Oh, what joy it would be to buy a boat in late summer, make a list of all the gear it needs in the fall, have the yard work on various projects during the winter, and launch a truly proper, fully functioning yacht in the spring.

This is not a joy I’ve experienced. Each vessel I’ve lived and cruised aboard—even the $100 schooner Elizabeth and the $200 double-ender Corina—busted the piggy bank upon purchase. For us sailors, cruising isn’t a question of which glittery yacht jewelry catches our roving eye. Rather, it’s how to prioritize our few pennies for maximum effect.

Initially, I limit expenditures to strength and safety issues. I make sure the rig won’t fall down, the keel won’t fall off, and the entire contraption won’t disappear beneath the sea. I focus on tasks requiring elbow grease and tenacity, not cash. I invest in things like bilge pumps. I don’t needlessly drill a dozen holes in my hull to install blue underwater LED lights.

Of course, to each his own. Whatever floats your boat—or, in this particular example, sinks it.

I’m not broke because I’m stupid or the world is unfair. I’m correctly and understandably low-income because, while all my contemporaries were hard at work in a corporate straitjacket, I was sailing the seven seas with a bottle of rum in one hand and my wife in the other, while answering my snail mail only every year or so. I’ve never had much economic depth, and it hasn’t much mattered because I measure my wealth in smiles and sea miles.

What is a boat? A container of air. If the water stays outside, then the boat is in a seaworthy condition. Thus, I spend my precious pennies making sure that salt water doesn’t invade, and that once it does, as it always will, I can get it back out before my batteries require a scuba-diving certificate.

Another thing I ask myself is, Does this item make me more free or less free? I personally believe that onboard generators make me less free. Ditto freshwater marine toilets, electric hatches, electric dinghy hoists, electrically extending gangplanks, electrically operated swim platforms, and electric-start dingy outboards.

Don’t they make shipboard life easier? Perhaps. For a week or two. Until they cease to work in the saltwater environment—and cease they will.

Part of the problem is worshiping the false God of convenience. I don’t live aboard because I aspire to sloth. I don’t own a boat because I want to do less. I own a boat because I want to do more, with the entire world as my oyster.

Once, while rowing across Charlotte Amalie harbor off St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, I watched an overweight friend leave a yacht with all the conveniences, hop into a center-console RIB with an electric-start outboard, roar ashore to the dinghy dock, slide into the seat of a waiting golf cart, jump from there into his air-conditioned vehicle, and then burn rubber out of the parking lot to drive to a gym—to use its rowing machine.

I mean, really?

When I purchased our 43-foot, 40-year-old midcockpit Wauquiez, I grabbed a notebook and a magnifying glass, and I vigorously scrubbed the entire vessel, inside and out, while taking notes.

Why? Because 99.9 percent of all the problems that a modern vessel has are long foretold if we observe. (This goes for 80 percent of all engine problems too.) Most masts don’t just fall down. They crumple after months of attempting to communicate to their blind owners that they’re about to topple.

Why is one corner of the cockpit spider-cracking, but the other three are not? Why is the portside main bulkhead imprinting through the gelcoat, but the starboard one is not? Why is one of the sheaves of my steering blocks wobbling, yet the others are not?

You don’t have to know what is happening or how to fix it. You just need to identify the problem. You can eventually figure out the solution, perhaps with some help from an experienced sailor.

Please do not hire a bored marine surveyor to do this. The whole idea is to get you in tune with your vessel, its rig and its propulsion system. After all, it is your life on the line offshore. Who cares more about your life? You or a marine expert?

Also beware of “new, modern marine advancements” or gear that sounds too good to be true. I remember how intrigued I was with dripless stuffing boxes until I was in a harbormaster’s office at Red Hook, St. Thomas, and the dock boy rushed in to announce that yet another boat was sinking in its slip.

“Just installed a newfangled stuffing box?” the harbormaster asked.

“We think so,” the kid answered.

“They’re dripless all right,” the harbormaster said as he grabbed his hat. “They gush instead.”

Not everything shiny or pricey is an advance. We sailed twice around the world without refrigeration, a windlass or a watermaker. I’ve never had a self-tailing sheet winch in my life. Hell, I only begrudgingly gave up my sextant in 1996, not because a GPS would give me my position, but rather for the man-overboard function—a clearly valuable offshore safety feature.

Thousands of people laughed when they learned that we hand-copied paper charts across the Pacific during our first circumnavigation. But they weren’t circumnavigating. We were. What do I care what lubbers think?

When I first stepped into Wild Card’s cockpit, I saw an array of wind instruments and six other electrical “conveniences” exposed to the elements. When we sold the boat 23 years and nearly 100,000 miles later, it did not have a single electrical item in the cockpit—not even an electrical switch. (In the Indian Ocean and around the “Cape of Storms,” we jokingly referred to our cockpit as the swimming pool.)

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have a computerized instrument array at your helm that rivals the ones aboard 747 airliners. I’m only suggesting that you consider how dangerous it is to have all your electronics blink out at the same instant, on a pitch-black night, while careening through the breakwater of Durban, South Africa, during a northeasterly gale.

Everything aboard Ganesh is wired independently—with damn good reason. We might be able to lose our depth meter or windspeed meter without consequence, but we never lose everything at once.

We’ve been involved in search-and-rescue operations offshore where all the fancy yachts within 500 miles can’t communicate with their expensive satellite phones, while all the poor folk and local vessels are chatting via no-monthly-fee single-sideband radios.

We simply don’t have, nor do we want, the things that most people desire—not even the modest conveniences our fellow yachties take for granted. Seriously, we don’t sail from Wi-Fi harbor to Wi-Fi harbor for the simple reason that you can’t get away from it all if you bring it all with you.

A buddy of mine just took delivery of a 32-foot, twin-wheel French sailboat. I was eager to see it. Alas, I couldn’t, because he was having air conditioning installed, along with hundreds of pounds of lithium batteries.

His plan? “Daysailing, mostly,” he told me, “with the odd cruising regatta thrown in.”

Perhaps the intake on the air conditioning might help suck him up to windward?

The last time I was in Cocos Keeling, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, there was a go-faster in the harbor with a bidet aboard but no barometer. To be honest, even if I had more money than Elon Musk, I’m not sure my vessel would be much better off.

Each boat is as different as the sailors who own them. I vowed upon purchasing Ganesh that I’d cut off its fixed Bimini top the first instant I could. Alas, I was too broke to buy hacksaw blades when the time came. Our (now beloved) dodger is still there 50,000 nautical miles later—and 99 percent of our meals are eaten under it.

A modern sailor doesn’t need a depth meter ported into high-tech goggles with music blaring in the background. Common sense is what you need—and a bucketful of cleaning supplies when you first step aboard.

The post Fatty Goodlander: Have Little, Want Less appeared first on Cruising World.

Chafe has many sadistic variations. I’ll never forget reaching into my hanging locker after an ocean crossing and taking out my favorite shirt, which had been reduced to lace from the constant swinging. My wife, Carolyn, laughed—until she realized her favorite party dress was now see-through as well. 

From then on, we’ve always put our favorite apparel in the center of the clothes bar and then shock-corded our clothes tightly to the bulkhead. (Better to arrive with wrinkled clothes than holey ones.)

Similarly, we almost never carry jugs on deck. However, if we must, we make sure their contact points have bits of rubber glued to them so that our rough nonslip doesn’t rasp through the plastic in the first week or two of a trans-Pacific passage. 

With the exception of our veggie nets (which allow our veggies to breathe), we have nothing swinging belowdecks. Why? Because my wife finds the motion to be seasickness-inducing, and I hate discovering arcs of ruined varnish on bulkheads where swinging items rub. 

Yes, sailors of yore had to be particularly vigilant against chafe. I can remember being a child aboard the schooner Elizabeth and chanting, “Worm and parcel with the lay, turn and serve the other way” as we protected our three-strand running rigging with this three-step process. 

While wave frequency varies widely, a common belief is that there are eight waves per minute. (Many scientists say six to 12.) At eight per minute, that’s more than 11,000 corkscrewing waves per day. Since most of our circumnavigations have totaled more than a year of being at sea—because we’re slowpokes and don’t cruise in a straight line—that translates to around 4 million waves per circ. That’s a lot of random motion. 

Let’s look at it another way. My wife loves pearls. Each time we pass through Polynesia, we visit pearl farmers so that I can dive her up a few more. Of course, we ask permission, and then open and pay for the resulting cultured pearls. We find it interesting to harvest our own pearls. When giving them as gifts, we like to be able to say, “As I opened the oyster in Kauehi and saw this lovely pearl, I thought of you.” 

However, as lovely as pearls are, they aren’t robust. Thus, when I put my favorite gargantuan eggplant pearl—a dark pearl with a lustrous nacre that flashes green—into a rough wooden container and stowed it for safekeeping—oops. It was ruined by rolling back and forth a zillion times across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. 

Why do I mention this? Because, for boaters who spend a lot of time at sea, chafe isn’t something that only occasionally happens to anchor rodes or dock lines. It is anything that results in damage as a result of the vessel’s back-and-forth movement at sea.  

Most modern cruising boats have spreaders, and sails that rub against those spreaders. This is a problem for ocean sailors rolling downwind continuously. On two occasions, we’ve purchased a new mainsail, sailed it across an ocean, and then added chafe patches at all the discolored spots. This allows a mainsail to last longer than a circumnavigation—not get holes rubbed through it during its first ocean crossing. 

Of course, sailors can solve spreader chafe from the opposite direction as well. Often, just gluing a tiny slit hose to the after side of sharp aluminum spreaders can dramatically reduce mainsail chafe. 

I have running backs on my mizzen. Dacron is wonderful stuff, but it doesn’t allow the stitching to “set” into the fabric like the soft Egyptian cotton of my youth. Thus, on my mizzen, I have to guard against thread chafe as much as fabric chafe. 

On my first few boats, I used baggywrinkle. This was fun to make, and it looks ultra-traditional. But, of course, you have to carry that windage upwind as well as down. Baggywrinkle is also heavy when wet. Thus, I’ve discarded my baggywrinkle on the garbage heap of bygone tradition. 

Numerous vessels with permanent staysail stays have their jibs fail early from thread chafe against the stay while tacking or while slatting in the doldrums. And cockpit awnings, while optional in northern climes, are almost mandatory in the tropics. They too suffer from chafe in unexpected forms. Ditto wind scoops, which we carry in different sizes and designs. (Carolyn’s “Big Shoulders” scoop turns the whole boat into a wind tunnel.)

Which brings us to hurricanes, during which chafe plays a major (and sometimes fatal) role. I could write a whole book about chafe at 100-plus knots—and basically did so after Hurricane Hugo in 1989. This is a very complicated subject. What follows is just a taste.

We carry three nylon snubbers for our anchor chain: a 35-foot, ¾-inch snubber, and two slightly shorter ones. All of them are protected by a long plastic hose at the spot where they go over the anchor roller or chock. 

During hurricane season, we also carry a square foot of ¾-inch plywood with four holes and Kevlar attachment lines, in case a chock or bow roller shears off. A nylon rode or snubber can’t bear on anything hard for more than a few minutes while surging. 

Why? Because we don’t want to experience what one boat I know had happen in Culebra, Puerto Rico. This boat’s anchor chain chafed through the bottom of an aluminum chock, mahogany cap rail, fiberglass toe rail and, eventually, the hull and deck. It just kept going until the chain had a straight line from its windlass attachment point to the anchor. The boat ended up with the jagged chain slot a mere 2 inches above the surface of the harbor.

That’s right: Anchor chains can turn into linear chainsaws while surging in winds of Force 12 on the Beaufort scale.

Another hurricane-season must for us is having a tub of cheap automotive grease and a crowbar in our anchor locker. 

The grease is to smear the boat, plywood and line. Isn’t that messy? You’re damn right it is, but a grease-smeared vessel above the water is better than a pristine vessel beneath it. And why the crowbar? To ease the rode or snubber without it escaping or running too far. 

On the homebuilt 36-foot Carlotta, I had two 4-by-4 hardwood bitts that ran from my stem. They were through-bolted up the forward crash bulkhead, and they emerged from the deck with a bronze pin (old prop shaft, actually) driven through both. Super strong.

During Hugo, I went forward every hour or so wearing a mask and a safety harness. Once at the bitts, I’d use my crowbar to work slack into the snubber (from the slack side) until the nylon would re-cinch onto the bitts. This allowed the chafe point to be moved only a couple of inches with no danger of it getting away from me. (Later, I was amazed to see the resulting deep, deep gouges in the hardwood.) 

Temperature plays a part in nylon-rode failure. Heat buildup can be a problem. Thus, some old hands in the Caribbean use a short section of Dacron line at the chafe point, claiming it isn’t as weakened as nylon is by the frictional heat, but I personally don’t have the hard science to recommend this practice. 

Each Caribbean hurricane that a sailor survives, especially if they lose the vessel, has steep learning curves that aren’t forgotten. During Hurricane Hugo, a Category 5 with steady 120-knot winds gusting to 140, a rare storm phenomenon that I’d never even heard of came into play. 

We were anchored in Ensenada Honda, a relatively shallow bay off Puerto Rico. The boats, starting with the full-keel vessels and soon involving the fin-keelers, started turning at odd angles to the wind. Some actually walked to windward against more than 100 knots of breeze.

Impossible? I would have thought so, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. The result was extreme shock-loading on the anchor gear and anchor rollers, from radically different angles. 

I believe that in the large but shallow bay, the 120 knots of wind caused the surface water to move downwind at a high velocity, ultimately forcing all that water to get back to windward along the bottom (or lower portion) of the bay. Thus, some of the full-keelers were turning almost sideways and appeared to be “leeway-ing” themselves to windward. Really strange.

Of course, the problem with eliminating chafe is often one of unintended consequences. In the Indian Ocean, I was spending so much time double-reefed that my braided Dacron reef lines were severely chafing in the area of the foot cringle. I put ultra-lightweight high-tech blocks at the cringle, eliminating the line chafe—only to have the flailing blocks start to damage the fabric. 

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. And we’ve just barely scratched the surface of chafe, really. 

For example, I installed my M92B Perkins diesel 12 years ago, with more than an inch between my steering sheeves and the 4-inch exhaust hose above it. Unfortunately, this water-filled hose sagged over the decades and began touching the rough-cast whirling bronze sheeves just beneath. I caught the problem in time, but it could have resulted in dangerous exhaust gases getting belowdecks while one of us slept (and, potentially, didn’t wake up). 

While my engine runs smoothly at rpm, it jiggles like a maniac at idle. Thus, three times in the past 64 years of living aboard, I’ve experienced fuel leaks by the hose or copper fuel tubing coming into unexpected contact with the shaking engine. 

We’ve also overheated from a hose sagging or heeling into a fan belt. Chafe, chafe, chafe. We almost never touch a dock. We live at anchor or on a mooring. Thus, our home is almost never stationary. And the truth is that our boat is filled with hoses, wires and plastic bits. This means that even a rolling soup can will become dangerous if the boat is allowed to roll, roll, roll long enough. 

And we haven’t even touched on dinghies and their davits. Or our Para-Tech sea anchor or Jordan Series drogue. They all come with massive chafe issues.

Yes, experienced seamen and seawomen nobly fight back against King Neptune’s and Mother Ocean’s sickest chafe tricks, but often with scant success. My father used to say, with great sadness, “A greenhorn wanting to install a strap eye in his bunk area just stupidly drills through the top of his water tank about half the time, while an experienced sailor knows that the water tank is there and so carefully measures, and drills through the tank nearly 100 percent of the time.”

And yes, the weirdest stuff happens on boats. Two of my friends were sinking off Panama’s San Blas Islands during a severe gale in the ’80s. Everything in the boat was floating and had clogged the three bilge pumps. They were wading around in waist-high bilge water, attempting to hand-bail with buckets, hour after hour. At midnight, totally exhausted, one said to the other: “This is horrible. What the hell could be worse than this?”

Just then, the poly straps keeping the holding tank in its cradle chafed through. The tank broke loose, twisted off its hose, popped to the surface next to them, and spewed its odiferous contents like a white whale with diarrhea. 

“You had to ask, didn’t you?” the other friend screamed.  “You had to ask!”

The post Fatty Goodlander: Dealing with Chafe While Cruising appeared first on Cruising World.

There are times when turning back while ocean sailing is the best choice, but those times are, hopefully, few and far between. I’ve turned back twice in the past four circumnavigations, and the figure seems about right for a well-prepared vessel attempting to cross an ocean during the correct weather pattern. 

However, turning back often isn’t about the boat or its prep. It’s about the soul of its skipper. 

There are good reasons to return to port: taking on ­water, for example, and ­having no way to remove ­water from your boat, or breaking a piece of your standing rigging, or having your self-steering gear fail. But do note that the first two reasons are strength and safety issues, while the third is a matter of basic seamanship.

If a couple is so fatigued by steering during their entire watch that they can’t eat, sleep or poop properly, they can quickly turn into numbskulls. Trust me on this. I’ve turned into a numbskull many times and almost made stupid decisions that cost our lives. Fatigue offshore is real, and it must be guarded against at all times. 

Take the story of one cruising couple I know. Back in 2000, they turned back to the Galapagos Islands with just 2,700 miles left to go to Fatu Hiva in French Polynesia. Only a fool would sail that vast distance with a Hurst transmission that was acting up, right? 

Perhaps.

Their boat was a typical 40-foot overloaded cruising vessel. Its boot top had been raised three times and needed a fourth. It had two heavy anchors forward and (because of the depth of Polynesian harbors versus Caribbean ones) 250 feet of brand-new 10 mm chain. 

Now, Galapagos is famous for its westbound currents. This particular year, the trade winds were piping up. The couple knew that their boat wasn’t a fast racer, but it always nobly completed the course. Then again, this was before the couple put the “tower of power” aft with the wind/gen, solar cells and radar. And added tankage for water and fuel. Oh, and doubled the amperage of the main battery bank. Plus, all the cruising supplies.

Thus, the two-day sleigh ride downwind and down-­current turned into a six-day slog to windward against wind and current, with the couple seasick and the hatches dogged tight in the tropics. 

Part of the problem was that their reefing system worked well off the wind, but it didn’t allow the mainsail to have enough foot tension in heavy airs upwind. They were dragging a balloon-shaped sail when they needed a flat one. 

But, hey, safety first, right? 

Alas, the Galapagos isn’t a great destination to have major mechanical work done on your boat. The couple were still in Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz, a few months later when all their cruising buddies were in Tahiti, partying their guts out at the (oh, what butt-shaking!) Heiva festival. The anchorage in Santa Cruz was rolly. The local officials smiled nicely as they put out their hands. The harbormaster shrugged and suggested that the couple sail to mainland Ecuador to get the work done, only 650 miles to windward. 

Eventually, the couple was so frustrated that they sailed directly to Tahiti without an engine, slapped in a new, preordered transmission, and then dashed for Nuku’alofa, Tonga, to catch the weather window down to New Zealand. There, for a ­combination of reasons, they sold the boat. 

Did they make the right choice turning back? I don’t know. What I do know is that 200 miles downwind ain’t 200 miles upwind in most overweight cruising vessels. When I later asked them how they enjoyed the Pacific, they asked: “Which part? The rushing part or the twiddling-our-thumbs part?” 

I can’t help but wonder if they would have felt differently if they’d just said, “Well, we don’t really need anything that Joshua Slocum didn’t have” and kept going. We’ll never know. 

About five years ago, other friends of ours left Maine on a 56-foot gold-plater bound for England but turned back after five days. Their hull was watertight, rig up, keel down, and the CD player still worked. But still, they turned back. 

Why? Their brand-new radar didn’t work, nor did their super-duper sophisticated watermaker or a couple of other new electronics. Water had, somehow, worked its way into the wiring that the shipyard had just installed. Oh, and there was a ­problem with the new lithium batteries—something about the system monitor. 

Luckily, the untouched starting battery still worked, but the most discouraging problem was a low-tech one. Their 8-year-old hatches, while totally watertight in ­vertical rain, leaked badly as the boat twisted in the boarding seas. The forepeak was awash. Even the skipper’s bunk was soggy. 

Now, because they’d left early in the season and had nearly unlimited funds, you’d think they’d have returned to the dock and hired an experienced marine electrician to sort things out. They didn’t. Instead, they returned to the dock and booked themselves into a coastal resort—never to mention their desire to go trans-Atlantic again, not that year or the next. 

Which is fine; they either got scared or didn’t enjoy it. And soon, some lucky sea gypsy might get a nice boat at an affordable price. But imagine if they had pulled into Bermuda and had a wonderful, exciting time while they casually dealt with their issues in between snorkeling trips to the reef. And then hopped to the Azores and, ultimately, wintered in the Mediterranean. 

The owner had expected, after all the money and time he’d spent, that every aspect of the cruise would go smoothly. But what he experienced was reality, not expectation. The marine environment is a harsh one for electronics, especially ­untested units that haven’t been through a shakedown. 

Turning back, in my humble experience, is often a worried captain turning his back on the trip and the dream. And we are nothing without our dreams. Of course, I wasn’t there and shouldn’t second-guess those folks who were. All I know is that I’ve crossed many oceans without any of the stuff they lacked, and I was happy to do it. 

Which brings us to the subject of fear. 

Fear is good. It helps keep us alive. And there’s no denying that being on a small boat on a large ocean can be scary. It’s true—we don’t have gills. 

But when it comes to fear offshore, 95 percent of the time, it’s blamed on the boat, yet boats don’t fear. Their skippers do. Their crews do. 

Fear is weird. I always go offshore with a storm trysail. I believe that many sailors bristle at the idea of buying such a wonderful, bulletproof, easy-to-set sail because they don’t want to acknowledge the fact that they might actually end up in weather that requires it.

And fear is contagious. I nip it in the bud whenever possible. Just one too-timid member of the crew can ruin the cruise for all. (I immediately assign jobs to the “we’re all gonna die” crewmember to see if I can make him too tired to stoke the fear in others.) 

Of course, I’m not saying that you should never turn back. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve turned back twice, and issued a mayday once. Am I proud of issuing that mayday? No. Did I do it lightly? No. Would I do it again? Yes. 

We were in heavy weather at night in the lower Caribbean during the 1970s, and the trade winds were howling into the high 20s and low 30s. I could see a freighter’s dim lights to leeward. I checked our main bilge. It was almost dry. We were under jib and jigger (­mizzen). Then we tacked. Within two minutes, our bilge alarm went off. I visually checked, and we had a lot of water in the main bilge. How could that be? I pumped it out, but it took a long time. 

I tasted the water. It was salt, not fresh. The best-case scenario would have been a water tank that burst. I stationed Carolyn forward and myself aft. I then shut off the sucking bilge pump to determine whether the leak was aft or forward. It was neither. And, two minutes later, we had another bilge full of water. 

There was a major point of water ingress in my boat somewhere, and my battery bank was in the engine compartment. 

A strong gust hit us, and we buried the leeward rail. We were held down like that for many minutes. And I could no longer see the freighter. 

Was our only chance of assistance or a radio relay to the US Coast Guard getting farther away with each passing minute? I called mayday. A local captain came back immediately. He was skippering an interisland freighter transiting from Venezuela. I gave him the pertinent information (from a little plastic card I kept by our VHF radio) and then asked him to stand by on Channel 16. He agreed. 

Once our trusty, extra-large submersible bilge pump sucked dry again, I had Carolyn switch it off while I shone a portable spotlight on the pump. It was immediately apparent to me that the pump was back-siphoning—sucking an inch and a half of raw seawater back into our bilge. 

I shut off the bilge pump’s seacock, confirmed that we were no longer sinking, and called back the West Indian fellow standing by on Channel 16 to cancel our emergency message. Actually, we repeatedly canceled it at five-minute intervals just to make sure, and we requested that the freighter (greater antenna height and, thus, greater range) do so as well. 

The truth is that most offshore ­passages that fail do so at the dock, with poor preparation. But most transoceanic voyages have a few surprises that are unfortunate and disconcerting. This is just the reality of cruising offshore. And the farther a person is from an emergency room, the more these surprises stand out in importance. 

If you want everything perfect—and all the conveniences of home—don’t go out there. And if, for some reason, the topic of abandoning ship or turning back comes up while offshore, the skipper should convey confidence and firmly tamp down such chatter. I’m a big, big ­believer in ­democracy ashore but not afloat. Somebody has to call the shots and bear the responsibility for the voyage, and that someone is the captain, not the greenest, most fearful lubber aboard. 

Not sure about this? Then consider the people from the 1979 Fastnet race who got into their life rafts, never to be seen again, while their vessels ultimately survived.

If there’s a semi-legitimate reason (or, more likely, reasons) to turn back, then ask yourself, What’s changed? Is it unneeded creature comforts? Or a real strength and safety issue? Tough out the former; respect the latter. 

And look deep within yourself. Are you fearful? If you are, is that fear warranted? If so, take logical, seamanlike steps to mitigate your circumstance. If not, take internal steps to mitigate your fear. In layman’s terms, chill, dude.

An adventurer should be brutally honest with himself or herself. There is no greater advantage in survival situations. Cowards really do die a thousand deaths. A brave man? Only one. 

Sailing offshore involves a certain amount of risk. It would be silly to deny that. But aboard a well-found vessel in the right ocean at the right time, that risk is acceptable if we don’t allow clips of Jaws to take up residence in our heads. 

Fatty Goodlander and his cottage-cheese stomach have been racing Lasers lately, with Carolyn in the dinghy at the finish line asking: “What happened? Did you get lost?”

Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed in On Watch are those of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Cruising World. We welcome feedback and differing points of view, which can be directed to editor@cruisingworld.com.

The post The Pros and Cons of Turning Back appeared first on Cruising World.

It is difficult to describe the utter devastation of a Category 5 storm such as Hurricane Irma because any accurate attempt seems like wild exaggeration. An 80-foot twin-engine catamaran with a generator and full fuel tanks blowing through the air like a 40-foot-wide tumbleweed? A 50-foot monohull whose barometer momentarily functioned as an altimeter before the boat landed on the roof of a government building? Entire harbors a sea of blue from the antifouling of the capsized rental catamarans?

Crazy, right?

Thatcher Lord and his wife, Vicki, couldn’t believe their eyes on September 6, 2017, as they forced open the door of their battered home enough to escape. The hillside on St. John, in the US Virgin Islands, appeared to have burned, as if magically incinerated during the torrential rains. There wasn’t a speck of greenery. Mighty trees were gone. Ditto the stone walls of sugar plantations that had stood for centuries. Thousands of houses were now mere smears in the dirt. Giant trucks had been swept into the sea. There were businesses so flattened that you couldn’t tell where they’d once been. Whole roads had slid into the valleys below.

“We’ll never make it, Thatch,” Vicki recalls telling her husband. “Bjork Creek is too far. Besides, sections of the road are missing and the rest of Centerline is so cluttered with debris that transiting it is more a climb than a hike.”

“I just want a look,” she remembers Thatcher telling her doggedly, as he climbed over the trunk of a tree in the middle of the asphalt in front of their house. “I know there’ll be damage. That’s a given. All I want is to make sure she’s floating. That’s all.”

Thatcher is a soft-spoken man, though the softness of his words somehow communicates strength. He wouldn’t be able to sleep until he knew his beloved Rhodes Reliant 41-foot fiberglass yawl, Trinka, was OK. They’d owned her for nearly three decades. All their spare time had been lavished on her; all their pennies too.

About two hours into the eastward hike down Centerline Road, Thatcher crested a pile of debris that had once been someone’s house and came face to face with Bad Nate. St. John is a small island with only a few thousand residents. Bad Nate’s eyes were dilated, and his teeth chattered as if he’d been staring into hell’s fires.

“She’s gone,” he croaked to Thatcher.

“What do you mean, gone?” Thatcher asked.

“Gone as in not there,” Bad Nate said. “Only one boat survived in Bjork Creek, the red-hulled Shibumi.”

Shibumi was owned by Dick Burks and Mary Tyler, two of Thatcher and Vicki’s best friends. Thatcher was happy to hear their boat had survived, even if the news came in such a backhanded, gut-wrenching manner.

Vicki was a few strides behind, but she’d heard as well. Worse, she’d seen Thatcher flinch as if he’d been whipped. Vicki wondered if her husband could handle all the drama, all the stress. He’d spent a decade wrestling with cancer, which he may have licked. But the long hospital stays and the bone-marrow transplant had drained them emotionally, physically and financially. Thatcher was a shadow of his former strapping self.

Two hours later, they rounded the point by Estate Zootenvaal and peered into Bjork Creek. Bad Nate had been right but also wrong. Trinka had been lost, but Thatcher knew exactly where she was: directly under those masts standing above the water that he’d once taken apart and reglued himself.

Thatcher waded into the now-still creek and swam out to his boat. Trinka was hard to look at. There was something obscene about her this way. It was too intimate, as if he should, as a gentleman sailor, glance away. He dived down and felt her wounds. She was holed and cracked and crushed. Sections of her transom had been eaten. Huge chunks of her rails had been pounded off. Only a tiny bit of her transom protruded forlornly above the water.

It wasn’t a judgment call. If she’d been insured, she’d be a total write-off, but of course, she wasn’t. It made no sense to attempt to fix her; the cost in both money and time would be astronomical.

“What do you think?” Vicki recalls asking from the shore.

“What do I think?” Thatcher snapped. “I think I want to cry.”

Over the course of the next month, Vicki researched their situation. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers quickly started removing all the sunken vessels in nearby Coral Bay without charge, Bjork Creek was in National Park Service waters. Almost a year would go by before the NPS would bring in a crane. So, in a sense, the Lords could do nothing but walk away.

But somehow walking away to callously leave Trinka’s corpse on display for a year didn’t seem right.

Thatcher bristled at the idea. He couldn’t decide whether to do the logical, sensible thing or the silly thing, so he asked a few of his knowledgeable friends for their opinion. I was one. I dinghied out to Bjork Creek and looked at the remains of the now brown-and-green Trinka. Then I gave him advice: “Forget it, Thatch,” I said. “It would take years and every penny you have, maybe every penny you will ever have.”

It was unanimous. Everyone agreed. Walk away, Thatcher, walk away!

And Thatcher agreed. But then, one afternoon, he and Vicky were driving past the Coral Bay Lumber yard, and, on a lark, Thatcher pulled in. A West Indian friend named Rupert greeted them with a wide smile. Thatcher asked if they had fir 6-by-6-inch lumber, 20 feet long. Rupert said they did.

Vicki was shocked to see Thatcher’s credit card flash in his hand. And so, the project began.

Plugging the major hole underwater with a sheet of plywood and Vicki’s yoga mat wasn’t easy. Thatcher found he could hold his breath long enough, but it was difficult to stay in place with the awkward materials. His friend Dick Burks dived into Bjork Creek to assist and held onto the side of the slimy cap rail of the sunken boat. Thatcher then dived underwater and sort of allowed Dick to stand on his shoulders to keep Thatcher in place with some stability. It was tough work. It took many hours. They managed.

Then came raising the sunken boat with float bags, bringing her to surface, and pumping her out.

A month underwater hadn’t been kind to Trinka. She looked like a slimy prop in a horror movie. And she apparently seemed angry at having been disturbed. The next day when they returned to the creek, she was on the bottom again. And a few days later, again she sank! But Thatcher was totally committed to the rebuild. He’d stay the course—even if it killed him.

“Once I purchased the big timbers for the cradle,” Thatcher said later, “that was it. I knew that if I started, I’d have to complete the project. Once I began, failing wouldn’t be an option.”

As mentioned, Dick and Mary of Shibumi were friends with the Lords, but that is an understatement. Dick and Mary were delighted to still have their home afloat, and translated that joy into hard, sustained work assisting in Trinka’s reincarnation. They didn’t just “kinda” help salvage the graceful yawl; they and a dozen other St. Johnians pitched in for days, weeks, months—and a few for years—of regular labor.

Once Trinka was moved from Bjork to nearby Coral Bay, work began in earnest. It was December, and Thatcher, a wood butcher and furniture-maker by trade, sliced and diced up the 6-by-6s to fashion a cradle that wasn’t merely strong enough to support the heavy-displacement Trinka, but it was also rugged enough to be dragged ashore with her in it.

Read More about Vicki, Thatcher and Trinka: Virgin Island Sailors Bounce Back

If building the cradle ashore weren’t difficult enough, it had to be floated out to Trinka, then weighed down and sunk so that Trinka could be loaded into it.

In mid-January, four months into the two-year project, the boat was firmly fastened in the cradle and she was skidded out of the water on plywood, using come-alongs and tractors, not to mention the help of half of the island community, both West Indian and continental.

Like the West Indians say, “Hurricanes blow all skin one color!”

While Thatcher stared at all the hull damage, Vicki and Mary went inside the dripping vessel with buckets and worked for three days. Wearing the same odoriferous clothes, they mucked the mud, oil, grease and diesel fuel out of the interior. Stinking barnacles were everywhere. Pieces of Thatcher’s six-string guitar floated in the bilge, along with a shoe and bits of the Lords’ Maine wedding pictures.

“I couldn’t think of all the projects required,” Thatcher confessed. “It was too daunting, too impossible. I just did one thing at a time. I didn’t look ahead; I just looked down, and put one foot in front of the other.

The big hole in the hull was gaping, and had lots of compound curves, so he made a mold and fiberglassed over it. Then he removed the mold and glassed the other side. Then, and only then, did he think about the cracks, another hole and the pulverized area by the rail.

Most of the bulkheads were salvageable, but much of the interior plywood was delaminated. The settee, galley and all the cabinetry had rippled from the immersion. Thatcher laboriously cut it way with a chisel until he found good wood.

He had some bits of luck. He stumbled into a pile of air-dried Burmese teak. The owner of a destroyed CSY 44 sold him its mainmast cheap. Thatched used the Sitka spruce from his box-section mainmast to repair his mizzen mast. And a sad sailor on St. Thomas had a brand-new 30 hp Yanmar diesel still in the carton because his boat had sunk before he could install it. One man’s bad luck is another man’s good.

Thatcher had built his house primarily because he wanted a woodworking shop. It was here he band-sawed teak planks into 1/16-inch slices, attached them temporarily to other blocks of wood, and then ran them through his joiner/planer, making his own teak veneer.

He and Vicki worked side by side, day after day. When they began, she wondered if this project would, literally, kill Thatcher. But as the months wore on, she realized that her husband was no longer obsessing about his health because he had Trinka to worry about. He became stronger and more confident. He not only gained weight, he gained muscle. Within a year, Thatcher once again resembled the handsome Viking he’d once been.

He tossed in the new engine, and replaced all the wiring, plumbing and tankage. There was a new stove and LED fixtures, along with solar panels and controllers, of course. All the sailing and nav instruments were deep-sixed and replaced as finances permitted. Ditto the windlass and roller furler. While he was at it, why not replace the original chainplates? Thatcher wasn’t making Trinka as good as new—she’d be even better.

The longer the project dragged on, and the more the local landlubbers thought Thatcher and Vicki were crazy, the more local Caribbean sailors chipped in to help. It was almost as if Trinka had morphed into the local sailing community’s vessel; Vick and Thatch just happened to skipper her. And when the work was done, it seemed as though the whole island showed up for the flag-snapping launch.

Then, on Christmas Day 2019, they went sailing—Vicki, Thatcher and Trinka. Crazy, right?

The Goodlanders are staying put in Singapore these days and enjoying time with the grandkids.

The post On Watch: Reincarnating Trinka appeared first on Cruising World.

A seasoned skipper and sailboat that has successfully anchored in the Caribbean might not have the gear or expertise to safely anchor in the Pacific. Why? Because the anchorages in the Bahamas and Lesser Antilles are generally benign, with shallow depth, white sand, no swell, few katabatic gusts and zero current. Not so, say, in French Polynesia.

I recently spent a month anchored in Huahine in the Society Islands and was surrounded by dragging sailboats. Anchoring here looks so easy on Google Earth, but it’s extremely challenging in this section of the actual planet Earth. Every single evening, the crews of large vessels (many high-windage single- and double-hulled chartered bareboats) return after a night at the waterfront bars of the main village of Fare to discover that their boat has gone on walkabout. This requires these bewildered crews (if lucky) to find their vessel in the dark, board it in possibly rough conditions, get it underway in treacherous, reef-strewn waters in the pitch-black of night, and then safely ­reanchor it in a crowded harbor—no easy task.

Why?

The reason is simple: They anchor for the conditions they are currently experiencing, not the conditions they will experience. I repeat: A seasoned sailor realizes that he must anchor to withstand the wind and sea conditions he might get, not the conditions he is currently in.

Conditions change. We know this. These changes must be anticipated.

Is it possible to anchor safely in Huahine? Absolutely! We’ve had no ­problem (other than people hitting us), and not one fully crewed charter boat manned by a Polynesian skipper (that we know of) has dragged. Does it require unusual or extraordinary gear? No, all that is needed is regular rode and hook—well, a generous amount of chain helps.

Most of the visiting boats arrive from Raiatea or Bora Bora in the afternoon. Afternoons are generally pleasant in July, the season most sailors pass through. Navigation is easy—the white sand jumps out from the deep blue water, and the hundreds of coral heads are easy to spot.

Basically, new arrivals tend to anchor in a millpond and immediately go ashore. This is one of the friendliest isles imaginable. They meet some locals, fall in love, and everyone retires to the Huahine Yacht Club for a wonderful night of local music and food, and laughter.

Alas, every single evening for days on end, we had katabatic wind gusts over 30 knots, and three evenings, the gusts reached 40 knots. Please understand, these are not the winds offshore, which are generally in the 18- to 22-knot range. They are the savage stop-and-go gusts from the high mountains and low ­valleys of the Haabai area. Of course, any cruising vessel properly anchored should be able to withstand a 30-knot gust. However, a 30-plus-knot gust is much easier to survive from a 20-knot steady breeze versus no wind and then howling. Why? Because your relaxed boat and its chain rode will build up a lot of speed and inertia before it suddenly comes up short. This can, and regularly does, snatch out anchors that have too little scope or too short a snubber.

And all of this takes place inside the lagoon, which, as a child, I thought would offer 360-degree protection; as an adult, I now realize it’s also a 360-degree dead lee shore. Basically, you can’t drag for long off the town anchorage of Fare without hitting another vessel, rock or reef.

But that’s not the whole of it. The moment the wind comes up, the seas build and slop over the windward (east) side of the reef. Each wave contains millions of gallons of water, and all this water has to exit the lagoon somehow and fast. Thus, one’s almost always anchored in some current, and occasionally in more than 4 knots of it.

This means that no vessel in the harbor is lying downwind of its anchor, and some deep-draft monohulls of traditional design can be tide-bound, transom facing into the wind. Centerboarders sometimes lie ahull sideways to the wind. And often catamarans scribe huge circles around their anchors at high rates of speed. (One night we saw a Catana smash into a steel boat, and the sound of the crash almost sickened me.)

Some of the local boats or experienced New Zealanders who regularly cruise these waters have small anti-hunt sails they hoist off their backstay to prevent their vessels from scribing circles when wind and current oppose. We are ketch-rigged on Ganesh, and hoisting our mizzen often either stops this completely or greatly exaggerates it. Given that, we never go ashore with our mizzen sail up in case conditions change.

And, oh, wait—we’re not done. While all the boats anchored off Fare appear to be in a group, they are actually anchored differently. About half are anchored in 8 feet of water, and the other half are anchored in 65 feet of water. Wow!

Now any sailor worth his salt knows the importance of scope: You have to have enough rope or chain deployed to anchor safely. I use a Rocna anchor with 7-to-1 scope when I can, and 5-to-1 when I must. This means that in 65 feet of water, I must deploy 350 feet of chain to safely anchor at the minimum 5-to-1 scope, or 490 feet of chain to anchor with a safety margin of 7-to-1 scope.

That’s a lot of chain. I carry only 225 feet of it, because otherwise my boat goes bow-down and begins to hobbyhorse excessively at sea. True, I have numerous nylon rodes I can add, but this makes retrieving the complicated mess in the middle of the night (say with a 30-foot-wide catamaran jammed on our bow) difficult.

Thus, I avoid anchoring in difficult conditions in 65 feet of water.

I also know that most (but maybe not all) recreational sailing craft anchoring ahead of me in 65 feet of water haven’t planned for 7-to-1 scope or 5-to-1 scope; more likely they’re at 3-to-1 or less, which is totally inadequate for the conditions they will soon face.

Now some Cruising World readers have very sharp pencils and are jumping up and down in protest because my scope numbers are wrong: 65 times 5 isn’t 350, but rather 325! Why am I being so sloppy with the numbers?

I’ll get to that in a second.

My ketch draws 6 feet, and in the ­lagoon, I was anchored in 8 feet of water, so I deployed 65 feet of chain plus my ­nylon snubber. Excessive? No, it’s minimal. I should have paid out 91 feet for 7-to-1 scope. Why? Because scope is calculated from the bow roller to the bottom, not by the depth of the water.

Think this doesn’t matter? Think again.

Anchored near us is a centerboard Skipjack-esque vessel (it looks like a Tarpon Springs sponge boat) with a large amount of sheer and a long bowsprit pointing skyward. It’s anchored in only 3 feet of water but requires about the same amount of scope as we do in 8 feet because its side-roller chock is so high above the water on its bowsprit.

There’s another factor: I was anchored on the edge of a sandy shelf, with my anchor well dug into the bottom, in 8 feet, as I said, and eventually with 7-to-1 scope out. So it was almost impossible to anchor ahead of me on this ledge because you couldn’t put out enough scope. Still, two boats anchored in 65 feet of water dragged back toward me until their anchors caught.

This “uphill” anchoring didn’t make me happy because the skippers of these boats couldn’t put out proper scope without hitting me, so they left their rodes as they were, though they were still in deeper water. If the wind reversed, they’d both drag back downhill and then go on walkabout.

In such a situation, what’s my ­responsibility as a cruiser? Tell them? Don’t tell them? Get in a fistfight or anchorment—er, I mean, argument?

I’ve found, from long experience, that the best thing to do is move. I ignore who is right or who is wrong and who anchored first; I just leave and reanchor my vessel safely. I have no right to tell others how or where to anchor, but I do, most certainly, have an obligation to anchor my boat safely. And that means moving when others anchor improperly around me.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying to not anchor in Huahine. I recommend you do, because this island is one of the nicest places in French Polynesia. And it is certainly possible because we never dragged, and none of the local skippers do either.

How do you do it?

You need a lot of chain because the Pacific is so much deeper than the Caribbean. I’m often forced to anchor in 80 feet of water in this ocean. Never have I considered such a thing in the Caribbean. (In northern Tonga, I managed to anchor in 105 feet for a month!)

And then you have to anchor far away from others. This usually isn’t a problem, but the fact of the matter is that someone without knowledge of any of the above might anchor right next to you and there’s nothing you can do (save move).

Example: My writer friend Dudley Pope of the Lord Ramage series wanted to finish his novel, so he purchased three spools of nylon line and anchored in more than 100 feet of water off Virgin Gorda. Just as he was tidying up, a Morgan Out Island 41 bareboat dropped its hook right next to him. With a smile, Dudley asked politely, “Do you realize you’re anchoring in over 100 feet of water?”

“No problem,” its not-yet-sunburnt skipper hollered back. “We only draw 4!”

Remember: Anchoring is the bedrock skill of sailors. Once mastered, the world is your oyster. But it can be tricky, especially at night, in Huahine, when the katabatic gusts blow.

Cap’n Fatty and Carolyn Goodlander are sitting out the pandemic aboard their ketch, Ganesh, in Singapore. You can read more about Fatty’s thoughts on dropping the hook in his book Creative Anchoring, available online.

The post Anchoring in Paradise appeared first on Cruising World.

There are three situations where I greatly appreciate my old-fashioned ketch rig on our present boat, Ganesh: under sail, under power and while anchored. Truth be told, for the entire 23 years that I owned my sloop-rigged S&S-designed Wild Card, I had mizzen envy. Sad!

What, in layman’s terms, is a ketch? Basically, it is a sloop with slightly smaller main and jib set slightly more forward on a main mast, with a mizzen sail aft that’s carried on a second spar. Thus, the ketch has roughly the same sail area spread over a longer span and in smaller chunks. What’s the difference between a ketch and a yawl? The ketch has a comparatively larger mizzen than the yawl, and the ketch’s mizzen mast is set forward of where the rudder post bisects the waterline rather than aft of it.

What good is a mizzen mast at anchor? Plenty good! One, it can hold cool stuff such as nav lights, aft-deck spreader lights, anchor light, radar dome, PA speakers, wind generator, exterior stereo speakers and a radar reflector. It also serves as a small hoisting crane aft. We can haul up our 9.8 hp Tohatsu outboard using our mizzen boom—though some boats require a boom extension (think sliding pole inside) to do so easily. Some skippers clap a block and tackle on the mizzen if they need to hoist an injured crewmember back aboard.

Anything else? Sure! With the mizzen sail hoisted, it can passively dampen the roll in two ways: through air resistance and by changing the vessel’s angle to the swell. Will the mizzen eliminate anchorage roll? No, but at times it can make a considerable difference by knocking the boat off its natural roll period, with dramatic effect.

Just recently, we were anchored in a windy harbor in Indonesia, with a building breeze and an increasing swell working its way around the point. In the early morning we were fine, but by midday, we were uncomfortable moving around below. My first move was to hoist our fully battened mizzen with decent halyard and outhaul tension, then sheet it home hard. (It is intentionally cut flat.) Next, I added two preventers to the boom ends to immobilize it.

RELATED: On Watch: Clearing In

This made a noticeable difference, and I forgot about the roll until later that afternoon when the wind was really piping up and the sea had built accordingly. My next move was to run a line forward from the mizzen boom end to the bow, and crank the mizzen boom to the side I wanted the boat to turn. This further steadied the vessel in two ways. First, it made the bow turn more into the swell, which reduced the roll. Second, it put a constant additional wind pressure into the mix. Both helped steady the boat.

Of course, if the wind had built further, I’d have deployed my twin flopper-stoppers from my two downwind pole ends. But in this case, just the mizzen was ample enough to dampen the roll into an OK-we-can-live-with-it zone.

Some people think of the mizzen mast as an obstruction. I think of it as something to hold on to, clip on to, and brace against. I even like the mizzen shrouds—one last chance to catch a handhold before the deep blue sea.

In many instances, I think of my mizzen sail as an air rudder. Simply by sheeting it in and easing it out, I can change the center of effort of the sails in relationship to the hull’s center of lateral resistance. That’s something a sloop cannot do as readily.

If I need to drift straight backward from a mooring, I hoist the full mizzen and full staysail, and put crew on both to pull and push as I steer backward. It is amazing how far I can get astern before my bow pays off in a consistent moderate breeze.

When sailing off the hook with the mizzen, I can always be sure of which tack I will pay off on. If this isn’t too important, I just turn the helm and push the mizzen boom to the desired side. If it is important, I pre-rig and pre-cant the vessel by running a line forward from the mizzen boom end through the bow hawsehole and adjust the sail accordingly.

I’ve seen schooners in Maine reverse under sail quite a way. But the very best at this was Garry Hoyt on his Freedom 40 cat ketch. Why, he could back up that “ting, mon” like a car, during Antigua Sailing Week.

I’m now 68 years old, and I must admit, my heavy mainsail is beginning to intimidate me. As a result, my wife, Carolyn, and I seldom fly it. If broad- reaching, we toss up our nylon mizzen staysail instead. It is almost the same size, and is a snap to hoist and douse in comparison to the main.

While I don’t usually carry my mizzen staysail dead downwind because of the efficiency of my twin downwind trade-wind jibs, I do occasionally carry it on a beam reach.

The thing I like best about a ketch is being able to, in heavy air, just get rid of the mainsail, and still sail well under mizzen and staysail, with the ability to tack smartly even in a lull. Yes, we can round down and jibe as well, but this takes considerably more sea room.

But if I’m sailing into a harbor or onto a mooring with Ganesh and the wind is moderate to fresh, I come in under jib and jigger (the term we used back in the day) with good control.

Of course, a mizzen takes some getting used to, especially if you’re using a windvane for steering. Most windvanes don’t like mizzens or mainsails; they want all the sails far forward for easier steering. In gusty conditions, I have to take down my mizzen while broad-reaching; if I don’t, the boat will attempt to round up.

However, on Ganesh, I’m often able to fly the mizzen while our Monitor windvane steers dead downwind in moderate conditions, perhaps because of our nearly full keel. Regardless of gusts, there is seldom a problem flying a properly sized mizzen (we have three sets of reefs), with the wind from beam-on to closehauled.

Since the mizzen is so easy to hoist and douse, we use it a lot. Its steadying force often helps the efficiency of our other sails.

Let’s be honest. As a cruiser, I’m not tweaking my vessel nearly as much as when I’m on the racecourse. In fact, while underway, over half the time I adjust my sail controls, it isn’t to go faster but to go better: with less chafe, roll and noise.

What’s the downside of a ketch? Basically, speed. Two sails of a given total square footage are more efficient than three adding up to the same size. There’s also more weight aloft and aft, both bad locations that promote hobby horsing and wallowing.

If the ketch isn’t well- designed, the mainsail will backwind the mizzen, and the only solution will be to drop the smaller sail or head lower on your course.

However, a properly designed modern ketch can be very weatherly, and develop enough extra horsepower off the wind to pay for itself.

The mizzen mast, shrouds and sails all have windage. There’s no denying that. If I was going to sail primarily upwind or in light air, I would not consider a traditional ketch. Why lug around the extra gear to little advantage?

However, as a serial circumnavigator and confirmed trade-wind sailor, all the windage of the mizzen is just additional sail area 99 percent of the time.

The real day in, day out advantage of the mizzen is that you can easily dial in your weather helm. Is the rudder fighting you in the gusts and does your vessel want to round up? If so, just ease the mizzen until the helm is almost (but not quite) neutral. It’s one string, right? Easy peasy, no?

Do you have lee helm and the boat feels like it is almost refusing to go to windward? If so, sheet in the mizzen until a faint weather helm emerges. (Test this by letting go of the wheel or tiller and watching the boat slowly round up.)

In light air, a ketch offers few advantages, and in light air to windward, even fewer still. But let the breeze pipe up and a ketch comes into its own. Smaller sails are easier to douse, furl and stow. Once the mainsail is taken care of and the jib is rolled up, the mizzen and staysail can drive our vessel through a gale with relatively little force on the mainmast, shrouds and stays.

This also means Ganesh stays more upright. No sailor likes to live on his ear for too long on passage.

Both mizzen and staysail sails are inboard and thus easy to handle in hard conditions. Our mizzen is not only fully battened, but also has lazy jacks to guide it into its stack pack, making the sail a dream to douse from a broad reach to closehauled. (However, with the battens and a large roach, the sail can be a handful if I attempt to douse it dead downwind in heavy air.)

Different mizzen masts are stayed differently. Ours has a big footprint on deck with running backstays for use in gale-force conditions. It is strong. How strong? We often heave to under mizzen alone without worry, in winds ranging from 15 to 33 knots. This isn’t as safe as heaving to with our storm trysail, but it’s a good, quick-and-dirty way to ride out a sustained squall.

Another cool thing is that we can easily remove our tabernacle-stepped mizzen spar by tilting it aft and controlling it with the higher main halyard while lowering it, all the while with the loose shrouds attached.

We even use the mizzen under power to dampen our roll because it is the quickest and easiest sail to deploy.

Of course, everything is relative. There can be too much of a good thing. I know a guy who tosses up a mizzen mast on every sloop that he buys—an installation that is trickier than it might appear. But on a well-designed sloop, a mizzen isn’t needed because of the location of the single mast, while on a ketch it is needed by design, given where the main is set.

To my mind, our mizzen mast really pays for itself aboard Ganesh, as it does on other old-fashioned, two-masted cruising tubs. In fact, I write these words on deck under an awning held up by—you guested it—my mizzen boom!

Cap’n Fatty and Carolyn Goodlander are currently cruising Southeast Asia.

The post On Watch: Mizzen Smitten appeared first on Cruising World.

In October 1975, while building our 36-foot ketch Carlotta from scratch, I happened to pick up a copy of National Geographic magazine featuring Borneo. On its cover was what appeared to me to be a sexy hippy chick, with a cute female orangutan on her hip and another on the ground in front of her. The standing orangutan was named Princess. It turns out the women’s name was Dr. Birutè Galdikas, a ­primatologist and conservationist, which I discovered as soon as I actually stopped to read the story.

But it was that image that spoke directly to me, not merely because of how foxy the doctor looked, but because of its deep-in-the-jungle exoticness. Though I was 23, dead broke, and the lease on our B Street and Congress building site in Boston was expiring, my desire at that time was to sail to the farthest corners of our world. I saw the entire planet as my classroom. Surely Borneo, where they were teaching orangutans sign language, would be a good place to start to learn.

So, with the brashness of youth, I convinced my wife, Carolyn, that once we launched our boat, we should sail there—without even knowing exactly where Borneo was, except that it was far, far away from chilly Boston.

Of course, life got in the way. It always does. Our daughter was born. Hurricanes loomed. Boats sank and others were refloated. Taxes needed to be paid. More shore jobs were offered than I had the energy to turn down. And I’m slow—slow on all levels. But I’m also tenacious, and I clutch my dreams fiercely. Thus, 26 years later, in 2001, I tossed my anchor in the muddy Kumai River across from a sleepy village on Borneo’s south coast, with a lone barefoot man in a dugout canoe rowing toward us.

His name was Herman Herry Roustaman. He was small in stature but huge in personality. He exuded both charm and warmth, and his lust for living was contagious. “What you need, Skipper—you need diesel fuel?”

I admitted I did.

“No problem, Skip!” he said as he grabbed my two fuel jugs, tossed them into his wobbly dug-out, and graciously cleared a place for me amid the bilge water and floating fish guts.

I grimaced as I sat down (while silently cursing myself for going commando that day).

We chatted. I immediately liked him. He was wildly enthusiastic. His grandiose dream was to lure away the local loggers (and thus stop their habitat destruction) with renewable and sustainable profits from tourism. This was all well and good, but I thought that, perhaps, he should first organize the buying of a pair of shoes.

He rowed me to a 55-gallon drum on the shore. It had some oily black fluid floating it in, along with what appeared to be some leaves and a dead rat.

“How many gallons would you like, Skip?” he asked.

I informed Herry that I could buy only clean, filtered diesel fuel. He frowned, thought about it a second, then whipped off his T-shirt, stretched its cotton fabric over his funnel, and poured away.

How can anyone not love such an entrepreneur?

“You like orangutans?” Herry asked as he poured. “I have friend with riverboat, and he likes to cook. We all go see orangutans?”

Actually, bits of this convoluted tale began in Africa at about the same time we were building our boat in Boston. In the early 1970s, the highly charismatic Louis Leakey, a British paleoanthropologist and archaeologist working in Kenya, took time out from digging up skulls from his African backyard to send three idealistic women into the world to save the great apes. You probably already know the life stories of two of those dynamic women. Dian Fossey (of Gorillas in the Mist fame) studied gorillas in Rwanda until she was tragically killed by poachers in 1985. And Jane Goodall has won a number of prestigious international awards for her work with chimpanzees. However, few folks know the name Birutè Galdikas. Why? Because Goodall and Fossey were forced to shake the Western money tree to fund their research, while Galdikas just nonchalantly climbed into a tree in Indonesia and started teaching orphaned baby orangutans how to build nests in order to survive in the wild.

She didn’t play the ­big-­money fundraising game. She quietly went her own way, did her own thing, and never kowtowed to “The Man”; she let it all hang out from atop lofty, swaying trees.

In order to understand the lifelong dedication of Galdikas, you have to understand orangutans. They live to be more than 50 years old. Their young are entirely dependent on their mothers; the fathers play no role in their upbringing. Up until the age of four, they don’t even let go of their mothers. By seven, if they’ve learned their lessons well, they’ll begin to play farther and farther from their mother, until one day—they’re gone.

They’ve graduated.

How does Galdikas find her wards? What are some common reasons orangutans are orphaned? For some, it’s due to intentionally set or accidental forest fires. Mothers are killed by loggers, or some by palm-oil farmers.

Galdikas’ goal wasn’t to take care of orphaned orangutans—it was exactly the opposite. It was to truly mother and mentor them, to teach the babies how to be themselves and to learn the skills needed to survive in the wild. For ­example, orangutans build a new nest in a new location each day. Thus, nest building is a mandatory, life-enabling skill. Galdikas has built thousands of nests over the years for the edification of hundreds of freedom-aspiring orangutans.

To say this is labor-intensive is a huge understatement. The doctor is nothing if not resolute. She has literally hung in there despite the fact that male orangutans are eight times stronger than their human counterparts, and she often must work with them far off the ground.

No scientist before or since has attempted such a thing for such a sustained period of time, let alone been responsible for 250 clueless baby orangutans returning to the wild as budding adults.

It was into this strange world that we arrived in 2001 with our new buddy-for-life and river-guide-forever Herry at our side. The moment we stepped onto the dock at Camp Leakey, the Orangutan Foundation International’s rehabilitation center founded by Galdikas, we were greeted by a friendly female orangutan making weird gang-member signs at me.

Yes, I’d finally met Princess, who wasn’t merely still alive but in the prime of life.

Herry watched her intently, then informed me. “She’s bored and wants to play. Actually, she’d prefer a snack first. Bananas and milk, perhaps?”

“I can’t believe I’m in the presence of, well, magazine royalty,” I laughed. Then I added, “Where’s the hot doctor?”

“Dr. Birutè is…” Herry said as he pointed a finger to the sky and the dense forest canopy above.

Sure, we could interview her, but only if we could find her. And finding the busy doctor in a rainforest is akin to searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack, assuming the haystack is hundreds of feet tall, thousands of hectares wide, and made of hardwood.

Part of the reason that Galdikas the scientist is so elusive is because the National Geographic article in question helped to spark a giant controversy among linguists over what exactly animal- to-human “speech” and “communication” is. More than one linguist accused her interactions with orangutans as overstepping her scientific bounds.

Back in Borneo, Galdikas didn’t climb out of the trees long enough to reply. After all, why bother when she was riveted by her swaying subjects, not the nitpicking greater scientific community.

Luckily, nobody told Princess of the controversy, and she was able to maintain her sunny disposition.

We spent the ensuing days playing with Princess and the other orangutans, and we met many of the Dayak park rangers, most of whom were just a generation or two away from their headhunting ancestors.

We even met Barry the Gibbon, a small ape that looked more like a monkey without a tail than a great ape. He moves through the dense jungle so fast that you can’t see him, only where he’s been by the shaking of the vegetation.

We were absolutely riveted by the entire otherworldly scene in 2001, but our weather window across the Indian Ocean was opening up. As we departed, never having managed to meet Galdikas, we vowed to return to Borneo ASAP—which turned out to be 18 years later, in 2019, in the midst of our latest circumnavigation.

Now, it is always tricky going back to a cruising ­destination that has touched your heart because you’re almost guaranteed to be ­disappointed. But not this time, not for us. Though we’d heard our beloved Princess has passed, if anything, our second visit was better than the first.

Kumai is now a city of 50,000, not a village of 400. Herry not only owns a highly successful regionwide tour agency, but he is also head of the Green Team, a group of environmentally concerned local river and forest guides who chip in their own pennies to buy buffer parcels of land between the orangutans and the palm-oil plantations.

And yes, Herry finally has a pair of shoes. Even better, his hippielike equation suggesting ecology plus orangutans equals wealth is finally coming true for thousands of Indonesians. Illegal logging is way, way down, and the big surging industry in Borneo that is now doing all the hiring is tourism.

Regardless, getting to Camp Leakey is still a ­challenge. First, we putt-putted Ganesh, our 43-foot Wauquiez ketch, 20 miles up the Kumai River. We took pains to anchor well because the reversing currents are strong and the occasional squalls fierce. Then we engaged an around-the-clock guard to sit in the cockpit, with the boat locked and alarmed. We then transferred to a shoal-draft, narrower vessel in which we motored an additional 20 miles up the muddy Sekonyer tributary, until the dense jungle vegetation leaning in from both banks began to slow our progress.

As the jungle closed in on us, proboscis monkeys tittered at our foolishness. Owls thought we were a hoot. Monitor lizards—all 7 feet of them—slithered on the riverbank mere feet away. Poisonous sea snakes poked up their heads with interest. Oriental pied hornbills ­fluttered. Stork-bill ­kingfishers flew up. And mighty trees shook alarmingly in the distance, a promise of huge beasts to come.

Ah, Borneo! You can’t get more primitive here on Earth without a time machine. Shortly after our third crocodile sighting, we came to a familiar dock. It had barely changed in the intervening 18 years.

I was securing our forward spring line as Princess’ son, Percy, approached. He’s 16 now, and like teenagers everywhere, perhaps a bit wary.

We’d never met.

“I used to know your mother back in the day,” I said, standing stock still.

While I dearly love animals, I’m also a human who has survived thus far because I never forget that a wild animal is a wild animal.

Percy approached. I stood my ground and forced myself not to smile. A show of teeth indicates a desire to fight.

Carolyn was more cautious. She stepped back on the boat.

“Careful,” she hissed to me. “Don’t grin, don’t establish eye contact, don’t act aggressive!”

Ah, the tricky social situations you find yourself in while world cruising!

Once Percy got our ­measure, however, there was no problem, other than his openly coveting Carolyn’s iPhone. He even lazily guided us into the reception area.

I couldn’t help but be proud that we were meeting an entirely new generation of orangutans this circumnavigation—and that in primitive Borneo, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Cap’n Fatty and Carolyn Goodlander are now anchored back in their beloved Singapore, aboard their ketch, Ganesh, swinging through the Asian skyscrapers.

The post On Watch: The Two Cover Girls of Borneo appeared first on Cruising World.

We should do something,” my wife, Carolyn, said. “Something special.”

Carolyn is still a party gal. She loves to invite fellow sailors aboard our 43-foot Wauquiez ketch Ganesh or visit on their boats, or even go ashore to mingle with the dirt dwellers. She is far more social than me.

“You mean for our 50th?” I asked. She came aboard my boat in 1968 to sew up my curtains, and has been stitching happiness into my life ever since. We were both 15 years old at the time and, being a gentleman, I waited until she turned 16 to suggest we run away to sea together.

Sadly, she wanted to ­complete high school first. “How middle class,” I had sniffed at the time.

However, patience is a sailor’s virtue.

At age 18, fresh from giving her valedictorian speech at Chicago’s Gage Park High, she stepped aboard my wooden double-ender and said, “Show me the world, skipper.”

I’ve been doing my best ever since.

“Sure,” I said to her, ­resurfacing into current reality. “I’m up for anything on our golden anniversary.”

“Actually, I was thinking of your 60th anniversary of living aboard,” she said. “Lots of married couples are still together after 50 years; very few sailors are on their sixth decade of sailing.”

I’d never thought of it that way. I hadn’t set out to achieve a liveaboard record, merely to have the highest-quality life I could imagine, and share it with the woman I love.

My earliest memories are of growing up aboard the 52-foot Alden schooner Elizabeth—and of the shock of my parents selling her and moving ashore when I was 12. It didn’t take long for me to realize that dirt dwelling wasn’t for me. So at 15, I purchased the double-ender Corina, sans engine and rig, said goodbye to formal education, and was cruising the Great Lakes a year later. So what if Corina was so rotten that the only thing keeping her together were the roaches holding hands? Such freedom, once tasted, is forever desired.

Looking back, I think it’s fair to say I’ve seen some changes around the waterfront. Here’s an example: Elizabeth had one small 12-volt battery; aboard Ganesh, we have 12 large deep-cycle batteries.

When I was still a kid, my father wanted me to ensure I’d have some change in my purse, so he taught me celestial navigation and Morse code so I’d always be able to earn my living. Ahem! How time marches on.

The schooner I grew up on was built of wood. Caulking kept out the water (well, some of it). My childhood home had more leaks than the White House. To empty the bilge, we used a bronze barrel pump mounted in the cockpit while at anchor and a large deck-mounted pitcher pump at sea. The pitcher pump’s handle was over 6 feet long. My mother hated it, especially while pumping it for four hours to keep our home afloat while Father and I were ashore.

Elizabeth’s anchor rode was tarred hemp, and hauling on it was like grabbing a fistful of fishhooks. Our rigging was galvanized steel—spliced, of course. Both running and cabin lights were primarily kerosene. We had two instruments aboard: temperature and oil-pressure gauges for our tiny gasoline Scripts auxiliary, an engine that ran whenever it felt like it.

Our sails were made of Egyptian cotton, and fit with mast hoops that made for both a quick drop and an easy climb. All our deck and rigging hardware was silicone bronze; stainless steel (which is totally misnamed) hadn’t been perpetrated on the marine community yet.

Our galley stove was made by Shipmate and coal-fired (unless we were short on money and forced to feed it wood). Little Liz, our wooden 10-foot dinghy, was clinker-built, and we sculled her. Our compass was regularly swung, we had its deviation table and, yes, we knew the local variation as well.

Since Elizabeth had been built to sail and race in the Great Lakes, both her 100-­gallon riveted-iron water tanks had underwater valves to let in the fresh water. Our marine radio transmitted 20 watts of amplitude-modulated power, was crystal-controlled, and (pretty much) would reach any vessel we could see with our naked eye.

To determine our depth, we used a lead line marked in fathoms and armed with wax so that we’d get a sample of the bottom as well. There was a trick to tossing it forward from the bowsprit if you wanted an accurate, vertical double-tap on the bottom. Rock felt different than sand, and sand felt different than mud.

Yeah, it was different back in the day.

Marinas didn’t exist, aside from major cities, so usually we’d just raft up alongside a tug or fishing vessel. We couldn’t tell people we were cruising; that didn’t make sense back then. So we’d tell them we were delivering the boat or collecting tropical fish—anything to disguise the fact that my father needed a timeout from Western society. Whenever he heard the word “civilization,” he’d shout: “Sounds like a damn fine idea to me. We’ll return if it happens.”

Oh, it was a wonderfully wild and wacko childhood. The only difference between me and Tom Sawyer was that nobody forced this sailor into school or church. Thank you, Lord!

Once, a movie producer attempted to charter Elizabeth for an upcoming flick but had a tough time dealing with my beatnik father. Just because we were dead broke didn’t mean the old man lacked integrity.

“What, I look like a bus driver to you?” he asked the producer.

A few days later, a shifty-eyed fellow showed up and said he had to get out of town quick.

“Skipping bail?” my father mused.

“That’s right,” the man said with a shrug.

“Are you guilty?” my father asked.

“Guiltier than a nun with a dildo,” the man replied.

“Welcome aboard,” my father said.

Oh, what a collection of seagoing misfits slept on deck in various ports. There was a circus guy named Ruby the Red, who had dropped his trapeze-swinging brother; an alcoholic undertaker who used to brag about burying his mistakes; an ex-cop who had run away to sea after tasting the oil from his gun’s barrel. Oh, and Barefoot Benny, a lawyer from Natchez, who had thrown his shoes at the judge while screaming, “No, the obscenity in this courtroom is your honor, Your Honor.” And there I was, swinging through the rig above it all, drinking it all in.

Nobody had any money. The last time I’d seen anything bigger than a $5 bill was when we’d paid $100 for Elizabeth—or whatever was at the end of those stiff dock lines leading like iron bars into the dark, swirling water. Yes, boats underwater tend to be cheap, and being underwater wasn’t so unusual back then.

In the Caribbean, on islands such as Tortola, all the local boats would take on a load of rocks, and then sit out in Road Harbour to await a hurricane. If the barometer continued to drop, skippers waited for the gale to start, then knocked out the garboard plugs, and swam ashore. Once the storm had passed, those West Indians would dive down, toss out the rocks, watch their wooden boats rise to the surface, pound back in the garboard plugs, bail, and they were good to go. Try that with a boat brimming with computer equipment, a bilge full of engines, and a cockpit dotted with multipixel screens.

Nobody viewed us as profit centers when we sailed into a port in the 1950s. Hell, it was more likely the townsfolk would take up a collection! One of the reasons we loved to raft up with fishing boats was that often the fishermen would bring over a red snapper, my mother would cook it up, and we’d all get to telling stories while the rum bottle circumnavigated.

Stories! The stories were all we had. They were the universal entertainment of the salt-stained poor. We were flotsam and jetsam, all of us. The most respected fisherman in the harbor wasn’t the one who caught the most fish; it was the guy who told the best stories. These men were clever and violent gunslingers of harsh words and tall tales and dangerous fishing yarns—and don’t think I didn’t listen. I listened hard. These men were my heroes; they were everything I wanted to be—then and now. I used to know how much to trust a man by looking at his hands to count the calluses. I recall how my father used to say, “If it can’t be fixed, don’t bring it aboard.”

All of a sudden, I realized that I couldn’t tell if I had spoken that last part aloud or not. So I again swam upward from my reverie into current reality, and stared across the galley table at Carolyn.

“Boy,” she said. “You’re sounding like an old fart now.”

“I’m 68,” I said. “If I’d had any idea I’d get this old, I would not have done half the stuff I did, leastwise not in those dosages.”

“Getting back to the point,” Carolyn said, “what do you want to do that’s special?”

We were in Batam, Indonesia, at the time. It’s not a bad port, actually.

“How ’bout we take a ferry to Singapore?” I suggested.

Carolyn slapped herself on the forehead.

“Let me get this straight,” she grimaced. “To celebrate 60 years of living aboard, you want to take a boat ride?”

“And 50 years of wedded bliss too,” I added. “We’ll go see our daughter and our grandkids in Singapore. I can handle a little rock hugging, if you do your part.”

“You mean shake your bed and sprinkle drops of water on you so you can get to sleep?” Carolyn quipped.

“Is that too much to ask?”

“The things I do for love,” she said with a smile.

The Goodlanders packed a fair amount of sailing into the past few months and are now enjoying their latest landfall: Singapore.

The post On Watch: Golden Times appeared first on Cruising World.