Do It Your Way
posted by John & Phyllis
Web Site
We will be traveling for the next week so the blog will be quiet unless we get to an Internet connection.
When we get back next week we will be sharing some really great comments on the Heavy Weather Series from experienced sailor and author Hal Roth and two time circumnavigator Evans Starzinger, including some good ideas for drogue retrieval.
The chance to discuss heavy weather strategies with experienced voyagers like Hal and Evans as well as Lin Pardey has been an unexpected benefit of writing this series and a real privilege.
To me the take away from these interactions is that there are a lot of right ways to do things at sea. The point being that it is not really important whether you do things our way, or Hal’s way, or Evan’s way. Rather the key to safety offshore in heavy weather is that you look at the available information, critically evaluate it in the light of your capabilities and boat, and then come up with and test your way.
Labels: Seamanship
A Professional Fisherman’s Take on Heavy Weather
posted by John & Phyllis
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[We received an e-mail a few weeks ago from our friend Bob Tetrault who has been following our heavy weather series. Bob went to Maine Maritime, has a master’s ticket, and has fished the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank in all kinds of weather. He currently owns three boats that fish the Gulf of Maine. His email is primarily about his experiences dragging up abandoned sea anchors but it is also full of other interesting nuggets of information and is a fascinating look at how the professionals deal with heavy weather.
Bob, unusually for a fisherman, owns a sailboat; a beautifully maintained Pearson 55 called, appropriately enough, “Sea Return”.]
“The sea anchor we carry on “Sea Return” was purchased new, a 24' Paratech. It has never been out of the bag. When I was fishing and towing [sea anchors] up they were usually military parachutes without much warp which leads me to believe they were cheap and cut free rather than retrieved.
Even now it’s not unusual to see a posting on a bulletin board at our ice plant advertising a sea anchor for sale. They are usually in good shape just snarled and a little dirty from being towed from the bottom. The last one I saw was a Paratech style with no warp, just the swivel.
When fishing well offshore and caught in a bomb or weather that was much more than predicted, we would haul our gear (net) while we still could, remove the otter boards, and put the net back off the stern. We would then cover the engine room vents with custom made tarpaulins and put the checker boards in the stern ramp so they couldn't wash out, leave the deck lights on and turn in. One crew member would always be on watch. If we started taking green water over the stern he would start up and work ahead slowly and the wash would keep the seas from breaking in on us.
[Same theory as the slick created by a boat properly heaved-to.]
Once I had to rig a pennant from the bow and winch the warps to the bow [so as] to lay bow-to, which was really about fifty degrees [to the wind] with the wheel house windage working against the significant drag of the fishing net. [Generally] we didn't [like] to do this because bringing the two warps to a point on the bow had the potential for the net to snarl but it was certainly safer [than being stern-to]. The resultant slick did the job. We would move very little, maybe a knot in >50 knots of wind. We don't carry anemometers so everything was an estimate but be assured foam was blowing off the wave tops.
[This would be in effect the same as the Pardey bridle or our own use of a Galerider.]
The biggest problem on an offshore dragger is the paravane booms. You must keep them out of the water and keep from rolling down too far or they would want to nest in the rigging on the opposite roll. They are usually lashed down to the rail but the lever is minimal compared to force of wave and gravity and the attachment point would part away.
I never once felt my crew and I were in danger while laying-to as I describe. The power of the sea commands a lot of respect; it can be awesome as you know.
As an aside, sometimes we would collect a deck full of puffins. They would gather at the stern under the deck lights presumably because it was calmer and some fish scraps would wash off the deck. Anyway the seas would wash them one at a time up over the checkers until we had dozens crouched down in the corners under the bulwarks. Getting them back in the water was always a big chore because they couldn't stand and got pretty excited when man was present so we would wash them one at a time out the scuppers with the deck hose.
All this reminds me that I need to discover what works best for “Sea Return”. You really need bad weather to experiment and I always find some excuse not to test my plan.”
Labels: Seamanship
Heavy Weather Gear and Strategies #11—Jordan Drogue Retrieval System
posted by John & Phyllis
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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:
- I could not budge the handle in the first two speeds.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
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
Anchoring in the modern world
posted by Colin Speedie
Web Site
Our new anchor in place awaiting a securing bracketThe first sailors anchored using heavy stones, attached to long ropes, and often with an army of slaves to pull them up. Thank God those days are over, and that we now have excellent choices of anchors available, and powerful windlasses to retrieve them.
There can be few more important decisions to make than what ground tackle to choose when planning a long term cruise. We placed the highest priority on selecting the right gear for our new OVNI, knowing that we’ll have to rely on those decisions for most nights over the coming years.
The standard boat comes with a 1000W Lofrans windlass, which might be fine for most purposes, but not for a heavy anchor and plenty of chain we feel, so we’ve upgraded to a 1500W unit. We endured a fruitless chase to find some G70 high tensile chain in Britain, and in the end had to give up, but we did (finally) manage to track down some 10mm G40 chain calibrated for our windlass, so we’ve had to settle for that. The main cable will therefore have 70m of this chain, with another 30m of 18mm nylon anchorplait spliced to it. The second cable will have 30m of the chain with 100m of anchorplait, and a third with 10m of chain and 100m of anchorplait. This should provide ample capacity for most situations.
For our anchors, we have gone down a tried and tested route, at least for us. In 2005, fed up with our 45lb CQR and its variable performance we imported a 25kg Rocna from New Zealand. Having used it for two seasons in the Hebrides, anchoring on an almost daily basis, we found it to be a revelation in terms of speed of setting and holding power in a wide variety of substrates. So we’ve gone for a 33kg Rocna, backed up with a 25kg from the same manufacturer as our usual bower and kedge. Backing this up we have an FX-37 Fortress, which whilst less than perfect in some situations (hard sand, weed) is so easy to handle from a dinghy as to be almost indispensable.
For many owners the CQR has achieved near mythic status, and for many years I would have agreed it was the best anchor on the market, having spent hundreds of nights safely anchored by one. Having worked hard to perfect the technique to set one effectively, we felt we couldn’t make much improvement, but over time, the weaknesses – slow setting, poor holding in hard sand, easily choked by weed – became a real annoyance, and I became dubious about their ultimate holding power. So, although the Rocna was very costly (we imported it independently before there was an importer in the UK) we felt it would be worth the risk. Reports on the abilities of the “new” generation of anchors like the Spade and the Rocna were so positive we felt we had to try one for ourselves. And I have to say that the reports are true as far as we are concerned.
The Rocna is such a good all rounder that we’ve decided that for the first time, we’ll carry two anchors of the same type. We may also buy a big fisherman as an emergency hook, and for use in rock and kelp (where we would not normally choose to anchor), but that’s a straightforward trip to the local shipbreakers and little expense. Many people have commented that the new anchors are expensive, but when compared against what? Our new Rocna has cost us about the same as a month in a marina berth here, and we have it for use in perpetuity, so let’s keep things in perspective.
These anchors have their own drawbacks in some ways, though. There is a need to learn a new technique when setting them to allow for their rapid digging in to avoid strain on deck gear and the windlass. And while the large lateral area gives phenomenal holding, it does make it hard to carry two anchors in twin bow rollers – they are very huge. But as a wise man once remarked; “every time someone walks past our boat and laughs at the anchor, I reckon I’ve got it just about right”. And most bow rollers are still set up for the CQR or similar, so we’ve a list of planned modifications for ours to be carried out over the next few weeks to allow us to deploy and secure the Rocna effectively.
We believe that the new generation of anchors mark a major improvement in safety, security and offer priceless peace of mind. Human invention is limitless, and so things develop over time, so the conviction that anchor development stopped with the CQR simply flies in the face of reality. For if we followed that logic to its conclusion, we’d still be driving cars with cable brakes, flying the Atlantic in biplanes, and – anchoring with stones.
[This post is part of a continuing series on the selection, building, and fitting out of an aluminum Ovni 435 by guest writer and very experienced offshore sailor Colin Speedie. You can read earlier posts in this series by clicking here and scrolling down to Colin's posts.
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: Anchoring
