by Bob Bernstein
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Fitting Out
It’s fairly obvious that groundhogs can tell time about as well as pigs can do long division. Yet, one January, with the temperature at fifteen below zero and the ice cakes in the river over eighteen inches thick, I gave Punxsutawney Pete the benefit of the doubt. When the little bugger meandered out of his hole and saw his shadow, I felt the nibble of the boat bug. It didn’t matter whether my feeling was borne out of a sense of desperation, or drawn from the power of positive thinking, in my mind warm weather was only six weeks away, and that meant it was time to prepare The List.
I’m not really a listomaniac, not like my friend Chris Wells. Chris, who serves as a Captain and boatwright for the Outward Bound Hurricane Island School in Rockland, Maine, has got lists to organize his lists. It sounds a little obsessive, but then Chris is about ten times more productive than I am. When he isn’t working on boats, he’s working on his house, or his lawn. In fact, I just about had to tie him down to get him to watch the Super Bowl with me. And even then, when Buffalo went into a tail spin at the third quarter, I could tell his mind drifted off to the world of skill saws and chalk lines.
Now I won’t pretend there are any worthwhile comparisons between the list for my last boat -- a 50’ wooden passenger vessel built in 1978 -- and the list for yours. My list would scare the begeezus out of the likes of Stede Bonnett or Edward Teach. I mean, I could drop $30,000 worth of equipment into the boat tomorrow and nobody would notice the difference, which doesn’t mean the boat looks like hell, only that if I put in a generator, extra fuel tank, new stuffing box, new head, and an autopilot, the boat would essentially look the same. What I’m getting at is that my list looks more like a NASA budget proposal than a boater’s outline of things-to-do. It has essentially the same foundation in reality, too; plenty of good reasons to spend a lot of money that isn’t there.
Part of the problem with my list -- as it forms over the winter -- has to do with what I like to refer to as, Barcolounger Syndrome, or BS for short. You know you’ve been overwhelmed by BS when you find yourself saying the following: They make it. I don’t have it. I need it. Symptoms of this dreadful boater’s malady begin early, usually after the first snowfall, and they continue for months. Severe cases are characterized by alternating bouts of depression (before the new brochures arrive), enthusiasm (after the brochures have actually arrived), and finally, uncontrollable whining (when the brochures with all your circles and check marks have been taken away by your spouse).
Because I own a big, wooden boat, and live in Maine, and because I am a chronic sufferer of this horrible disorder, I can help you put all the BS items on your list in their proper place.
First order of business: Write up the essentials, the things you have to do every year. For example, the boat will need to be painted and/or waxed. It will need new zincs. The engine will need an oil and filter change (if you didn’t do it at lay-up time), new air filters, and a tune-up (if they’re gas engines). The chrome should be polished, the bilge cleaned, and the air vents cleared. Impellers, hoses, and belts should be changed, or at least checked for dirt, excessive wear, and signs of fatigue. Dirt causes wear. Wear causes fatigue. Fatigue causes failure -- which brings me to the subject of the spring survey.
There’s something undeniably satisfying about that first spring day on the boat; the faint smell of wood rot and mildewed canvas, the look of all the tarps and spruce frames on the ground, the sound of the boat hoist, and the salty taste of that greasy, high-cholesterol wedge from the deli down the street. No doubt, it’s that first walk around the boat after the cover’s off that really gets the juices flowing. Unfortunately, it’s usually that same walk that makes you forget about all the BS items on your list. Why? Because that’s when you find the little repairs you didn’t expect.
Second order of business: Hose the boat down. Wash her. Hose her again, then look for trouble. Pay particular attention to areas that are subjected to a lot of stress; stuffing boxes, stern tubes, shaft bearings, rudder boxes and related gear, anchor windlass’, propellers, pulpits and rollers, masts and rigging, steering gear, pipe towers, etc. And, when in doubt, ask a professional. A stress crack is not something you want to ignore.
Stress cracks can appear anywhere. Two places where they can be especially dangerous are propellers and pipe towers. A stressed wheel can give way at high speed, throwing a blade into the hull, possibly cracking it. A tower can collapse in a heap, spilling it’s occupants into the sea. I know a guy who had this happen to him and his mate. They were both thrown against the rail and into the water, and the boat took off without them. Fortunately, another captain on another boat arrived in time to get them air-lifted to a hospital. But it was close. Very close.
In addition to checking for stress cracks in propellers and towers, you may want to check the covering on your steering cables and the insulation on your wiring, particularly those wires and cables in the engine room, and those that must bend around obstructions. Look for cracked or fatigued coatings, and plan on replacing anything that looks suspect. You don’t want to deal with an electrical short or a broken throttle cable when your thirty miles out to sea, or anywhere, for that matter.
All right, then. You’ve listed the “Every Year Items”, and the “Emergency Repair Items”. What’s next?
Third and last order of business: The BS list. That’s right. If you’ve got any money left after dealing with the first two orders of business, and you haven’t totally alienated your spouse or significant other, then you’re a better man than me, and by George you’re damn well entitled to a new toy. So, go ahead. Splurge. Pick through the BS list and choose something that will make you happy. You deserve it.
Launching
I love a launching. Whether the boat’s a brand-new, production puddle-jumper or a hand-built, custom classic, I can’t help noticing how pure and unsullied the thing looks -- as Madonna would say, “like a virgin”.
But a launching is hardly the time to be overcome by any amount of pomp and fanfare. Lot’s of things can go wrong. For example, I heard this story once about the launching of a big, wooden dragger. The builders forgot to put weights on the cradle and after the boat slid down the ways into the water, they couldn’t separate the two. Kind of embarrassing.
There’s also the story about the multi-million dollar sloop that slid off the ways and kept on going. It turned out that after the sloop’s transmission failed to engage, the skiff that the builders had standing by to tend the boat didn’t have the power to control it.
And how could I not include one of the most famous launching disasters of all time, that of the poorly designed and extremely top-heavy, Vasa?
On August 10, 1628, the flagship of the King of Sweden left her launch site in Stockholm with all her flags flying. She sailed less than a half mile, ran into a sudden squall, and tipped over. The 1,300 ton warship took water through her open gun ports and sank. Very embarrassing, yes, but also fatal. A good number of the King’s best fighting men, as well as a few members of the aristocracy went to their graves amidst the mud and timbers of the wreckage.
In comparison, my launchings experiences are kind of anticlimactic, though they didn’t seem that way at the time. At one yard, my boat -- a thirty foot, single screw, diesel lobster yacht, with a two foot dive platform -- got thumped on the bottom when an overanxious hoist operator lowered it too quickly in too little water. I was a bit peeved, to say the least, but no harm came to the boat, and the tide was flooding.
The second incident occurred at the same yard, on the same day. Picture this: The slipway -- oriented in an east-west direction with east being the seaward side of the ways -- opens to a narrow passage with a set of floats to the north and a grout pile to the south. At low tide, the distance between the grout pile and the sides of the vessels tied to the dock is just over thirty two feet. I know this is true because I’ve measured it with my boat.
Here’s what happened.
On the day in question, the wind was stiff at twenty to thirty knots out of the west, in other words, straight out of the slipway. I was launched stern first -- as is customary -- and I was alone. The hoist operator, having waited for me to start the engine, apologized for plopping me in the mud and walked off. I glowered at him as he left, hung-out a few minutes until the tide flooded and the boat floated free, then started backing out. Bad move.
Two seconds after I cleared the slipway, the propeller sucked a piece of canvas from the mud and stalled the engine. The wind caught hold of the bow and swung it south, toward the grout pile. Fortunately, I had a boat hook handy. I rushed to the stern and reached out for the rail of the nearest vessel. When I got hold of it, I pulled the stern in as close as I could and snubbed her tight, then I waited for the crunch of granite against fiberglass as the bow swung forty five degrees counterclockwise. But, the crunch never came. The wind swung the bow safely past the grout pile. Like I said, the span was just over thirty two feet.
I have to admit that I was lucky. A few inches and I would have had a major gelcoat repair on my hands. On the other hand, I was also prepared. I had a boat hook, fenders, and dock lines, and they were handy and ready to go. Of course, in retrospect, the whole incident could have been avoided if the two people involved -- the hoist operator and I -- had been a touch less hurried.
Anyway, this time of year, it pays to have an open mind and a good attitude. Let’s face it. The yard crew has its hands full trying to make everyone happy. How would you like to have a hundred doctors, lawyers, sales exec’s, etc., breathing down your neck? I’m not saying you have to walk on egg shells just because your yard boss is ready to knock on the door of the nearest sanatorium. But a little flexibility helps. Trust me on this one. The yard crew takes an instant dislike to two types of people. The first insists on a launch date, then postpones it over and over again. The second insists on a launch date, gets his wish, then leaves the boat untended at the dock for two or three weeks.
That said, let’s get down to specifics. If you’re launching this year via the boat hoist, what can you do to ease the transition from land to water?
1. Don’t launch the boat until the work’s done. If you’re like me, once it’s in the water, painting and sanding take a back seat to cruising or fishing.
2. Start the engine before the launch. You can do this with a freshwater hose and a bucket. Just keep a wary eye on the temperature gauges, and don’t run the motors too long. You can check the transmission, too, but be careful, and don’t give her any throttle. This is also a good time to check the bilge pumps. Just make sure nobody’s standing in the wrong place when you turn one of them on.
3. Don’t forget fenders, dock lines, life preservers, and a boat hook.
4. Inspect all sea cocks.
5. If you must commission a new boat with a bottle of champagne, uncork the bottle and spill some of its contents on deck. Don’t even think about smashing the boat with the bottle, unless its one of those special break-apart bottles. Even then, you have to wonder.
6. Make sure the boat hoist operator hangs around until you’ve checked all your through-hulls. Don’t let him rush you. And don’t let him walk off if you have any doubts, especially if you own a wooden vessel.
Well, that’s about it. If the engine is pumping the right amount of water, and all the gauges appear normal, you’re ready to go. Take a last look to see that your running gear is clear of the straps, and back her out. It’s time to start another season.
Windage and Current
All vessels have a distinctive set of performance traits. Some are obvious. For instance, twin screw boats are more maneuverable than single screw boats, and boats with relatively big rudders respond quicker to the helm than boats with small rudders. Other traits -- like windage and engine rotation -- are not so obvious.
Windage is a function of a vessel’s “sail” area and its volume below the waterline; submarines have little windage, lightly loaded high-sided tankers have a lot. A center console sport fisherman with a lot of freeboard in its forward section will tend to fall off the wind bow first. A high speed, Cigarette-style hull -- even though it has a flatter shear line and significantly less sail area -- will experience a similar windage effect by virtue of its underwater configuration; designed as a racing boat, it has a shallow draft up forward to reduce drag.
Conversely, vessels with deep keels and low-profile superstructures -- like sailboats and many displacement hull trawlers -- are prone to be effected more by tide and current than the strength and direction of the wind.
In maneuvering any vessel, careful consideration should be given to the way in which it is effected by wind and current.
Propeller Walk
Engine rotation (left or right), the diameter and pitch of the propeller, and the size of the rudder, contribute significantly to the characteristic handling of a boat. For example, when reversing a single screw vessel, left hand wheels pull or walk the boat’s stern to starboard, while right hand wheels pull the boat’s stern to port. Moreover, the effect is further aggravated when the vessel’s wheel is way over-square (has much more pitch than diameter). The effect of propeller walk on twin-screw boats will be handled later.
Compensating for Windage and Using Propeller Walk In A Single Screw Boat
In practical terms, if you’re landing a single screw, sedan sportfisherman side-to in a stiff wind, you have to remember that the bow will be moving faster than the stern. This means that you should put the leeward quarter in first and keep the bow out a bit. You can always compensate (keep the stern off the dock) with some hard rudder and a short burst of throttle. What you want to avoid is a situation where the bow beats the stern to the dock. Trying to correct this by reversing the engine will be difficult, if not impossible -- especially if the propeller walk is away from the dock when the engine is reversed.
Let’s say your approaching a tight dock space against a moderate breeze. You have a single engine sportfisherman with a right hand screw propeller and you plan to end up with the vessel’s port side to the dock. For the sake of argument, assume you’re going to do this without a spring line. We’ll get to spring lines later.
Now you know the boat and you know she pulls to port when backing. So what you want to do is bring the boat in bow first, against the force of the wind. You want to try and get the bow in as close as possible because you know it will fall off faster than the stern. In fact, ideally, you want to work the wind like a seagull does when it lands. (Watch them. They’re really good at this).
Sometimes -- in order to compensate for the wind and keep the bow from falling of before you can get a line attached -- you have to swing the boat in order to generate a little angular momentum (a rotational quantity). Just give the boat some angular momentum with a hard starboard rudder. Then use a burst of reverse thrust to stop. The vessel’s right hand propeller will pull the stern in, remove forward motion, and reduce rotation, all at the same time.
Plan Ahead, Bail Out Quick, and Try Again
At the risk of stating the obvious, planning ahead means figuring out where you want to end up and what you have to do to get there. Basically. this entails having lines, fenders, and crew ready for the landing. But it also means drawing a mental picture of your intended track, kind of a “gravities rainbow” (the path taken by a projectile) of your docking.
Every summer I observe dozens of power and sailing vessels approach their docks. Most of these landings are accomplished without a hitch. Some would make the Terminator wince.
Curiously, almost all the bad dockings I’ve ever seen -- including a few of my own -- could have been avoided by the simple rule, “bail out quick and try again”.
Say you know your boat, have registered the prevailing wind and sea conditions, and have established a mental picture of your intended track to the dock. As soon as the boat’s course deviates from your mental picture (and you can’t wait to long to do this) -- bail out and start over. In most cases, if you predetermined maneuver has been considered accurately, you’ll know soon enough when things have gone wrong.
Invariably, what gets people in trouble are last minute corrective measures.
The Throttle
When I was in my early teens I convinced my father to buy a boat from a Chrysler dealer at the New York Boat Show. It was a 23’ cabin cruiser with twin outdrives. Twin outdrives really peaked my interest back then because of the vessel Lloyd Bridges had on the television series, Sea Hunt. Remember the boat? It was either a modified V-hull Formula Thunderbird or a Cruisers Inc. hull of a similar design -- or maybe that was the boat used on the series, Flipper? Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. The point is that either Lloyd or Flipper’s squeaky-clean biologist friend made running a twin engine boat look like more fun than anything I could dream of at the time, which is probably why I make my living today by operating an offshore tour boat.
Some time passed before we took delivery of our twin engine cruiser. I could barely stand the wait. Finally, though, the fateful day arrived. Boiling over with ungoverned enthusiasm, my friend Bill Soltz and I journeyed forth to meet the manufacturer’s area representative, a half-crazed codger from a small dealership and marine store on the western end of City Island, New York. As I recall, my mother drove us down with strict instructions from my father -- who was either out of town or had to work that day -- to learn all we could about the new boat. In fact, he made it a point to emphasize the importance of our learning the proper method of maneuvering with twin engines.
At the dealership, we were directed to Minneford’s Yacht Yard. I had never even been past Minneford’s gate before, let alone inside. Minneford’s was a piece of heaven. Passagemaking wannabes like myself would stand outside the fence, gaze upon the dozens of oceangoing Herreshoffs and Aldens and Sparkman & Stephens, and daydream about sailing around the world. We would drool over the twelve meters (Intrepid and Courageous), built at Minneford and usually stored and modified there.
And this was where we found my father’s little cruiser, blocked-up all by itself on one of the yard’s huge railways. It looked unbelievably out of place, like a beach ball on the assembly line of a blimp factory.
As Billy and I neared the cruiser, we saw the dealer, a wiry old man who had obviously spent the greater part of his life in the sun. We climbed the ladder and shook hands and before I could say, “... tell me about running twin engines... “, the little Chrysler was sliding down the ways. Billy and I didn’t know much about traditional launching rituals at the time, and since we were well under the legal drinking age and wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to get a bottle of champagne anyway, no precious bubbly was ceremoniously spilt on deck. In retrospect, this might have been partially to blame for some of the vessel’s problems. That, and perhaps the fact that the boat had two totally unreliable four cylinder engines, and a modified-V hull with sponsons that would loosen your molars in a head sea.
The boat hit the water and our crusty leader spurted both engine to life. We then headed out around Hart Island and that was where I got my first lesson regarding the unique advantages of twin engine maneuvering. While the captain regaled Billy and me about how he used to pilot aircraft carriers through Hell’s Gate (“... couldn’t see nothin’ but city street on either side of the flight deck.”), he set the starboard engine to full ahead and the port engine to full reverse.
Now, let me put this in the proper perspective for you: It was a 23’ boat, powered by two 130 hp outdrives having a total running time of approximately four minutes -- being run at about 5,000 r.p.m. in opposite directions by an 80 year old cowboy who probably thought he was at the helm of the U.S.S. Midway. At the time, I clearly remember thinking that Lloyd Bridges never did anything like this. I mean, there was nearly enough centrifugal force to separate molecules.
Needless to say, just when I had adjusted to the idea of living with my internal organs stacked on one side of my body like playing cards, the dealer-from-hell reversed the maneuver and sent us spinning in the other direction. At that point, it was a good thing that neither Bill nor I had an empty bottle of champagne. We probably would have beaned the guy with it.
In truth, with small, high powered boats, there are damn few situations that call for a full throttle maneuver such as the one through which Billy and I were subjected. Once, while talking with someone aboard a moored salmon pen in Eastport, I got a single screw boat caught broadside in a funneling spring tide. I had to use bursts of full throttle -- forward and reverse -- in order to bring the bow around. Even twin engines, which would have been really handy then, might have required full throttle. But that was a very special situation.
There are a handful of other “special situations” that might call for a full throttle, twin engine turn. For example, modestly powered displacement boats (trawler-type yachts) are designed to maximize creature comforts, cruising range, and fuel economy. The boats often have only a minimum of horsepower, sometimes just enough to attain hull speed, which means that maneuvering can become a full throttle affair, even in relatively calm conditions. This is fine, of course, as long as the boats are equipped with appropriately matched powerplants; a lot engines are not well suited for applications requiring frequent load cycling, i.e. bursts of full throttle.
Finally, the only other possible full throttle maneuvering situations that come to mind are big game fishing, boat handling with tugs, and avoiding an accident. The former relates to chasing or backing down on marlin or tuna (I’ve never needed full throttle for this but I’m willing to listen to someone who has), and the latter relates to running afoul of nefarious marine obstacles i.e. ledges, buoys, obstructions, or uncommonly brave nautical neophytes. The second situation, boat handling with tugs, is beyond the scope of this chapter, but suffice it to say that with a loaded barge alongside (”on the hip”, as it’s called), horsepower is a commodity not taken lightly.
I remember the day I got home from sea trials of the new boat, after I secured and resecured and re-resucured it at Minneford’s, between two 65 footers flying the English flag. At dinner, my father asked me what I had learned about twin engines. I told him that I had a pretty good idea of what two of them sounded like seconds before they blew up, and I told him that the surest way to senility was to pilot aircraft carriers through Hell’s Gate.
A Vessel’s Trim
Sometimes, passengers just don’t get the trim thing.
Ever have all your guests climb to one side of the boat? Captains of head boats, particularly whale-watch and party fishing vessels, know exactly what I’m talking about. On a given day, during some monstrously long out and back steam to the grounds, they’ll get every paying customer on one side of the boat or the other. Their passengers will go to the side without the spray, the side with the sun, or the side with the sights -- be they finback whale or city skyline.
Most of the time, I just come out of the wheelhouse and tell them: “We’ll go faster and have a much smoother ride if the boat goes through the water nice and flat. So don’t all bunch up on one side.”
This works if they’re fisherman and they want to get out to the grounds in a hurry, and it works if it’s really rough and you’re staring into a boat load of barely coherent, greenish-colored faces. Other times your guests or paying customers who just nod and go about their business of blissfully recreating -- like when they’re all bunched up on the stern deck watching the mate cut and filet their catch. Imagine it: You’re homeward bound and you have forty people on the stern deck scrutinizing the mate while he or she cuts fish, the bow is standing straight up in the air, and you’re on your tippy toes trying to make sure you don’t run into any of those partially submerged sixty foot pilings.
But you don’t have to be a head boat captain to experience the down-side of improper trim. Any yacht, sport fisherman or motor cruiser, falls victim to the whims of its passengers. If your guests all want to hang out in the cockpit or on the foredeck, then they’re going to do it. They don’t care if the boat squats or plows through the water with all the grace of a loaded barge.
Trim tabs -- those aileron-like devices mounted on the trailing edge of the hull’s bottom -- make a lot of sense at times like these. You just hit the control switch, raise one side, lower the other, or drop both sides -- depending on the conditions -- and presto, the boat’s trimmed.
Trim tabs can also help when you’re running into a nasty chop. For example. let’s say you’ve got some guests sitting on the foredeck of your sedan sport fisherman and you’re steaming into a bunch of feather-white three footers. Being a considerate, well meaning captain from the “we aim to please” school of piloting and seamanship, you simply adjust the tabs to raise the bow -- before the wet stuff finds its way over the rail and onto your passengers.
Of course, trim tabs aren’t the magic answer to boat trim. For one thing, just like spray rails and lifting strakes, they become less effective as sea conditions worsen, i.e. don’t expect too much from them when you’re coming off the tops of waves. Moreover, they can be considered by some manufacturers as necessary equipment, instead of as an option, which can be the same as saying that a particular boat won’t perform well without tabs; I’m a firm believer that proper trim starts at the design board, and I’m convinced that the only time to use trim tabs is when you have to compensate for load or seas, as described above.
No doubt some hull forms need trim tabs more than others. For example, deep vee shapes with a lot of deadrise require tabs more than round-bilge planing boats. The reason is that deep vees tend to squat before coming up on plane, which is where you end up when sea conditions make it imprudent to go faster.
Ok, you caught me. First I say that trim tabs become less effective when sea conditions worsen, and then I say you need to use trim tabs on deep vees to lower the bow when cruising below planing speeds in rough water. How is it that both statements can be true? Well, the answer to this has two parts. First, there is most definitely a point at which trim tabs stop being effective. That point is different for all boats, and it depends on the seas, hull shape, and the size of the tabs.
The second part relates to all aspects of boat handling. Basically, what it boils down to is finesse, otherwise known as delicacy of execution, or artful management. In a given situation, where a captain is called upon to provide a perfect balance between wind and seas and boat and passengers, theory sometimes falls short. While you sit at home in the comfort of your easy chair, you may say to yourself, “she’ll never respond to trim adjustments in seas over four feet high.” And then you get out there one day in a four foot chop, and you give her a little throttle, bring up the starboard trim tab, lower the port one, and she responds.
What can you do when you have a trim problem and no tabs? Short of repositioning stuff around the vessel -- a difficult task with the built-in features of today’s production boats -- not much. Sure, you can engage in some artful management of the fuel and water reserves, i.e. emptying a forward or aft water tank and/or using fuel from one side or the other, but, more than likely, this won’t solve the problem.
Most yachts just aren’t designed for ballast oriented adjustments. This is due to the fact that the type of equipment needed -- transfer pumps that move fuel between tanks or tanks that can be flooded with seawater, or both -- requires lots of space. If you happen to own a converted work boat, mega-yacht, or large displacement hull cruiser, you may have the ability to adjust the trim of your vessel by means of shifting ballast.
Commercial fisherman, on the other hand, deal with trim a different way. They load their boat up with fuel and ice at the dock, spend nearly half of both on the way to the grounds and during fishing, and compensate for the lost weight on the return trip by, hopefully, filling the hold with equal amounts of marketable product. For example, if a west coast-style commercial fish boat has had a successful trip, it looks about the same riding through the water coming and going. If it hasn’t been successful, it might look a little bow heavy on its way back into port.
Meanwhile, since your average cruising power boat or sleek sportfisherman -- less trim tabs -- doesn’t have ballast tanks, fuel transfer pumps, portable loads that can be shifted around the cabins or decks at will, or a big hall of fish to bring home, trimming often means swallowing some pride and confronting your guests. It’s really not that hard. Just turn around, smile, and ask half of them to move.
Boat Handling is Visceral
I think people who like to be on boats are the way they are because of a strange kind of prenatal mind set. I’m not saying that your average mariner secretly yearns to crawl back into the primal sea of his or her birth, just that there’s some unknown and uncontrollable catalyst at work. Why else would we voluntarily subject ourselves to endless periods of grimy, knuckle scraping, back bending maintenance routines and/or agonizing yard bills?
All right, so maybe you don’t agree with me. Maybe you think we do what we do because of a minor deformity in our eustachian tubes, or you think it’s simply a gadget issue. Whatever you believe, the fact remains that we relate to boating in a visceral way, and that’s the point I’m trying to make. Because when it comes to the idiosynchracies of boat handling, all the written knowledge pales in comparison to gut instinct. Here are some examples.
Picking up a mooring should be one of the easiest of all boat handling routines, but sometimes even the simplest effort can get complicated, like when the wind is a steady twenty five knots and you’re all alone after dropping off your guests at the dock. (No doubt someone offered to come out with you. No doubt you graciously refused their help. No doubt the bunch of them will scrutinize your progress from shore.)
Obviously, you don’t want to mess this up, because if you do, you’ll have to row back to raised eyebrows and possibly a chorus of “I told you so’s”. So, in proper fashion, you plan on coming up on the mooring dead into the wind, and I mean absolutely dead into the wind. Unfortunately, the 90’ mega yacht that came in the previous night, swinging ever so slowly on a mooring in front of you, is creating an unpredictable vortex and two periods of dead air; when she’s straight into the wind the dinghy you left tied to the mooring never turns the same way twice, and when she’s off the wind, she creates a lee.
This is one of those situations where it helps to have a visceral knowledge of boat handling. Two choices: Grab the pick-up buoy while it’s in the lee, or grab it when it’s not. Personally, I opt for the former. It’s really annoying when the bow falls off with the wind and you have to muscle the pendant over the bitt, or worse, when the wind pushes the bow over the mooring ball. To avoid this, and reach your dinghy while it’s in the lee of the yacht, you’ll have to power up through the wind, which means easing up on your dinghy and pick-up buoy with perfect timing. And timing is the operative word.
Not much can be said in the way of instruction here. After all, you’re going to have to “feel” your way to the mooring. However, it may help to point out that you don’t want to come up so fast that you have to back down hard once you get alongside your dinghy. Backing down hard will cause the bow to swing off one way or the other, depending on the rotation of the propeller.
Needless to say, the most appropriate solution to this boat handling problem is obvious. Next time, swallow your pride and accept the offer of help.
Some anchoring situations fall into a similar category. Let’s say you’ve idled into a crowded cove. Conventional wisdom recommends that you find a spot where you’ll have enough swinging room, bring your boat to a dead stop, drop anchor, and back down until you have sufficient scope for the depth. Well, conventional wisdom is a wonderful thing, provided it doesn’t stand in the way of logic.
In most anchorages, “scope” is a relative term. You can’t come into a cove full of yachts and pay out rode at a ratio of seven to one. For one thing, when the wind dies, or the tide slackens, all that rode will become a liability. Your boat will drift around the cove perilously and your nearest neighbors will stop their recreating and glare at you, unless it’s at night and they’re asleep, in which case they’ll just pound furiously on the side of your vessel until you wake up and re-anchor.
When you come into a crowded cove, check the angle between the rodes of other boats and the water and figure about the same for your own. then proceed to set the hook in traditional fashion. However, as you back down, or as you let the wind set the boat off the hook, keep a little tension on the rode to encourage the flukes to grab bottom as soon as possible. In other words, don’t pay out rode until you have the scope you want, then try and set the hook. Set the hook first, then pay out rode.
How much tension should you have on the rode? Good question. In fact, I can’t really answer it. The truth is, too little and you may not as well have any. Too much and the anchor will skid over the bottom. All I can say is it’s a visceral thing. You sort of have to “feel” it. Here’s a suggestion, though, and a word of caution: Put more and more tension on the rode as the anchor begins to grab, until the boat’s way has been checked, and be sure to leave enough scope for the rise of the tide. It’s all well and good to shorten the recommended scope for a particular mooring area, but don’t take it to extremes.
There are other examples of how your viscera, or gut instincts, play a role in boat handling, like when you’re fast asleep while the boat is at anchor and you wake up in a start because you know she’s slipped the hook. Or you’re running a course in the thick of fog and you realize, without benefit of a navigational device, that she’s off by a few degrees to the east.
In his book, The Captain, Jan De Hartog had something to say about this latter one. His protagonist, Martinus Harinxma, had been taking an unfamiliar tug and tow through a mine-swept channel in zero visibility when some “instinctive restlessness” urged him to steer a couple of points higher. After it all worked out, he made the following observation:
“.... You can train a man in navigation, seamanship, celestial observation and the computing of tide, current, speed, wind and drift, and yet he will never be a sailer unless, at the moment of truth when he is forced into a corner from which there is no way out except by instant intuitive action, he unerringly makes the right move.”
Heave-Ho
When I was sixteen, I learned three valuable lessons about boating. The first -- never take anything for granted -- I learned from my younger brother. The second -- never try and push a boat off a beach stern first -- I learned from a mysterious beachcomber. And the third -- don’t go where you’re not invited -- I learned from a wealthy Manhasset landowner. It happened like this:
My brother and I had been fishing Western Long Island Sound in my father’s boat, a 23’ cabin cruiser with twin-outdrives. Sometime in the late afternoon, while steaming between Execution Rocks and Stepping Stones, we developed motor trouble. The port engine died and the starboard engine threatened to do the same. I looked around, and made for Crescent Beach. My plan was to drop anchor in the bite between Barker Point and Sands Point; I knew we would find good holding bottom there, and anchoring in the shoal water would keep us out of the traffic going east and west.
Now, Crescent Beach -- a local name given to a pebble-strewn stretch of private property -- looks like something out of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination (or maybe it was the other way around). Anyway, the point is that ordinary people aren’t supposed to walk in the footsteps of the Great Gatsby. In fact, they shouldn’t disrespect signs that read “Private Property”, “No Trespassing” or “Violators Will Be Shot”, either. But as the saying goes, “The best laid plans... ” Well, you know what I mean.
When I got into fifteen feet of water, I hollered to my brother to drop anchor. Without a moment’s hesitation, he had it up and over the side. Unfortunately, I’d detached the rode a few days before (to spray the anchor with zinc paint) and the hook went sailing into the Sound never to be seen again.
As usually happens on the water, little problems begot bigger ones; after we lost the anchor, the starboard engine failed, the boat drifted side-to, and we hit the beach like a dead whale. I had just enough time to up-end the outdrives with the power tilt.
While the boat pounded and scraped on the beach (nothing life threatening, mind you), my brother and I got the engines started; it turned out the master fuses had shorted. We then tried to push her off the beach stern first; I figured that once the outdrives were in deep water, I could back out. However, the two of us alone couldn’t move the boat against the wind and chop. We needed help. And so my brother went up the hill to find a couple of good Samaritans. Five or so minutes after he had disappeared over the dunes, a stranger appeared with some important advice. “You’ll never get her off that way,” he said. “You’ve got to push her bow into the waves.”
The beachcomber and I pushed the boat into knee-deep water. While he held the bow into the wind, I jumped aboard and lowered the outdrives just enough to cover the props. A minute later I was safely off the beach.
Meanwhile, my brother had walked across an expansive lawn to the tiled patio of a beautiful mansion. He approached a sliding glass door and saw a woman in a bathrobe talking frantically on the telephone. She was waving her hand at him and yelling. He thought she was saying: “I’m getting some help”. But when he got closer, he realized she was yelling: “I’m talking to the police!” He tapped on the glass and tried to explain that we’d gone ashore, and she answered him with: “I have a gun and I know how to use it!”
I’m sure it was all a terrible misunderstanding, but when I saw my brother again, he was running toward the boat and flailing his arms like a madman. A couple of hundred feet behind him, gun drawn, was a uniformed police officer. This unexpected turn of events, unfortunately, prompted the kindly beachcomber to flee eastward at a high rate of speed, and, as a result, I never had the chance to thank him.
I know now that my brother should have stopped, but he didn’t. Instead, he jumped in the water and swam to the boat, whereupon I hoisted him aboard, put the engines in gear and sped away. No shots were ever fired, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Since this incident, I’ve learned quite a bit more about anchoring. For one thing, I always keep the rode and anchor connected, because when you need to set the hook in a hurry, you don’t always have time to shackle the two together. What else have I learned. Well, here are a few examples:
Don’t skimp on chain. The chain is the key to getting the flukes to bite.
Don’t go by the 7:1 rule if you’re setting the hook in a crowded, well protected cove. Use less, a lot less. Get the anchor to bite, and give just enough rode to compensate for the rise and fall of the tide.
When hauling the anchor, always cinch the rode until you’ve got it straight up and down. Let the waves work it loose, and if that doesn’t work, try idling ahead on it. When an anchor is badly stuck, it’s usually chain wrapped around a rock. Be patient and keep trying. Sometimes you have to give it a little slack and free the chain before you can pull the anchor loose.
The scowing of an anchor (attaching the rode to the crown and seizing it at the ring), or the use of a buoyed trip line, reduces holding power in rough weather. I consider both to be more trouble than they’re worth.
Special Anchoring Techniques
I used to run six passenger dive charters from the public landing in Tenants Harbor, Me. I carried six divers, eighteen scuba tanks, several hundred pounds of extraneous equipment, and a big cooler of food. The weight of all the gear taxed the load bearing capabilities of the boat and set her boot top about an inch below the waterline. Sometimes, on a spring low tide, I would find myself stuck in the mud after everybody was aboard.
Those early morning, spring low tides necessitated the setting of a kedge anchor (not a “type” of anchor, but an anchor used for kedging). As I idled toward the landing to meet my passengers, I would drop the anchor over the stern, pay out the rode slowly, and dock the boat (without backing down). I would then secure a stern line to the dock, walk the rode to the bow, and warp the boat around until it was perpendicular to the landing; in other words, after adjusting the lines, I’d have the swim platform a couple of inches away from the dock, and the bow pointed seaward. With the boat berthed in this fashion -- the rode made fast to the bow bitt and the platform one step from the dock -- we’d load over the transom. When we were ready to leave, we would warp free of the mud by hauling the rode in hand-over-hand.
Kedging (the warping of a boat or ship by means of an anchor and rode) is a time tested technique for freeing a stranded boat. It’s also a good way to prevent a vessel from being pushed farther onto a beach or ledge by wind and current. In my case, kedging enabled me to get out of the mud without putting the transmission in gear, thereby saving my propeller from having to dredge through large stones, derelict lobster traps, and old engine blocks.
Now I didn’t bring up the subject of kedging just to talk about kedging, I brought it up to point out the advantages of setting an anchor over the stern. Sometimes -- particularly when you’re in need of a two-point mooring -- laying the anchor over the stern can be a handy way of doing things.
Say you’re in a cove with a pretty good tidal rip and you want to keep your boat from spinning around and chain-wrapping a rock. In order to prevent this from happening, you have to set two anchors, one from the bow and one from the stern. Now you could drop both anchors from the bow -- backing from the first spot to the second -- or you could drop one anchor from the stern. Here’s one way to do the latter:
(1) Drop the first anchor over the stern as you ease into the cove, preferably with the set and drift. (2) Pay out the rode until you reach the site of the second anchor drop. (3) Put a strain on the first anchor rode so you don’t run over the second one when you set it. (4) Drop the second anchor off the bow. (5) Warp the boat halfway back to the first anchor, or put it in gear and drive it slowly -- with someone tending the rode to make sure it doesn’t foul the wheel. (6) Make everything fast at the bow and stern.
I like setting the anchor over the stern for three reasons: If you maintain headway when you set it, the rode pays out astern and you don’t have to worry about it winding-up in the propeller. If you warp the boat back stern-first, then you’ve got the rode in your hands, and again you don’t have to worry about it fouling the propeller. And, if you keep your lunch hook stowed somewhere in the stern, like I do (the lazarette’s a good place), then all you’ve got to do is take it out and drop it over the rail.
I should say here that trawlers, flush deck cruisers, aft-cabin motoryachts, and sailboats typically have their primary and secondary anchors stowed in rollers on their bow sprits or pulpits, which means that their operators will be more inclined to set both anchors from the bow, rather than carry one aft to set from the stern. This works just as well. However, after you drop the first anchor and back to the site of the second anchor drop, I recommend that you walk the first rode aft (reverse the boat’s direction) and tie it off to the stern; this way you’ll be dropping the second anchor from the bow, and warping your way back stern-first, as described above. In my opinion, you’re less likely to foul the propeller when the anchor rode leading from the stern is in your hand. Problems arise when this rode is untended.
Last but not least -- and this is a technique used quite a bit by cod and tuna fishermen -- you can haul your anchor out of deep water using a float ball and a large ring or shackle.
Let’s say you’ve been fishing in 50 fathoms of water and now you’re ready to leave for home. Rather than haul the anchor hand-over-hand from the depths of Davy Jones locker, you can devise a rig to do the work for you.
(1) Attach a large shackle or a shackle and a big ring (a big pear link works well) to a good size poly-ball. Make sure the shank of the anchor will fit through the ring. (2) While standing at the bow, reeve the anchor rode through the ring and drop it and the ball into the water. (3) Release the anchor rode from the bow and walk it back to the stern. Do this carefully so as not to foul the propeller, or drop the bitter end of the rode. In fact, with a good wind blowing, you’ll want one of the crew to tend the rode while you man the helm and keep the boat head-up into the wind. (4) With the boat in gear, and the anchor rode made fast to a stern cleat, drive straight into the wind. (5) Keep heading into the wind until the shank of the anchor pulls through the ring in the poly-ball. (6) Put the boat in neutral, and retrieve the floating anchor hand-over-hand.
Outboard, Outdrive, and Twin Screw Maneuvers
Generally speaking, there are really only three ways to approach or shove off from a dock -- bow first, stern first, or side to. Granted, this is a lot like saying there are only three themes in literature -- love, hate, and greed -- but you get the point. Whether it’s a four hundred page work of fiction, or a 40’ sport fisherman, you’ve got to start with the fundamentals.
I first began operating a boat professionally at sixteen, as a water skiing instructor at a summer camp. Ninety nine point nine percent of all the boat handling was bow first, and for two very good reasons. First, because an outboard or sterndrive powered boat has a steerable propeller, and because the unit is farther astern than the rudder on an inboard, outboard and sterndrive equipped vessels tend to pivot more dramatically. In other words -- and this is for you analytical mechanics buffs -- an outboard or sterndrive powered boat has a greater Moment of Force, otherwise known as Torque.
This is not an engine or propeller torque, it’s a boat or system torque; the force applied at a given distance from the vessel’s pivot point. Anyway, the bottom line here is that you can handle a lot of maneuvering situations in an outboard or sterndrive powered boat by putting the bow where you want it and whipping the stern around.
The second reason you run a ski boat bow first a lot is the most important. It has to do with safety. No matter what, you should never back toward someone in the water -- skier, diver, swimmer, whomever. It’s just unnecessary. If you’re passing a ski to a person in the water or picking them up, approach bow first, preferably straight on, leave a little room, and come in without creating a heavy wake. In other words, don’t boil-up some giant wave that arrives just as the person starts to climb into the boat or reach for a ski. Also, try and avoid that burst of throttle at the last second to take the boat’s way off. That’s just “hot-dogging”.
While ski boats maneuver bow first a lot, big game sportfishermen do the opposite. These boats often have twin engine installations, which make them highly responsive going astern. Kick the starboard engine ahead and the port engine back, and the boat’s bow spins to port. Kick the port ahead and the starboard back, and the boat’s bow turns to starboard. Both turns are accomplished on the proverbial dime, since the pivot point ends up somewhere amidships. In fact, using one engine alone, while leaving the other in neutral, yields a whole other set of operating capabilities. So does a combination of different rudder angles. But more about this later.
It’s not just the sportfisherman’s engine arrangement that dictates the preferred mode of maneuvering, it’s the whole method of big game fishing. Look at the way these kinds of production boats have changed over the years. Fifteen years ago, only special interest builders like Rybovich, Merritt, Whiticar, Norseman, and Buddy Davis used center console-type helms on the flybridge. Now everybody’s got them, or some reasonable facsimile. And for good reason. Besides the fact that all the action takes place in the cockpit, a big game sportfishing boat is sometimes called upon to make relatively high speed runs on fish... in reverse! Consequently, a good fishing vessel needs a helm that allows its captain to see the rod tip, the monofilament, and the fish at the same time.
In truth, all big game sportfisherman spend a lot more time going astern into their slips than they do backing on fish. That’s not by choice, mind you. It’s just that there aren’t that many fish around. In fact, next time you’re in Montauk, N.Y., or Singer Island, Florida -- home to two of the world’s largest charter fleets -- or West Palm Beach, Florida -- home to the Rybovich Boat Yard -- check out the flybridge helms on some of the sportfishermen. You’ll notice that many of them, particularly the ones on the day boats, are set up so the captain has access to the shifts and throttles while standing forward of the helm looking aft. Now, what does that tell you about the importance of going astern in a twin engine sport fisherman?
All right. All I’ve got left is side to. And you’re probably wondering what could be better at going side to than either bow first or stern first? Well, I’ll tell you. How about a canoe with one or to paddlers using the draw stroke, or a small sailboat with its centerboard in the raised position, or a mega-yacht with a bow thruster, or a twin engine boat in a flanking maneuver?
Flanking is a tug boat expression. It refers to moving a boat sideways by taking advantage of a combination of rudder angle and propeller walk. Here’s how it works: If you’re starboard side to the dock and you want to pull away to port, you put the starboard engine ahead, the port engine in reverse, and the rudder hard to starboard. The starboard engine will try to turn the bow to port, but the opposing rudder angle will resist the motion. The port engine will pull the bow to port, too; its rudder is immaterial because the water around it is static. In other words, the starboard screw (a left hand wheel going ahead), will draw the stern to port. The port screw (a right hand wheel going astern), will do the same. Hence, both screws will turn the bow to port as well as draw the stern to port. Hence, the boat goes to port. It works going the other way, too.
Of course, before you go trying this at a crowded marina, I recommend you first practice the maneuver in open water. Every boat handles differently. For one thing, your vessel must be one with inboard turning screws. Most aren’t.
A Good Mate
I’ve got this arrangement on my boat whereby I don’t have a regular mate. Instead, I have a bunch of mates assigned to me by a third party. They work in shifts, one week at a time, and I hardly ever see the same one twice. I know it sounds strange, but that’s the way I worked it out back in February of last winter. All I can say is that, at the time, there was three feet of snow on the ground and my logic circuits must have frozen. Without a doubt, if I had it to do all over again, I would have come up with a completely different plan. I’d have one mate for the season, and I’d choose the person. Here’s why.
The other day I brought the boat into her usual spot at the marina and I did it as well as I’ve ever done it. I mean, she laid side-to perfectly, then touched the dock with the gentleness of a romantic Hollywood kiss. My passengers, about thirty five of them, were satisfied, if not downright impressed. Unfortunately, things went downhill from there. The mate passed one end of the bow line to the dock steward and handed the other end to one of the passengers. Bad idea. The passenger pulled the bow line in as tight as possible, which of course sent the stern away from the dock, toward the middle of the channel. The mate, now standing on the stern, couldn’t heave a line to save his life (or anyone’s, for that matter), so I had to yell at the passenger on the bow to let go his end of the line, leave the wheelhouse to secure a spring, then hustle back to the helm in order to winch the boat in with her big V-8. So much for my perfect docking.
Good mates are damn hard to come by. When you find one, you know right from the start how lucky you are. Good mates don’t have to be told how to adjust the fenders when you land at a new float, or how much scope you need on a dock line, or where to stow gear, or how not to oversteer in a following sea. They don’t have to be reminded to walk around the boat and make sure everything is in its place. In fact, they think of things about a half a second after you do.
Perhaps there’s no place more worthy of a good mate than the deck of a fish boat. Fishing compounds a mate’s job about ten fold. Whether it’s a charter boat, a head boat, or a recreational sportfishing boat, a mate’s abilities can make a big difference in the day’s events.
On a party fishing boat, a mate has to be proficient at untangling snarls, as well as gaffing and cutting fish. He or she also has to get along fairly well with people, and be extremely reliable; If the mate doesn’t show on a given day, and a captain leaves the dock alone, there’s a good chance he’s in violation of his Certificate of Inspection.
On charter and private sportfishing boats, the mate doesn’t have to untangle snarls so much, but he or she has to be equally good at gaffing and cutting fish. And there’s the added complication of rigging bait and handling leaders on boats that troll for the big ones.
I can recall two stories that illustrate the best and the worst in a mate on a fishing boat. First the best.
My friend John Earl owns and operates a party fishing boat, the Henrietta, out of the same dock from which I run. He fishes for cod, cusk, hake, and pollock, groundfish mostly. John’s mate is Bruce, and he’s about as big a man as men come. He’s the kind of guy who can drive sixteen penny nails with his thumbs. One time this summer one of the passengers had drunk a little too much beer. John told the guy nicely that he had had enough and that he should abstain from the brew, but the guy didn’t listen. Either that or he had some comment that didn’t exactly suggest acquiescence to John’s request. Anyway, I guess the guy reached into the cooler and grabbed another beer, only before he had a chance to open it, Bruce came up behind him, wrapped his big maw around the guy’s hand -- beer and all -- and squeezed until the can burst. The guy didn’t drink any beer after that.
Actually, that‘s not the story that best illustrates Bruce’s high points. That just gives you an idea how big he is. As far as his abilities go, well, he can cut fish, and tend lines, and he’s pretty good with people. But the other day John was bringing the boat in from a particularly good trip. Bruce was cutting fish on the stern deck as John came around the floats for a landing at the fuel dock. As John goosed the throttle to swing the stern hard around, the diesel choked on an air bubble and stalled. It was a once in a lifetime occurrence. Well, John turned around and yelled for Bruce to heave a line. Bruce had one shot and one shot only -- a three pointer at the buzzer -- and he made it.
OK, now for the worst.
I heard this story about a charter fisherman whose mate called in sick the night before a big tuna trip to the canyon. The mate knew he was leaving the captain in the lurch so he told him that he’d send a replacement, a friend who he said could handle the task at hand. The captain didn’t have much of a choice so he agreed. (This story goes back a ways. Today, with random drug testing, an owner/operator has to be more discriminating.)
The next day the guy showed up at the dock as planned. He weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds and looked like hell. The first thing he did on the boat was slam down a box full of jelly doughnuts. Then, after shoving off, he went into the salon and stretched out on the convertible sofa in the main salon, whereupon he fell fast asleep. The captain, a little peeved about this, went to the flybridge and began what was to be a five or six hour trip to the grounds.
Finally, after about three hours at the helm, the captain couldn’t stand it anymore. He switched on the autopilot and went down the bridge ladder with every intention of telling the mate that if he didn’t take a turn at the wheel, or mix up some chow for his customers, he wasn’t going to get paid. However, when he walked over to the mate and called his name, he got no response. When he put a hand on the guy’s shoulder and shook, he discovered why. The mate was stone-cold dead.
Rather than terminate the trip, the captain told his passengers that the mate wasn’t feeling very well. He recommended that they not bother him, and they didn’t. In fact, when it was over, they had a pretty decent trip. They caught some tuna and had a lot of fun. They even gave the captain a tip for the mate.
Boat Handling and Fishing
When I chartered out of Three Mile Harbor in Eastern Long Island, I usually fished Plum Gut, Gardiners Bay, and the Peconics, because that was what I liked to do best. I’d hit the rips for blues and stripers, or poke around for flounder, blackfish and weaks. Occasionally, I’d go offshore for shark and tuna, but it wasn’t my first choice and conditions had to be just right. First of all, I had a small boat, so I needed a good forecast. And secondly, because dealing with a big fish can be dangerous as well as costly to the boat, I needed the right party. Translation: I wouldn’t take anyone out who insisted on keeping the fish.
I’m sure that last statement sounds incredibly selfish to a lot of people. However, how many of those same people can say they’ve actually caught a large bluefin or mako on a charter boat whose captain agreed to give up the fish? It’s one thing to hook up with a 500 to 1,000 pound fish and bring it near enough to see. It’s another to bring it alongside the boat, and still another getting it on deck. In fact, anyone who thinks they can land a big fish without a good boat handler has probably got a magic rod and reel and knuckles that drag on the floor when they walk.
In Montauk, homeport of the second or third largest charter fleet in the world, shopping for a boat is like browsing the isles at Walmarts. The boats are all tied up with their bows out and their sterns in. Painted signs that list the vessel’s day rates (half, full or overnight), and the vessel’s quarry (shark and tuna, or bluefish and striper), sit on fighting chairs or hang from flybridge rails. At day’s end, the captains will be found tinkering with their machines, resting in the cockpit, or watching the news on television. If they see you staring at their boat they may come out and pitch to you. Otherwise, they’ll wait for you to make the first move. If you’re first move is to insist on ownership of the fish, most will probably send you on your way. Of course, persistence is the mother of success. Given enough time, even the most obnoxious charterer can find a willing and thoroughly able captain.
Now, since this is a chapter on boat handling and not the principles or legalities of sportfishing, I’m not going to defend the boat owner’s right to keeping a large, marketable fish. Instead, I’m going to tell you what a captain -- one who has agreed to give up the fish -- can do to keep from landing one. (Essentially, this is the same as telling you how to land one.)
One way to ensure that a fish won’t get caught is to let it take straight runs away from the boat. In other words, if the fish takes line off the reel without pulling it sideways through the water, it isn’t working that hard. Sure there’s some reel drag to consider, but that’s nothing compared to the drag created by two hundred yards of mono being pulled sideways though the water. Look at it this way: If the fish swims toward you while you gain back line, and the captain follows it while it swims away, then guess who gets tired first? That’s right. It’s the guy in the fighting chair.
Another way to keep from landing a fish is to let the line chafe against the vessel. If, when the fish sounds, the captain doesn’t maneuver the boat away from the line fast enough, it will touch the rail, or worse, snag on some of the running gear. When a fish heads for bottom, a captain who wants to catch the fish will try to control the direction of the line by making lazy circles around the point where the line touches the water. He will then direct the person in the fighting chair to try and turn the fish. In other words, he or she will instruct the fisherman to pump and reel.
The very best captains know how to get a fish from hook-up to the deck in the shortest possible time. They know how to turn the fish, bring it alongside, dispatch it, and get it into the boat, without any wasted motion. This isn’t to say that the fisherman holding the rod isn’t equally important, only that a good captain knows exactly what must be done to get the fish home. With a big tuna or mako, this often leads to a harrowing last minute fight at the rail.
Needless to say, lots of fish, even those that the captain wants, are lost at the rail. However, if the agreement requires that the charter party gets the fish, chances are they’ll probably never even see the leader. Why? Let me put it this way. A few weeks ago, I read a news item about a hooked 500 pound Mako that jumped into the cockpit of a sportfisherman, pounded the deck and bulwarks to smithereens, raked one of the guys in the boat, jumped out, then swam away. I also remember hearing about a boat coming into Montauk about fifteen years ago with a swordfish bill sticking into the salon headboard. The fish tried to throw the hook while it was at the side of the boat. Tuna can be pretty unpredictable, too. Last year, a guy on Jeffrey’s lost a couple of fingers, and another one was pulled right out of the boat, never to be seen or heard from again.
Having a big fish at the side of a boat is a potentially risky venture. Even if everything goes according to plan and there are no accidents, there’s bound to be some loss in terms of boat gear and equipment. I mean, the fish can rake the gelcoat with the point of the gaff, or dent the mahogany cap rail, or bend the hinges on the tuna door....
Generally speaking, without the prospect of financial reward looming in front of his or her face, what’s a captain to do? I’ll tell you. Just before the leader comes into view, the boat will turn this way or that, the fish will take another run, and the monofilament, which has been considerably weakened, either by repeated encounters with the rail or one to many periods of heavy pumping, will snap. Goodbye fish, and another case of, “the one that got away”.
Catch and release notwithstanding, here’s my advice for chartering a boat. No matter where you are in the world, if you want to maximize your chances of catching a big, marketable fish -- like bluefin tuna or mako -- and, at the same time, learn something about wrangling a boat around deepwater trophies, stay out of the fish business and just have fun.
Fishing Etiquitte
In his book, “Fish the Chair if You Dare”, Greg Beecher, a respected Montauk tuna fisherman who passed away recently, wrote that there were always guys who came out to the grounds and trolled through the middle of the anchored hand-line and rod and reel fleet. He also wrote that these same guys were invariably pummeled with lead sinkers and could be easily identified at any marina by their broken windshields. He further went on to say that as a general rule of thumb, one should never troll within the throwing range of an eight to twelve ounce sinker. I would further qualify this by saying that one should estimate this range not by how far you think you can throw a ten ounce sinker, but by how far Dave Winfield or Nolan Ryan can throw one.
Beecher’s recommendation doesn’t just apply to tuna fisherman. Let’s say you’re cruising Long Island Sound in search of bluefish, and you find a bunch of boats making lazy circles around a school of frenzied fifteen to twenty pounders. Well, following time honored traditions of fishing courtesy and etiquette, you simply drop in line behind one of the boats -- provided they’re not already squeezed to tightly -- and follow the pack’s course and speed. If you hook-up a couple of fish, and you don’t feel like fighting them while the boat’s in gear, pull to the outboard side of the fleet and get out of everyone’s way. Anchoring or drifting anywhere near this particular school won’t be very productive, unless you’re running low on sinkers.
Here’s another fisherman’s faux pas: You decide to do a little sharking with some buddies, so you get about 200 pounds of bloody, smelly mackerel and pogy chum together, and you plan on leaving with the party boats in the morning. You’ve got it all figured out because the day before you overheard a couple of guys from the party boats talking about all the sharks they’d seen. Well, morning comes, and you depart as scheduled. Two hours later, you anchor up in the middle of the party boat fleet, a bunch of boats, I might add, filled to capacity with hungry, meat-eating-hunter-gatherers, fully intent on stocking their freezers with cod. While in throwing distance of the nearest boat, you immediately flood the water with bloody, smelly shark chum, and, because a shark can sense one part blood in something like a gazillion parts water, within the hour you have one hundred sharks in sight. Unfortunately, since you started chumming, the guys on the party boats have yet to land
a single fish with both a head and a tail on it, and, consequently, they’re hoping like hell to get back before you do so they can find your car and fill it with leftover clam bellies. Angry fishermen are an unforgiving lot.
Now, this isn’t to say that the majority-rules principle supersedes the first-come- first-serve principle. On the contrary, if you’re out there chumming the water for sharks, and a bunch of other boats come around and start bottom fishing, well, that’s just too bad for them. You got there first and you’re entitled to your space.
All right then, given the fact that you’re never the only one out there, how do you know how much space to give the other guy? On the one hand, since a lot of boat owning sport fishermen spend part of their work week bucking traffic jams and muscling through crowded elevators, you can’t expect to find anyone like Mahatma Gandhi anchored over your favorite fishing spot. On the other hand, if it weren’t for a couple of old timers who let me fish alongside them when I was a kid, I wouldn’t know half of what I know now, which isn’t much.
When I was kid, my father took me to City Island, N.Y. He’d put his outboard on a wooden skiff rented from Rosenbergers Bait and Tackle -- just over the bridge on the left -- and we’d fish the mud bottom for flounder and the rock ledges for black fish. We caught a lot of fish. When I was old enough, he drove me and my friends down and let us go out on our own. I was pretty careful back then about moving in on somebody elses territory, which, at times, resulted in a very low sandworm to flat catch ratio; staying out of everyone’s way usually meant being too far from the fish. However, eventually the policy paid off. After awhile, the regulars took pity on me and my friends and waved us closer. They showed us different ways to rig our baits and dress our catch. One guy taught me how to fin and de-bone a black fish with a pair of pliers.
What I’m trying to say here is that while every situation is different, generally speaking, you should be thoughtful and moderately generous when fishing around others, especially when those others are well meaning kids without boom boxes and beer. So, the next time you’re out, if you see a boat full of young fishermen who aren’t doing that well, help them out a little. Wave them over. Show them how to tend bottom properly. Give them some bait if you have to. Trust me on this one: No matter what you preconceive about the afterlife, two things are fairly certain; not all the rooms face the water, and very few come with their own dock and boat.
The “Greatest of All Sea Boats”
Before we touch on the subject of making a rough water fetch, I'd like to get something off my chest about the phrase, "great sea boat". Here's my grievance.
I have my boat up for sale, and she's a great boat. I love the boat. But the other day I a guy calls who wants to know how she is in a six foot sea. I tell him it's a 30' boat and ask what he means by a six foot sea? I say, "Do you mean six footers with the tops breaking off of them, six footers that are four feet apart, six footers that are twenty feet apart, six footers in Long Island Sound, or six footers at Cashes? Do you mean heading into six footers, running from six footers, or having six footers roll toward the rail?"
The guy says he fishes fifty or so miles off the coast of New Jersey in a 26' center console Robalo and he's looking for something that will be more comfortable. Now, I'm thinking that what this guy really wants is a bigger boat than what I've got, but I tell him that for the past six years I've fished thirty to sixty miles offshore, in the Gulf of Maine, where NOAA's prevailing summer forecasts have called for southwest winds of 10 to 20 knots and seas of three to six feet. I don't tell him that while two years ago I was able to go out every day and fish comfortably in those conditions, last year, on several occasions, the same forecasted conditions were almost unbearable.
Boats are funny that way, every one of them. No matter how able they are, each one responds to a particular kind of sea in its own particular way. Take your typical beamy sedan sport fisherman, with a a lot of flare, a deep forefoot, and a very modest deadrise aft. Great sea boat, right? Stable? Fast? Dry? Sure, but put her next to another boat, say a smaller one with a narrower beam and a sharper hull shape, and run them both before a following sea of a certain size, moving at a certain speed. Strangely enough, the bigger one may start to yaw first. Why? Because wide, flat sterns on boats with deep forefoots get a little squirrely in a following sea. Shorten the troughs another foot and a half, or slow the waves, and the situation is reversed, the sport fisherman becomes a "great sea boat" again.
Admittedly, what I'm driving at -- that there are no such things as great sea boats, only bad sea boats -- is somewhat debatable. However, I believe that if you want a truly great sea boat, capable of handling any weather, get a full displacement, double-ended motorsailer with stabilizers, or a submarine. Everything else is a trade-off.
So, how does this relate to the handling of boats in rough water? In short, it is a very subtle and thoroughly boat-dependent exercise.
For example, take three different vessels of roughly the same size -- a twin-outboard powered deep-v planing skiff, an inboard powered round bilge lobster boat, and an I/O powered modified-v cuddy cabin, i.e., a tri-hull or Boston Whaler-type. Put the boats side by side under the same set of conditions; a small craft advisory in effect, with 15 to 25 knot winds and steep seas of four to six feet, maybe six or seven seconds apart -- nothing too extreme, just a nasty chop that none of the sample boats will be able to get on top of.
Now, pretend our course takes us dead into the weather, or head-to, as they say, and don't forget that this is a very particular kind of sea, in a very particular kind of bay, on a very particular day. That said, what might we expect from the boats in terms of their individual seakeeping capabilities?
Generally speaking, the round bilge lobster boat will have the smoothest ride with the least pounding. However, it will also have the most motion; in this case, pitch. The hard chine deep-v will pitch less and pound more (at the chine). And the modified-v will have the least motion and pound the most (between the sponson or reverse chine and the main section of hull).
And what might be the prescription for handling these seas? Well, standard operating procedure here calls for a course change that will set each boat to quarter the seas (45 degrees to the wind and waves, or thereabouts). But will this maneuver ease the passage for all three boats?
Actually, the lobster boat might be just as well off maintaining her course, if not her speed. In the event she starts to pitch excessively, or "dolphin" a little and pound under the stern, she can be throttled back. A course change (45 degrees off the wind), might help reduce the lobster boat's motion and stern-slap, but it might also just add an annoying roll component, and cause more pounding to occur along the weather bow, as oncoming waves meet the hull's topside.
If the lobster boat can handle the head seas, then the skiff probably can, too. She won't pound in the stern because her deadrise back there will cut the receding wave like a knife, more so, anyway, than the flat stern section of the lobster boat. But, she'll pound hard at the chine and most likely require a course change to quarter the seas. Granted, she'll pick up a little roll and slap on her new course, but overall, she'll ride a lot smoother.
Finally, there's the modified-v. This boat presents a lot of unyielding bow area to the oncoming waves, more than the other two. Consequently, she won't handle our hypothetical head sea as well as the skiff or lobster boat. Better for her to be set on a course that quarters the seas. This will lower her resistance to forward motion and allow for a smoother, less jolting ride. On her new course, she'll pound somewhat, but roll less than the others.
Sounds like the modified-v isn't as "great a "sea boat" as the either the round bilge lobster boat or the deep-v skiff, doesn't it? Well give me a second while I take my hypothetical sea and shorten the troughs and steepen the crests and....
Turning in Rough Water
I’m not sure which hurricane it was; David I think. I was in Three Mile Harbor on the east end of Long Island. My father was with me and we wanted to go out and take a look around, see what the boat could do. There was a lot of wind at the time, a lot of wind. If I remember right, the eye was just about to cross our latitude.
The harbor’s a hurricane-hole if ever there was one, and the inlet to Gardiners Bay hardly ever shows its teeth, except for maybe special occasions; there’s an unbroken fetch through Plum Gut to South Lyme, CT -- sixteen plus miles, NNW. The day we went out, waves from the Sound were filtering through The Gut like light through a laser. When they hit the other side they all looked pretty much the same -- short and steep. In my book, high amplitude plus high frequency equals just plain ugly.
Finding the right place to turn around can be an exercise in futility when all the waves look the same. Inevitably, you reach a conclusion that you just have to go; the seas aren’t getting any smaller, and you’re just jogging farther and farther from shore. I remember saying almost immediately that I’d seen enough of what the boat could do. And my father, prudent mariner that he is, wholeheartedly agreed. So we “felt” our way into a turn, absorbed a roll that seemed to approach ninety degrees, and carefully negotiated our way back through the inlet. Safely tied to the dock, I humbly admitted that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to go out.
That day was clearly not a good day to go out. But more often than not the line between “acceptable” and “not good” is a little fuzzy. Sometimes you don’t know it’s not good until you get out past a particular point. The other side of an inlet is one of those points. So are outer bay openings to the Atlantic; when waves have nothing to stop them for hundreds or even thousands of miles, they tend to show up in surprising shapes, sizes and combinations.
Every boatman I’ve ever met has had to find a place to turn around at some time in his life. It’s almost a given. Eventually you venture forth only to be turned back by the fury of the sea. I wish there was some hard and fast rule that applied to finding that special place and negotiating that special turn, but there isn’t. You just have to feel your way through it. Of course, your rudder should be in the water when you try it. And you should avoid getting pooped, which is to say that you shouldn’t turn the stern under a breaking wave and have hundreds of gallons of seawater spill into the cockpit.
What often happens when you’re stuck in a horrendous chop with very steep, short seas, is that the turn takes more time than you want it to. Though the rule of thumb is to fight to stay out of the trough, sometimes that’s just not possible. In many cases, you have no choice but to stretch your maneuver over two complete waves: Start your turn on the front-side of the first wave (so you end up at about a 45 degree angle on the crest), turn a little more in the trough (almost but not quite broadside), and continue your turn over the crest of the second wave. Complete the turn on the backside of the second wave -- and give her plenty of throttle to get the stern around before the arrival of the third wave.
When running an inlet from seaward, the best place for you to be is on the backside of an inbound wave. Ideally, you want to ride the backside of the wave all the way home. You don’t want to have the boat overrun the crest of the wave your on, and you don’t want the wave behind you to overrun the boat from astern.
Unfortunately, the best laid plans often turn to naught and you can’t keep the boat exactly where you want it. This means that you will sometimes find yourself surfing big waves in either an inlet or open water. In these situations, you can’t afford to be timid at the helm. Undoubtedly, radical wheel and throttle maneuvers will be needed in order to avoid being broached or pitchpoled. (For the most part -- and this is not a hard and fast rule, either -- you’re in serious danger of pitchpoling anytime the height of the wave exceeds the length of the boat, or when the vessel’s buoyancy has been compromised.)
Sometimes it isn’t a matter of when to turn, but when not to turn. A few years back I got caught in a very nasty storm -- winds of 45 knots. We had 10’ seas from the southwest and were making way in a westerly direction. Waves buffeted the boat from the port bow. It wasn’t very pleasant. There was fog and rain, and it was at night. I wanted to stay the course, as George Bush would say, but one of my colleagues wanted to turn to the northeast and head for an inside passage. I refused. He got kind of adamant about it and I ended up raising my voice and losing my cool. I told him that I didn’t want these waves on my stern for the two hours it would take us to get inside, and that we were better off maintaining course and speed. To this day, I’m sure I made the right decision. Going the other way would have brought us to a quiet thoroughfare, but we would have had to run before mountainous seas and navigate around a series of ledges and small islands to get there. Moreover, we
still would have had a beam-to crossing of the bay to consider.
It’s appropriate that as I write this chapter the wind outside is gusting to 70 mph northwest -- the prevailing direction when a low goes by. Through my window I can see one to three foot seas making-up feather-white in the river. It’s a bad blow, storm conditions, with forecasts for the waters 25 miles from shore out to the Hague Line calling for sustained winds of 50 knots and seas to 27’. Imagine that! Seas of 27’! And out in the thick of it, you can bet there’s a fish boat with a small crew. Most likely they’re hove-to, jogging into it, trying to ride it out, a bunch of guys huddled in the wheelhouse wishing they were somewhere else -- wishing, maybe, that they’d turned around yesterday.
Radar
Running in fog can be mentally exhausting. We sort of get used to it up here in Maine because we get more of it than they do almost anywhere else in the country. It doesn’t mean we like it. In fact, I can remember one year when I went three weeks without seeing more than a quarter mile. And that’s nothing. Some of the “from heres” (Mainers whose Grandparents were born and raised here and who have never lived anywhere else --seed-folk) tell me about summers when they didn’t see the mouth of the harbor for more than a month and a half.
The new raster scan radars help. They’re easier on the eyes because you don’t have to alternate between looking inside the hood of an old-style radar -- which is a black, tunnel-like affair -- and looking at the bright light of a mid-day, dungeon-thick fog. However, anytime you have to concentrate on a bunch of tiny, lighted dots, you’re going to get fatigued. Like I said, you can get used to running in the fog, but you’ll never learn to like it.
I’m lucky. This year I found a mate (Jon Eckert, and actually he found me) who has experience at the helm. He’s a a Coxswain in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserves and he’s pretty good on the radar. Until now, I’ve never had someone working on the boat who I could trust with an important detail like radar watch. It’s a luxury that I will never take for granted. Why? Because Jon can distinguish moving contacts from stationary contacts, and he can report their relative bearings and distances.
Even though radars are excellent navigation tools, their primary purpose is collision avoidance. Sure, you can use it to thread the passage between two rocky ledges, or fetch a buoy, but a loran, GPS, and even a bit of precision chart work will accomplish the same task. On the other hand, keeping track of other boats while you’re making way is another story. I don’t know about you, but I can’t hear anyone else’s fog horn while my engine is running. So, without a radar, I have to post a watch on the bow, and proceed with utmost caution, i.e. go a little ways, stop, shut down, and listen... ad infinitum, a process that turns a two hour passage into a four hour chore.
These days, as the captain of a passenger vessel, I wouldn’t venture into the fog without a radar. I’d sooner cancel a trip. There are just too many “Skippies” out there who have no idea what their doing. Here are two cases in point.
The other day we were coming back from offshore. There was a lot of inbound traffic in the Bay, including a 600’ tanker called the Sega River. Well, he had a pretty good radar, and he was posting security calls on channel sixteen like there was no tomorrow. As he was transiting the part of the Bay just East of Rockport Harbor, he started calling a high speed boat of about 24’ feet making thirty knots. Apparently, the boat was running toward the tanker’s bow from right to left. The Pilot on the Sega River called several times with no effect, then ended up blowing the danger signal, and, believe it or not, reversing his engines to avoid a collision. He was so annoyed he called the Rockport Harbormaster to try and get the name and registration numbers of the offending vessel.
A week later the same thing happened to me. We were inbound and I was on the radar and Jon was at the wheel. I had a contact hugging the Approach Buoy in Penobscot Bay. Suddenly, the contact headed southwest at a high rate of speed. We were northbound and it looked as if we were clear of the contact. But then he turned, circled the buoy once, and headed northeast, on a high speed collision course. I told John to give him a prolonged blast on the horn. I made a security call to him. We gave him another blast. The next thing I knew I was giving him the danger signal and reversing my engines. He broke out of the fog at twenty knots and crossed my bow, from port to starboard. It was the first time in twenty years I’ve had to use the danger signal. And guess what? As the boat streamed by our bow, we saw that he had a radar.
“Skippies” are a danger to us all, particularly when they’re bombing around in the fog. Needless to say, it pays to keep your eyes peeled, and it helps to have someone aboard who can take the wheel or the radar or both. While mates like Jon Eckert don’t come easily, there are ways to train your crew for times of reduced visibility.
Next time you’re out on a bright, sunny day, turn the radar on and let your crew take turns with it. Keep the brightness down so the person on the radar has to look into it closely, and don’t let them look out the windows. Give them complete control of the radar and ask them for relative bearings and distances of land masses, navigational aids, and moving contacts, then ask them to navigate you through a passage, a channel, or a harbor.
Relative bearings are given in degrees, not hours of the clock. A typical radar report might sound something like this. “We have a conflict with a contact bearing three-five-zero, about three quarters of a mile, heading toward our port bow. Recommend you give him a prolonged blast, and alter course to starboard.” Or in terms of navigating a passage, a report might sound something like this: “We have Sheep Island at Zero-Three-Zero, off the starboard bow, and Fisherman’s Island at three-three-zero, to port. I have both the nun and can buoys, about one mile away. No other contacts at this time. Come left ten degrees to go between the buoys.”
As far as security calls are concerned, they should be short, simple, and to the point. In other words, have it all figured out before you push the mike button. For example: “Security Call... Security Call... This is the FINBACK WBR 7160, at the PA Buoy, heading inbound to Rockland Harbor by way of the Monroe Island bell. FINBACK WBR 7160, standing by on channels sixteen and thirteen.”
Navigating in fog can be a challenge and a test of skill. It doesn’t have to be harrowing. With a boat load of good hands, and a body of water that’s relatively free of Skippies, it can even be kind of fun.
Spring Lines
Twenty years ago, I watched in awe as a retired commercial airline pilot brought his 37’ Egg Harbor to the public landing in Mattituck, NY. The pilot edged his way against a stiff westerly breeze by using both engines and a couple of spring lines. A few years later, I saw a tug on the Ohio River regain control of a stubborn barge in much the same way. Still later, on one of my first trips to Maine, I noted how Captain Jim Barstow used a spring line to position the Laura B. against the wharf on Monhegan Island. A few years ago, in Cancun, Mexico, I stopped to watch the deck hands on the Isla Mujara ferry. Throwing their spring lines like lassos, they connected with pilings and bollards from about thirty feet away.
Skippers of big boats know the value of a well placed spring line. Sometimes there’s no alternative but to work with the strain of a taught rope. Other times it’s just advantageous to do so. Take the Laura B., for example, a converted Army LT of WWII vintage. When she comes into her ferry landing at Monhegan Island, and she has a lot of passengers and gear to off-load, the skipper keeps her rudder hard over and the engine in gear, idling ahead, against the strain of a spring line. The maneuver secures the ramp and makes disembarking safer.
Actually, most ferry captains keep their transmissions in gear and their engines running. If they didn’t, the friction created by the vehicles being driven off the boat would push the ferry backwards. Ok, I admit that very few of us take our cars with us when we go fishing or cruising, and I concur that ro-ro (roll on-roll off) ferry dynamics has no obvious application to recreational boating. However, the practice of horsing a boat around with engine and spring line, and the idea of making a boat fast to a dock or wharf with only engine and gear, is quite common. I once saw a tug captain idle into the corner of a quay in Jamaica, give her some steam, then hop off the boat for lunch in a nearby kiosk. It was kind of like putting the front bumper of your car against the wall of a bank and leaving it in drive.
Spring lines aren’t just for getting near the dock. They’re also pretty useful for shoving off, particularly when the wind has a vessel hard against its berth. Simply run a good length of line aft from the bow (the after bow spring) or forward from the stern (the forward quarter spring), to a cleat on the dock. Reverse against the stern line (to bring out the bow), or go ahead against the bow line (to bring out the stern).
The after quarter spring and the forward bow spring are the correct names for the other two spring lines. Unlike the after bow and forward quarter, which can be used for both clearing the dock and getting close to it, these two are used primarily for getting in. Essentially, with rudder amidships, you reverse against the forward bow spring, or go ahead against the after quarter. Both maneuvers will cause the boat to be drawn toward the dock. Sometimes, all that’s needed to hold the boat in place is one of these springs and a steady wind from the right direction. For example, if you’re starboard side to, with an after quarter spring leading from the starboard quarter cleat, then a wind off your port quarter will lay the boat to the dock and probably hold it there. With a forward bow spring out, the wind would have to be off the port bow.
It all sounds so simple. It’s not. There are subtleties to this spring line business, and it pays to be aware of them. Rick Booth, a former Editor of Offshore, used to say: “Experience is the best teacher, but the tuition can be murder”. The statement is tailor made for people maneuvering with spring lines for the first time.
Here are a few basic pointers.
1. Before you plan on horsing the boat around with a spring line, make sure the line and its bowline or eye splice are in A-1 shape and of sufficient diameter. Putting a strain on 1/2” twisted nylon and having it snap will put a real damper on your day. While you’re at it, check to make sure the cleats and bitts and bollards on the dock will stand the strain. The only thing worse than snapping a length of twisted nylon is snapping one with a five pound bollard on the end.
2. Even if you’ve got good cleats and lines, you may not have a firmly moored dock. There’s no point in trying to muscle into or out of a berth if all you’re going to do is take the whole damn float for a ride. I know it’s hard to tell what kind of tackle there is under the dock, but you can get some idea as to how rugged it is by a perfunctory examination.
3. Dock, lines, cleats, bitts, etc., all check out. What’s next? Well, better get ready. Make sure fenders are out and well positioned, and use spring lines with large eye splices or bowlines. If you’re coming in, and someone on the dock is there to take your line, pass them the end with the eye splice or bowline and tell them where to put it. Shorten it up or pay it out from the boat, as needed, and have people stand clear. If you’re pulling away from the dock, and you have doubts about clearing that big eye splice over the bitt as you’re leaving, use a doubled line (no knots, please) looped around the bitt. Let go of one end as the boat pulls away and the line slackens.
4. Remember, it’s easier to work with longer spring lines than shorter ones. When approaching a dock, longer lines allow you to get the boat in position before you actually start working against the spring. However, the lines shouldn’t be so long that they take the strain while inboard of the cap rail.
5. There is something worse than having a bollard come flying through the air. That’s having the bollard come flying through the air while you’re standing on the dock and the boat is in gear and running. If you’re handling a big boat all by yourself, and you’re putting it against a dock with a single spring line, don’t jump off until you’ve secured at least one more line. Come to think of it, if you’re going to stick the boat somewhere with the engine and gear running, have someone aboard at all times. It’s extremely uncouth to have your boat go steaming through the harbor with no one at the helm.
Remember that Jamaican tug captain I mentioned earlier? Well, what if his diesel engine had sucked some air and stalled.
Spring Line First
It seems a lot of guys who work fuel docks and marinas are a bit frustrated by the skippers who come in and heave the bow line first. They say that most skippers -- over ninety percent of them -- come into the face-dock bow-first, against the wind, and pass a bow line instead of a spring. They don’t want a bow line. They want a spring.
A spring line is a working line. When you heave one to a good line handler, it can mean the difference between a smooth, uneventful docking, and a muscle straining tug of war. Next time you approach a float or wharf, bow first against the wind, forget about the bow and stern lines. Use a spring, preferably an after bow or after quarter. And, assuming your boat has four cleats per side (many don’t), tie off to numbers two or three, not one or four (the ones located at the bow and stern, respectively).
You’ll be amazed how much easier it is to dock the boat this way. Just put the rudder somewhere between midships and hard over away from the dock; how much will depend on your vessel, the position of the cleats, and your angle of attack. Then kick her ahead, and, if needed, shorten scope to get into your spot; in other words, spring in a ways, then back down, then shorten line, then snub it tight, then kick her ahead again, until you’re right where you want to be.
There are, of course, unique situations that require alterations to your usual way of thinking. For example, we almost always dock FINBACK with an after bow spring, and usually, after securing lines, we keep the transmission in gear so that the stern stays tight against the boarding steps; it facilitates loading and unloading. But the other day, while we were still about six miles out, the transmission started slipping. (I wasn’t sure what was happening at first, but it turned out that a pinhole in the oil cooler was sucking the transmission dry.)
It wasn’t possible to refill the transmission with the boat pitching and rolling and full of passengers, and I wasn’t sure what the problem was anyway, so I dropped the throttle to 1,600 rpm and eased back to Rockland. Then, because I had a sneaking suspicion that I wouldn’t have reverse gear when I needed it, I told my mate that he should be ready with an after quarter spring, instead of the after bow; he was still thinking after bow spring, which wouldn’t have worked because without forward thrust there wouldn’t have been any propeller wash pushing against the rudder. In effect, with forward way on, and no propeller wash, the after bow spring would have done nothing but drive the bow into the dock.
Sure enough, when I threw it in reverse to take the boat’s way off, nothing happened. No reverse. No forward. A moment later, one of my well-meaning passengers heaved the after bow spring -- the line I didn’t want thrown -- and everything went as predicted. Bow in, stern out. Fortunately, we had approached nice and easy (I always do) and the effect was quickly countered by the line-handlers on the dock.
In retrospect, even though I was optimistic about my reverse gear, I should have said straight out, “heave the after quarter spring first and use it as a braking line”. If I’d done this, there would have been no doubt about the plan, or room for second guessing on the part of the crew. The mate would have thrown the spring to someone on the dock, taken a turn around the number three cleat (to use as a fairlead), and a turn around the number two or four cleat (to make fast to). He would have arrested the boat’s way by slowly taking a strain on the cleat, which would have brought the boat side-to as easy as pie. Incidentally, the two cleats are for safety sake. If you were on a sailboat, you would use a rolling hitch on a winch drum instead of a turn around a cleat.
Knowing which line to heave when approaching the dock, and knowing which cleat to make fast to, is pretty basic stuff, but the basics are often overlooked. In the approach I suggested above, I made the assumption that everyone has two extra cleats per side. This is hardly the case with production boats under forty feet. In fact, if you buy a new boat today in the 30’ range, you’ll be lucky if you get one extra cleat. Sometimes it’s amidships. Other times -- and this I believe is better -- it’s just forward of amidships. With one extra cleat per side, your options are reduced by one. You still have two possibilities for your after bow spring, but only one for the after quarter spring; an after quarter spring from a cleat located amidships doesn’t work that well.
When is a boat big enough for spring lines? Good question. I would say that it’s not so much a matter of size, but design. A high-sided, single diesel trawler of 32’ will have a greater need for them than a twin screw sportfisherman of 40’, and anyone running a boat over 45’ should definitely know how to use them. Moreover, it’s my opinion that any vessel over this length should have two extra cleats per side, one at 45 degrees, one at 135 degrees, one at 225 degrees, and one at 315 degrees.
Spring lines and boat handling go together like power steering and parallel parking. With a little practice, and an understanding of how your boat pivots under a strain, you can dock in a worse case scenario and still impress the hell out of people on the dock.
Towing Tips
Last summer, while having a beer at the Landings Restaurant in Rockland, Maine, a man sat next to me who had spent World War II crewing on a tow boat in the Western Pacific. If you’ve ever read Farley Mowatt’s account of the ocean-going salvage tug, FOUNDATION FRANKLIN, in the book, “Grey Seas Under”, then you have a pretty good idea what kind of conversation took place. The guy had me spellbound with tales of danger and woe on the high seas.
We also talked about various types of tug boat gear, things like fishplates, bridles, and jockeys. No, I’m not talking about the jockey you’ll find at Belmont or Foxboro. I’m referring to the cable arrangement on the pushing knee of a tug boat, the tie-down that keep the knee from slipping away from its barge during a hard-over turn.
Most of us won’t ever have occasion to use a fishplate (a triangular-shaped plate with three holes for securing a bridle to a hawser) or a jockey, but we will find ourselves towing along a dinghy or a somewhat larger tender, or helping out a fellow mariner in need.
There are tricks of the trade to consider when towing, even when handling something as small as an 8’ inflatable. Some of these tricks are rather obvious, like remembering to haul in the tow rope when backing down. Others are more subtle, like sometimes using polypropylene (which floats) instead of nylon (which sinks).
Here’s a question that has been bothering me for awhile: Why don’t more captains put their tows “on the hip” prior to docking, mooring, or general close-quarter maneuvering? Putting the dinghy on the hip simply means securing its bow and stern to one side of the tow boat. Properly secured in this way, and fendered, a dinghy will ride like a remora on a shark -- even when the tow boat’s engines are running astern. You wouldn’t want to do this with a heavy hand on the throttle, or in a particularly sloppy chop -- because too much of either can swamp your tender with water funneling up between the hulls -- but any other time it works like a charm.
If you’re not going to put the dinghy on the hip, then use a polypro painter; it’s not as strong or elastic as nylon, but it’s perfect for a small tow. Also, have a mate or crewman stand-by to guide the tow (no hands or feet, please) away from the boat when the time comes. Just this past season, I watched a guy in a 57’ Chris Craft Connie back over his varnished mahogany rowing dory at the Public Landing. He caught the painter in one of the wheels and wound the dinghy under the stern. The accident could have been avoided had he used float rope instead of nylon. At the very least, he could have had someone standing on the stern with a boat hook.
Of course, handling a tow inside a protected harbor is one thing. Heading into the thick of it is another. There are tried and true rules about towing in open water, like choosing the right size hawser and making sure your tow is properly located, “in step” as Chapman says in “Piloting Seamanship and Small Boat Handling”.
In step means that both tow and tow boat are riding the waves in synch, a detail that prevents unnecessary strain on the hawser. In other words, the length of the tow rope is set so that both vessels crest the waves at the same time. Naturally, the hawser should be adequate enough to handle the expected loads of the tow, and it should have chafing gear added wherever needed. In addition, it should be made with the proper scope.
At the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School in Rockland, Maine, the institution’s boat captains do a lot of towing of their training vessels, 30’ pulling boats equipped with sprit rigged sails. Though quick to point out that the length of a tow depends on the boats involved, the condition of the sea, and the towing speed, one of Outward Bound’s captains, tells me he usually sets the scope of the hawser so that the first boat rides just behind the crest of the second wave. This is a pretty good place to set the tow when pulling at speeds under ten knots.
Every boat has its own peculiar way of tracking under tow, and some, like inflatables, don’t track at all and should be hauled aboard. The best dinghy to tow will have a towing eye somewhere near the waterline. At rest, it’s forefoot will sit fairly high, and it’s bottom will be of the round bilge, v-shape or modified-v design. Flat bottom boats will yaw excessively, and dinghys with sharp, narrow entries will play in following seas like squirrels burrowing into piles of leaves.
Towing in rough weather is almost as much fun as climbing Mt. Washington in the Oscar Meyer truck. It’s even worse when you’re towing a 75 pound dinghy. My advice with respect to towing light boats in rough seas is to haul them aboard. If you can’t get them hoisted, then wait for better weather. Even if the wind doesn’t capsize the tow, it will set it off to leeward so that you’ll have to worry about it being capsized by your wake.
Needless to say, having a boat under tow reduces the overall maneuverability of the tow boat. This isn’t that noticeable when all your doing is dragging a small dinghy around, but it becomes painfully obvious when you’re bringing in a stricken vessel bigger than your own. In these situations, you need a good hawser, a bridle, a place to make the bridle fast -- and a little skill.
Tie off your bridle so that the tow pulls on your boat from a point forward of the rudder post. If you don’t do this, you’ll have almost no maneuverability. Then, as you bring the stricken boat home, keep everyone clear of the hawser, since most rope can snap like a slingshot. At the point when traffic becomes a consideration, shorten the tow, and when you’re ready to dock, tie off to the stricken vessel so that your rudder post is astern of the other vessel’s transom.
In the towing business, revenue is a function of horsepower. While this is hardly the case for us dinghy-toters, George H. Reed has a quote in his book “Primer of Towing“ that applies to everyone: “Sometimes it is more important to have the horsepower in the wheelhouse than in the engine room”.
Waiting for the Tide
Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, when you think you can sit back and kick off your shoes, maybe take a little vacation, mother nature throws in the proverbial monkey wrench. Take December 13th, for example.
A low pressure system had stalled about 150 miles southeast of Cape Cod, and a lot of unusually warm air was piled-up somewhere off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes. As a result, gale force winds and heavy rains pounded Maine from the northeast. These winds, with gusts of 76 m.p.h., put quite a strain on the floats and pilings to which my boat and two others were tied. The strain was so severe that, at 9:30 in the evening, I got an urgent call from some friends who live at the marina aboard an old Norwegian Coast Guard cutter.
When I got down to the dock, I found that my friend, Harry, had his hands full. The line of floats on the west end of the marina were tipped ninety degrees sideways -- like the blinds on a closed window shade -- because the one nearest the ladder had hung-up on a piling at low tide. Fortunately, Harry arrived in time to cut my boat loose and tie it off to the pilings. His quick response didn’t do much to free the stuck floats, but it kept the pipe railings from chafing against Finback’s hull, and it reduced the strain on the float’s two end points; it was a toss up as to which one would come out ahead, the boat or the half-sunk floats.
Anyway, being two great maritime thinkers, we soon realized that: (1) The floats wouldn’t straighten-out until they were damn ready to straighten-out. (2) No amount of kedging, wedging or swearing would straighten them out. (3) Nothing much would change until low tide. Or, in other words, we were looking at about six hours of babysitting.
Despite these obvious conclusions, and because it’s frustrating as hell to stand around doing nothing, Harry and I decided to get to work. First off, we lit the propane heater in the main cabin, drank a pot of coffee, and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. That out of the way, we walked on deck and stared at the floats and scratched our heads. After that, we waited. In fact, we waited until we couldn’t wait any longer. Then, knowing full well that we should wait some more, we tried horsing the stuck part of the float free with a gaff. When that didn’t work, we tried pushing on the floats with a two-by-four. Then we jumped on them, carefully, and wiggled them, even more carefully. And all the while we knew -- deep down in the logic centers of our highly advanced mammalian brains -- that our efforts made about as much sense as hanging donuts from our ears.
If you’re one of the unfortunate mariners who have cruised the waters of Maine and points downeast and have fallen victim to the tide, you can relate to this experience. I know you can because I’ve seen some of you sail to a float or dock in a quaint little cove, tie up, lose track of the time, and get back to find the boat wobbling on its keel. You know there’s nothing to do but fend off and wait, but you can’t do that because the very act of waiting goes against everything you hold near and dear. And no wonder. Man’s innate ability to be patient went into a tail spin soon after he saw the first dinosaur heading for the tar pits.
So, you set out a kedge anchor, raise the sails, put the engine in gear, call for a tow. You do everything humanly possible to free your boat from nature’s grasp, and all to no avail. In the end, your efforts are fruitless. You have no choice but to wait for the tide to turn.
Now, this isn’t to say that waiting is the first order of business. On the contrary. Whether you’re aground at a dock, on a ledge, or tied to a sunken float, you should take precautions in order to keep your crew safe and your vessel from harm. Sure, a good boat can take a hell of a grounding, more than you can imagine, but -- and I’m stating the obvious -- the farther it is away from the hard stuff, the better. Under ideal conditions, you might try using the dinghy to set a bow and stern anchor, not to kedge the boat off the ledge, necessarily, but to hold it in a deep crevasse. If you’re on a sailboat, you might try hauling on an anchor line reeved through the top of the mast, a tactic that lists the boat and shortens the draft, maybe enough to keep her from pounding on a particularly sharp rock. And a generous distribution of fenders won’t hurt, either.
But a word of caution: Being aground at a dock in a quiet cove, or being tied to sinking floats (like I was), is bad enough, but it’s nothing compared to grounding on a Maine ledge with a sea on. In addition to keeping an eye on the forces at work (a stuck float can let go at any time), and worrying about hypothermia, you have to concern yourself with the violent and unpredictable motion of the boat. So, wear PFD’s, if called for, and don’t stay in the water too long, or climb over the side and start sticking fenders under the turn of the bilge, or stand too close to a line that might part under the strain of a sudden roll or pitch.
And remember, while you’re on the ledge, you’re essentially high and dry. Plenty of skippers have gotten themselves off the rocks only to discover they’ve jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Face it, just because you’re not taking on water while you’re aground, doesn’t mean you won’t when you’re afloat. A crack can be held tight by the weight of the hull, or be held above the waterline, and then open-up when the pressure releases or the boat levels off -- which is why it’s always a good idea to have someone standing by when you finally get free.
To wait or not to wait? Well, nine times out of ten it’s the former. It certainly was that late December night for me and Harry. After several hours of fruitless work, we gave up. Harry went aboard his boat, Skagrac, for a bite to eat, and I took the dog for a walk by the fish pier. When I returned fifteen minutes later, the tide had dropped far enough to free the float. I secured Finback with some new dock lines, and went home. It was 3:30 in the morning. Time to kick off the shoes and relax.
Yeah, right!
Watch Out for the Jury Rig
No element of boating tests the creative skill of a captain like jury rigging. It is the last word in emergency marine repair, the ultimate hands-on challenge, and the piece de resistance of by-the-seat-of-your-pants technology. On the water, hardly a day goes by that doesn’t require some form of “imagineering”.
Without question, the most prevalent call to arms for the seafaring imagineer -- to borrow a Disney term -- requires a working knowledge of cordage, knots and marlinespike. After all, what is a short or long splice if not a jury rigged piece of rope? In fact, when you take a close look at the knots, hitches and bends described in Ashley’s well known Book of Knots, you can easily picture half of them being invented, on the spot, by imagineers with immediate needs and very few alternatives. The timber hitch, the reeving line bend, and the sheepshank are perfect examples.
Emergencies notwithstanding, jury rigging with a length of rope can factor into a boater’s life anytime and anywhere. It is particularly noticeable during cargo handling, battening, and securing for heavy weather. Whether you’re in eminent danger or not, you still need a quick wit and a sure hand when tying a bicycle or a potted plant down, hoisting a small outboard to the deck, or securing a tarp over a broken hatch.
While the bowline is without doubt the most useful knot, my favorite hitches for jury rigging are the clove hitch, the rolling hitch, the tautline hitch, and the trucker’s hitch. The rolling hitch, a clove hitch with an extra turn before the locking turn, is used wherever you need to take a vertical strain on a stanchion or spar. The tautlline hitch, a rolling hitch tied to form a loop, is a knot that can be adjusted up or down without untying; you see these a lot on big tents at the country fairs and carnivals. The trucker’s hitch, used as a cargo strap or tie-down, combines a bend and a half hitch to form a non-cinching knot that you can really lean on.
Of course, knots, bends and hitches are only part of the jury riggers arsenal. The boat’s tool box contains just as many useful items. For example:
Late this past November, after bringing my boat up the St. George river to avoid a Nor’easter that never showed, I noticed quite a bit of water streaming from the stuffing box. Since I wasn’t scheduled to haul for two or three weeks, I had no choice but to crawl into the bilge and tighten the box. Unfortunately, when I took a couple of turns on one of the bolts, the threads stripped.
Before I continue, I’d like to point out that the art of jury rigging goes a long way toward voiding any and all manufacturer’s warranties. It’s the nature of the beast; sometimes you have to do something that isn’t entirely safe or especially good for the equipment. In the case of my stuffing box, I pinched the outer flange on the gland nut with a pair of vise grips, and tightened the grip’s adjusting screw with a small pipe wrench. Wallah! No more leak.
I was pretty lucky, really. Both my stuffing box and my vise grips came out of the ordeal in fine shape. This isn’t always the case and I have a drawer full of broken tools to prove it, which helps to show that jury rigging should be a mind-set of last resort only. In other words, if you start playing Mr. Fixit when you don’t really need a jury rig, all you’re actually doing is experimenting. And if you think jury rigs can be costly, try paying for an experiment gone wrong. Here’s an example:
One time a guy came down to the dock to watch me do an in-water propeller change. I had just hung my tools and equipment (an adjustable wrench, pliers, a jury rigged wheel puller, and the new propeller) over the side of the boat, and was getting my dive gear ready, when he offered me an alternative to the wheel puller... an alternative that I have never in my life been offered before: Detonating cord.
“I’ve got some Primacord that’ll break the seal ‘tween that old wheel and the shaft,” he said.
All right. Are you following this? Do you understand the concept here? What this guy wanted me to do was dive under the boat, wrap the shaft with detonating cord (just forward of the propeller hub), wire it to a blasting cap and a 9 volt battery, climb back aboard (a sensible suggestion, I thought) and fire it off.
Alas. I didn’t do it. I know it would have made a much better story if I had. But I didn’t. Instead, I chose to change the propeller the old fashioned way, with my jury rigged wheel puller. However, after I finished the job and had my tools and gear stowed, I did ask the guy how one might go about properly rigging Primacord. Because -- and I’m sure this would concern you, too -- if one opts for the Primacord method of wheel-pulling, one would like to do it without blowing the stern clean off his boat. (In case you’re not that familiar with the stuff, it detonates at 22,000 feet per second.)
So I asked the guy, hypothetically, what would happen if you took one too many turns of cord around the shaft? Interestingly enough, he admitted he used too much the very first time he tried it on his own boat. He said there was a kaboom and a big splash, and added that the wheel shot off the shaft, bounced off the rudder, and went flying into oblivion. He said it took him fifteen minutes to locate the propeller in the mud and twenty minutes to hammer the rudder straight. The wheel, he confessed, was beyond repair. And the bottom of his boat was never the same.
Like I said, experiments can be very expensive.
A lot of you former Navy engineers and machinists will remember using detonating cord, or det cord as it’s commonly called, to loosen big propellers on big ships. The guy who introduced me to the stuff -- a Vietnam veteran who’s now a very close friend -- tells me they use it all the time. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t suggest you ask for it down at the local ship’s chandlery, unless you want a surprise visit from the BATF. Besides being very dangerous, det cord is categorized as a class A explosive.
Jury rigging is an art. And my friend, while a bit unorthodox, is most definitely an artist. Among other things, he taught me how to find a leak in a wooden boat with a squeeze bottle full of mustard. I also got hit in the chest with a rock watching him create a well with four sticks of dynamite, which only goes to prove that the most creative and imaginative jury riggers are not always the safest ones to be around.
Boating with Jack Frost
When the temperature first starts to drop up here in Maine, it drops fast. One day you’re out on the boat on a balmy fifty five degree day, thinking about pickling (winterizing) the Lectra-San, but choosing instead go cruising through the oh-so-gentle chop. And the next, you’re crammed face down in the bilge trying to replace a cracked freshwater wash-down hose. Take yesterday, for example.
Oh what a beautiful day yesterday was, fifty five to sixty degrees, light winds; the sugar maples had just turned a brilliant red. It was without a doubt the perfect day for you to row out to the boat and check things over. Of course, it was also the perfect day to rake leaves, slop some paint on the shutters and drink hot cider with your wife’s cousins on the deck of their new house. But then, the wind shifted to the northwest and the cloud cover thinned -- a bad sign. And Joe Cupo of Channel Six news said it would be cold, maybe twenty to twenty five degrees. And then later in the night, while on a short milk run to the local variety store, the DJ on your favorite radio station announced that temperatures in the mountains would probably reach a low of fifteen degrees. Whoops. Maybe you should have gone to the boat after all.
Lots of people get caught with their pants down this time of year. If it isn’t the cold, it’s the wind. In fact, above the 44th parallel, most of the summer people haul their boats between the end of September and the third week of October. They know that as the tenth month wanes, the first major easterly is only a heartbeat away. They know this because every October their friendly neighborhood marina owner sends them subtle messages of pending doom; he shuts off the water, pulls the shore-power, hauls his own boat, and yanks the floats and docks. And let’s not forget the subtle “look” he gives out-of-state boat owners who tell him they’ll be leaving their boats in the water for a while longer. The “look”, if and when you get it, will make you wonder whether he’s questioning your logic, or staring at a giant cantaloupe that suddenly sprouted from the middle of your forehead.
Now, this doesn’t mean that all the boats clear out of Maine’s harbors before the end of October. On the contrary, many of Maine’s recreational boaters like to stay in as long as possible. Let’s face it, there’s a good deal of great sailing and boating to be had in the fall. However, keeping a boat afloat late in the year is a lot like bullfighting. You don’t want to do either without a good deal of experience. Moreover, you want to keep a keen eye on the bull, or in this case, the weather.
Ok then, for those of you thinking about extended your boating season, here are a few general reminders:
Since temperatures on the water remain somewhat higher than they do on land, anything below the waterline will be fine, at least until ice actually forms around the boat. Even then, early ice doesn’t present much of a problem because most of it’s slush ice, what is sometimes referred to as “swish”. (”Swish”, because of the sound it makes when a vessel’s bow slices through it.) On the other hand, batteries, and hoses and equipment above the waterline, are another story. For batteries, the best thing to do is keep them topped-off with electrolyte and fully charged. Batteries don’t like the cold. It accelerates their rate of self-discharge.
For stuff above the waterline, the best thing to do is winterize at the earliest opportunity. This includes freshwater tanks and pumps, head, etc. Keep the through-hulls closed and maintain a generous supply of RV anti-freeze, just in case your guests (however adventurous) want to use the head and you have to pickle it more than once. If you’re planning on staying in the water really late, remove the engine’s intake hose (heat exchanger cooled engines only), stick the through-hull end in a bucket of anti-freeze -- preferably propylene glycol because it’s better for the impeller and non-toxic to marine life -- and run the engine until you see pink coming out of the exhaust. Then put everything back together again. In mid-winter, you’ll be doing this every time you use the boat.
Preparing for the winds that blow in late fall and early winter is even more important. Start with a good mooring that you have 100% confidence in. Use a pendant of sufficient strength and rig substantial chafing material around where it will interface with the chock or bow roller, and make certain the whole arrangement is tied and secured so it won’t jump free during a storm. While you’re at it, clear the shelves and cabinets of everything but the bare cruising essentials, and hunker down anchors, coolers, gas and propane tanks, etc., so they don't roll around and splinter wood and fiberglass on the inside of your boat.
Of course, you can be meticulously careful about all these things and still have a big problem. How? Next time you’re out on the boat feeling wonderfully satisfied that you’ve taken all the right precautions, spend a minute looking at the other vessels near you. I can almost guarantee you’ll find at least one boat whose owner hasn’t done a tenth of what you have. Hopefully, your boat is upwind of his. Probably -- Murphy’s Law being the rule rather than the exception -- it’s not. Which brings me to the final and most important consideration of all: Insurance.
Don’t forget that almost all yacht policies written for this area have a lay-up clause that requires the boat to be dry-docked from November to April. If you leave your boat in the water, and you don’t make advance arrangements to modify your policy, well, you’ll be out of luck if something happens. And while you’re on the phone with the insurance company, make sure they understand that the batteries will be left in the boat. Some “in-water” contracts are basically “in-water” storage agreements. In other words, you can’t use the boat, and you have to remove the batteries.
Ok, I guess that’s about it. You’ve got her pickled, hunkered down, fully charged, and fully insured. What’s left? Well, it’s probably a good idea to get out the winter parka, the mitts, the earmuffs for the wife, some extra-woolly long-johns, the two gallon thermos, a couple pairs of insulated boots, an ice scraper, and.... Wait a minute. Whose idea was this?
Safety First
Hear’s one I bet you haven’t heard before.
A few years ago I was running six-pack (a synonym for passengers, not beer) sportfishing charters. I ran these on a 30’ Sisu lobster yacht called the Blue Glory III.
Being a lobster boat, Blue Glory III was fully equipped to haul and tend traps. In other words, it had a large work deck aft of the main bulkhead, and a hydraulic pot hauler located at the helm. Now I didn’t fish for lobsters, ever, and I didn’t have any traps, but I still used the hauler as an anchor winch.
Why would anyone use a pot hauler as an anchor winch? Because it can yank rode into the boat at around six hundred feet per minute. In fact, it’ll chock-a-block the chain and/or anchor so fast it’ll make your head spin, literally. For instance, if you’re daydreaming, or distracted by a talkative passenger, you can get whacked by a piece of your own ground tackle. And that can hurt. Just ask any lobsterman who has been knocked to his knees by a forgotten toggle. Think of it. The hauler swings a harmless bit of foam-blown polystyrene into your head and you can’t remember your own telephone number for a week. Imagine what a thirty pound Danforth will do. But back to my story.
Your typical pot hauler is comprised of a belt-driven or gear-driven hydraulic pump, a clutch, a reservoir or expansion tank, a bunch of hydraulic hose, a valve, a hydraulic motor, a filter, and some clamps and/or fittings. Of these various pieces of equipment, one of the most convenient is the clutch. This simple device allows you to engage and disengage the pump at will, an absolute necessity if you want to prevent the whole system from overheating at normal cruising speeds.
Ok. My boat didn’t have one of these.
Not having a clutch meant that I had to remove the belts prior to the long steam out and back, a distance of some thirty to forty miles. It also meant that I had to remount the belts while wallowing in three to six foot seas. This wasn’t really a big deal. Basically, while everybody was fishing, I would raise the engine hatch and mount the belts. It took thirty seconds with a box-end wrench and a wedge of some kind, either a shark billy or the butt end of a gaff, whichever was handier. (Have you guessed where I’m going with this? I doubt it.)
So one day I have these six passengers and it’s blowing a steady twenty knots and the seas are around five or six feet. We get out there -- two and a half hours from shore -- and anchor up. Everyone starts jigging and catching doubles. I mean they’re catching so many fish I can’t keep up with them. But I want to get the belts on so I raise the engine box and grab my wrench and wedge, and this time I use the butt end of three foot long gaff. (Guessed yet?)
The guys are “yippying” and “yahooing”, as fishermen are apt to do when the fishing is really good, and I’m simultaneously pushing on the wedge and tightening on the wrench. I hear someone yell that they have triples on and I turn my head for an instant, and that’s when my right hand slips. I roll with the boat and my momentum drives the butt end of the gaff toward the bilge. Before I can recover, there’s a sharp pain in my neck.
Well, fully primed with adrenaline, I jump to my feet and take stock of the situation. I’m alive, and fairly certain I’ll stay that way. The point didn’t spear me. Instead, as I discover when I go below and examine myself in the mirror, it just skidded the surface. What I have, though, is a pretty gruesome scratch that goes halfway around my neck from front to back. Remember how Clint Eastwood looked in the movie, Hang ‘Em High? Well I had the same look without the benefit of a make-up man. In fact, when I finally returned to tend lines and bleed fish, after dousing the scratch thoroughly with Iodine -- the end of a gaff isn’t the cleanest utensil around -- one of my passengers looked at me bug-eyed and exclaimed: “Holy cow, Bob. What did you do? Try and hang yourself?”
This is the absolute truth. I did not make it up. I almost put a fish gaff through my own neck.
Ah yes. Life is grand. But I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself: “Wow, what a bozo. And he put it in writing, too!”
True on both counts. However, when it comes to this marine stuff, I consider myself to be as good as the next man, maybe even better. After all, I do it for a living. But just to prove that stupidity cannot be monopolized by any one person, let me add the following:
A friend of mine from New Hampshire, with over twenty years experience as a licensed party boat captain, smashed his head on an overhead instrument console. He did this while standing up too fast in a custom-equipped tuna boat. Not wanting to abort the trip, he tried to stop the bleeding with a rag, some electrical tape, and a baseball cap. It didn’t work, and eventually, after a full day on the grounds, he had to go to the hospital. The doctor who attended my friend was so completely flabbergasted by what he saw -- a seemingly intelligent person with a dirty fish-rag taped to his head -- that he called the other physicians into the emergency room so they could see it for themselves. (By the way, I didn’t abort my trip, either.)
I have another friend, also a licensed captain, who, in preparation for a ferry trip across Narragansett Bay, was using a bunch of bungie cords to secure a bicycle to his boat’s coaming. He was standing with his legs spread, and pulling up on one of the cords, when the steel hook straightened and let go. Twang! The metal part swung around between his legs and impacted squarely on his right testicle. Need I say more?
There are hundreds of bizarre boating accidents waiting to happen every season, and they don’t just happen to neophytes. Even the best, most attentive boaters get hurt. So this winter season, think ahead. Plan to stay alert. Don’t work on your boat if you’ve been drinking. Don’t wear loose clothing or jewelry around rotating machinery, i.e., shaft couplings, running engines, flywheels on outboards. And for God’s sake, use the right tool for the right job.
Tunnel Vision
In the last chapter I added insult to injury by documenting what happens to captains who don’t use the right tools for the right jobs. I included an embarrassing and somewhat humorous death-defying personal experience that almost left me with one orifice too many. In this chapter, in an effort to further qualify the safety issue, and prove without a shadow of doubt that a boat is no place for tunnel vision, I will tell you about three other captains who have done similarly stupid things.
An acquaintance of mine was getting things put away on his boat -- after a sailing trip on Penobscot Bay -- when he heard a tiny voice being carried over the placid waters around his usual mooring of refuge. Curious, and a little concerned, he climbed into his skiff and headed for the source of the disquieting sound. Five minutes later, as he was trying to locate the voice, he saw -- just barely visible over the rail of a nearby sailing schooner -- the soles and heels of a pair of Docksiders. He climbed aboard the boat in question and to his utter astonishment, discovered a man hanging upside down in the lazarette hatch. The man, a very good friend and a highly experienced schooner captain, had leaned head-first into the lazarette to retrieve a lost screwdriver. He had stretched further and further into the hole to net the illusive tool, until finally, he had wormed his way far enough through the narrow opening to get himself thoroughly stuck. Fortunately for him, someone he
ard his cry for help and came to the rescue. Otherwise, as he mused later, he would be there today, giving new meaning to the term, “manual steering”.
Needless to say, unless you’re a bat or an astronaut, this is an extremely unfavorable position to be in. Moreover, it becomes potentially life threatening when you have high blood pressure, and downright dangerous when the bilge is giving off hydrogen sulfide, a toxic sump-type gas that can kill in high enough concentrations.
Of course, getting stuck in a tight spot is not all that uncommon. One spring, while hauled at a local marina, I decided to rebuild my pintle bearing. At 175 pounds, it was difficult but not impossible to crawl through the deck hatch and unbolt the four fastenings to the skeg, which had to be taken off in order to gain access to the bearing. Unfortunately, I had to leave town before I finished the job, so I asked the chief mechanic at the yard to do it for me. Because he tips the scales somewhere between 220 and 250 pounds, I told him not to go into the bilge to refasten the skeg. Instead, I asked him to block it up and leave it that way until I returned. Oh well, maybe I should have written it down.
Anyway, when I got back to the boat several days later, I found that the skeg and bearing were back in place. I also found that the inside flange of the hatch was smooth as a hake; while trying to wriggle free of the bilge, the mechanic had polished it like the chrome on a Rybo. The poor guy was down there for two or three hours and didn’t get out until he had stripped naked and greased his torso with lubricating oil.
I’ve got a few more stories about people who’ve gotten stuck on boats, but I prefer to tell you about a guy who went one step further.
This friend of mine owns and operates a small fish dragger. One icy-cold winter morning, his main engine -- a naturally aspirated Detroit Diesel 6-71 -- wouldn’t start. As he’d done hundreds of times in the past, he crawled into the engine room with a can of ether and gave the sleepy motor a shot. However, when he crawled back to the wheelhouse and turned the key, nothing happened. So he started looking for a short. He began at the panel and worked his way to the engine room. Armed with a small toolbox, his can of either, and a flashlight, he attacked connector after connector. Finally he located the source of the problem -- a couple of moderately corroded wires on the solenoid. He took the wires off, sprayed them with a shot of either (because that was what he had in his hand), cleaned them with a small file, and reconnected them. Then, since he was down there anyway, he decided to clean other terminals, beginning with the ones on the bilge pump. Like before, he removed the
wires, sprayed them, and filed them clean. But this time around he added a step: In order to remove the burrs and copper filings, he rubbed the two wires together, like you might do with a pair of knives if you didn’t have a stone to sharpen them on.
And they sparked.
The spark ignited the very thin film of ether and diesel fuel and crankcase oil that was floating on the water in the bilge. As he recalls, tiny blue flames began dancing around his face like sea smoke. For the briefest moment, he was dumbstruck. He looked fore and aft in the bilge and saw that it was alight with blue flame. An instant later, he scrambled for the nearest fire extinguisher. Fortunately, two things worked in his favor, and probably saved his boat and his life: First, aside from the bilge water, his engine room was relatively clean, i.e., free of greasy wires and bulkheads. Second, because the hatches were open, most of the ether fumes had vented. Consequently, what happened was that the flames fizzled-out on their own. Phew! Close one, huh?
Now, you’re probably wondering if my friend had turned off the battery switch before he started working on the wires. He did. But, as is common practice, the bilge pump was wired directly to one of the service batteries. His problem was that, having worked on the engine without incident, he had lulled himself into thinking that he’d isolated everything.
Hopefully, the examples above help to further demonstrate what can happen when you become excessively focused on a particular task. True, my dragger friend isn’t a recreational boater. But his experience, and those of the others, aren’t unique. No one is beyond the grasp of Murphy’s Laws, and whether you apply it to a screwdriver, a pintle bearing, or a pair of wires, tunnel vision is a prelude to trouble.
Be Cool
I don’t know why, but on rare occasions, maybe twice a year, I get a little nervous when I’m moving the boat. Usually it’s blowing like stink and I’m alone. Take this past April, for example. I had to leave my winter berth so I could haul at O’Hara’s Journey’s End Marina. It was blowing thirty or more, northwest, and the bow was falling off faster than I could say, “Take my deductible, please.” In other words, no matter how fast I ran, I couldn’t free a spring line and get to the wheelhouse before FINBACK drifted into the three vessels tied to leeward.
Fortunately, Donna came by to help. She handled the after spring while I hauled in the bow and timed how long it took to fall away with the wind. It turned out that Donna gave me a few seconds to get to the helm and hit the throttle. Anyway, it worked out all right, but it was nerve racking, which is strange because two weeks later I was moving the boat around in a gale and I wasn’t the slightest bit nervous.
Strange? Maybe not.
Physiologically, our nervous systems are pretty important. They’re our body’s way of telling us that we’re punching the envelope. Not that everbody’s envelope is the same. Some envelopes are bigger than others, and some are just shaped differently. For example, maybe Chuck Yeager has a bigger envelope than, say, Woody Allen, but maybe Yeager gets all flustered every time he loses track of the TV remote. See what I mean. Bigger, but different.
Anyway, being nervous, or even afraid, is a good thing. It helps us make snap decisions and keeps us on our toes. It’s also a diaphanous thing; you can’t automatically assume a person has no fear simply because they don’t sound afraid.
I remember when the Tug, Harkness, went down a couple of years ago. It was off Matinicus Island, Maine, in the middle of a winter storm. The wind was northwest at something like 40 to 60 knots, and the temperature was 20 below zero, without the wind chill. I was at home, in Port Clyde, while my friend, Steve Waterman, was sitting by the wood stove in the comfort of his living room in South Thomaston. Steve told me later that he heard Rudy, the Tug’s captain, talking to Vance Bunker, one of the rescuers, over the radio, and that at one point Rudy said, “Well, we got to get out of here. The seas are coming in the pilothouse.” And the way he said it -- calmly, without inflection -- was more like someone saying, “Pass the peas and potatoes, please.”
Maybe he really wasn’t outside his envelope, or maybe he had been there for a long enough time that he had resigned himself to his fate -- an eventuality that I can vouch for personally. On the other hand, maybe he just had great control.
Outside the envelope, control is the ultimate equalizer, because without it, fear turns to panic. And panic acts like a short circuit. It shuts down the decision making process and converts leaders into useless dweebs.
Fortunately, despite the fact that I’ve seen my knuckles turn white on several occasions, it’s not in my nature to panic. Nevertheless, I find that it helps to have a few general guidelines to fall back on, especially when the excrement hits the whirling blades. Incidentally, these work just as well when there are only small amounts of the former, or when the latter aren’t spinning all that fast.
1. No matter what, never let anyone know how nervous you really are. As the old saying goes, if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. This means, don’t try and squeeze between the 50’ Hinckly and the Trumpy motor yacht if the maneuver is going to do nothing but cause you to yell obscenities at your crew.
2. Ask yourself what John Wayne would have done in the same situation. For example, I don’t think the Duke would have ever gotten bent out of shape on account of a little scratched gell coat. So don’t make a bad situation worse by obsessing over details.
3. Don’t make a non-life threatening situation life threatening by doing something stupid like placing yourself between two 20 ton boats on a collision course, or trying to swim down an errant dinghy. I’ve seen people try and do both, though not at the same time... yet.
4. Don’t forget you have insurance. You do have insurance, don’t you?
5. Remember, in rough weather, a good boat will withstand a bad sea a hell of a lot better than you will, even without steerageway. So, if you’ve got deep, open water, just hang on.
6. Given enough money, anything can be fixed, except your health. This is kind of a combination of rules 3 and 4.
7. When in doubt, do nothing. This rule really only applies about 75 percent of the time. Basically, it prohibits you from forcing a decision that really doesn’t have to be made. Remember Harinxma’s rule in De Hartog’s novel, The Captain? Harinxma realized, as the new captain, that his crew would be hitting him with all sorts of mundane “yes” or “no” type questions, i.e., “Should we buy an extra 50 pounds of vegetables? Should we transfer the waste oil now? Should we chip the paint on the cabin top, etc.” Well, Harinxma handled this by assigning “yes” answers to even number questions, and “no” answers to odd number questions. In other words, the first question someone asked was numbered, 1, the second, 2, and so on.
Rule #7 is a lot like Harinxma’s. Say you’re coming into the marina and just as you get near the finger piers your motor quits. Do you try and throw a line first, or put out fenders first? Not sure about the line? Have doubts? Then forget it right off. Sure about the fenders, then jump to it. In other words, don’t waste time pondering over questions with doubtful answers. Go for the certainties. If there aren’t any certainties, then there’s not much left to do. And by the way, don’t apply this rule in life-threatening emergencies, i.e. fires or sinkings.
The bottom line here is simple: Heed the warning signs, and try and stay inside your envelope. In the event you can’t, then above all else... be cool.
Reading Helps
This guy, I’ll call him Billy, came up to me at the marina a few weeks ago and told me he was scheduled to take his U.S. Coast Guard License exam. I nodded, said I thought it was a great idea, then watched out of the corner of my eye as he pulled his 38’ custom sport fisherman away from the dock. First, he almost scratched the side of the hull with the end of the float as he shoved off, then he left his fenders hanging over the side while he sped out of the harbor.
I could have excused the former, but not the latter. As his wake hit the dock, rolling the boats and mashing their fenders, I wondered whether or not he would pass his test. Somehow I doubted it. How could he not know to slow down and haul in his fenders? It must be written in a hundred different boating books.
Now I don’t mean to come off sounding like the U.S. Coast Guard License is the last word in nautical know-how, or that reading books is the only way to learn. On the contrary, the other day I saw a special on PBS that highlighted the seafaring virtues of a particular Micronesian navigator. The guy could tell you where each and every wave he passed came from, and could get from point A to point B, over thousands of nautical miles of open ocean, without a compass. Now I can pretty much tell you the waves that came from between the Green Islands in Penobscot Bay, but I’ll be damned if I can tell whether one’s from Iceland or Spitzbergen. So I was impressed, not because of his wave-reading ability -- every mariner gets a “feel” for his own cruising grounds -- but because of the range and accuracy of his skill.
It’s probably unlikely that a person will learn to identify waves by reading a book. Oh sure, I can write an article and explain that, in comparison to others, certain seas will be of a given size and shape as a result of a particular fetch, but that’s not like having someone in a boat pointing at one and saying: “That one, that one there, with the long trough, came from the Flemish Cap.”
Obviously, there is knowledge that can be gained only by reading and knowledge that can be gained only by doing. More importantly, the two are not interchangeable. Reading can’t compensate for doing, and vice versa. Look at it this way. As good as he is, you wouldn’t want that Micronesian navigator piloting your boat into Boston Harbor, at night, in the fog, on July 4th weekend, unless you looked in his sea bag and found a copy of the Inland Rules of the Road, the COLREGS, the current Notice to Mariners, charts of Massachusetts Bay and Boston Harbor, the Coast Pilot, and maybe a Bean Town Restaurant Guide.
On the other hand, you wouldn’t want a book worm at the helm, either. I know this Stockbroker in New York. He works on Wall Street and has a photographic memory. When he wants to try something new, he reads everything he can about it. I remember when he wanted to learn about flyfishing. He bought every book on the subject and studied for three months. Then he spent a couple thousand dollars to fish some famous salmon river in Canada. He’s one of the smartest flyfisherman I’ve ever met, but he can’t catch a fish to save his life.
Is there a perfect balance between reading and doing? Sure. I know plenty of well balanced skippers. Some of them are licensed, some are not. Most of the latter are passagemakers or commercial fisherman who grew up on the ocean and learned about the sea from their fathers and grandfathers. They’re ocean-raised, with a rich seafaring heritage. They’ve been scored once or twice by the horns of Poseidon and lived to tell about it. However, they’re not complacent or overconfident. They still read books and articles about boats and gear and the ocean. Despite the fact that they have hands on experience to beat the band, they keep the gray matter massaged, which is something every one of us should do.
Bearing this in mind, what does the well healed skipper have in his library, and what might we recommend for Billy?
To start with, there are dozens of excellent boating books. Everyone who has a boat, or wants to have one, should own a copy of Chapman’s Piloting, Seamanship, and Small Boat Handling, or a reasonable facsimile. Chapman’s, of course, is one of the most popular. Besides being comprehensive, it is highly recommended by the Coast Guard, the Power Squadron, and the Auxiliary. It is also on the curriculum of many our Maritime Academies.
In addition to the generalized publications like Chapman’s, you have almanac-style guides like Eldridge’s Tide and Pilot Book and The Mariner’s Pocket Companion. You also have Advanced First Aid, published by the Red Cross, a good on-the-boat book, and other advanced books on seamanship and navigation, as well as books about heavy weather sailing and boat handling.
Finally, in addition to the non-fiction titles, there are novels that offer excellent between-the-lines advice to the would-be skipper. Two of my favorite are: The Captain, by Jan De Hartog (which I’ve referenced before), and The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk. I have others in my library, but these are the ones I re-read most often.
Shoving Off
This spring I launched my boat at the Lyman-Morse yard on the St. George River. After the boat had soaked -- it’s wood, you know -- a friend of mine, Chris Wells, came to help move it a hundred yards to the public landing. The tide was coming and he said, “You want to spring the bow out? I don’t think there’s room astern.”
Except for the fact that the engine started in reverse, ran away on starting fluid, and popped a cleat out of the boat’s coaming, everything went as smooth as a smelt. We sprung off the quarter bitt, eased into the tide, and tied-up at the landing. (I’ll get to the ‘except for’ part later.)
Shoving off when you have a lot of current and/or a stiff wind from ahead or astern is a function of maneuvering space. Whether you go bow-first or stern-first, with the tide or against it, you have to have enough room to clear the dock and the boats around you. In our case, with the tide coming from almost dead ahead, it wasn’t advisable to swing stern-first into the channel. What would have happened if we’d tried is that the tide would have swept the bow around, and FINBACK would have drifted into one of Lyman-Morse’s custom-built million dollar sailboats. Since I’d only just missed one of them a few minutes before -- when the engine ran away in reverse -- I thought it would be a good idea to leave the dock with a minimum of fuss. Why tempt fate? The vessel behind me was also named FINBACK.
Bow-first or stern-first? How do you decide? Well, as a general rule, it’s easier to maneuver while going against the wind and current than it is to maneuver while going with it. Planes and kites take off with a head wind for a good reason. And the Western River’s Rule of the Rules of the Road -- stating that the descending (downbound) vessel is the Stand On vessel and the ascending (upbound) vessel is the Give Way vessel -- wasn’t decided by a flip of a coin.
The first question to ask when shoving off is which way does the boat want to go? Is it being pulled away from the dock, or pushed onto it? If it’s being pushed away, all you have to do is release your dock lines and you’re off -- making sure you’re on the boat when it goes. Don’t laugh. It wouldn’t be the first time someone got left on the dock. Sometimes the wind blows so hard, you have to hold her with a quick-slipping breast line, or the motor and a spring line, to keep the boat from leaving without you.
If the boat’s being pushed onto the dock, and fenders are squeezed tight, you have to decide whether you’re being pushed bow-to, broadside, or stern-to. For obvious reasons, having the wind or current on your broadside presents the most difficulty.
If you have a single screw boat, you have to know which way the propeller turns. A right hand wheel walks the stern to port in reverse and a left hand wheel walks the stern to starboard. This is important, because if you’re port-side-to, and you have the wind broadside, and you have a left hand screw propeller, you’re probably better off pushing or springing the stern out first: Have a mate lay a fender over the port bow to protect the boat’s finish, motor ahead off an after bow spring (or push off with a boat hook), shift into reverse, and back the vessel into the wind stern-first. The effect of the prop walk combined with the wind pressure on the bow will help spin the boat around.
Shoving off bow-first in this same situation is a lot more complicated. The effect of prop walk (pulling the stern to port when going ahead) and wind pressure, will tend to lay the port quarter toward the dock. In other words, you won’t be able to use a hard rudder, and you may not have enough room to ease away from the dock with a soft rudder. Conversely, when you shove off stern-first in this situation, you can use all the rudder you want.
Obviously, twin screw boats are much more maneuverable. For the most part, you can take them either way. However, what usually works best for a single screw vessel, also works best for a twin screw boat. The bottom line is still one of control, and you have more of it when the boat’s going into the wind and/or current.
What do you do when the wind or current is from dead ahead or dead astern to just off the bow or stern quarter?
The first order of business is to determine if you can get the bow or stern out far enough to be pushed in the direction you want it to go. In other words, can you shove or spring off far enough that the wind or current will do the work for you? For example: With the wind off the starboard bow, and the boat port-side-to the dock, push the bow out with a boat hook or use a forward quarter spring until the wind catches the bow like a sail. As the bow falls off, kick her ahead with rudder amidships, or even a little to port -- not too much to port. Use the wind and/or current to generate sideways thrust. Kick her in and out of gear until the stern’s clear and the boat eases away from the dock.
Now for the ‘except for’ part.
What happened was that the turbocharger oil return line had to be replaced. I made a new one, then had to take apart the shift linkage and mounting bracket in order to get it on. I put everything back together, went to the helm, gave the shift control its customary test back and forth, shot the engine with a couple squirts of ether, and turned the key. The motor turned over very, very slowly.
The motor was turning the reverse gear, the shaft and the propeller, because the cable safety snap had slipped off the transmission shift lever during my customary test (the one you do to make sure you’re in neutral). But I didn’t realize what was going on. I thought the batteries were low because the pumps had been running virtually non-stop for days. So I plugged in the charger, gave the engine a couple more squirts of ether, gave her some throttle, and turned the key. What a way to find out you don’t have a neutral safety switch.
Are We Sinking or Are My Legs Getting Shorter?
It happened on a lake in Central Maine in the summer of 1969. I was 16 and had been hired as the new water skiing instructor for Camp Modin. Never mind that I didn’t know how to water ski. The Director assured me I would know enough by the time the kids arrived. He was right, but that’s another story.
I was in charge of two boats, a 17’ MFG with a 65 hp Johnson, and a 16’ Glastron with a 55 hp, four-stroke Bearcat. They don’t make the Bearcat anymore, and for good reason. The old Bearcat was way ahead of its time -- a good idea backed by something less than perfect engineering. It was a high-concept outboard with a few problems, among them a tendency to overheat.
The director took me to the waterfront and left me with the two boats, both beached and full of rainwater. I decided to tend to the Glastron first. I climbed aboard, dropped the lower unit into the water, and turned the key. The engine spurted to life -- and I do mean ‘spurt’; a little rubber nozzle under the bonnet was the key to proper engine performance. As long as water flowed unimpeded through the nozzle, the engine ran fine. However, as soon as dirt or air clogged the nozzle, the motor would overheat, sputter, cough, rattle, and die. Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to figure out that the problem could be corrected by oral siphoning of the nozzle. After several breathless minutes of alternately blowing and sucking on the nozzle, I had the beast running smoothly.
Before heading out on the lake to drain the boat I did two things. First, I boarded the MFG and started the Johnson. I let it run a few minutes, then shut it off and pocketed the key. Second, I went into the dining room to shanghai a couple volunteers to help push the Glastron off the beach; the boat had a double hull and full of water it was heavy as a tank.
I found half a dozen counselors drinking coffee at one of the tables, but only one expressed an interest in coming along. Ken, a thick-set, blond-haired, die-hard Yankee fan from Westport, L. I., said he would help if I agreed to take him over to the girl’s side of camp. I nodded heartily and together we walked back to the beach.
“I don’t get down here to often,” Ken said as we strolled to the Glastron. “It’s not really my thing.”
“Well,” I said. “All you have to do is help me push it off the beach, maybe steer a little while I pull the plug.”
“I probably should warn you,” Ken said placing his hand on the rail. “I don’t know much about boats.”
“That’s all right,” I assured him. “I do.”
Ken peaked in the Glastron with a dubious expression. “It’s full of water,” he said. “Shouldn’t we drain it first?”
“Nah. We’ll do it out there. We’ll bail her through the drain plug.”
“The drain plug?”
“A little hole in the back.”
“There’s a hole in the boat?”
“Yeah. It’s supposed to be there. We get her up to cruising speed, pull the plug, and the water will be sucked out the hole.”
Ken was unconvinced. “Wait a minute. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s more water in the lake than in the boat. What’s to stop the water from coming back in?”
“It’s physics, Ken. Trust me. I know what I’m doing. Now start pushing.”
Reluctantly, Ken rolled up his pants, heaved the boat off the beach, and climbed in. As the green and white hull of the Glastron floated a bit low in the water -- not dangerously so -- I started the motor, turned the wheel, and headed for the middle of the lake. It was flat calm. A minute or so later, with water up to our shins. I brought the vessel up to speed. The Bearcat labored. Skis, life jackets, cushions, fuel tanks, and other miscellaneous boat stuff piled aft. The bow pointed toward the skies.
“Ken!”
“What?”
“Take the wheel and hold her steady. I’ll go pull the plug.”
Ken maneuvered himself to the helm, cautiously, so as not to splash his pants. I went aft, dropped to my hands and knees, and reached back through the water and mess of floating junk for the drain plug. I released the dog and pulled. Nothing. I pulled harder. Still nothing. Finally, I took a deep breath, held it, and used all my strength. The plug pulled free. Water began to drain rapidly and I felt pleased with myself.
And then the old Bearcat just up and died.
“I already told you I don’t know too much about boats,” Ken said. “But isn’t the water coming in kind of fast.”
“Now don’t panic, Ken,” I said. “I’ll just put the plug back in and get the motor started.” I lifted my hand to look at the plug and came to a startling realization. Soaking all winter and spring on the east end of St. George lake had swollen the rubber to three times its normal size. Nothing short of a miracle would get it back into the hole from which it came.
“Well,” Ken said. “What are you waiting for? Put the plug back.”
“It’s swollen, Ken. It won’t go back.”
“You mean we’re sinking.”
“Well, in a matter of speaking.”
“How deep is it here?”
“About ninety feet.”
“Can I panic now?”
“No. I know what’s wrong. It’s no big deal. I can fix it. The motor’s overheated because the cooling circuit’s jammed. It’s air or something. Just wait a sec.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to scream for help.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
Ken watched me as I positioned myself over the Bearcat. “Well, as long as you know what you’re doing,” he said.”
“I do. Don’t worry.”
“You going to tighten some screws or bolts or something?”
“No,” I said, leaning over the stern of the boat. “I’m gonna wrap my lips around this little rubber thing and suck as hard as I... YEOW! SON OF A BITCH’S HOT.”
“HEEELP... SOMEBODY... HEEELP!” Ken screamed.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, leaning over the rail and dabbing cold water on my lips.
“Sorry. But if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather yell for help. I don’t think you’re going to fix anything like that. No offense.” Ken faced the beach and waved his hands over his head. “Heeelp... Somebody... Heeelp!” he hollered.
Just then my new boss, the Camp Director, walked down to the beach. We could see him looking at us, then cupping his hands to his mouth. The words came across the lake clearly and distinctly. “Are... you... in... trouble... ?”
“Ken... “ I was begging now. “Don’t go starting a panic. As soon as this thing cools I can start it. Just be calm and don’t say anything to worry him. It’s really not as serious as you think.”
Ken looked at me questioningly, then at the beach. “No problem,” he said. “I know just what to say.” He cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled: “We... are... sinking... !”
“Great,” I said. “Now all he has to do is ask me where the key to the other boat is?”
“Where’s... the... key... to... the... other... boat... ?” the Director yelled.
“Where is it?” Ken asked.
I was laughing. I couldn’t help myself.
Ken scowled. “I don’t really see the humor here, Bob. I mean, the boat’s broken. Water’s pouring in through the back. My pants are wet. It looks like a long swim to shore. Why don’t you just tell him where the damn key is?”
I reached into my pocket and produced the tiny key. “It’s right here.” I gave it to Ken. “You tell him where it is.” Ken shook his head.
“Where’s... the... key... to... the... other... boat... ?” the Director yelled again.
I had no choice. I cupped my hands to my mouth and answered. “It’s... in... my... pocket.”
The director’s head dropped to face the ground. He turned and walked away from the beach. He wasn’t in any hurry, as if maybe he didn’t really need two ski boats, or a new skiing instructor. In fact, he was controlling his heart rate with tabs of glycerin and headed for the nearest telephone.
Ken resigned himself to his fate. He walked forward into the open bow and made himself comfortable, lifting his legs over the gunwales to keep his pants as dry as possible.
Me, well I knew what I was doing all along -- sort of. After the motor cooled I cleared the obstruction in the nozzle, started the Bearcat, got the Glastron drained, and learned two valuable lessons. I don’t take anything apart that I know I can’t put back together. And I have a lot of spare keys.
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