Attainable Adventure Cruising—What's New

Is the Espar heater really that hot?

posted by John & Phyllis Web Site

This post has been archived on our main site. Please see Heating & ventilation.

Labels: Equipment

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North Atlantic Crossing, East to West

posted by John & Phyllis Web Site

This post has been archived on our main site. Please see Sailing routes.

Labels: Passage Planning

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The London Boatshow

posted by John & Phyllis Web Site

We just got back to our cottage in Nova Scotia from the London Boatshow. While the people we met and the old friends we reconnected with made it a great trip for Phyllis and me, and well worth while, I have to say that the show itself was a disappointment.

The trend toward focusing ever more on gadgets and ever less on seamanship and good boat design and build seems to continue unabated. Does it really matter if your plotter has a million features that you will probably never use and is connected by some whizbang network so it can display everything from your fuel consumption to how many cans of tomatoes you have left in the galley? Come to think of it, it does matter since all this interconnection now means that the whole works can crash at once. I’m as much a technology lover as anyone, having spent most of my business life in the computer industry, but this stuff is starting to bore me witless.

Two gadgets I did like: AIS transponders that will not only tell you about the ships around you but also tell them about you. Now that would be a real comfort when heaved-to in a gale, particularly if you had a bunch of gear like a sea anchor over the side. I also liked a new design passive radar reflector that claims to substantially upgrade radar visibility and will fit exactly where our old Firdel Blipper is mounted.

It was sad to see how few sailboats there were when compared to motorboats. Maybe $100 a barrel oil will fix that. Of the few sailboats that were there, most were, in my never humble opinion, very poor offshore designs with flat U-shaped sections forward and wide sterns with too much buoyancy aft. Boats that will pound hard enough to shake your fillings out when going to windward offshore and bury their bows in every convenient wave. Add a lightly built spade rudder and a deep fin keel that will drive up through the bottom of the boat the first time you hit something, and you have a recipe for broken dreams.


The Hallberg Rassy 43 was an exception to the above although I still think the stern is a bit wide. All the builder needs to do is get rid of some accommodation and increase the deck-accessible storage from the current amount that might be just adequate for three fenders and two dock lines. Two heads and two showers in a 43’ boat, give me a break. Lose the acres of teak too; no voyager has time to take care of it. How about a voyaging version? No teak on deck, one head only and use the space saved for an expanded engine room and parts storage area with workbench. Cut down the cabins a bit and let’s have a real lazarette and a decent sized locker forward. Combine these changes with HR’s undeniable quality (the engine and mechanical installation is a work of art) and the HR43 would be a nice voyaging boat, albeit at a hefty price.


A bright spot in all of this was Colin Speedie’s new Ovni that he has been writing about on this blog. This is definitely an offshore boat. When I got past the hard chines and flat area at the very bottom of the hull (so she can dry out) I realized that she might be a surprisingly sea-kindly hull too. Add to that the incredible value for money (at least in Euros) and Alubat’s willingness to make substantial customizations at reasonable cost, and you have an interesting alternative to a custom-built boat in aluminum. Of course there is the stability question that rears its head whenever we talk about centerboard boats, but I think this concern is overblown. Ovnis have been everywhere and centerboard boats like “Seal” and the “Pelagics” have seen a lot of heavy weather without any of their crews wearing them as a hat. Colin will be dealing with the stability issue at some length in a future post.

In summary, there are better boat shows for offshore sailors: Several people told me that both the Düsseldorf and Paris shows have more serious voyaging sailboats on display. Although I have not been to one for 10 years, I suspect that for North Americans the Annapolis Boat show is a much better value than trekking all the way to London.

Now to tackle the mountain of email, including several interesting questions from our readers that will make it to this blog in the next few days. After that, it’s back to the heavy weather series.

Labels: Boats and Design, Rants and Musings

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Off to The London Boatshow

posted by John & Phyllis Web Site

Phyllis and I have not been to a major boatshow since the winter of 2000/01 that we spent living on “Morgan’s Cloud” at St. Katharine’s Marina in London. So it seems like it is about time, particularly since we still have some major acquisitions to make for the boat including a plotter and a new dinghy—nothing like being able to poke and prod before laying serious coin down.

It will also give us a chance to see various people that we do business with but have never met face to face, as well as rendezvous with old friends from Norway. Colin Speedie will be there with his new Ovni on the Alubat stand, so it will be interesting to see the boat and finally meet Colin who has made such a great contribution to this blog over the last few months.

The upshot of all this is that the Blog will be quiet for the next three weeks or so, unless Colin is feeling inspired to post something in-between handling the million problems and details involved in putting a new boat together.

When we get back I will continue with the very well received heavy weather series (it has just about doubled the traffic to the blog). My current thinking is that there will be at least five more posts:

• Our new backup storm survival system and why we chose it.
  
  
• Our deployment and retrieval system.
  
  
• Details, details—all the little changes we have made to “Morgan’s Cloud” over the years to make her easier and safer to handle in heavy weather. Lots of pictures with this one.
  
  
• Our strategy if we get caught on a lee shore in storm conditions—heaven forbid.
  
  
• And finally, unless I think of something else to blather on about, wrap-up and conclusions.
  

If you want to make sure that you don’t miss the next installment in this series, without having to keep checking this blog, subscribe to our feed or automated notification e-mails, both available on the side bar. You will then receive a short notice when the next post comes up. Of course we will respect your privacy and will never divulge your e-mail address or shower you with junk. If you don’t like the feed you can unsubscribe in a moment.

Labels: Rants and Musings

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Heavy Weather Gear and Strategies #7—Our Old Backup System

posted by John & Phyllis Web Site

As discussed earlier in this series, our primary gale and storm survival strategy is heaving-to, with or without the addition of a drogue off the bow, as discussed in this post. However, we have always carried a second system in case our rigging was damaged making heaving-to impossible. We also believe, as discussed in this post, that there may be conditions in which heaving-to, even with a drogue, just does not work.

Up until this year, we carried a 24-foot diameter PARA-TECH sea anchor and all the gear to set it as our backup system. However, despite thinking that it was the best option at the time we bought it, we have never been entirely happy with this solution, as I discussed in this post. In summary, we got rid of our sea anchor for the following reasons:

1. The deployment of so much heavy gear off the bow in storm conditions would be both difficult and dangerous.
   
   
2. I believe that the pitching and yawing in true storm conditions would be truly horrendous. Most modern sailboats, particularly with the forward windage of roller furling headsails like “Morgan’s Cloud” has, yaw a lot at anchor when it is blowing hard—imagine the same behavior in 30-40 foot seas! There are ways to ameliorate this, such as riding sails, but this is still more gear to rig and to break in survival conditions.
   
   
3. The yawing problem can be solved by using a Pardey Bridle but I have real reservations about rigging such a system on a boat the size of “Morgan’s Cloud”.
   
   
4. I think that it is unlikely that Phyllis and I would be able to retrieve the sea anchor and its associated gear, particularly after being beaten up and exhausted by several days of lying to it in storm conditions. On this subject I got an email last week from a friend who is a commercial fisherman running three draggers off the US east coast. He says “I have never needed to purchase a sea anchor. Towing a bottom trawl in the Gulf of Maine has routinely provided sea anchors of all types and shapes. Judging from what I have seen people often discard the sea anchor rather than deal with its recovery.”
   
   
5. The PARA-TECH manual, like that provided with the Galerider, demands that you deploy the drag device on a long rode so that it is immersed two to three waves back from the wave the boat is on and that the device is in the same relative point on its wave as the boat is on hers. Give me a break! Waves in storm conditions are confused and of varying heights and periods. They do not conform to the pretty diagrams in these manuals and even if they did, how, pray tell, are you to see in storm conditions with blowing spray where the thing is several waves to windward?
   
   
6. A 24-foot sea anchor, the size recommended for “Morgan’s Cloud”, is going to be essentially impossible to drag through the water. Being attached to something in storm conditions at sea that has almost no give will generate forces that are truly frightening to think about. The PARA-TECH manual calls for at least 600’ of nylon rope to ameliorate this problem. However, recent research shows that nylon rope that is being heavily cycle loaded, particularly when wet, is much more subject to failure than we all once thought. The problem lies with self heating due to friction between the fibers that can eventually lead to the rope failing through melting. I suspect that this may be the reason that many sea anchors are lost due to rode breakage, rather than the chafe that has usually been blamed. Recently I spoke with a woman who had deployed a sea anchor on a trip to Bermuda. It worked well, but the nylon rope broke during recovery after the gale. This would suggest to me that it may have been weakened by the problem noted above.
   

So, while I’m not suggesting that sea anchors never work well or discounting the fact that they have saved many lives and boats, I think there is now a better storm survival backup system, at least for us on “Morgan’s Cloud”, and that is the subject for 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

If you want to make sure that you don’t miss the next installment in this series, without having to keep checking this blog, subscribe to our feed or automated notification e-mails, both available on the side bar. You will then receive a short notice when the next post comes up. Of course we will respect your privacy and will never divulge your e-mail address or shower you with junk. If you don’t like the feed you can unsubscribe in a moment.

Labels: Seamanship

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