Boat columns

For Practical Boat Owner magazine

Vittles and Drink

Good morning, or afternoon, as the case may be. Here we are on the face of the waters, moving cheerfully towards the next anchorage in our cruise, for in this isolated age we are shunning the viral hurly-burly of the marina. The autopilot is wheezing to itself, the sails are trimmed just so, and the course will bring us in shortly before sunset. All that remains is to plan the evening's menu.

Once this was a simple process. There would have been salt pork, or beef, or horse, desalted with fresh water from the harness cask and boiled. Ther would have been ship's biscuit (mingle wholemeal flour with water until it forms a stiff paste; add a pinch of salt; form rounds, and bake at about 150% until brownish, then turn the oven down to mark 1 and leave there for a day and a half, at which point it will have assumed the characteristics of a lump of granite. Serving suggestion: don goggles, hit with hammer). To lubricate this tough stuff, two parts water to one part rum, with a spot of lime juice against the scurvy.

For reasons easy to identify once you have tried it, this diet has largely been supplanted by Modern Traditional sea fare, viz. Fray Bentos steak and kidney (allegedly) pies, Heinz baked beans, and sliced packet bread, the whole heavily irrigated with chili sauce to hide the taste. The rum-and-water mixture has been replaced by beer of an industrial nature, carried in tins.

As we proceed on our broad reach, though, it seems a bit too easy just to haul out the can opener and dig in - though purity can be taken too far. Some Spartan figures, like Roger Taylor, who sails his Achilles 24 Mingming II well to the north of Svalbard, subsist largely on muesli. Different strokes and all that, but it would not do on Dahlia, where the cuisine is a bit more haute.

The task as we see it is to combine the moderne with the traditional. The first step is the bread. Yeast on board is a pain in the neck, but there are some excellent bread mixes available. A loaf proving under a tea towel in a warm corner of the cockpit is a charming companion as the land begins to peer over the horizon. Then there is soda bread, which is a lot of flour and water to which is added a bit of bicarbonate of soda and some buttermilk or vinegarised milk to react with the bicarb, making it fizz. Mix it all up together, form into a blob, and slap it into the oven. If you do not have an oven, the mixture can be squashed into a frying pan and cooked on the stove, at which point it becomes a farl.

It has been said and said rightly that man does not live by bread alone. This is why the seagoing gourmet will have filled various nets with the produce of the potager, allotment or veg box, sorting the stuff every day and ejecting rotten fruit, stowaway banana spiders and other interlopers. The cabin deckhead, meanwhile, is decorated with an assortment of dried sausages and hams that will sway gently as the boat hurdles the swell. And in Dahlia's forepeak, the semi-transparent fibreglass hatch that is a feature of most boats built in the early 70s admits exactly the right amount of light to draw up a healthy crop of mustard and cress and mung bean sprouts and one thing and another, grown, traditionally, on face flannels. I have seen a Nic 32 pass through the Crinan Canal with basil growing in dedicated pot holders in the cockpit, but Dahlia's cockpit is too small.

The exquisite concoctions made possible by these ingredients practically cry out for fine wines. A prominent literary agent told me the other year that he had bought a boat specifically because he could store his claret upright and thus avoid getting the mucky stuff in the bottom of the bottle mixed up with the rest of it, but this may be a bridge too far. Under the saloon seats is fine, well padded with carboard.

If you have been at sea for a year or two and stocks are running low, remember one of the Unwritten Laws of the Sea: whatever the boat, there will always be a pot noodle rolling around in the bilges. Give me a salt horse any day.

Maths for Lashups

There is a pattern to boat restoration best expressed by a graph that I have heard Boffin Derek down the yard call an exponential decay curve. The easiest bit, or anyway the most obvious, is the hull. That and the accommodation and the rig can be accomplished in big lumps. These major works represent the early part of the graph curve as it roars down the paper like a surfer on a tsunami, the amount remaining to be done decreasing rapidly with every day that passes. A fierce euphoria seizes the bodger. Onward, he cries, hanging up the spokeshave and reaching for the varnish brush and the thinners. On goes the goop, coat after coat, until he can see his reflection in it, wearing a cheesy grin of foolish pride.

There comes a point when the hull is glossy, the interior impeccable, the rig fine and upstanding. Visions of watery joy rise behind the bodger's eyes. In his mind's ear is the rumble as she rolls off the trailer. Climb aboard. Peace descends. The slop of the water, the living deck underfoot. A pull at the oars. She seems to feel the thrill of life along her keel. Up go the sails –

The mind pings back to the shed with a stinging thud. A non-siren voice speaks of finishing touches, while somewhere in the background the curve of the graph is flattening. The sails are no longer young. All right in essence, of course. But in detail not so perfect. The luff of the mainsail is held to the mast by parrels, which in case you have had the good fortune never to meet one are little snoods of beads. Parrel beads are available from all good chandlers for some three quid a copy. Five parrels are the adult dose, and each parrel requires four beads with a stopper knot between each. This is sixty quid's worth, and sixty quid is a large fraction of what the whole boat cost. Alternative solution needed. This arrives in the shape of some hardwood balls that look like one-inch models of the planet Jupiter, three quid for thirty from a craft shop. Drill each one through the north pole to the south pole, and string in fours on short lengths of old line. Parrels complete. But it has taken ages, and the curve of the graph is not far off horizontal.

But there is still the clew of the mainsail. The cringle is thanks to UV and fraying looking right manky, and needs, in a word, replacing, using the Lashup Method, as follows. Remove old cringle. Take a bit of cloth cut off an old sail, a fat needle, and in the absence of proper sail thread some whipping twine, and a brass eyelet in two halves, available for just about nothing online in packs of twenty. Remove the old cringle. Reinforce the clew with the sailcloth, copying the seams. Make your hole the exact same size as your eyelet, which is exactly the same size as the old hole. Sew round the edge of the new hole with plenty of blanket stitch. Stick the male end of the brass eyelet through, unite with the female end, strike firmly with hammer hitting thumb, curse, strike firmly again to lodge, and summon someone to admire your handiwork. It has taken a week. More. The graph curve? Declining. But only just.

Step back, shaking head in wonder at own genius. Notice the tiller. What it needs is a Turk's head. Open Ashley Book of Knots. Get headache. Close Ashley Book of Knots. Go to Youtube. Make woggle knot at sixth attempt. Double it. Treble it. Work it up the swell of the tiller until it is tight as a drum. Step back again to admire handiwork. Kick over varnish pot. Swear. Clean bilges with white spirit.

The sun is sinking low. Its flat pink light glints on dings in the mast varnish. Furthermore it is revealed to you that the roller forestay hanging cobwebby in the shed rafters, broken after an injudicious wine-tasting on a beach on Scilly, would fit just nicely with a bit of filing and a new Sta-lok terminal...

The downslope of the graph is now scarcely perceptible. The voice of a long-dead maths master, destroyed by mustard gas in 1916, croaks: in graphs like this, the curve touches zero only at infinity.

I should live so long. To hell with exponential decay curves. Let's launch the boat, and we'll finish her off on the water.

No-engine week

This year, as most years, we will be having a no-engine week. The idea is to climb on to sailing boats of various sizes and use only the wind and the tide to perform the usual manoeuvres and some unusual ones. Its advantage is that that it slows the pace of life, reduces the carbon footprint and puts the sailor in touch with the spirit of the ancestors. The disadvantage is that you tend to bump into things.

Marinas have been the death of engineless manoeuvring. The prospect of T-boning a million quid's worth of Sunseeker after an innocent miscalculation has encouraged the use of diesel in close-quarters situations. So has the spectacle of marina managers sprinting down the pontoon waving and screeching. Experiment far from the marina, then, preferably on a pontoon outside a pub in which you can seek consolation after one of the inevitable wrapups.

This is not the place to discuss the basics of picking up and dropping moorings under sail, which have been gone into ad nauseam elsewhere. It is enough to suggest that all you need is plenty of sea room and a state of spiritual development in which you can just let everything go. Recovery involves pointing the boat in the desired direction using a backed jib, then unbacking it until you are moving through the water fast enough for the rudder to bite. The backed jib will also lever you off a pontoon, and is invaluable during the heaving-to process, vital for the peaceable manufacture of cups of tea on passage, which is for many the true object of cruising.

As no-engine week draws on, advanced manoeuvres suggest themselves. I have fond memories of entering a deep lock in a 55' cutter built in 1922, powered only by the jib topsail which stuck up far enough above the surroundings to get clear wind to slide us in - a trick derived from Thames bargemen, who did it all the time. Not everyone has a jib topsail, admittedly, but a small hanked jib run up a spare forestay with a long strop to the bow roller might work if you insist on trying.

Many sloop owners swear by hanking a small jib on to their boat's backstay and sheeting it in to stop it wandering round an anchor, and giving it some extra sheet to use it as a reverse gear. Both these things become easy if you are lucky enough to have a mizzen, which can be cranked in or pushed out, according to choice. Furthermore, in a ketch or yawl the jib-and-jigger-no-mainsail rig will cart you beautifully along while sloops are chugging for cover as hard as their fuel will take them. A mizzen will also provide the facilities for a mizzen staysail, an exellent turbocharger for the reaching two-master. Anchor the tack somewhere abaft the mast, run the peak up a halyard on the mizzen, sheet the clew to a block on the end of the mizzen boom, and watch the rest of the fleet blench as you surge past. Any old sail will do, and can be launched from a sailbag in the cockpit without spilling your tea (see above, cruising, object of).

Some sails are a matter of fashion. Not long ago, no ocean wanderer worth his salt would go to sea without a squaresail. These were normally flown from a yard that when not in use was stowed parallel with the mast, and were deployed when the wind was well abaft the beam. They are still fun, if you are an unvoguish sailor with a decent crew. A tarpaulin laced to the spar at the sail's top and with a sheet at each of its bottom corners will do nicely. There are also signs that the downwind twin-jib rig, comprising a genoa to leeward and on the windward side another foresail flown from a spare forestay, is gaining popularity - particularly with short-handed sailors who cannot face the traditional sweat-soaked mano a mano with a cruising chute. With two jibs and a lashed helm the boat will just about steer itself, freeing the navigator to make yet more tea.

By the end of the week chances are you will be reaching along under jib, staysail, main, watersail under the boom, mizzen staysail and mizzen if worn, perfectly balanced, blind to anything except that glorious cloud of canvas, making that cup of tea. And the chances are you will sail crunch into the pontoon. With any luck there will be a pub at its inshore end.

Columns for the RYA website

Landfall

It is four in the morning, flat calm. The long swells pass under smooth as glass. The last of the breeze was from dead astern, so the genoa is rolled up, the chute down, and the preventer still rigged to stop the worst of the boom's slat and bang. It is an awkward movement - the roll, the bang of the boom, the return roll, the bang of the boom again. Annoying, really. Annoying for the crew off watch, anyway. On deck, the conversation between helm and standby hand has become sporadic, partly because we are tired, and partly because we are gaping at the Milky Way, a great striding arch across the heavens among whose thick constellations little shooting stars are wriggling.

A greenish-white meteor tears across the sky, huge, inconceivably fast, dropping bits of itself like welding slag. Woooooh, we say, and the light is so bright that for a moment there is nothing to be seen except blackness. Then the standby hand says, 'Over there. I think, anyway,' and points a shadowy arm.

And over there it is: a pale bloom on the horizon, growing, that fades, pauses, then returns. A lighthouse. The standby hand clambers below to mark the chart. A dim red glow from the night lamp in the navigatorium. The clank of cups in the sink, a glorious waft of coffee up the companionway. The cup nested in a coil next to the compass. A feather of steam in the green glow, bending sideways. And on the face, faint as a baby's breath, a tiny waft of breeze.

The mainsail rumples. The hand on the wheel feels water passing over the rudder. The eastern sky is paling. The wind is conventionally supposed to die with the dawn, but not, by the look of it, today. Get the preventer off. The mainsail is drawing now. The standby hand uncleats the reefing line, and the big genoa unrolls from its foil with a rumble and thump.

The movement of water over the rudder firms up, and if you take your hands off the wheel the boat's nose claws up to port, hunting the wind. Haul in some genoa, let off some mainsheet. She is balanced now, with a faint trace of weather helm for safety's sake, but not so much that the rudder will act as a brake.

The lightness of the horizon has become a pale stripe. Between us and it the sea has completely lost its glassiness, crosshatched with moving air. A dark shadow flits across the swells. The gust hits with a bang. Down goes the lee rail, and the the acceleration compresses the knees, and the sound of the wake is a full-throated roar.

Under normal circumstances it would seem a good idea to take a reef. But we have been on passage for a week, and our judgement of such matters is finer than it once was. So we hang on, and feel the power of the heel translate into forward motion until we are thundering ahead, flat out, and the brilliant disc of the sun, white, not a trace of threatening red, soars out of the horizon, and the grey world floods with blue and green and gold.

The standby hand takes time to watch the sunrise, and goes below to put a note in the log and the kettle on the stove. It is 0550, and the watch below is stirring, groping feebly for coffee. The light pours over a sea of deepest indigo frizzled with whitecaps. Far ahead is a long grey shadow that you might think was a cloud, if you were not absolutely certain it was the land.

Winter afternoon

It is three in the afternoon. Outside the window, grey scarves of rain are drifting across the harbour on a northeasterly breeze. Soon it will be dark. The mind drifts back to summer....

I am in the open yawl, heading for the next anchorage. The sun is beating down out of a sky dotted with small white clouds, illuminating a sea of purest blue. The boat is neat as a duck, tent lashed down the starboard side, scrambling up to windward, aiming at the blue rise of land on the horizon. There is no sea to speak of.

Take the hand off the tiller. The luff of the mainsail bulges back as the boat starts to climb the wind. Let out a little mainsheet and mizzen, pull in a little jib. On she sails, nicely trimmed now, in balance; a forefinger on the tiller is all you need.

There is a loop of bungy anchored to the floorboards under the tiller. Pull it up, loop it over the tiller's end, remove the forefinger. Away she goes, straight down her groove, the wake gurgling pleasantly at her transom. But the gurgle is not a good thing, because it is produced by turbulence. What we need is non-turbulent laminar flow, water moving under the hull in a smooth stream, not a series of hampering eddies. The transom needs to come out of the water, which means moving weight forward. How to achieve this singlehanded?

Bend a light line to the tiller. Put it through a block on the windward rail. Move forward to the mast. Still gurgling. Move forward of the mast, on to the foredeck. No more gurgle. But the boat wants to come up into the wind. Pull the light line, which pulls the tiller up to windward, which corrects. On we sail, faster now, hissing through the sea, tweaking the line from time to time.

Surely we can do without all this tweaking? Let go the light line. Stand up, back against the mast. Put weight on the downhill foot, and the boat's nose seeks the wind. Put the weight on the uphill foot, and the boat bears away. We are gliding soundlessly across the sea at six easy knots, maintaining airflow through the sails by the simple application of foot pressure. This is the kind of thing shearwaters do with their wings, and porpoises do with their bodies, and no animal exercising this much control with this little movement could be anything but euphoric. And there alongside, blow me down, is a porpoise, rolling.

But here comes the black shadow of a gust on the water, and the porpoise rolls off about her business, and it is time to put plenty of pressure on the right foot to luff into the puff, and perhaps it is not too clever to be up here, so far from sheets and tiller. I read somewhere of a transatlantic singlehander who reached a state of overconfidence so profound that he jumped overboard hanging on to a line and allowed himself to be towed along, all alone, wreathed in phosphorescence, a thousand miles from the nearest land. Fun, of course. But inadvisable is hardly a strong enough word.

Scramble aft. The transom goes back into the water, and the turbulence is with us again, but we are ready for anything. The sun beats down and the breeze blows soft but strong over the blue and lovely sea....

That was then, and this is now. The light has almost gone, and the clouds have a yellowish tinge. The rain is still coming across the harbour. Unless I am much mistaken it will soon turn into snow.

Longer stories

Propless in Badachro

The propeller fell off in Badachro, off Loch Gairloch, in latitude 57 north, as my heavy ketch Dahlia and I were anchoring. The first indication of its departure was a clunk from the direction of the rudder. The second, more conclusive, was the fact that while the engine was going hard astern, the rocks ahead carried right on approaching. Having sprinted up to the foredeck, let go the anchor, stopped the boat, and reduced the heartbeat to about 120, I started thinking.

The first step was to ring the kindly Rob Adam, Badachro's nautical Mr Fixit, who showed up in a RIB with a TV camera taped to the end of a roofing batten. The screen showed a shaft, but no propeller. The waters of Badachro are the colour of strong tea thanks to the peaty river that pours into it, so diving was useless. Anyway, even if a propeller could be found there was no chance of refitting it in this beautiful but remote spot. The boat needed to go south, to her home in Tighnabruaich on the West Kyle of Bute.

There was very little wind, but the forecast was for northwesterlies to arrive. If I could make the first, no-wind part down to Kyle Rhea, the strait which separates Skye from the mainland, the Lord might or might not provide. Then there would be Ardnamurchan, the Sound of Mull, the Crinan Canal, Loch Fyne, the West Kyle of Bute and home: 150 miles, give or take. Dahlia is a sailing boat, after all, I told myself, pushing aside the sensation that I was whistling in the dark. Furthermore she was currently the mothership of three Cornish Shrimpers, companions on our annual flotilla cruise, and the sea was like a mirror. Pausing only to lash one Shrimper on either side, we pulled up the anchor. The Shrimpers engaged forward gear, and on to the broad grey bosom of the sea we motored.

The convention of our flotilla cruises, which we have been making for twenty-odd years, is that we sail solo every day and meet up for a party every night. Today the party continued all day as we trundled south at four knots in our de facto trimaran. The island of Rona passed, a series of blackish humps in the murk to starboard. A helicopter clattered up from the listening post of the submarine range between Rona and the mainland, ignored by a white-tailed sea eagle engaged in a scuff with some seagulls. The red beaches of Torridon inched by. The tide swooshed us under the Skye Bridge, past the Simon Princess, a ship devoted to delousing farmed salmon by pumping them through pipes full of warm water, and into the narrows of Kyle Rhea, where the GPS read nine knots. At the bottom of the narrows we turned to port out of the current, waited for the sounder to register four metres, groped for a gear lever to engage astern, remembered there was no astern or ahead either, and dropped the anchor off a placid beach in water of reassuring glassiness. The Shrimpers then withdrew.

The next leg of the voyage would be different. Ardnamurchan is the westernmost extremity of the British mainland, and a protuberance that should be approached by the mariner with maximum ingenuity, assuming he has any. The forecast was for northwest four and five and a bit of six. I rose at 5 a.m., hauled up full sail, cranked the anchor off the seabed and ghosted away from the sleeping Shrimpers towards the salmon-river whorls of tide issuing from the southern end of Kyle Rhea. As we left the shelter of the anchorage a shadow came into being under the Skye shore, grew little white teeth and emitted a bracing roar. Dahlia's deck tilted sharply to port, and the chainplates tore white plumes out of the sea, and the merry crash of crockery from the galley demonstrated that it is wind as well as tide that funnels down Kyle Rhea. I dropped the mainsail and returned to the wheel, sweating in mind and body. Dahlia broad-reached down the Sound of Sleat under jib and mizzen with seven knots on the GPS. Ardnamurchan? No problem.

It could not last. The tide faded under us and the waves took on an unpleasantly glassy look. Up went the mainsail again, and slatted and banged. Point of Sleat came abeam. Far beyond the bow the long grey finger of Ardnamurchan lay over the horizon. My thoughts turned to the inflatable on the afterdeck, and the ancient and untried 5hp Yamaha outboard that had been sitting on the side deck for a while. Even if it started, an alongside tow with the pair of them would be a strictly flat-water business. Here the water was by no means flat, and off Ardnamurchan, where the seabed is said to resemble the Montana Badlands, it would be worse.

Resignation is a great advantage to the propless seafarer. I therefore made another cup of tea, using leaves, not bags, and ignored the slat and bang of the sails. As I finished the second cup I observed that the ripples on the water had taken on a frosted quality. The frosting became a jaggedness, and the mainsail filled with a soft whap, and all of a sudden we were close-reaching across the blue, and the sun was out, and Ardnamurchan was off the port bow, turning from distance-blue to mountain-green. A seal jumped three times clear of the waves down to port, and I knew exactly how it felt. Off Ardnamurchan light I cracked sheets, doused the mizzen, and at eight that evening went head to wind and glided on to a mooring buoy in Tobermory Harbour.

Next morning, heart in mouth, I dropped the dinghy over the side, lashed it on, persuaded the antique Yamaha to start, dropped the mooring and towed Dahlia very slowly on to the hammerhead. The forecast was for winds of F2, and Dahlia is not at her best in anything under F3. This meant extra petrol, and extra cans from Brown's, which by pure coincidence sells as well as ironmongery the greatest range of whiskies in the Western world. I returned to the boat with four gallons of petrol and a couple of bottles of the incomparable Te Bheag, made on Skye and hard to find elsewhere. Then I filled up with water, backed the genoa to get the bow off the pontoon, let go the stern line, sheeted in, and proceeded towards the mouth of the harbour, where there was a clear patch in which to hoist the main.

The first objective was Lochaline, but when we were off the entrance it seemed a pity to waste the wind still funnelling powerfully down the Sound of Mull; so on we went. Off Castle Duart the wind failed, but a couple of knots of tide took us on in the general direction of Crinan. There were now ferries, large and purposeful and much too close, and as the evening developed the wind failed completely. So on to the starboard side went the dinghy and the engine, and emitting a noise like a tubercular wasp Dahlia pointed her nose at Puilladobhrain.

We anchored in the usual throng. The sun set behind a hill, rose again as it rolled out the other side, then set again. At five next morning the Yamaha was hounding us over a mirror calm down the Firth of Lorn and into the powerful tide that rushes down the Sound of Luing, through the Dorus Mor, and into the sea lock at the northern end of the Crinan Canal.

Here we were an object of curiosity. This intensified as the outboard sulked for a while. I enlisted help to warp the boat through the first couple of locks, trudged up to the Crinan Boatyard for a new spark plug, and set off on the nine-mile ordeal by dereliction known as the Canal. The engine coughed, but held out. Kindly staff helped us through the locks. At lunchtime the following day we were sinking down the Ardrishaig sea lock, heading for half-ebb in Loch Fyne.

The Loch Fyne tide was running at about half a knot, and five miles south of the lock the breeze failed completely. I hauled the dinghy alongside, pulled the start cord, and put it in gear. It stopped. I repeated the operation. No result. The sun hammered down. Slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea. We were stuck, and the tide was turning.

A mile to the south of us a white yacht was motoring south. I blew the ship's hooter, raved on Channel 16, waved arms and brandished a towline. And joy of joys, the white boat turned towards us, and said they would tow us in for six hundred quid, and I said what about a bottle of whisky, and they said okay. And an hour later we hammered on to the pontoon in the marina at Portavadie, pride of the Cowal Peninsula, if you like your marinas with infinity pools and all the trimmings.

The weather changed in the night. A kind man with a rib and a hangover towed us out of the marina and into the wind, gusting force 6, on the nose. I unrolled some genoa to clear a salmon farm, tore down into a patch of clear water, rolled up the genoa and hauled up the roaring and flogging mizzen. Out came two-thirds of the jib, held aback till the mizzen drew on the port tack. And we were away, slanting up the wind tack on tack through the wind-over-tide seas. Spray was coming aboard in lumps now. Tack, and tack again, and again, 110º between them, but not bad without a mainsail, seven tons of us hammering the seas. Clear the point. Mainsail up. Storm along the land just outside the fifteen-metre line, wind failing now, and the red can on Ardlamont Point is there. Mizzen down, plenty of port helm, and we are running north for Tighnabruaich with a hard soldier's wind. In the moorings point up, sails flapping, gliding through the other boats. The hand no longer gropes automatically for the gear lever, for this is a sailing boat. I stroll forward and pick up the mooring buoy. Home.

Scilly

When we said we were going cruising in the Isles of Scilly, there were some sharp intakes of breath. Scilly’s advantages are well-known - clear sea, crystal beaches, the sun (when it shines) peculiarly brilliant. But the breath-drawers have a point. Scilly lies some thirty miles off Land’s End. Its uniquely jagged shores and seabed are lashed by weather and seas that come all the way from America, and spring tides sluice through the archipelago at several knots. All but the most intrepid of keelboats are limited to the principal anchorages - Hugh Town on St Mary’s, Old and New Grimsby on Tresco, St Helen’s Pool and Tean Sound off St Martin’s, and the Cove and Porth Conger on St Agnes. The convenient anchorages can get crowded, and the uncrowded anchorages are inconvenient, and all except St Helen’s Pool are open from one direction or another. The RCC Foundation’s useful pilot to the islands mentions many occasional anchorages, but hedges them around with caveats almost as thickly as Scilly is hedged with rocks.

So when David Burnett and I were meditating the best means of making a detailed cruise of Scilly, we decided to follow a guerrilla camping approach. We would of course take Lucille and Dove, our Drascombe Longboats. These are open boats 21’6” long and 6’ wide, with a gunter yawl rig that can peel down to jib and mizzen in a blow, and centreboards that make it easy for them to take the ground. They also have tents, weird contrivances of heavy brown canvas supported on bendy plastic tubes which when erected give the boat the look of a yawl-rigged Conestoga waggon hull-down in the Rio Grande. When the wind drops, the boats are propelled by 6-hp four-stroke outboards. And when all else fails, you can haul up the centreboard, drive up the beach, and ride out a gale in the perfect safety to be found only on dry land.

So we towed the boats down to Penzance, watched the derrick swing them on to the foredeck of the Isles of Scilly Steamship Company’s RMS Scillonian, and set off for the islands. In St Mary’s harbour we rigged the boats and bought pasties from the Kavorna cafe and ice creams from the Dairy - Rule 1 of guerrilla camping says that guerrilla campers take their food where and when they can find it. Then we beat out of the harbour into a light northwesterly, ice cream dripping down our sleeves as we dodged the shoals of tripper boats converging on St Mary’s quay for the Scillonian’s return trip to Penzance. On all sides, purple islands rose from a blue and brilliant sea. We close-reached up the channel between Samson and Tresco, taking the dogleg between the Hulman to starboard and Rag Ledge to port, into the drying harbour at New Grimsby for supplies at the Tresco Stores, purveyor of exotic foods to the Isles of Scilly.

I was born on Tresco, and the place is still heaving with my relations. Rule 2 of guerrilla camping is to take advantage of your advantages, whether these consist of a modest headland between you and a gale or a charming bedroom with sea views. The first night or two, the tents lay unused in the boats.

On the third day, we set off for some serious camping, via Hell Bay. This is on the western side of Bryher. It is one of Europe’s tougher spots, and has seen many a wreck. We left the flat water of the Tresco Channel, tacking between Bryher and Samson. The breeze was blowing flat west. We tacked off Tresco Flats, tacked again at Yellow Rock, dodging pillars and domes of granite. The swell was snarling in the stones as we left Buzza Rock to port, then Merrick to starboard, hauled the tiller to windward and turned downwind into Stinking Porth (‘for use in very settled weather. Local knowledge is essential,’ says the pilot book). Local knowledge in this case told us that there is an excellent hotel just by Stinking Porth, so we decided to have lunch there, following Rule 1.

Normal procedure with a Drascombe is to land on the beach, shove the boat off, and jerk the anchor overboard with a tripping line. This does not work reliably when, as today, the wind is blowing onshore. At worst it is a failure, and at best you get wet, and Rule 3 of guerrilla camping says that it is unwise to get wet, since in an open boat it is difficult to get dry again. Just off the beach, however, there was a large, convenient mooring buoy. So we attached Dave’s Dove to the buoy, lashed a big single block to her aft mooring cleat, and ran an endless line through it, attached to Lucille’s forward mooring cleat. We went ashore in Lucille and hauled on the line. Lucille glided off the beach and lay cheerfully astern of Dove while we performed operations on draught Guinness and crab salads.

In a moderate sea, Hell Bay’s many rocks give it a strong resemblance to a gigantic washing machine. In anything more than that, it lives up to its name. Today the breeze was a mere Force 3. The bay was brilliant sapphire, with ice-white spray. We sailed out to Scilly Rock in a whirr of puffins and turned in for the top of Bryher, tacking broad reach to broad reach so as not to jibe on the surfs. Waves were crawling white up the granite slopes of Shipman’s Head, and all but Dave’s masthead was vanishing in the troughs. The wind was freshening.

In such circumstances, the guerrilla camper looks for somewhere to anchor. Obviously, shelter is of the essence. But as well as shelter, a good anchorage needs a certain friendliness. We investigated a bay on the eastern side of the islet of Norwethel, but the sound effects, provided by a large wind-over-tide sea on the Golden Ball bar, were too like the Battle of Verdun for comfort. Gimble Porth on Tresco, recommended in the pilot book, provided doubtful holding, a funnelling breeze, and a high lonesome quality not conducive to sound sleep in an open boat. So we retreated to the Blockhouse on Tresco, where a high white wall of dunes sits between the camper and the breeze. Drascombes draw less than a foot, board up. So we anchored right under the beach, let out plenty of cable, and formed a sociable raft for a glass of wine and the odd steak.

A word here about cookery for the guerrilla camper. In an ideal world, this is done on bonfires below the night’s high water mark. When these are discourteous or attention-seeking, we use stoves of the kind that screw onto gas bottles. Dave keeps his upright in a small open-topped box containing a cement mould of the bottle. My own preference is for form stability rather than weight. My burner sits wedged into a large, flat wooden box that once contained twelve bottles of cru bourgeois claret and now acts as storage for an entire cruising batterie de cuisine.

A half-moon appeared, as did a large number of peculiarly brilliant stars. We separated. The anchorage rang with the clonks and grunts of tents going up. Soon, the open boats had become long, narrow sampans with barrel-vaulted roofs. Someone with an exceptionally powerful imagination might even have described them as cosy. There was a Thermarest mattress on the bottom boards. There was a sleeping bag with a Mylar layer, warm even when wet. There was a Coleman gas lamp, hissing gently - cold-water campers appreciate the Coleman’s knack of providing heat as well as light. There was a copy of Bleak House. The snores of the sleepers segued impeccably into the morning shouts of the gulls.

It is nice to spend a few days sailing around the inner sounds of Scilly. It is bracing to have a go at Hell Bay and the frankly murderous North of Tresco, with Men-a-Vaur, Round Island and the Golden Ball ready to chew the unwary mariner to hamburger. But sooner or later, a small-boat sailor on Scilly will be tempted to have a look at the Western Rocks. So we sailed down to St Agnes, the southwesternmost island in the archipelago. That night we dropped anchor in Porth Conger, an excellent small-boat anchorage with good holding and a pub nearby. The following morning we obliterated the tents and stowed and lashed everything in the boats into a state of complete immobility. The sky was blue, and a gentle zephyr stirred the burgee. These propitious signs notwithstanding, I put in two deep reefs, and I noticed Dave doing the same.

The horizon of the Western Rocks does not inspire confidence. The chart shows three rough lines of rocks, diminishing in height, the first or easternmost formed by the island of Annet, the westernmost awash. Annet is a low green island covered in nesting birds. The rest are just rocks. They should be wave-smoothed, but nobody has told them this, or if they have the rocks have paid no attention. They look as if they were put there by the set designer of Pirates of the Caribbean - rank after rank of hungry granite fangs, set in gums of white water. As the west end of St Agnes comes abeam, the tiny zephyr of breeze had freshened. The lee rail was heeled to within a couple of inches of big, inky waves that had come all the way from Nova Scotia. We continued west until we could see puffins and razorbills fiddling around in the Haycocks, at the northern end of Annet. Spray was going thirty feet into the air round the rocks beyond. It would be possible to visit the Western Rocks another time, when it was flat calm; or indeed, not to visit them at all. Even guerrilla camping is no fun unless you are alive. With deep sighs of relief we put our helms down and shot back up the sound into the heart of the islands.

Into St Mary’s Road we shot, past Nut Rock, along the north coast of St Mary’s, past the Crow Beacon to the Hats buoy, then rock-dodged up through the Eastern Isles, heading in a strengthening breeze for the normally sheltered lagoon between the Arthurs. But the lagoon was a slate-grey mess of funnelling gusts. So we went for St Martin’s Head, slid past the growl of Chapel Rocks to port and Flat Ledge to starboard, and put the boats back on the wind.

At this point the sun came out, the breeze dropped in the lee of the island, and a splendid prospect of turquoise sea extended before us, studded with charming islets. We conducted a through exploration, coasting past the dire cliffs of Bread and Cheese Cove and sliding at last into eighteen inches of vodka-clear water just south of Merrick. Here we dropped anchors, pumped bilges, spread tents out to dry, and knocked up a chili con carne. ‘Dunno about you,’ said Dave, contemplating the pinkening sky over the wine bottles on the pallet we were using as a Japanese style dining table, ‘but this is where we spend the night.’ Rule 5 of guerrilla camping: if someone says this is a nice place, it is.

On Scilly, open boats will motor in comfort in places where yachts will motor in mortal fear and yacht tenders in acute discomfort. Next morning, the tide being on the flood, we toured the local rocks, trailing lines. Half an hour filled a fish box with pollack. At high water we went over the bar and round the north of Tresco, taking the ebb down to Samson. A long line of yachts hung off the New Grimsby visitors’ moorings. Their clean and tidy owners waved at us sentimentally as we passed, wild-eyed and unshaven.

The weather went high and clear. That night, we did guitar playing on the beach, and people drifted out of the dune-shadows to listen. At about midnight we slid across the coal-black flats to the fair-weather anchorage between Samson and Puffin Island. Next day we sat on the beach at Samson, eating crab sandwiches and drinking sea-cooled Sancerre. The sun beat down, and a shoal of mullet hovered over the bar in water so clear they looked as if they were hanging in mid-air. In a lackadaisical, sun-kippered manner we reviewed the lessons of the week, if any. As far as I can remember they went like this. When guerrilla camping, always take a Coleman gas lamp and double the amount of wine you thought you would need. One four-pound lobster is a meatier proposition than two two-pounders. Shun the north of Tresco, especially when there is wind over tide. The back of St Martin’s is the closest thing to the Caribbean you will find in Europe, given a breeze firmly in the southwest. Two rows of reef points, full deep-sea Henri Lloyd oilskins and a good offshore flare kit are a minimum for open boat Scilly. Oh, and do it again. Soon.

Ray’s Dazed Kipper Manual

is a manual of seamanship based on best practice and appearing monthly in Classic Boat magazine. Goodness knows who writes it; someone called Samson Post, apparently, though it seems improbable that this is his real name. I have been given permission to reproduce a few specimen lessons here. I hope they may be of some use, if only to show mariners what to avoid.

Introduction

There are plenty of seamanship tutors around these days. The French have the Glenans manual, bless them. The British have our own type, quite unlike the French model because we draw the line at sleeping three to a bunk. The Americans can safely be ignored, for their habit of laying their buoys the wrong way round causes severe disappointment. But there is always room for one manual more; in particular, a manual aimed at people who like to go sailing in boats that are past their first youth. So we are going to start one, and this is the introduction to it.
It will not, like the Glenans manual, talk a lot about la Psychologie du Mal de Mer. Unlike American how-to DVDs, it will be silent as regards Lunker Action on Bass Boats. And it will not attempt to squeeze the prospective navigator into a course of exams commencing with Competent Cradle, passing through a linked series of twenty-eight qualifications all of which cost several hundred quid to acquire, and terminating with Burial at Sea (final).
So what is it then?
Ray’s Dazed Kipper Manual is based on nautical wisdom bearing the toothmarks of generations of professional seafarers. Modern manuals tend to stress safety. This only makes the student seafarer nervous. The Dazed Kipper manual places the emphasis firmly on survival. The voice of experience, delivered at a volume audible above a force 9 breeze with thunder, will eventually bring the student seafarer to the stunned, pickled condition that characterises the experienced mariner. And there is no voice on the seas around our island home louder or more experienced than that of Ray Doggett.
Of who?
Of whom, you mean. Captain Doggett, or Ray as he is known to his three friends and thousands of enemies, is a hardy British seafarer of advanced years. He absorbed salt water with his mother’s milk. Now it runs in his veins, combined with alcohol, Stockholm tar and of course blood. He has worked on Thames barges, J-class yachts, garbage lighters and deep-sea trawlers. His many circumnavigations under sail are legendary and highly fictional, and he has survived the bankruptcy of six boatyards, for all of which he was responsible.
What?
By an intensive process of brainstorming, idea showering, and very noisy arguments culminating in fist fights, Ray and I have devised a syllabus for the Manual. We feel it is a quality assured contribution to the literature, aimed at growing the skills base of marine leisure participants in the runup to the Olympics; or as Ray puts it, taking a few quid off them RYA bastards.
How?
Inevitably, comparisons will be made between Ray’s Dazed Kipper Manual and the RYA Day Skipper Manual. There will be significant differences. RYA students will be encouraged to avoid sunlight, sail clean plastic boats with odour-free bilges, and take hot (but never scalding) showers at sea. They will know exactly where they are at all times, update their charts continuously, and may come to regard the occasional sea voyages they can cram into their busy timetable as vexatious interruptions to a lifelong schedule of exams.
Ray’s students may feel that a glass of rum is a warming breakfast beverage, that there is a sentimental joy in using charts passed on without updating by elderly great-aunts, and that a tiny bit of tobacco smuggling is a handy way to offset the shocking expense of yachting. Dazed Kipper candidates, confronted by an exam, are expected to fail it. Ray was second mate of a tug at the age of fourteen, and everything he knows he made up. Dazed Kipper students will be expected to do the same; the Manual will merely provide hints, amplified by sage maxims from Ray himself. Provided he is not upside down in the snug bar at the Anchor.
Huh?
So in the months to come, we will work our way topic by topic through the arts of seamanship. We will begin with the Naming of Parts, then Choose a Boat, develop Cruising Skills, give mature consideration to Elementary and Advanced Smuggling, and know where we are most of the time to within about twenty miles.
Now you will have to excuse me, for some friends of Ray’s have just done a bank job and the safe will make a perfect anchor for the Vicar’s mooring. Further information in Classic Boat magazine. Notebooks out, pencils at the ready, mine’s a rum, same for Ray. See you then!

Harbour Manoeuvres

It is time to consider manoeuvring in confined spaces. The sea is big, but harbours are not, and they call for a special range of skills and mental attitudes.
Ray’s time as a tugboat skipper has made him intolerant of the delicate evolutions of yachtsfolk. He reckons that if you show real conviction people will get out of your way, and eight times out of ten he is right. He is rarely in command of anything small enough to get into a marina, so he knows little about them, except that they tend to be padded round the edges, which saves wear on fenders and any Golden Virginia that may be packed inside them.
Ray reckons that in order to leave the quay, you untie the lines and engage ahead and astern until you see clear water, when you engage full ahead (or astern if the clear water is behind you). For coming alongside, he recommends the standard method: motor towards the quay, attach bow line and fender, and screw the stern in by using prop wash on the rudder. When sailing a charter boat or one belonging to someone else, you may choose to omit the fender. When helming a large yacht or small merchant vessel, you may prefer to use the T-Bone.
The T-Bone.
Engage Full Ahead. Sound siren. Drain glass. Ram quay at 90º angle. Vessel will stop, unless quay falls down, in which case vessel was too big. Step ashore. Head for station.
The T-Bone with Turn
for use with good strong granite quay. Engage full ahead (see above). Drain glass. Ram quay at 90º angle so bow digs in to coping. Apply full right or left rudder to taste. Bow is held by rock in which it is embedded, so stern will swing using bow as pivot. Sound siren to drown harbourmaster’s screams. Attach bow line. Step ashore. Head for station.
The Braunston Snatch
Approach quay on converging course, half ahead. Stand by aft cleat or bollard nearest to quay, holding loop of stout line or lasso if preferred. Drain glass. Engage neutral if you have time, but don’t worry if you don’t and the mooring line is a strong one. As rope drops neatly over quay bollard, take swift turn on cleat and surge until way is off boat, at which point bow line can be attached. Possible outcomes:
1. boat stops
2. rope breaks
3 bollard shoots out of quay and demolishes wheelhouse
4 cleat shoots out of boat and demolishes harbourmaster’s car.

NB as its name implies, this is a technique derived from Ray’s days on the Inland Waterways Lime Juice run. In the
Braunston Snatch – canal version, the boatman drains glass and throws a turn over the bollard which is an integral part of the top lock gate as his stern passes it. This not only stops the boat, but closes the lock gate. In an ill-maintained canal, the top lock gate may be pulled off its hinges, leading to the ramming and consequent destruction of the bottom lock gate and flooding on a Chinese scale.

RAY says: They may complain, but you will end up tied up. Mine’s a rum. Next month? Fine. Tara for now.

Emergencies. Summoning Help

At some point in your boating career you will be almost certainly be torpedoed, hit a rock or catch fire. Do not worry. This is perfectly normal and happens to just about everyone. Usual procedure is to fire flares in all directions until they are used up. There are many VHF distress aids, including the recently introduced GMDSS, which in combination with DSC, GPS and of course a vessel’s MMSI has provided increased functionality in casualty location and communication as regards distress.
Naturally Ray Doggett is not in favour of this newfangled bilge. If he wanted anyone to know where he was, he says, he would give them the address of his lodgings. The bad thing about the sea is it is cold wet and rough. The good thing is that nobody can find you when you are on it. His opinion is certainly tinged by the fact that he sees the Coastguard as first cousin to his natural enemy the Customs Officer, and that a successful rescue may interfere with a profitable insurance claim. Still, it is just possible to admire his sturdy if rather furtive spirit of self-reliance. It is against his better judgement that we include in this Manual a system for issuing the the old-fashioned MAYDAY.

Sending a MAYDAY is simple. Whatever Ray says, the Coastguard wants to help you, and will be respectfully sympathetic to your plight. Make his life easier by remembering the simple mnemonic OMIGOD. Procedure:
DIAGRAM
Switch on VHF. Tune to Channel 16. Put thumb on TRANSMIT button. Scream:
O we are going to drown. O we will all die. O we are too young/old/weak/beautiful
M mayday. mayday. mayday. mayday. mayday. Is anyone there MAYDAYEEEEE
Identification? You mean the boat’s name? Then say so. Bloody hell I can’t remember but it is dark so what difference will it make anyway just get in your helicopter and get out here. Oh
God
O God I wish we had never bought this ruddy boat This is awful. What a
Disaster.

It is possible that the coastguard may not think you are sufficiently important to rescue, and will ask supplementary questions, such as
Q: What is your position?
A: Area sales manager, Western Europe. (exaggerate if you think the truth is insufficiently impressive).
Q: Oo. Wow. Cool. And how will the helicopter be able to identify you?
A: There are quite a lot of boats out here in the dark but we are the only one on fire.
Q: Stand by.

RAY says: Well if you must you must, I suppose. But remember, when the winchman comes down to fetch you up, be sure and offer him a swift rum if available. They get cheap fags in the Forces so it is important to get off on the right foot.