This month, Tom Cunliffe muses on how sailing has been likened to standing under a cold shower ripping up £10 notes. It’s an outlook that occasionally has the ring of truth. Tom opted to take economising measures…

Listen to Tom Cunliffe’s Podcast Here!

Tom Cunliffe’s July Column

Like the rest of us, I’m always keeping a weather eye on my boating budget. I never begrudge a penny on sails and I won’t sell my engine short on filters, oil, coolant, belts and the rest. There’s no escape from the annual hit for antifouling, and if the propeller shaft starts wobbling in the cutless bearing, stump up I must. This year I’ve treated myself to one or two new lengths of Dyneema running rigging. It’ll be a joy all summer. It’s the safety equipment that sticks in my throat. I part with hundreds of pounds of the hard-earned and if Fortune favours my efforts I’ll probably never use the stuff. 

Take the liferaft: I’ve had the same one for ages and, every two years, here it is again demanding a service. I’m a hands-on sort of chap so two seasons ago I decided to tackle the job myself. There can’t be much to it, I thought. Because most of my sailing is around the coast these days I’m not particularly interested in the tins of biscuits, the cans of water and everything else that might be in the pack. The important thing to me is that when I throw it over the side and pull the ripcord it’s going to inflate, the canopy will open and the tubes haven’t perished from old age. With these priorities in mind, I imagined I could pull it out of its valise, open it up, scrutinise the tubes and check the gas cylinder that blows it up. If this was anything like the ones on my lifejackets, I thought, I’d reassure myself by unscrewing it, peering at the numbers stamped in the side to see what its weight should be and replacing it if it fell short. I could then check the various gadgets for firing it to make sure they were in good shape, examine the drogue and the blunt-nosed knife, perhaps replace the night-light battery and cram the whole thing back into the bag. I’d save myself two or three hundred pounds for what couldn’t be more than a morning’s work. 

How naïve can you get? 

It came out of the valise OK, but I soon discovered it was in a hermetically sealed plastic bag. This was not a promising start. Never despair, however. My raft is stowed in a place that, if it ever gets wet, the least of my worries will be that the inner bag has been damaged, so I pressed on and carefully worked my way in. Once I had the beast open on my front lawn, Plan A went smoothly enough until I started to re-pack it into the valise. I folded, re-folded, turned it this way and that, then upside down, getting hotter and more bothered as the sun climbed steadily up the sky. It was lunch-time when the thing finally sent me a message that couldn’t be ignored. I must have caught the painter under my foot, because the cylinder went off with a loud bang that brought the neighbours out in short order. Instead of witnessing the first terrorist attack in the history of our sleepy Wiltshire village, they arrived just as I disappeared under a fully inflated four-man liferaft. 

At this point I accepted defeat. I deflated the raft as far as I could then manoeuvred it with difficulty into the car and delivered it apologetically to Ocean Safety down in Southampton. I expected a thorough finger-wagging from the professionals, but to their credit they had a good laugh instead, then they scooped up the flabby remains and whisked it away. A week later I picked it up, duly tested, certificated and packed according to the Merchant Shipping Act, or some such guidance issued by our betters to protect the adventurous and foolish. I never tried that again.

A few months later a pal of mine who was also fed up with paying through the nose to save his hide confessed to a far worse mistake then mine. He also attempted the job himself – on a day so rainy there was nothing else he could achieve. He humped the canister into his shed and got stuck in. His shed was not big and when he reached the stage where I had come to grief, the raft went off just like mine, only instead of spreading itself on the grass for the amusement of the passers-by, it expanded rapidly, filling the available volume between the rough brick wall and the work bench. 

It was perhaps unfortunate that he was standing at the bench at the time. As the orange raft expanded, he found himself being swept off his feet and driven against the wall. It all happened so swiftly that he failed to grab his last chance of escape. When the monster went into its ‘exhale mode’, noisily blowing off any unneeded gas after fully inflating the tubes, he found himself pressed hard against the wall. The masonry showed no sign of giving way. He was trapped.

As it happened, the shed was out of earshot from the nearest human presence, so he didn’t bother to shout for help. Instead, he wrestled and wriggled and shoved for half an hour. He became intimately acquainted with a two-foot section of the tubing and its associated canopy area, but he gained no traction whatever. At this point he stopped for a breather and saw the supreme irony of his situation. Here he was with two thousand pounds-worth of gear on top of him that was meant to save his life. If nobody showed up for a week, he’d die of thirst and starvation instead of drowning like a gentleman. Since this seemed a poor trade-off, he did what any properly equipped sailor would have done. He groped in his pocket for the lock-blade knife he always carried. The blade clicked open and, after taking a long hard look at what he was about to do to his bank balance, he made the unkindest cut of all. The raft went down with a satisfying hiss, the pressure came off his tortured body and he sloped off in search of the rum bottle.  

Many of us do our sailing in the summer months on the continental shelf and choose our weather from the remarkable predictions available free of charge via the telephone screen. If ever we have to hop off the yacht, we won’t be in mid-ocean and we’ll surely take our phones and hand-held VHF with us. Even if the DSC Mayday we broadcast before stepping over the rail has gone wrong, we still have plenty of chance of attracting rescuers in reasonably short order. Of course, if we’re planning a cruise to Fair Isle by way of St Kilda and Rockall, this may not be the case, but it seems to me that for many people the standard liferaft is probably over-specced. It is also pretty heavy. My four-man unit is so unwieldy that my fit, agile wife can’t deal with it alone if I’m incapacitated. For all these reasons I am re-equipping this season with a lighter, lower-spec raft. It has a single tube with welded seams, a decent floor and an excellent canopy that self-inflates. It’s a two-man unit and anyone can manhandle the pack with ease. A number of these are on the market, but I’m going for aircraft industry quality. You’d think so simple a raft would be cheaper than the heftier equivalent. Perhaps because of low numbers it isn’t at the moment, but servicing is cheaper when the time comes because there’s no pack inside with things I don’t want. It’s so much lighter and smaller that I can stow the valise anywhere without compromising other gear. In short, it’s what I actually need and no more. It wouldn’t do off Cape Horn in hooligan weather, but I’m planning no such events. I’ve served my time in deep water with a full-on SOLAS raft, but these days my safety gear is a bit like my oilskins. I don’t really need bullet-proof, multi-layered outfits that cost a week’s stay at the Ritz. I’m happy with something to keep the water out, a flat cap and some comfy woollies that smell like an honest wet sheep if they ever get wet. That’ll do me!

More from Tom Cunliffe:

• How to Avoid Cabin Fever: Tom Cunliffe’s Column
• How to Prevent Food Waste at Sea: Tom Cunliffe’s Cooking Guide
• Tom Cunliffe: What to do with no Berths in Town

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The post How to Sail on a Budget: Tom Cunliffe’s Column appeared first on Sailing Today.

Tom’s Podcast on How to Avoid Cabin Fever – Give it a Listen!

How to Avoid Cabin Fever

‘Love, soft as an easy chair…’ sang my watchmate for the tenth time since eight bells, following with a whistled version of what he imagined to be the next line. I thought how much better Barbara Streisand delivered the number and ground my teeth silently. 

The wretch was clearly missing his girlfriend, but why he had to load up his angst on the rest of us was beyond me. ‘Why doesn’t he finish the song,’ I thought. ‘Or better still shut up?’ 

Spike, for that was his name, and I were signed on as gash hands aboard a beaten-up vessel headed south for better weather which had so far eluded her. It was February. The gales blew, the mainsail was so old that only regular attention with the needle saved it from blowing out of its bolt ropes, and the main topsail set like a pensioned-off pillow case outward bound for the rag bag. There was simply no excuse for our skipper, a paranoid hater of his fellow men; the mate was a manic depressive while the cook could only be described as a human mistake. Faced with such morale-busting circumstances, we focsle hands had every reason to be nice to one another, yet even in our small world the atmosphere was strained. These days I can see that Spike probably disliked the way Bert left his kit lying around. I didn’t care for it myself, but Bert was an amiable sort of guy. I don’t suppose my shipmates were crazy about my practising the harmonica either but, like so many before me, I fancied myself without sin, placing responsibility for the tense ambience firmly on Spike and his endless repetition of that single tuneless phrase. 

Sailors have always had a superstition about whistling. The popular explanation is that the malefactor will whistle up a headwind, but I’m convinced the truth is different. Any vessel far from land is a potential hothouse of cabin fever. We can’t escape our companions and they are certainly stuck with us. A snatch of tune whistled over and over again can provoke reprisals varying from a quick-acting dose of paraffin in the morning tea to a shove in the back near the rail on a dark night.

The chandler’s shelves are crammed with useful instruction manuals, but no author offers simple advice on dealing with a shipmate ripe for a punch on the nose. Yet grief between humans obliged to live cheek by jowl goes back a thousand years to the days of the Norse sagas and no doubt far beyond. If you haven’t experienced aggravation on a boat yet, never fear. Sail with friends or strangers for long enough and you will. Here are a few pointers. 

Unhappiness is catching. Put one misery guts in a crew and you’ll soon have a handful more. The classic sign of impending cabin fever and conflict on an extended passage is when one shipmate becomes uncharacteristically quiet and introspective. Unless the sufferer has a nasty attack of dyspepsia, he is either worried about his business or, more likely, he has a wife or sweetheart back home. Either he’s feeling bad because he’s having all the fun and she’s slaving away paying the mortgage, or he’s convinced she is even now getting it on with the plumber. In either case, he’s decided he shouldn’t be here at all. The fact that he’s obviously depressed loads you, the skipper, with the suspicion that you have fallen short in leadership when you have probably done nothing of the sort. The knock-on effects are inescapable and, whether it’s sex or the office, you have a dying duck on your hands who will wear down the spirit of the troops as surely as a Jonah. It’s your job to take steps, and the best answer is somehow to get Mister Longface talking. It’s a lonely world when you’re worried, and most discontented people can’t wait to cough it all up once they find a friend. Having rooted out the problem you can at least reassure the victim. Tell him his plumber is an ugly weirdo with nasty habits, or that his wife is probably as happy to have a quiet week or three on her own as he is. If being a confessor just isn’t your bag, delegate the job to a sympathetic crew member, but you must recognise the signs and act.      

Manners are another area of concern. When my daughter was four and still susceptible to the influence of her seniors, I shipped a young man who, among other unsavoury traits, used to pick up his wooden plate and lick it clean at the end of dinner. Although an undeniable vote of confidence in the victuals, we didn’t want the child to grow up imagining this was normal behaviour. Although inherently a decent lad, his wide array of unacceptable antics was worse than irritating. At twenty years my junior, all it really needed was a firm private word, and once I bit the bullet I was surprised at how readily he accepted the advice to clean up his act. The rest of the summer passed in comparative harmony and I was spared a stretch in the Scrubs for violent crime.

A third classic point of conflict and cabin fever occurs when people’s motives and aspirations fail to concur. On varying scales, such misunderstandings lead to divorces, boardroom brawls and wars between nations. At sea things are much the same. A ship can only go one place at a time so, if two parties want something different, one is going to be disappointed. Not having the option of stepping off onto a passing wave, the aggrieved party will generally be entered onto the list of undesirables by becoming alienated. This is bad news if the unhappy soul expected a jolly week’s yachting with nightly frolics in convivial anchorages, to find instead a prolonged session with half a gale in deep water. It’s even worse if a teenage daughter fancies an afternoon in the pricey marina handy for the boardwalk shopping mall when you want to drop the hook in a quiet creek for free. 

The best solution to cross-purpose aggro I ever heard of was dreamed up by a crew who circumnavigated from South Africa. Before committing to the trip, they sat down at the saloon table and thrashed out where they would go, why they would go there, and how long they might stay. Next they agreed who would be responsible for what, how much each would pay, and so on. The consensus was then written up as ship’s articles which they all signed. When the first rumblings of trouble sounded somewhere down in the Pacific, the skipper had only to summon all hands and lay out the agreement to which all were bound. End of problem.

As a postscript I must return to the provocation caused by the evil habit of whistling. If someone came up on deck, whistled or sang a tune from beginning to end just once, then went below again, nobody would mind at all. They might even enjoy it. It’s the unspeakable repetition of a disembodied phrase that does the damage. People don’t even know they’re doing it. 

Not long ago I was visiting a marina washroom. A lifetime had elapsed since that awful voyage with Spike, Bert, the misanthropic skipper and his mad mate. As I shook off my oilskin, a sound I recalled with horrid clarity came warbling from behind one of the loo doors.      

‘Love, soft as an easy chair….’

I slumped over the basin with a sense of déja vu before the flush sounded loud and long, and a grey-haired Spike appeared at the toilet door, somewhat stouter, but cleaner by far than ever he was in the old days. It beggared belief not only that he was there, but that the phono needle in his brain was still stuck on that same phrase. I thought of hiding in the next cubicle, but instead I manned up, shook his hand and bought him a pint. 

I’d been wrong about Spike all along. He might have been a dodgy shipmate, but once ashore he stood the next round like a gent. By the third pint, we were laughing our wellies off about that awful cook. 

‘Never hold a grudge’ isn’t bad advice either.

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The post How to Avoid Cabin Fever: Tom Cunliffe’s Column appeared first on Sailing Today.

The idea of food waste at sea, while on a long passage, is unspeakable. In this month’s column Tom Cunliffe lists a few tips and tricks for making your food last, and keeping the hungry crew fed.

Sinful Food Waste at Sea

I was shocked to read recently that 9.5 million tons of food are thrown away every year in the UK alone. My answer to this is along the lines of W S Gilbert’s Mikado, making the punishment fit the crime. While the Emperor of Japan planned to have those convicted of cheating at billiards play for evermore ‘on a cloth untrue with a twisted cue’, I am determined to send food wasters to sea in small yachts with no refrigeration. Food’s a bit like water on a long passage. Unless you have a water-maker or are an expert fisherman whose luck is permanently in, once it’s gone, it’s gone. So, waste not, want not. 

Curry For Breakfast?

Those who live on the sea, even for short periods, soon become experts at recycling food. Roz and I spent so long on the oceans without a fridge that although we’re based ashore at last, we still can’t bring ourselves to bin anything we could put in our mouths. 

When we made our home moored on the piles in mid-river off Beaulieu following an extended cruise, our eight-year-old daughter used to scull ashore to the village school in the morning. She’d hop down into the dinghy togged up in official pullover and skirt with her lunch box tossed onto the stern seat. I don’t know what her classmates carted along to munch at mid-day, but Hannah’s creations showed initiative. Occasionally it might be conventional cheese or ham. More often it was the remains of last night’s dinner – the shepherd’s pie sandwich was a favourite. Binning the remains is still against our religion.

We’d a big boat in those days and made our passages with a full crew. At sea, we’d follow the lead of the great HW Tilman and offer the left-overs from dinner the following morning. Tilman once stirred an already mutinous crew into open rebellion by serving curry for breakfast. He doesn’t say in his book whether he had directed the cook to prepare it specially to give the day a red-hot start, but in our case curry for breakfast was a not-infrequent entry on the bill of fare. Generally, we got away with it. My curries have been described by connoisseurs of subcontinental cuisine as ‘Force Ten’. Some love them. Others grumble and gasp, but there’s no escape. If any is uneaten at the first round in the second dogwatch, it sits on the cooker until morning so those suffering night starvation can heat it up for a treat, or not, to suit their fancy. Often this would see the last of it, but if daybreak showed a decent whack still in the pan, it went into an omelette. The idea of scraping it over the side never entered our heads. 

The No food Waste at Sea ‘Five Day Stew’

I was introduced to the final word in turning one’s back on food waste at sea by the late Harold Hudson, a professional delivery skipper of the old school. When I knew him, Harold used more or less to commute to the Mediterranean from the Solent, delivering boats of wildly varying quality for gentlemen and others. I was living in a mud berth near to his and it was inevitable that I would ship out on one of these ventures. The yacht in question was a 60-foot wooden classic whose stability derived more from a deep lead keel than a healthy beam. Predictably, she went to windward like a half-tide rock at an extreme angle of heel. 

We beat out past the Needles at sunset into a rising sou’wester. Our crew were a hard-bitten lot and nobody was seasick, but volunteers to knock up supper were not forthcoming. In the end, Harold did it himself, opening a random array of cans and mixing up the contents into a large pressure cooker. Half an hour later, he served up the unique result in big enamel mugs that burned our fingers, but it warmed us up and filled the gap. There was half a pan left. 

The next night, we prospected in the can locker, topped up the remnants with beans and added a few spuds for good luck. On day three we’d rounded Ushant and were bashing down the Bay. Harold’s stew was going strong so we fried up the last of the mushrooms with a couple of onions, chopped up a large black pudding, tipped them in and served it up again.  And so it continued until, still hard on the wind, we rounded Finisterre. As often happens, the wind finally freed us south of the corner and we came upright at last. By then we had a proper ‘five-day stew’ still in the same pot. The quality was sumptuous and we’d never washed up, so we finished it off by tipping in half a can of curry powder. There was no curry left for breakfast and absolutely nothing had been wasted. Just don’t ask what we did with the empty cans.

Tom Cunliffe’s Top Cooking Tips: Preventing Food Waste at Sea

Any sailors with half an ounce of the sense they were born with give careful thought to their victualling lists. Things have changed mightily since Harold’s day back in the 1970s when on-board refrigeration and freezers were, for most of us, unimaginable. After the first week of a trip the fresh produce was limited to a few guaranteed ‘keepers’. Stowed in a string bag so air could circulate, a big, hard cabbage could be relied on to stay good to the end if eaten leaf by leaf  from the outside in. The humble spud might not have been universally popular, but it’s surprising what an enterprising sea cook can do with it. I was looking at an old log book this morning and found that in three months, mostly at sea and a lot of it in the tropics, my wife and I consumed 56 lb of King Alfreds with only one given the deep six for going rotten. Onions are another winner. A half-hundredweight netting sack of Spanish onions will still see an average crew across the Atlantic with some to spare.  

Like decent veggies, eggs can also go the distance at room temperature. The trick to preventing food waste at sea, where eggs and are involved, is to insist that they’re fresh when you sail. So long as they’ve come to you straight from the hen they’ll keep for weeks, so go and see Farmer Giles and make the arrangements. I once read that eggs would stay good for ages if the shells were rolled in Vaseline. The theory was that the grease stopped air passing through the semi-permeable membranes and kept out any microscopic pond life that might sneak across with it. Roz and I tried this on our early voyages. It gave us soft hands and the eggs certainly stayed fresh. Later, laziness set in and the Vaseline treatment went by the board, but we still bought fresh and were enjoying a soft-boiled double-yolk for breakfast crossing the Line six weeks later.

Dry goods such as rice and flour are OK if purchased north or south of 23°. In the tropics, weevils were once pretty much guaranteed. With today’s tidier standards this is no longer inevitable, but you can’t be sure, not even in the English Channel. I bought some sealed packs of pasta in Salisbury of all places for a passage to North Africa a few years ago. When one was broken out off the coast of Portugal, there were the pests, as large as life and twice as small, chomping contentedly at my dinner.  

And for the Weevils…

There’s an old seaman’s remedy for clearing rice and pasta of weevils to prevent food waste at sea. One thing is certain. You’ll never pick them all off by hand. Just when you think you’ve got the lot, another one will always come peeping out. Here’s what you do: Take a large flat pan or a serving dish, layer in the nice white rice with the nasty little weevils and carefully pour in clean water. Not fancying this early introduction to Davy Jones, the bugs float to the surface while the uncooked rice stays put at the bottom. Scoop them off and you’re home free. There’s only one catch. You need to be smart about the scooping. If you leave the weevils floating until they drown, they sink to the bottom like Pharoah’s Host and you’re stuck with them. This doesn’t work with flour, of course, but you can’t have everything. And remember, you heard it first in Sailing Today!

Tom Cunliffe’s Columns

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Listen to Tom Cunliffe’s Podcast – February 2024. Produced by Sailing Today with Yachts and Yachting.

Tom’s February Column

‘Do you come from a land down under/ Where women glow and men plunder?’ …Remember that? It was the unofficial theme song for the crew of Australia II when they lifted the America’s Cup from the New York Yacht Club in 1983 off Newport Rhode Island. As it happened, my crew and I sailed into Newport harbour in the thick of the action. We had just completed an East-West North Atlantic voyage via Norway, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. We were bound for Mystic Connecticut where we planned to lay up for a month or two to bang the old boat back together. Our 1911 pilot cutter had taken a hammering in the Greenland Sea and we were running short of jibs. We were now in day-sailing mode and Newport looked like an ideal stopover.

It seems incredible today that we had no idea about the historic events taking place there, but what with all the fun of the fair up north, we had taken our eye off the ball when it came to international yachting events. When we arrived, the 12-metres were out racing. Huge Australian flags were flying over the marina giving Old Glory a good run for its money. We’d seen the spectator boats and the twelves in the offing and realised what we had stumbled upon, so I decided to spring for a marina berth. We’d be part of the action and, as a spin-off, hard by Thames Street where we knew that ‘The Handy Lunch’ café offered ‘Breakfast All Day’. We were already planning our ‘link Sausage, two eggs easy over and hash browns with pancakes on the side’ when a white-clad youth in an official-looking baseball hat on the outer pontoon waved us away.

‘No room, Man. We’ve been booked out all summer. There’s no berths in town.’ Digesting this dismal intelligence, we pottered off towards the anchorage which was so chock-full of boats that finding a hole for a 50-footer extended by fifteen feet of extra spars was a non-starter. It’s never easy to give up on a harbour and head back to sea, but that was the state of play when a scruffy motorboat hove alongside with an old shipmate jumping up and down who lived on the waterfront.

‘Great to see you. You’ll never get a slot by asking. Follow me!’

Tom Cunliffe: Following Kenny

Kenny has been around the block more times than most sailors and we were fresh out of options, so follow him we did. He led us back towards the central marina, but instead of approaching the pontoons he puttered round the corner and laid his craft alongside a stone wall where a group of locals were engaged in casual fishing. We watched as Kenny struck up a conversation with them. I could see where this was leading. It seemed we were to moor up on a vacant quay backed by a small park, beyond which ran Washington Street, home of many of New England’s great and good. It couldn’t possibly be allowed, and anyway, the fishermen had first to be appeased.

The thing about ordinary Americans on their home turf is that their default reaction to strangers is to be welcoming. There are, of course, exceptions, but in general, once you are away from the big cities, that’s how it is. I could see the guys sizing us up as Kenny made his pitch. They were used to seeing smart yachts and gleaming stainless fittings, clean preppy crews and clearly no shortage of funds. Our boat looked different. Her black hull was stained from thousands of tough ocean miles, some of her iron fastenings were bleeding rust and her brown gaff sails made a statement in themselves. The guys approved and moved apart to make space for a berth. Kenny shunted his boat out of the way and in we went. We’d bowlines at the ready but when the hands looked for cleats or bollards to drop them over, there weren’t any. Confusion reigned until Kenny waved towards a series of conveniently spaced park benches with heavy wrought-iron legs set in concrete. No sooner were we secure to these admirable alternatives than our informal hosts came crowding round with questions. The outstanding query was ‘Have you guys come all the way from England in that?’

Later that afternoon things had settled down at the park benches when the world went mad. Racket and rumpus began to erupt from down the shoreline as the biggest Australian flag in the world came in, flying bravely from Australia II’s masthead. She’d won her race and had clawed the aggregate back to ‘3-all out of seven’. We discovered all this as we elbowed our way through the crowds to watch the radical 12-metre with the green-and-gold stripes berth with the music playing full-on. The final race was going to be a historic show-down, but not for a day or two.

As the partying ramped up next door, events were not proceeding without interest at our private berth. The fishermen all remained friendly. One of them even gave us enough of his catch to make our dinner, but we started to wonder how long it could possibly be before some official arrived demanding money. We had now found out that spaces in the marina where we had tried our luck were charging out at $150 a night for 30-footers. This, remember, was 1983 when you still got a lot of burger for your buck. Two nights of that at ‘pro rata’ would have emptied our coffers, but by now we were fully committed to the racing, cheering lustily for the Aussies. Leaving town before the final result was out of the question, so we sat tight and said nothing. The following day, there was still no representative from the harbour master’s office to clean us out, but soon after lunch in the heat of the afternoon, a cop car stopped on the other side of the park. A proper American policeman climbed out looking exactly as Hollywood had taught us he should. Loaded down with hand-cuffs, side-arms, night stick and radio, he strolled menacingly across the grass to stand alongside the shrouds, astride our headspring with its bowline round the stout chair leg.

‘Which of you guys is the captain?’ He asked with an alarmingly neutral expression.

I admitted it was me.

‘Who gave you permission to stay here?’ he went on, ‘And who are you paying?’

It had to happen, I thought. Given the sort of money people were stumping up to scrum it out in a marina literally stuffed with boats, our privileged berth position couldn’t continue. One lesson I’ve learned ashore, if not at sea, is that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

With a heavy heart I came clean and admitted that, despite our smart red ensign, we were really no better than chancers. The guardian of law and order opened his notebook and was about to start writing when one of our neighbours put down his fishing rod and spoke up.

‘See here, officer,’ he said. ‘These guys are visiting our country. They ain’t done no harm and they’ll be gone soon. Why not leave them alone?’ 

I could have kissed him. The policeman hesitated, then put the notebook back in his pocket.

‘I guess if there’s no trouble it’s OK,’ he said slowly. ‘Just don’t be here next week or the sheriff will have you for loitering.’ 

Still with a poker face, he walked back to his car and drove away.

An Even Warmer Welcome

That evening at cocktail time the front door of one of the grand houses across the park opened and a butler, complete with tailed coat and bow tie, came out carrying a tray of drinks. We were all on deck as he stopped beside the boat and made his announcement:

‘The lady of the house wishes me to tell you that your boat has improved her view these last few days. She would like to share her evening cocktail with you.’ 

With that, he handed over the silver tray. I asked if I could invite his boss to join us. He made it clear that this would not be appropriate, but reiterated that we, and our berth, were welcome in the neighbourhood. God bless America, I thought.

The following day the last cup race finally got away. Australia II won by 41 seconds and changed the course of yachting history.

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Tom Cunliffe dives into the undesirable depths of fog, is this not every sailor and mariner’s worst nightmare? Listen to Tom’s podcast here!

Tom’s Column

Fog’s not what it used to be. Time was when our whereabouts was down to an ‘analogue’ estimated position, and any poor masher who hadn’t kept the DR up to date was left blundering around in confusion. We know where we are today thanks to GPS, and AIS tells us about any ship over 300 tons heading our way with malice intent. We still have to dodge small fishing craft, yachts, navigation buoys and a hundred-and-one further hazards not declaring themselves electronically, but most will be spotted by radar if we have it. The result of this progress in the space of a single generation is that, when we see a bank of fog coming our way, nobody need clutch the coaming with white knuckles wondering what to do next. 

Fog in the digital age

Fog is still horrible of course. Nothing is going to change that. It remains an elemental thing that injects a crawling unease into our innermost soul. It bypasses education, intellect and rational persona, but today we can hang onto our plotters like toddlers chewing their mothers’ apron strings. So long as the screen stays bright and we keep a good lookout just in case, all is generally well, but the primeval fear is still there when you can’t see the poor wretch emptying his lungs into an old horn fifty yards away. 

Navigating in fog without any modern aids had an illuminating effect on one’s self-knowledge. Instead of handing over responsibility to a computer screen, we had to fall back on our training and keep a grip to avoid the natural tendency to panic. Landfalls were the crunch. There was a parallel here with pre-electronic ocean crossings. The thrill of seeing your dream island pop up as expected after weeks of sun and star sights has been stripped away by the certainty of GPS. Similarly, when a headland materialised out of the murk after sixty miles in the surging tides of the English Channel, deciphering its features and concluding that it was the right one was something special. If it wasn’t, of course, the character-building began. As you tried to work out a plan for what to do next, you might find yourself running out of room and blowing down onto an unknown lee shore, which concentrated the mind wonderfully.

This sort of thing was often the reality for most of the time. If your luck was in, however, you might find a safe depth contour to guide you to a secure port of refuge or at least keep you out of trouble. On one occasion I was coming down the North Sea when the visibility dumped in a big way. We were bound for the Thames Estuary and made a landfall of sorts on the north Norfolk coast. We knew we were there because the echo sounder suggested land was approaching and the DR, updated after fortuitously sighting Smith’s Knoll lightship, stated it had to be East Anglia. We sounded in to find a suitable depth, swung to port in zero visibility and, with little idea of how far up or down the coast we might be, we followed the contour towards Great Yarmouth. The big benefit of this shoreline is that it is generally free of surprises, so wherever we were, we could sail the contour with confidence we wouldn’t hit anything. If we got lucky, sighting a buoy or anything else might confirm our position. 

Ghosting along through the dank grey opaqueness in what was now calm water, we read off three fathoms on the old ‘Seafarer’ echo sounder with its madly whirling orange LEDs. The course required to keep the depth steady implied that we were somewhere near the Happisburgh light.

As teatime came and went, the tide turned foul and progress dropped off. Drifting down to us on the offshore wind, however, came unmistakable sounds of life. Somewhere in the eye of the breeze a dog was barking happily as it chased its stick across an invisible beach. Next, the assembled wildfowlers of East Anglia began loosing off round after round in hope of duck for a late dinner. It occurred to us that these sportsmen were probably shooting to seawards rather than risking a bulls-eye on whatever there might be in the way of civilisation in the other direction. The guns sounded uncomfortably close, so we hit the deck as the second volley rang out. Still we saw nothing and although one of the hands swore he heard half-spent 12-bore shot pattering against the mainsail, no game came fluttering down from the overcast to broaden the scope of our evening menu. 

Night fell, the wildfowlers had trudged away home with their bag, the dogs had followed their masters back to their cars and the mist swirled on. Sailing in fog and darkness is a challenge to this day. Working an inshore contour with position unknown, it is downright frightening, so we dropped the pick and set an anchor watch. The luckless crew on deck was kitted out with an aerosol foghorn plus a frying pan and a big spoon in case the gas ran out. The rest of us turned in. It wasn’t exactly a snug berth, but we could do no more. 

Around midnight the wind shifted northwesterly and blew the fog clear away. We’d been right about Happisburgh. The grand light blazed out now and the tide was fair, so up came the anchor and away we went with our position finally fixed. Patience, as you might say, rewarded. 

Low visibility: Every sailor and mariner’s worst nightmare?

That was classic stuff, but occasionally, something very different might come to your assistance. Only five years before acquiring my first GPS receiver I was sailing across the Channel in a biggish boat with a notable crew. In addition to my old pal Nigel Irens who was designing me a new vessel at the time, we had a boat builder from North America and his lady. Peggy assured us that she carried the genes of her indigenous ancestors which had left her with psychic powers. Time and one or two awkward situations had shown me that Peg was the sort of person you want on your side when things turn to the bad. Whether on account of her forebears, or perhaps just because she went to a good school, she had a knack of cutting to the chase. 

We had set sail from Guernsey bound towards Dartmouth in a steady southwest breeze. The fair wind carried us through the night, but when I relieved the watch at 0600 the air had suddenly come on thick. The midnight Shipping Forecast had hinted at possible fog banks in Plymouth so the prospect of a landfall on the ironbound coast anywhere from Berry Head to Start Point was not encouraging. In the absence of a certain fix I had kept up a meticulous dead reckoning plot and was reasonably sure of where we were to within a couple of miles. In those days of ‘compass, lead, log, lookout and trust in the Lord’, this was as good as any realist would have hoped for. Watching disappearing seagulls told us that visibility was around a cable at best, probably less. That’s 200 yards in new money.

At breakfast time the fog was even heavier and I was starting to feel anxious. We ate our bacon rolls on deck peering into nothingness. All except Peggy that was. She was enjoying a carefree lie-in. Half an hour later we’d run our distance on the reliable Walker log, but the bottom was still a long way beneath the sounder. It is pretty steep-to hereabouts, so there was no comfort to be had there. I had a man on the bow and the rest of us were straining our eyes ahead when Peg put in an appearance. She seemed surprised to see her shipmates so apprehensive.

‘What’s the problem?’ she asked. 

I told her. 

‘If it’s land you want, it’s just over there,’ she announced, pointing through the fog. We could make out absolutely nothing at all but, lacking further data, I followed her extended finger. Five minutes later the unmistakable shape of Berry Head materialised almost above us. 

We gave up on Dartmouth and went to Brixham instead. Over a fish and chip lunch I enquired how she did it.

‘Sometimes it’s best not to ask,’ she replied. ‘I just knew…’

Tom’s Columns

This is Tom’s column for May 2024 – Click here for more monthly musings by Tom Cunliffe.

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The post Tom Cunliffe: Fog’s Not What It Used To Be appeared first on Sailing Today.

Tom Cunliffe muses on the tricky business of running aground: recalling a near miss on the Beaulieu River, and how to get unstuck.

Listen to his podcast here!

Tom’s Column

Unless they’re being peppered with rockets fired by maniacs, we don’t generally read much about shipping in the papers. The exceptions come when things haven’t gone well. Not so long ago, a container ship outward bound from Southampton was seen running aground spectacularly in the Solent and remained lying on her bilge for several days. The crew were taken off and, realising that there was now no danger to life, every sailing yacht on the coast thoroughly enjoyed the video footage and the purple descriptions in the national press about the ‘stricken vessel’. It turned out that she had developed a dangerous list and that the pilot and captain put her ashore on the Bramble Bank rather than risk her capsizing in deep water. 

As strandings go, this one was unusual. More typically, they result from good old human error. Commander Bill Anderson, RN Retd, my ex-boss in the Yachtmaster examining trade and a man who knows more than most about such matters, once observed that when any ship comes to a grinding halt, the navigator usually hasn’t a clue what’s happening because he has maintained his plot and knows exactly where he is. Or he thinks he does. Bill illustrated the remark by referring to a lamentable incident involving one of Her Majesty’s destroyers.

Before GPS and Running Aground

In those days of traditional, non-electronic navigation, pilotage errors and running aground was generally rooted either in sloppy dead reckoning or in what Napoleon described as ‘making pictures’. Boney, of course, was referring to generals who lost battles, rather than ships’ captains who found themselves on the rocks. The human condition being what it is, however, the results are the same. ‘Making pictures’ is all about setting aside inconvenient evidence while preferring to massage reality to fit what you hope is going to happen. I can’t speak for the military, but in the navigator’s case, it’s choosing to ignore shore features or buoyage that refuse to line up with what the chart says.

Before GPS, this sort of thing was common. I well recall running down onto the North Coast of Spain after crossing Biscay in the days before I discovered Astro. We’d been guided by dead reckoning plus a bit of help from the old Console radio beacon at Lugo, but we’d been held back by headwinds for days and we really didn’t have much idea of where we were. The black and white ‘fathoms’ charts we used then had drawings in the margins to discourage skippers from ‘making things fit’. These were delightful works of art featuring eighteenth-century sailing craft and they really did help, but we still couldn’t be sure. It was only when the mighty tower of Hercules flashed up outside Corunna that we saw we’d been wrong all along and were grateful we hadn’t rushed in.   

Getting Stuck Anyway

I once had a Yachtmaster candidate whose task was to take me into Chichester Harbour. By punching the wrong numbers into his GPS he sailed into neighbouring Langstone instead. Chichester entrance is well buoyed. Langstone is less amply supplied. When I asked him where he thought the charted buoys might be as we sailed into Nowhere Land, he was determined to make pictures. His reply was that they must all have been taken up for maintenance. Like the destroyer captain, he still fancied he knew where he was as he came to an unscheduled halt.   

The universal downside of running aground under the mistaken impression that you are in deep water is that, because you have no control over the grounding, the right action to take may be far from obvious. If, on the other hand, you slide to a standstill on the mud at the end of a tack while beating up a river, you’ll have anticipated this possibility and ought to have a contingency plan.

The Banks of the Beaulieu River

All should be well working off a weather shore, so long as you’ve swung the yacht’s head through the wind by backing the headsail as soon as she touched, but when you pile up on a lee shore the chances of coming off unassisted are almost non-existent. Should the tide be falling, the immediate future looks grim. This was my portion in my 22-footer back in the Dark Ages. My engine was literally a non-starter and my wife and I were foolishly tacking up the Beaulieu River in a stiff breeze against a strong ebb. Perhaps inevitably, in our inexperience we missed stays on the lee side and ended up well and truly pinned onto the beach. 

Firmly run aground with the water draining out like an unplugged bath, our only chance was somehow to get the tiny yacht’s head through the wind so she could heel over and sail off. We thought about it for a few minutes and it was soon clear there was only one thing for it. With the centerboard up, as it now was, she drew only three feet. I kicked off my wellies and socks, jumped over the side, struggled round to the bow and started shoving. For a few agonized moments, nothing happened while the sails continued to thrash in the rising breeze. Then, following a massive effort, she suddenly moved, the jib backed and took over my efforts to swing her round to face the river.

Downstream to Deep Water

Now beam-on to the wind, the mainsail filled, she heeled over and away she went with like a little rocket with me hanging on to the main horse for grim death. My wife was now at the helm and, with a leading wind, was able to steer back downstream and out into the Solent trailing me astern with my knuckles turning steadily whiter. Back in deep water, she came up towards the wind to spill all the air from the sails. As way dropped off I was able to claw along to a point around amidships. This shifted my relatively huge lateral resistance to where it would do most good and the boat sat still while I clambered dripping and chastened back into the cockpit. 

We reached over to Cowes in what remained of the daylight and spent the night with two metres of water under us off the Folly Inn. There’d be no more tight-quarters stuff in thin water for us until we regained our nerve. 

How To Get Unstuck

Being too slow to tack as the keel touches always leaves you with a problem, whatever the tide. Unless you can fall back on the services of a bow thruster to kick her through, sailing off what is now to all intents and purposes a lee shore will be impossible since you’re unlikely to be as young and foolish as I was when I jumped in to save the day. Drop the sails instead and do your best to motor out astern, the way you came in. Reduce your draught by moving bodies to induce a heel and, when all else fails, lay out the kedge or accept assistance gracefully. Always keep a bottle of scotch handy as a present after being pulled off. The general bonhomie engendered can save a fortune in salvage claims.

A helping hand

When things seem hopeless, the ultimate solution can be to pass the spinnaker halyard to a friendly motorboat by attaching a long line to its shackle while its fall is made fast on board. You might even manage this using your own dinghy with an outboard. I stood by once while some highly competent guys did it with their hefty RIB, oddly enough on the Beaulieu River Bar. A French yacht had got it badly wrong; she needed a pull off sharpish and a straight tow didn’t work, so they took the halyard and cruised away while Frenchie closed his hatches. When the RIB was far enough off, the lads poured on the power. The yacht heeled over so far she’d no option but to come off as they dragged her sideways. 

This drastic procedure seldom fails, given a big-enough power boat. Years ago I was hard and fast on a coral head with no helpers presenting themselves. I secured the halyard to a distant mangrove root ashore and winched myself down. Another pal succeeded by hanging the halyard onto his kedge and rowing it well out, but whatever dire ends to which you are driven, the tide will always have the last laugh. If it’s rising, and it’s stuck, take your time. When it’s falling remember Nelson, who always encouraged his men to ‘Lose not a moment!’

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The post Tom Cunliffe: Running aground and getting out of there appeared first on Sailing Today.

Paper or electronic? Tom Cunliffe and Bill Aylward have developed an app 

Shortly after GPS made its inaugural real-world appearance in the mid-1990s, a pal showed me the first chart plotter I’d ever seen.

After a lifetime of paper-chart navigation it took me a while to fathom the concept of the electronic chart, but although at that stage the plotters on offer were worse than useless, only a fully paid-up luddite would have said there was no future in the idea.

Things moved on rapidly, and soon we had embryonic plotters that worked and were a genuine aid to safe navigation.

The quality of software and speed varied between manufacturers, but they all improved and the best have morphed into ‘Multi-function devices’ (MFDs) that link to further data sources.

The default chart is the so-called ‘vector chart’ which can, of course, now be used via chart plotter apps available for tablets, iPads and mobile phones.

Vector charts look radically different from paper charts and, while we have all grown used to them, they do have some downsides. Unlike paper charts, they are not ‘drawn’ by professional cartographers.

If you zoom in tightly enough, all the available data should be there, but it isn’t presented for easy reading like a paper chart.

Rather than being able to see a buoy or a light’s characteristics at a glance, you may have to ‘interrogate’ the chart to bring up a box with the info. It’s staring you in the face on the paper chart. Channels are obvious and transits are emphasised. Someone’s been thinking about the navigators. 

Vector charts often carry little or no information about the relevant land masses, so you can’t fix on shore objects. You have no choice but to rely on the GPS fix. Unless you are in a Royal Navy frigate equipped with WECDIS, you can’t plot on the charts beyond perhaps laying off a single line of position.

If GPS should be shut down or compromised, or you simply fancy putting down a plot to keep in practice, vector charts aren’t a realistic option.

With a paper chart, what you see is what you get. To see that much on a vector chart, it must be zoomed in very tightly. At lower zoom levels, vital detail deliberately left on a paper chart by the human cartographer can disappear with well-publicised results.

With all these issues constantly in mind as a practical navigator, I was delighted when I stumbled across Bill Aylward who was working on a new way to deliver safe electronic navigation at a sensible price.

Bill is very much one of us. Having retired as an eye surgeon, he now sails the seas in his boat and has cultivated something of an inner genius for software. He also knows a decent chart when he sees one.

With input from me on the ‘yachtmastering’ side, we’ve developed an app – currently for iPad use – that is totally different.

When you open up AngelNav, you won’t see the usual vector chart. Instead, after the standard disclaimers, a chart will appear that looks suspiciously like the UKHO ‘Admiralty’ paper chart which, deep down, you know and love.

The glad tidings are that it is derived directly from the paper chart, except that to project it onto a screen it has been digitised, almost literally, by scanning it.

The process is known as ‘raster scanning’ and the chart is a ‘raster chart’.

I’ve used these on my PC for years with a different program and I find them far superior for navigation than any vector equivalent. As well as being a thing of beauty that delivers the goods with crystal clarity, a raster chart has all the extra material you normally find only on paper.

It may be possible to discover information about survey dates and notes about shipping movements on a vector chart, but they’ll be hidden deep in the menus if they’re there at all. The same goes for useful warnings and much more.

On the raster chart they’re all up front, usually in a corner along with the title, exactly where they are on the paper equivalent. 

AngelNav charts are true rasters. They aren’t ‘quilted’ like some raster programs so that the boat sails seamlessly from one chart to the next. Instead, when the yacht icon reaches the edge, if you ask it nicely, the system will tell you which your next one might be, defaulting to the most detailed alternative.

That may sound like needless extra work, so why don’t we quilt the charts and make it more like a vector set-up? The answer is that this is an intelligent system for thinking navigators. If you quilt the charts, you lose a lot of the notes and details which make rasters special.

With AngelNav, it’s just like opening up the chart table and deciding which you’d like next, with the big difference that you’ve got them all – and they’re up to date.

At the moment we have home waters and Ireland charts, but more areas are coming on-line as I write. This huge folio is divided into well-priced sections so you only buy the ones you need.

There will always be those who say, ‘Why bother? UKHO-derived Raster charts sound all very good, but do I really need another app?’

‘Yes,’ is the answer.

‘Why?’

‘Because AngelNav alone allows us to plot proper, traditional chartwork easily on the screen.’

Do you fancy taking a three-point fix? After all, there’s not a lot else to do after lunch in a long afternoon watch. Go ahead. Set up the autopilot and dig out the old hand-bearing compass. Plot the position lines, dot in the fix where you feel it should be, then note the time against it to relate it to the paper log book. To see how you’re doing, you can check it against the electronic yacht. If you fancy plotting a vector diagram for course to steer, or perhaps working up an EP, go right ahead. 

‘Ah,’ mocks Captain Lazy. ‘I’m far too smart to bother with all that old stuff. I don’t have to think any more. I have an expensive vector plotter buzzing with bells and whistles that does it all for me.’ 

Clearly, this is not for him but if, like me, you prefer to keep your hand in, AngelNav is more than just another chart plotter. It’s actually a load of fun as well as a gift for the creative instructor. The in-app manual and help files are written by real English-speaking navigators.

If GPS takes a short holiday and we don’t have much of a folio of paper charts it won’t matter.

With piloting skills honed as they once were and charge in our iPads, we can navigate electronically, using reliable analogue inputs as we sail safely into a bright future, independent at last of things we cannot control. 

AngelNav is available from the Apple App store for iPhones and iPads running iOS 15.0 and above

The post Why I’ve developed a new navigation app, by Tom Cunliffe appeared first on Sailing Today.

It doesn’t matter what far-flung harbour you land in, you’ve only to raise a glass with a stranger to discover that he’s actually a long-lost shipmate of some disreputable bloke you knew years ago in a different life. The coincidences don’t end there. Not so long ago my telephone rang with a call from a young woman who makes her living researching people’s boats. From time to time, she hits a blank wall, leaving her no option but to put the question to her private panel of ancient mariners, which includes me.

‘Do you know anything about a 14ft sailing cruiser called the West Wight Potter?’ she asked. Her tone implied that she was at her wit’s end and was beginning to doubt the very existence of the vessel.

As it happened, I was well aware of West Wight Potters, half-decked, hard-chined boats dating from the mid-Sixties that flourished for a while in the sheltered waters whose name they bore. Jaunty craft with snug little cuddies and a distinctive sheer, I’d have recognised one straight away but, bent as I was in their heyday on what I imagined were greater things, I’d never taken much notice of them. I hadn’t seen one in years.

‘Who wants to know about them?’

‘It seems they’re built today in the US. I’ve an American desperate for a heads-up on the design. You’re my last hope.’

I mentioned all the usual sources of information on boat types, from the dear old Bristow’s Book of Yachts, last published many years ago, to Lloyds Register. As a professional, she had trawled the lot, plus others I had never heard of. I was running out of ideas when my wife overheard the conversation.

‘West Wight Potter…,’ she mused. ‘Hang on! Don’t you remember sailing into Yarmouth Isle of Wight and your old pal Colin giving us a little book about a Potter. It was written by his father.’

That was twenty years ago and I didn’t.

‘It’s here somewhere,’ she scrabbled the bookshelves and produced what must be a rare surviving copy of a slim volume called October Potter. It describes a delivery voyage made in one of these redoubtable craft by the designer and builder, Stanley C Smith. The account tells how Mr Smith had sailed the diminutive vessel eight hundred miles to Sweden from his yard on The Island, mostly single-handed. This would be a significant feat in any sailor’s canon, but when I noticed that he’d done it in October and November, it struck me as more than a bit special.

After a protracted passage in freezing weather, Smith ended up off the beaches of Jutland in Denmark, one of the bleakest lee shores in Europe. It had been blowing 45 knots for three days and despite a game struggle it became inevitable that his staunch craft would be washed up the beach. With huge breakers downwind, he packed his accommodation with large inflatable rollers, normally stowed without air for pulling the boat up beaches, to save him from otherwise certain capsize. He then bagged up his more important gear and settled down to await his fate while a sea anchor held the boat more or less head-up to the action. Incredibly, the Potter came in through the breakers stern-first. She was full of water but still right way up when an unexpected problem developed. The sea anchor was so effective that she was taking too long to arrive at terra firma and was suffering a shocking battering in the process. Still far out from the beach with the surf thundering right over the boat, Smith was in real danger of being thrown into the water and rolled under if the drogue were to fail. Rather than risk this, he picked his moment, abandoned ship and struggled ashore, reluctantly leaving the Potter to her fate.

After a few days in hospital, Smith was discharged ‘fit and well, but stiff and aching in every muscle’. Astonishingly, the Potter was found virtually undamaged, so he quietly completed his voyage to Sweden, now with the willing new owner as crew. Tough customers indeed, these Scandinavians. The story winds up with a classically low-key statement.

I stepped onto Swedish soil for the first time at 0015 hours, Wednesday 17/11/65.

We then had a four-mile stagger through the snow to the Captain’s home at the head of the fjord…

I had a hot bath, a change of clothing, a large hot meal. Then we had a few drinks of something new to me, a cross between vodka and nectar, and went to bed. Our first sleep in forty-five hours.

Today’s magazines are well stocked with tales of large, fully decked craft achieving marvels at substantial expense, but we don’t all want to be heroes. Plenty of us just seek the quiet life which a small boat and modest ambitions can often deliver. The story of Stanley Smith and his West Wight Potter sets the established ideas of what yachts ought to be doing firmly on their heads. Diminutive, half-open sailing craft with no pretensions to race performance are conceived mostly for taking friends and family on fair-weather summer picnics. The stern stuff is more naturally saved either for tough yachts marketed as ocean cruisers, or flying machines constructed of sponsored high-tech materials whose downwind performance reduces the apparent wind speed of even a following hurricane to manageable proportions. And it’s not only the boats that are questioned by ‘October Potter’. Mr Smith himself hardly fits the image of the 20-knot gymnasium-trained starship commander promoted by today’s newspapers as an example to us all. No sports psychologist was employed by an anxious commercial backer to mould his character. Instead, reading between the pages of his book suggests a moderate man happier in his workshop with a sharp chisel than he ever would have been parading in front of cameras in the floodlights. Although he had quietly crossed the Atlantic twice in earlier years, there are no blazing flares held aloft watched by millions on the Internet for him. Instead, a couple of drinks with a shipmate, then the ancient opiate of the sailor, ‘a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.’

It’s easy to be carried along by the propaganda that leaves many of us with a vague sensation that we are underachieving, but Mr Smith’s voyage reminds us that the most unexpected people and boats are capable of the extraordinary, should the mood take them. He made his passage for commercial reasons and personal satisfaction, not for glory, that short-lived impostor. So far as I know, he did not repeat it. Like most of us, he had another life to lead.

The other side of the coin is worthy of study for bigger-boat people. While small-craft sailors may sometimes feel they should buy larger and go further, those of us who already have tonnage under our feet may fancy we are not using it to the full. My own yacht is more than capable of sailing around the world. I haven’t done that yet and I probably shan’t. The Atlantic north and south has been enough. Instead, this summer I’ll be taking things relatively easy at the top end of the Baltic in what I sincerely wish will be light, sunny weather. There, I hope to find some kindred spirits and share a barbecue on those lovely smooth rocks the Scandis specialise in. We’ll drink wine, we’ll sing the old songs, and we’ll enjoy the warmth of companionship that comes with messing around in boats. When the ogre who sometimes nags me that I ought really to be in the Southern Ocean pokes his head in from the Nordic twilight, I’ll remember Stanley Smith. Just as he did on his return, I’ll settle for the relatively ordinary. There’s no shame there. For most sailors, family and work pressures mean that’s all there is, but if the call should ever come, most of us are well capable of rising to the challenge. I’ll enjoy the moment, and send that old gremlin packing to the Land of Muddled Thinking where he belongs.

Read Stanley C Smith’s own account of his adventure

The post Tom Cunliffe: On Stanley C Smith, and thinking small… appeared first on Sailing Today.

If you’ve never been to the Caribbean before, the place is bound to surprise you (writes Tom Cunliffe), but it’s full of lessons for the sailor. Some of those I’ve learned are too personal to print; others can be shared in the hope that all may profit. Here are three I won’t forget.

 For more of Tom Cunnliffe’s wit and wisdom – click here

These days, supermarkets in the Eastern Caribbean are reasonably free of pest attack, but don’t be fooled. Continuous vigilance and occasional stern action can keep any boat clear of the dreaded cockroach, but the campaign against the six-legged armies doesn’t end there, and it doesn’t always begin in West Indian street stalls. Take weevils, for instance.

When preparing for a summer cruise closer to home, it’s always worth loading the dry goods and the heavy, non-perishable stuff before leaving, for no other reason than that it saves humping heavy bags miles through dusty streets in searing
heat. Use the car while you have it, is my motto. My wife takes this seriously and terrifies me annually with what she’s spent, but it all binds in by the autumn and we rarely come back with much left over from her spring shopping bonanza, beyond a few bags of flour and a couple of snake and pigmy pies. Not long ago she zoomed off to Waitrose and returned as usual with the old Saab groaning on its springs. Among her purchases were two sealed plastic bags of high-quality Italian spaghetti. When we dug these out of their locker a month or two later, we were amused to note that a modest population of honest, old-fashioned weevils were browsing peacefully among the dried pasta.

The weevil has always been part of the sailor’s life. They were traditionally fond of ship’s biscuit, so seamen of all ranks habitually tapped theirs on the table to dislodge unwanted boarders. Weevils are tiny little chaps and they don’t do any harm, but they do stick between your teeth and, really, nobody wants them. The question is, when you find your bag of rice infested, how do you get shot of them? You can’t pick them out one by one because, like the 7-litre American cars that used to have to switch off their engines at the gas pump or they’d use the stuff faster than it was going in, they reproduce at a lively rate and may beat you to the post. The answer, as imparted to me by a kindly lady in a flowery dress and floppy hat behind a Grenada market stall in 1975, is to get a big flat pan, half-fill it with cold water and lay the rice carefully into the bottom. The rice sinks, the weevils float up and can be scooped off. You have to be quick, though, if they are allowed to drown, they sink again and you really have a problem. The rice can then be popped into the boiling water and away you go.

Her advice has stood me in good stead but it didn’t work with the pasta. Fortunately, Waitrose did the honest thing when presented with a photograph of the little beasts in the luxy spag packet. They refunded my wife’s money, awarded her a free bottle of wine, and you can’t say fairer than that.

The second lesson for today is one I ought to have known all along, but hot weather and a lazy lifestyle do something to a sailor’s judgment. I’ve seen strong men ‘go troppo’, but I never thought I’d succumb until the following event showed how easy it can be. Many people picking up a mooring with a ring on top, slip a line through it, bring it back aboard then secure both ends. Job done. However, anyone who has taken a decent sailing course knows this is a bad idea. A rope passed once through a ring can chafe. If you’re lucky, it’s a still night and you get away with it, but even a little chafe is infuriating because it always hits the very middle of a perfectly good rope, rendering it fit only for the ‘Might be useful in an emergency’ corner of the locker. At worst, the line chafes clean through.

The answer to this is simple. Pick up the mooring with a slip line. When the dust has settled, heave it up short so you can reach the ring on the buoy without scuppering your lumbar vertebrae, and pass a fresh line, secured with a round turn and a bowline. The benefit of the bowline is that it can be made long enough to break without bending down and crawling around between the bow roller and the forestay. So long as you leave the slip rope rigged as a sort of ‘catch-all’, there’s no danger of the bowline being locked under load, because the slip can always relieve it. Happy days. Of course, this does involve a modicum of effort, so it’s not always popular with crews quietly going troppo.

And so it was that I arrived in the Tobago Keys, hired skipper of a monster Bénéteau charter boat with a crew of likely lads. The Keys are tiny islands and the anchorage has little or no shelter from anything their side of Africa except for a grand series of reefs which break the sea but not the blustering trade wind. Time was when boats anchored at will in this marine paradise. Today, the roadstead is cluttered with moorings for which a charge is levied. Approaching in hope, a yacht whose luck is in will be spotted by a boat boy who leads the customers to a free mooring and passes a slip line for them. As the big Benny was duly hooked up for us with a resounding, ‘All fast, Skip. Looking good,’ I was feeling weary after a day spent beating hard under the sun so I discreetly inspected the neighbours. Without exception, every one, large, small, mono or multi, was lying to a slip rope. You can imagine the rest. ‘What the hell,’ I thought. ‘Why be a pedant? Forget the bowline. Just sit back, drink some rum and be happy.’ So I did, and I was happy, until breakfast time.

The boys and I were sitting around the huge cockpit table watching the sun climb out of the Atlantic as we tucked in to fresh grapefruit and toast, when suddenly the world changed shape. Other boats were lying head to wind. We were beam on and accelerating sideways towards a large catamaran under our lee. One way or another, we had lost our mooring. I unlocked the wheel and spun it to leeward. To her credit, Mrs Bénéteau’s finest responded and swung her head downwind. Now running under bare poles in 20 knots of breeze, we were able to steer narrowly clear of grief and anchor in an unfashionable corner well out of the way. Up at the windlass, I gathered in the shredded remains of our mooring line. It had chafed comprehensively through, presumably on a sharp piece of metal in the ring which, not having made the connection ourselves, nobody had noticed.

The message of the slip rope was obvious, the sidebar is that I am even more reluctant than before to take anyone else’s word for something really important.

On the subject of Caribbean cruising, here’s a tip from the gloomy classrooms of the College of Hard Knocks. I was once anchored off St Kitts on Christmas Eve. With the festive dinner beckoning, I battled ashore against a mighty trade wind to return with two promising bottles of claret unearthed in the depths of the local store. Uncorking them on Christmas morning, I was distraught to find both were long past drinking, leaving all hands obliged to irrigate their systems with island rum instead. The net results were similar, but the taste experience left something to be desired. On the Bénéteau trip mentioned above, the shipmates loaded up a case or two of France’s finest in Antigua. Just under half were corked.

Ever optimistic, we raided a likely emporium in French Martinique, only to suffer further dismay. Now desperate, we abandoned the vintages and went for honest, screw-topped bottles. The outcome was gratifying. Not a loser among them, so my advice for the connoisseur of fine wines in the Caribbean is to seek out the despised screw tops, even if they put Château Pétrus beyond the reach of your yacht’s cellar.

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After a further morale-busting board, I admitted that the tide had routed me and retreated into Cowes instead. The now-friendly stream shot me downhill into the river and carried me onward to the Folly Inn. Here, in the lunchtime quiet of the public bar, I opened my heart to a man who was to become an early mentor. Ron lived aboard a decommissioned Yangtze River steam gunboat whose lean hull and unmistakable sheer told of raw adventure in far-off places. He was a master of turning tides to his advantage. He and the gunboat used occasionally to disappear eastwards towards Belgium in the dark of the moon, returning a few days later, lower on their marks than when they had left. No questions were asked and no lies told, but as he supped his pint that day he set me straight about the basics.

‘In the English Channel, the tide is King,’ he said. ‘A weather forecast is useful, but ignore the tide and you’re dead in the water.’

How right he was. In those days, the Folly could muster an up-to-date Reeds Almanac from behind the bottles. He thumbed through this to show me in about five minutes how to ensure fair stream on simple passages, then he slipped me the wink about one or two tricks of his trade. These included the little-known fact that, on a big tide, a vessel maintaining 8 knots through the water can steam from the Hamble River into the North Sea with the tide under her all the way. The secret is to sail on an East-going eddy running along the North shore of the East Solent before the main stream turns. Hit this and you’re home free. The Owers and Brighton are soon astern; you whizz by Beachy to round Dungeness in time to catch the ‘gravy train’ up to the Straits of Dover and on past the Goodwins to Heaven knows where with the spring flood still barrelling up astern.

It was years before I was able to take advantage of Ron’s more sophisticated advice, but from that day on tidal waters became a wonderland where a few minutes with the stream atlas spelt out a passport to improbable distances run over many a six-hour period. It also opened the door to destinations

I hadn’t previously considered. A case in point for sailors around the Isle of Wight is Bembridge Harbour, where a glance at the chart is plenty to put off the tidally innocent. The entrance channel more or less dries out and there are other places to go, so why expose yourself gratuitously to what might look like danger? Armed with my new-found education, however, the place took on a different mien. Today, it’s even better. There’s a grand little marina in deep water privately run by people who are proud of their facility.

They’ll buy in the Sunday papers for you, deliver fresh bread and even ferry you across to the extraordinary village in their mini-landing craft if the tide serves. It’s all very jolly, but the best thing is that, arriving or leaving, the tide is always on your side, so long as you aren’t coming from east of Selsey Bill.

Because of the drying channel, it’s important to turn up in the offing with plenty of rise but, thanks to a merciful Almighty, the harbour lies at the extreme eastern end of the known world for Solent sailors or adventurers from Chichester. From anywhere west of here the flood carries you to Bembridge and the ebb will whisk you home again. The rising tide supplies plenty of water to float you in and to see you out when you’re ready. If you show up early, a call to the marina or a swift internet search reveals the realtime depth at the shallowest part of the channel via an electronic tide gauge.

Those who don’t trust electronics or can’t be bothered to stroll up to the office for ‘chapter and verse’ when it’s time to leave can check out the monster, old-fashioned gauge on the visitors berth. One way and another, it’s hard to go wrong.

When it comes to tidal predictions, not much has changed over the decades since Ron’s steam gunboat ran to Dover under the stars. Weather is the same too. Fronts are still fronts, although a few new arrivals on the scene, such as ‘bombs’ and the modern meaning of ‘troughs’ have come along to challenge complacency. Forecasting, however, has undergone a revolution. I try to keep in step and my on-board computer is stuffed with programs for predicting the inevitable, but every now and again I find myself lagging behind. Oddly enough, the last time this happened was in Bembridge a couple of years back.

It was Sunday morning. Overnight, a maniac cold front had thundered through. Down on the docks we were punch-drunk from hail battering on our hatches in the small hours. We now lay under a highly unstable airstream with the met-man promising squalls and the lady on the next yacht telling me she could see them coming on her internet radar. This showed the immediate past and encouraged a spot of creative extrapolation to give a homemade short-range forecast. It all sounded like a tall story to me.

We hadn’t had a gust for an hour or more. The sky to windward was clear and, except for the fact that my barometer was going up like a lift in Canary Wharf, you’d have been forgiven for thinking it was all over bar the shouting.

‘What’s next then,’ I asked her, more out of politeness than curiosity.

‘There’s a whopper coming in,’ she replied, and toddled off to double up her springs.

My plan was to leave as soon as I could squeeze out and I was watching the big gauge with interest. It hit 2.6 metres – half a metre clearance ‘for the Queen’ – just as the neighbour popped her head up the hatch to promise the alleged squall in thirty minutes. Still no sign of any weather. Just a nice sunny force 6 on the beam. I had to cross the bar into my home port of Beaulieu at the end of my passage. If I hung around here, depths might well be shoaling by the time I arrived. I needed all the tide I could get, so I cast caution to the breeze and away I went.

We were off Seaview when the world went mad. Up to windward, out of nothing, the shore disappeared in a total white-out. First the rain came – so solid it wouldn’t have shamed a fire hose. Then the wind. I hadn’t seen anything like it in decades. The dial appeared to have given up in disgust, but I know it was over 50 knots solid because when I tried to walk out on deck I couldn’t stand up. We’d wrestled the main off her when we saw it coming and I rolled away all but a fag end of jib, under which we reached at improbable speed in zero visibility on a safe compass heading I’d noted just before the rain and horizontal spray shut out all hope of seeing anything beyond the pulpit.

Twenty minutes later it was all over, with no damage except to our self-esteem. Doubtless the lady with the computer was still snug in her berth, deciding whether to slip her lines or have another cup of tea. We’d won the chess game with the tide, but when it came to meteorology, technology had triumphed over intuition. Occasionally, even HW Portsmouth must take second place.

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