to behold. They can swim in water and walk on land.

Something unfair here, surely? Especially if you’re a decent law-abiding otter just trying to eat a peaceful lunch.

Today’s Thought

For nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal,

The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow speared by the shrike,

And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.

— Tennyson, Maud

Tailpiece

“What’s your opinion of bathing beauties?”

“Dunno. My wife’s never let me bathe one.”

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Boat Plans Aluminium Australia | What real sailors do in winter

Boat Plans Aluminium Australia

 

I WAS ONCE ASKED by someone who had spent a long time in the sub-tropics: “What do northern sailors do in winter?”

Well, some go skiing. Some flee south in RVs. Some go away on cruise ships. These are the dilettantes, the dabblers, the amateurs, the superficial tire-kickers.

And before you accuse me of using big words you can’t understand, let me explain that a dilettante is someone (especially someone French) who follows sailing for an amusement, a diversion. Someone who doesn’t take sailing half seriously enough.

The real sailors are reading books of ocean adventures. They’re studying boat plans and looking at ads for Herreshoff 28 ketches. They’re making plans to get time off from their partners, and continue their clandestine affairs with their boats.

They’re poking holes in the shrink-wrap so they can get inside and sit on the saloon couch for a bit, maybe making a cup of coffee on the stove and searching for the half-bottle of rum they hid in the cabinet for medical emergencies.

They check the bilges for water and crank the motor over half a turn by hand, so the impeller doesn’t take a fatal set. They check that there’s air circulating through the cabin, to deter mold. They switch on the VHF, listen to forecasts of raging storms, and grin to themselves, snug in their winter refuge.

They read with delight the logs of their past year’s cruising, and dream of those lovely lazy breezes and warm seas. They play back in their minds, time and time again, the peaceful nights at anchor, the early-morning call of the loon, and the shrill cry of a kingfisher carrying breakfast back to a forest of open beaks.

The thing about serious sailors, as opposed to those dilettantes, is that they are in love with their boats. They can hardly bear to be parted from them. They tend and care for them. They talk to them as if they were flesh and blood. They nurture them. They praise their good qualities and pardon their faults.

And in that definitive demonstration of ardor, they look back, long and hard, when they part. That’s what real sailors do in winter.

Today’s Thought

A man nearly always loves for other reasons than he thinks. A lover is apt to be as full of secrets from himself as is the object of his love from him.

— Ben Hecht

Tailpiece

“What’s the special today?”

“Ve got fine zoop today, sir. You like some zoop, mebbe?”

“Zoop? What’s zoop?”

“You don’t know what is zoop? You know what is stew, yes? Vell, zoop is same ting, only looser.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

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Boat Plans Catamaran | On boat neglect and boat fever

Boat Plans Catamaran

THIS IS THE TIME OF YEAR when many are so busy with parties and presents and family and Christmas trees that their boats tend to be neglected. Its not such a bad thing, as long as the neglect is not long-lasting. Boating fever can resume with fervor after a refreshing break, and we can all look forward to a new season of sailing in the coming spring.

As long as there had been Christmas, it has been thus. In fact, 100 years ago this is what Thomas Fleming Day, editor of The Rudder, had to say about it:

"When Winter gets up his hook and stands offshore, the boat fever comes on strong and the itch to be away on the blue again takes hold of us. Sunday finds the boys sidling off towards the yards and wading around in the slush looking over the laid-up craft.

"They walk round and round them, peer at the stern, eye the bow, comment on the spars, find fault with the bottom, and curse the price that makes it not for them. Year after year this is our amusement. Spring after spring we go through the same yards, see the same boats, and express the same opinions regarding their appearance and condition. If those boats have ears, how tired they must get, how weary of the silly comments that the boat-fevered busybody makes each March under their hulls.

"A few weeks after, the yard is almost cleared, except here and there a poor old cripple or rich mans forgotten plaything is left standing surrounded by a raffle of timber and truck. Over by the fence, lying on its side, is a once crack-a-jack racer, too rotten to be moved and going rapidly to punk.

"And we look on her and think of the days when we will be lying up against the fence, dismantled and broken, while our successors are out cleaving the blue and making a mainsheet haul of health and happiness."

 u  Well, he ended up a little maudlin, there, didnt he? I guess he was rather depressed after a Christmas that had gone on too long and kept him away from his boat.

But we, as his successors, can look forward happily to cleaving the blue once again. So Happy Christmas. Happy Hanukah. Happy Kwanzaa.

Todays Thought

Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want — and their kids pay for it.

— Richard Lamm, former Governor of Colorado.

Tailpiece

"My girlfriend thinks Im a stalker."

"Your girlfriend thinks that?"

"Yeah, well, shes not actually my girlfriend yet."

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

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Boat Plans At Mystic Seaport | Learning about boat design

Boat Plans At Mystic Seaport

MANY BOATERS eventually become interested in yacht design — but how do you learn about it? Veteran designer Ted Brewer suggests three methods in his book Understanding Boat Design (International Marine).

In the first place, he says, the hobbyist can simply read about yacht design. That sounds simple enough but it can be confusing because of conflicting theories.  Brewer says that designers “including me, may push their own concept of the perfect hull, layout, or rig. It is important to develop your own ideas based on facts and experience, rather than to accept someone else’s theories.”

In the second place, he recommends the home-study course. “The cost is moderate, but large enough to keep the student working hard at it. “The Westlawn course is good if it is done properly without taking all the easiest options. The Westlawn course requires serious commitment to time and effort, but provides a thorough grounding in small-boat design.”

In the third place is the time-honored college degree from the Webb Institute, M.I.T., Michigan, or another university offering a degree in naval architecture. This is for the serious student only, of course. “Since the emphasis of the university course is on large-ship design, it is not ideal for students of small-boat design, but it does work. Many famous yacht designers have gone that route. The Maine Maritime Academy offers a course in small-craft design that is worth serious consideration as well.”

Finally, Brewer offers this piece of advice:

“Anyone going into the yacht design business should work as a draftsman or assistant for a reputable naval architect for several years to gain practical experience. This is true for university and home-study graduates. Indeed, it is best if the budding designer works for several different architects or builders before he hangs out his shingle because he will gain invaluable experience and practical knowledge from each.”

Today’s Thought

Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down projects the way they can turn down some clients, but we’ve both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.

— Philip Johnson, Esquire, Dec 80

Tailpiece

Four-year-old Janie had been put to bed for the night when her little brother wandered along and tried to enter her room.
“You can’t come in, Jimmy,” she said, “cos Mom says little boys mustn’t see little girls in their nighties.”
Jimmy went outside, closed the door, and was puzzling about this when the door opened again. “It’s aw wight Jimmy, you can come in now,” said Janie. “I’se tooked my nightie off.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

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