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SINGLE HANDED SAILING
Single handed sailing is not for the average person, the single handed sailor must be a masochist at best. On long voyages some people have gone stark raving mad from the solitude. It is hard for some of us to imagine not seeing another living sole for days, weeks or months at a time and this is where the problem is. There have been instances of sailors actually jumping overboard from the solitude.
By the time you discover that you need people, you may be past the point of no return. For others, solitude is a way of life, but you must truly hate people to make long ocean voyages. Some say that the dislike of people and companionship is a sure sign of mental problems and long instances of solitude will certainly make the situation worse.
I have always been considered a bit weird (maybe that is what it takes). but solitude is my trip back to reality. I have always come back from a long trip in a much better frame of mind than when I departed on the voyage. I don't recommend it for everybody, or anybody for that matter, so don't say I told you to do it.
Solitude at sea is dangerous at best. Lack of sleep is the number one cause of mistakes ending up in injuries and even death. As your boat sails leisurely along as you sleep, huge ships speed across the ocean at speeds of forty plus knots. The larger and longer the ship, the greater the possible speed it will travel. A Ships that size travel through the water rather than over the water as a planing hull will do. The possible speed of a ship is determined by the length of the hull. A narrow ship will travel faster than a wide ship.
A large ship can be seen as it rises above the horizon. At first only the radio antennas are above the horizon, but you can't see them. Normally You will not see a ship in the daytime until the hull comes over the horizon. During night time hours, The higher lights may be seen sooner in clear weather with little starlight. This difference is minimal, usually taking a matter of minutes, usually on the average of thirty minutes in the case of larger faster ships.
For the single handed sailor, twenty minutes is not near enough time to sleep and get enough rest to be alert, yet you must be wide awake and on deck as lookout for these huge ships. If you sleep more than the thirty minutes you run the danger of being run down by one of these monsters of the sea that popped over the horizon just as you dropped down into the cabin from your last look around.
How long the body can go without adequate sleep depends upon your general health. As time passes without adequate sleep, your bodies healthy condition diminishes making you less alert and capable of making critical decisions like, are our courses crossing? are we on a collision course? and what action must I take to avoid a collision? It takes some time to determine whether you are on a collision course and take evasive action, so realistically, your sleep time is reduced from thirty minutes to twenty minutes.
Large ships are not the only danger to the single handed sailor. many large objects are floating around the ocean, from logs to freight containers larger than the boat you may be aboard. There is also the danger of rocks and sand bars near shore and sudden storms or even slow moving whales at sea. All of these can really ruin your day if you encounter one of them while you are asleep.
Getting Things Done
Your voyage alone is not a pleasant cruise when you are not asleep. while you are not sleeping there is the daily maintenance and continuous inspection of your boat. In almost every instance, your job will become increasingly more difficult as time without proper sleep passes. A good seaman will use a safety harness to attach him to the boat should he fall overboard. After all, if you go overboard with the boat on auto pilot, who will come back to pick you up? The safety harness and its trailing line seems to find every possible object to hang itself on adding to your problems.
As the cruise continues on and time passes, the day after day movement of the boat causes wear and tear on your boat. In the case of long trips it could be a major safety problem if you do not keep up the maintenance and repair of the boat. Something simple like a loose bolt is a major job if the head is above deck and the nut is below deck. After all, who will hold the nut below while you tighten it above? Sure, now you say to jam a pair of vice grips on something to hole the bolt while you tighten the nut, but after several weeks at sea your mental capacity is diminished to the point that you may not be able to comprehend how to tighten the bolt, much less, be able to figure out how you will do it alone.
Preparations For The Voyage
I think by now you are starting to get the picture that sailing alone is not all that it is made out to be. There are a lot of things you can do to make your boat as seaworthy and maintenance free as possible. One of the greatest boons to single or short handed sailing is the many auto pilots or the wind vane steering systems on the market. They will steer your boat while you carry on your daily activities.
There are also many tricks and gadgets you can use to fit your boat out for the voyage. After all these gadgets and lines are set up your boat usually looks like some kind of maze or confidence course and has taken quite a toll on your pocket book. \par \tab After preparing your boat you have to take into consideration the fact that if there is a problem during the voyage, repairs will usually take extended lengths of time to accomplish.
Sometimes you may drift for weeks until the weather is good enough to make proper repairs not to mention deciding how to do it. When you are far from shore, you are basically on your own. I have never been too quick to call for help because I put myself in a dangerous position by being out there alone. I have always been of the mind that I got myself in that position, so I should not endanger the lives of others helping me out of that position.
These extended delays will make it necessary to take extra food and water just incase. My general grocery order always included rations for 6 months since I am not too fond of fish. Hay, you never know. Until I went hungry for a few days, I didn't think about that. Now I jam as much food and water aboard as possible. Even when I am not planing a long trip it is nice not to have to go to the grocery store every week. Even when I was not doing any extensive traveling, I usually bought my groceries about three or four times a year. sure, I had to go to the store to buy fruit and vegetables that did not keep for extended lengths of time, but it sure made for faster shopping trips which I hate.
well, now that you know that single handed sailing is more torture than it is pleasure, and I have probably blown any ideas you may have had about doing it, I will try to tell you about some of my adventures at sea to satisfy that yearning for a life at sea you were dreaming about before you started reading this. I will start out with a couple of rather short but funny story about myself when I started hanging out around boats.
They weren't too funny at the time, but as I look Back, They were. These mostly are about power boats, and now that I think about it, may have had something to do with my desire to go to sea in a sail boat rather than a power boat.
Steering By A Star
When I was about ten years old I had wandered over the bridge to the mainland and conned my way into a job on a couple of party boats helping them clean up after a days fishing. After a while I was asked if I wanted to go fishing for free. I had finally admitted to my mother that I had disobeyed her and was going across the bridge and convinced her to let me go fishing.
As time passed on I eventual had a chance to go on a 3 am trip far off shore where the big ones were. On the day trips I had learned to steer the boat by compass and by watching the clouds on the horizon. In the early morning hours before daylight there were no clouds to steer by so my course was wandering all over the Gulf of Mexico because I was trying to follow the compass.
After a bit of joking about my "snake wake" the mate pointed out that I could pick out a bright star and steer by that and refer back to the compass every once and a while to check my course. All went well for a while until the Captain came to the wheel house and said, Where the hell are you going?
I quickly looked at the compass to find that I was almost headed back toward shore. After getting back on course I said, "I don't understand it. I know that star didn't move". The Captain asked what star I was steering for. I pointed it out to him and he asked me to watch it for a minute. Suddenly noticed it was an airplane. After that I was more careful.
Earl Taylor
By the time I reached the early teens I had managed to get invited to go commercial fishing with my friend Mark and his father Earl. Since my father had died when I was very young, he was about as close a father figure as I had. When I first started hanging out with Mark, he told me that when we were together and messed up I was subject to the same punishment as Mark. Later mark told me never to let him give me a whipping. He had never gotten one yet, but he assured me it would be no fun.
His father had been a fisherman all his life and was as hard as the barnacles on the bottom of the boat. He never brought toilet paper, opting for a handful of water and seldom brought anything to eat. We occasional snuck some snacks and toilet paper aboard for our comfort since we sometimes spent days at a time on it.
He never cut us any slack for being kids, at best he let us share the same job and gave us the full share of a crewman to split between us. Whatever we did we usually did together. We lived in utter horror of the day this man would give us a whipping, because we knew it would be one we would never forget and probably not live through. Eventual Mark got a whipping for back talking his dad and just hearing about it sent chills down my spine. There wasn't any way I was ever going to disobey this man.
One cold January morning we were sain fishing along a channel where a big school of mullet was traveling along the edge. The weather was just below freezing and our job was when his father backed the boat into shallow water we would jump over the stern and pull the end of the net ashore and start pulling the rest of it moving down the beach with the current until his father who would run down the beach behind the fish, drop the anchor and pull the other end. By the way it was about a couple of hundred yards long and the bottom line was full of lead weights that made it very heavy.
Well, things went wrong from the beginning. He backed the boat into the beach and we jumped over the stern dressed in chest waders several layers of pants, long johns and coats and gloves. As soon as we hit the water we discovered that it was about a foot over our head. with all the wet clothes and chest waders full of water we sunk like rocks. Along with that we still had hold of the lead line full of weights which we knew never to let go of.
We could jump off the bottom and get a lung full of air and drop back to the bottom. As I jumped up for a lung full of air I looked to see if he had seen our predicament and turned the boat around to get us. To our amazement he was still running down the beach yelling back, "walk on the bottom". We finally walked up the side of the channel dragging the heavy net which had gotten heavier (because of our delay of wasted time breathing) by the additional length running off the boat and laying on the bottom that we had to drag behind us.
When we finally got to shore we started pulling the net and freezing. His father was casually standing down the beach pulling that end while we were half sitting and digging our feet into the sand up above out ankles pulling the other end while his father said pull harder. After getting the net ashore and filling several other boats with fish we went back to the dock to unload and set out again still wearing wet clothes. I think it was another day or so before we got to go home to change clothes and eat.
As time went on we earned enough money with his dad that we decided to buy ourselves a couple of small outboard boats to cruise the bay when we weren't killing ourselves fishing. My mother didn't know anything about boats so she left the boat stuff up to Earl as well as punishment for disobeying his rules. The Northern most boundary of our area was the south end of Tampa bay, beyond that we had to answer to Earl.
One day we heard that there was a big old square rig sailing ship anchored in Tampa bay so we jumped into our boats and went to the bay to see if we could see it. It was huge and very beautiful to look at. We took binoculars and spent some time checking it out, then Mark had an idea. "dad's fishing down below sarasota and he would never know if we ran out there and took a quick look up close" We both thought about the consequences, but the temptation was too much. We started our motors and went about two miles out into the bay to see it. There were dozens of boats around it looking at it. We slid between them and got alongside of it and got a good look and went back to our territory.
That night I spent at marks house and the next morning. being Sunday, his dad wasn't fishing. As usual his face was hidden behind the newspaper. We knew better than to disturb him when he was reading the paper, so when he spoke we were shocked. He asked "Did you see the ship in the bay yesterday"? "Yes" we answered. "Did you get a good look at it"? he asked. Oh-ooo "Yes sir" we answered, we knew something was up. "I figured you did", as he turned the newspaper around to show us a half page picture on the front page of the Bradenton Harold of us in our boats alongside of the ship.
One of those many boats had the papers photographer in it. \par \tab Now in place of a whipping Mark had occasionally gotten the back of the hand for some minor things. Sometimes his dad would wait days or weeks and deliver the blow when least expected. This was not going to be so easy. We did something really dangerous and stupid in going out there, not to mention how stupid it was to have disobeyed him.
We waited days for that whipping knowing it was coming with no doubt in our mind. We didn't ask to use the boats for weeks because we didn't want to even me nation them to him because we figured he would make us get rid of them. We finally used the boats but the fear of that whipping was overpowering us. The days became weeks and months. We knew when the time came it was really be bad because of the time he delayed in giving us the whipping.
About 20 years later I was visiting Earl in his recently purchased fish market and decided to ask why he had never given us a whipping for that days adventure. He asked if I still remembered that. I said I have thought about it every day since then and that was no lie either. it haunted me. He laughed and told me that was why he never gave us the whipping, so we would remember it.
I think it was what that man imprinted on my brain at that early age has helped me to make some very un pleasant sailing trips turn into a success rather than a disaster. Without him, I an sure I would never be writing this now.
Now To The Sailing Stories
my first years of sailing consisted of reading books and the local pram fleet where I often lost races because I wanted to go just a bit farther out into the bay rather than compete in the race. I had hung out there Saturday mornings just watching them rig the boats and race. I knew my mother wasn't going to let me join so I just watched and daydreamed.
One day somebody launched a boat and handed me the line, sails, and rudder and told me to get it out of the way. Ah at last a chance to try it out, I thought as I rigged it and moved away from the dock. Then somebody on the hailer said to get ready for the first race, so I fell in with the rest of them and jockeyed for a good starting position. It was everything I had hoped for, being able to make the wind work for me and to ba able to go where I wanted to go without a motor was greatest thing I had ever experienced.
After about six months somebody realized I wasn't a member and had not taken the swimming test, so I took the test and forged my mothers name on the permission slip and was finally a full fledged member.
It wasn't long after that when somebody I knew gave me the use of their small sailing dingy that had two sails instead of only one. It had a sailboat hull rather than the square bow and flat bottom of the prams. My first adventure in it was to sail about 5 miles down the island to where the pram fleet met and sail just close enough to let everybody there know I was free from the race course and could go where I wanted to go.
Seaweed
As the years passed I went from one borrowed boat to another and a few home built boats. None of them were even close to being big enough to get out on the Gulf of Mexico where I really wanted to be. I had finally gotten enough experience to get jobs delivering sail boats by water to New York and other places along with the power boats I was delivering. I had pretty well given up on being able to afford what I wanted, so I decided that if god wanted me to have a boat he would give it to me.
Soon after that I was unemployed for a while and decided to sail a small boat I had south on the Intercostal Waterway and look for a job. near Ft. Myers I ran across an old friend who told me about an old but very strong boat about twenty feet long. not big enough for what I wanted and with no money I knew I wasn't going to get it, But I decided to tie my boat behind his houseboat and go with him to the other end of Charlotte Harbor to see this boat he had told me about.
I was introduced to Joe Newton who showed me the boat named "Seaweed" and told me about how he liked the boat but never had time to sail it. While we swapped sailing stories. I told Joe that I had no job or money but if he did not sell it first, I would be back for it. He said he wasn't advertizing it so I had a good chance of getting it. Several months went by and a friend was going to Charlotte harbor so I decided to go along to take a look at "Seaweed" again and see if it was still for sale.
My friend dropped me off at the marina and went his way and I walked down the dock to look for the boat. Along the way I ran across Joe and we spent the afternoon shooting the breeze. When my ride came back, Joe said to tell him to go ahead without me. I figured Joe was going to Bradenton and we would talk some more on the way. After my ride left, Joe said go ahead and sail "seaweed" home and pay me for it when you can. he got out the boat's papers and signed them over to me and had them notarized. Then he showed me where all the equipment for the boat was and helped me load it aboard. As I sailed out of the marina I started to think about leaving it up to god as to what, when and where I would get a boat.
Within a week I found work and was able to pay off the boat quickly. I lived on it despite the fact you could not even sit up in it with the hatch closed. I fixed it up and sailed it as often as possible.
A lady whom I had delivered her boat from Tampa to New York several times saw it and wanted it. I sold it to her and she wanted me to sail it to New York for her. Since I had fixed it up and it was certainly strong enough for a summer trip north if I hurried because hurricane season was coming fast. I quickly spent a week on it getting ready and set out.
The wind was almost at a standstill and when I got to the Dry Tortugas the wind died all together. I didn't want to take a chance of being becalmed in the gulf stream, so I waited two weeks until there was enough wind to travel. I sailed as far as Miami with a good wind, but then the hurricane warnings came.
The hurricane season had finally caught up with me so I had to return to Tampa. She put "Seaweed" into storage for a few years until she realized she had no time to work on it or use it. One day she approached me and offered to sell it back at a fraction of what I had sold it to her for. I had missed the "seaweed' so I bought it back from her.
I had it for several more years until it was time for her to move on and I sold it to a fellow who also lived in her cramped quarters. I have since seen her a few times sailing on the bay and wondered if she ever got back to sea again. the short trip from the Dry Tortugas to Miami was rough enough that I was sure the trip would have been very successful with a little precaution because of her small size.
Seaweed 2nd.
The second seaweed came to me by a friend I was visiting at a boatyard while he was working on it. I had told him I liked the boat and he said it was for sale. We made a deal and I bought it soon after. It was a 27 Ft plywood boat with a ketch rig and no engine. Despite it's age and home built title, it was in very good condition. The full keel made her easy to self steer and it wasn't until a few years later that I even got around to looking for a self steering gear for it. The cockpit consisted of only a foot well which, on hot day at sea I would fill with water and use as a small pool to lay in and read while on deck. During a good hard rain it made a great bath tub too.
I lived on "Seaweed 2nd." for a couple of years until one day I came aboard from spending the night ashore for a couple of days and when I stepped on deck I felt and heard water sloshing in the cabin. Since the boat collected dust in even the lowest part of the bilge, this meant trouble. The bat had been struck by lightning and a small pinhole was blown in the side of the boat. That was on the inside, on the outside it was ten inches high and two feet long.
While I had it out of the water I decided to let her sit out for several months and let it dry out so I could take the bottom down to bare wood and epoxy glue and nail a second 3/4 inch layer of plywood over the existing bottom. There wasn't anything wrong with the original bottom, I just wanted more than a 3/4 inch bottom (I have a tendency to over-do almost everything resulting in very little problems at sea).
As I was nearing the end of the project a friend stopped by and asked what I was going to do when I got her back in the water. Since I had not lined up any work so I could work on my boat for a while he suggested I go to Yucatán which we had been talking about for several years. I thought about it for about thirty seconds and decided to do it.
I spent an additional couple of weeks on the boat building some storage for supplies for a long trip and went directly to Yucatán from the marina as soon as she was back in the water. The trip went well, taking seven days of calm weather. The only problem was an upper shroud that had a defect in the jaw connecting it to the turnbuckle. I changed course putting the strain on the other side and repaired it so I could continue on.
I did not realize it, but my friend Ed who had suggested I make the trip, had made the trip to Progreso, Yucatán in a 27 foot boat and they were still talking about the crazy Gringo in the little boat. When I sailed in I immediately assumed the tile and when everybody found out I was sailing without an engine, They knew I was crazy.
My first experience with the Mexican Government was the port police who stopped by to start the process of entering the country. As he started to make out his paperwork he said I needed to have the boats name on the boat. It seems their paperwork is based on boats names rather than state numbers like here. I always try to make the best of a bad situation so I asked where they had to be, how big and what color. He said it didn't matter. I decided to see if I could get a smile out of him so I borrowed his pencil and bent over the stern and wrote "seaweed 2" on the stern in half inch letters upside down. He looked, smiled, nodded his head and continued the paperwork. That upside down penciled in name stayed there for several years while I was in Mexico and never gave me a problem anywhere.
During the rush to leave I had forgotten the boats papers and the captain of the port kept saying "mucho problema" In other words get ready for a bribe. He kept saying no problema ..... no problema. For the lack of anything else to say, (I remembered that my friend Ed had known him when he was here) I said "By the way, your friend Ed on the yacht Ginah said hi". His eyes lit up and he said "He remembered me" Then he said "No Problema", but in a different tone of voice. He continued to tell me to go ahead and finish entering Mexico and when I got my papers give him a copy of them for his records and everything would be OK. I did as he said and never heard another word about it again after that.
As time went on I found that having a name to drop could get you through anything.
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