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Heavy Weather Gear and Strategies #11—Jordan Drogue Retrieval System

posted by John & Phyllis Web Site

In the last post I wrote about our deployment system for our new Jordan Series Drogue on Morgan’s Cloud. In this post I’m going to look at how we are going to get the damned thing back aboard after the storm.

You would think that the first place to look for a solution to this challenge would be the manufacturer or designer of the drogue system. Well, afraid not. While the information provided with the Jordan Drogue is generally far better and more realistic than that provided by their competitors, even Jordan has punted on this important issue. He does provide one example, but it is for a 26 foot boat.

To try and determine what retrieval would be like, we did the following experiment with Morgan’s Cloud: While motoring at 1200 rpm—not much over idle and our best guess at the forward speed of the boat in say 30 knots of wind at the end of a storm—we tried to grind in the drogue using one of our powerful three-speed Lewmar 65 sheet winches. We learned the following:

1. I could not budge the handle in the first two speeds.
   
   
2. In the third and most powerful speed, the load felt equivalent to grinding in the last few inches of our jib when going to windward in 20 knots of true wind. Something that I can just manage, and not too often thank you.
   
   
3. After grinding in about 10 feet I was pretty much done in, with 30 feet (9 meters) to go before the first cones would come out of the water thereby reducing the load, and 350 feet (106 meters) to go before completion.
   
   
4. Despite being strong and 10 years my junior, Phyllis had trouble moving the handle at all.
   

We were fresh, well rested and in a flat calm bay. I would expect that after a blow and on a pitching deck our performance would be halved from that observed above. See this post.

Our conclusion is that any solution that requires manually grinding the drogue in on a winch is totally impractical for us. In addition, at 56 years old, 6’ 2”and 190lb with a reasonable level of fitness, I’m probably at the median for fitness and strength for cruising men and so I think this will be a common problem. As Phyllis found, women will typically have even more trouble since the amount of force that you can exert on a winch handle is substantially influenced by your weight.

Morgan’s Cloud weighs 52,000 lb (23,500 kg). My guess would be that, unless the crew is made up of Americas Cup grinders, the above conclusion would apply to any boat that weighs more than 20,000 lb (9000 kg) and maybe less than that. Keep in mind that as the boat gets smaller, so do the winches, thereby scaling the problem.

One option would be to wait for very calm weather and then retrieve the drogue with the boat stopped, but on Morgan’s Cloud we want to get sailing as soon as we can to get out of the way of the next blow. Also, there are few things more uncomfortable than wallowing around with too little sail up in the slop left over from a big blow.

To solve this problem we looked at and rejected two solutions:

1. Fit at least one electric winch: Really expensive and would probably require upgrading our whole electrical system since electric winches work a lot better on 24 volts and we are 12 volt. Also, I don’t like electric sheet winches: they separate you from the loads on your boat and enable you to break things in truly spectacular ways.
   
   
2. Lead the drogue to our powerful anchor windlass: Not very practical because of lead considerations and the amount of times a nipper line will be required before the drogue gets to the winch drum. Also, this moves the whole operation onto a pitching exposed foredeck rather than a nice secure cockpit. (Keep in mind that we want to do this when it is still blowing pretty hard.)
   

What we did do was to buy a 24 volt Milwaukee right angle drill motor and a special bit that fits in a standard winch socket to go in the chuck. This whole rig cost us less than 10% of the cost of an electric winch and it has plenty of other uses on our boat. Yes I know, I was skeptical too, but this thing is miraculous: Using it we were easily able to grind the whole drogue in under load in less than half an hour. Since its effective length is about 60% more than a 10” winch handle, the torque load is quite easy on the operator too.

There are a few things to know:

1. You need several batteries so you won’t have to stop the retrieval to charge. In our case, three batteries do the job of retrieving our Jordan Drogue.
   
   
2. In the early stages when the loads are high, it pays to stop for a minute or so every three minutes to let the drill cool. If the battery overheats, a safety will trip on that battery and only charging will reset it.
   
   
3. The drill is not water proof. One good slop of salt water will probably ruin it.
   

The drill motor is only part of the total solution. How do you get the heavily loaded drogue line to the winch? What about chafe as it comes over the stern. Will the cones snag on things? We ran into all these challenges in our experiments. I will write about our solutions to them in the next post.


Earlier Posts in the Series
#1 Goals
#2 Heaving-To
#3 When Heaving-to is Dangerous
#4 Options When Heaving-to is Not Working
#5 Stopping Wave Strikes While Heaved-To
#6 Survival Storms
#7 Our Old Backup System
#8 Our New Backup System
#9 You Need a System
#10 Jordan Drogue Launch System

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Labels: Seamanship

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