Yacht surveyor and designer Andrew Simpson cruises with his wife Chele in his
own-design 11.9m (39ft) yacht Shindig. Read his blog at http://www.offshore-sailor.comAndrew Simpson
Monthly musings
O
kay. It’s
confession
time. No
matter how
experienced,
we all get it
wrong sometimes. And
although it’s tempting to brush
such incidents under the table
to protect one’s reputation and/
or pride, this secrecy doesn’t
exactly add to the sum of human
knowledge. So this is the point
where I bare my soul and confess
to having lately been an idiot.
We were on the last leg of our
recent Atlantic crossing – about
three days out from Barbados to
be more accurate. The electronic
autopilot had long since been
retired to the sickbay, and
Shindig was being steered by our
trusty Monitor windvane gear
which has behaved admirably
since it was fi tted before
launching in 2001. Readers
familiar with windvanes will
know that they work best in the
hands of sympathetic crews
who will make life as easy for
them as possible. Whereas an
electronic autopilot might just
be able to monster some
tolerable semblance of a course
out of the unkindest
circumstances – badly-set sails
delivering loads of lee or
weather helm being typical
culprits – windvanes do require
a bit of cosseting.
So, really it was this cossetting
that led to my humiliation. In
An extra knot isn’t
always welcome
Oh what a tangled web we weave when fi rst we practise
to cosset a windvane in robust trade wind conditions
robust trade wind conditions we
had been broad-reaching most
of that day, nudging the 6 knot
mark under just a single headsail,
set to starboard without a pole.
In a quest for more speed we
could, of course, have set its
twin on the port side but at the
cost of exchanging Shindig’s
comfortable motion for some
gunwale-to-gunwale rolling.
I was hunched over a book in
the cockpit when a fl ash of blue
caught my eye. I looked up to
see that, moreover, a line had
come loose and had wrapped
itself around the foresheet. Its
colour identifi ed it immediately
as the upper component of a
Dyneema running backstay weonly deployed when rigged as a
cutter – that’s to say with
headsail and staysail set. As
doubtless you know, a running
backstay is a removable stay you
can stow below when not in
use. In practice it’s often only
the deck level components you
can put away, since the stay
itself is attached high up the
mast with the lower end secured
so it can’t get loose.
Did I just say ‘can’t’? Clearly
ours didn’t understand the rules.
Its lower attachment had come
adrift and whipped forward
producing the results described.
My fi rst thoughts were that this
was no more than a minor
nuisance. The snarl-up was toohigh to reach from the deck, but
I believed that a couple of sharp
tugs would pull it loose. Wrong.
The harder I pulled the blue
line, the more consolidated
became the tangle.
So now we had a problem.
Dusk was approaching, and I
had planned to gybe before
nightfall. It’s often the way that
the run of the wind and the
waves don’t complement each
other. This can make life
uncomfortable for a windvane
gear, and I believed the Monitor
would do its stuff somewhat
easier if we gybed. However, this
would be impossible now with a
pair of lines effectively attached
to the sail’s clew.
It was at that point I believed
that the genius in me broke
cover. The existing foresheet
was soon due for replacement.
Indeed, we had a 100m spool of
12mm polyester braidline
stowed below, at least partly for
that purpose. I addressed Chele
and Anne, fellow crew
members. ‘Call me clever if you
must, but why don’t we cut the
old foresheet and allow the
headsail to gybe over to port?
Without tension on it the tangle
will shake loose and we can fi t a
brand new sheet later.’
I was later to deny they looked
doubtful because I was too busy
gaffer-taping a fi lleting knife to
the boathook. We put down
the helm and, choosing an
appropriate place, I reached
out and did the deed.
I would like to report that my
solution was a winner, but it
wasn’t. As the photo confi rms,
we completed the gybe but now
had a single foresheet nattily
embellished with fancy
knot-work. In the event we had
to live with that embarrassing
arrangement until anchored off
Barbados, having to walk our
one and only foresheet from
one side to the other as we
tacked or gybed.‘We now had a single foresheet nattily embellished with fancy knot-work’(UJOVYPUN:VS[PVUZ
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