Monthly Archives: December 2013

Motorless in Training

26 Thursday Dec 2013

Posted by in Sailing/Boat Handling

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off of Madison, CT in 2012 -- photo: Judy Schultz

off of Madison, CT in 2012 — photo: Judy Schultz

The trips over the last two summers took place primarily under sail, with the small electric outboard for “just in case.” The goal was to use the motor less and less, and that pretty much worked out. It was a real education about the realities of motorless sailing.

Here are some of the things that I learned:

1. (This is obvious) It can take a long time to get somewhere.

2. It’s important to really not turn the motor on. There are many situations where you can clearly see that it’s possible to arrive without the motor, but it will take longer. By not starting the motor, regardless, you have the opportunity to measure the day after day energy required to get there slower. Or after dark. Or tomorrow afternoon. This takes more energy than one might think – it’s doable, but the ongoing grind can wear a person down.

2.5. Sometimes you get places fast! Across long distances, as if it was nothing. You just never know…

3. It’s really satisfying to move around the planet with no motor. This is particularly true when distance walking is not an option.

4. The one solar panel keeps up with all the electrical needs of the boat just fine, if it is not asked to also keep up with recharging the motor more than once every week or two. If the motor were to be used more, the boat would need a second solar panel. Or more time at a dock.

5. Going around the outside of Cape Cod is pretty easy northbound/eastbound. (The Cape Cod issue is important because to go through the canal a motor or a tow is required; the authorities bust people on this unless perfect conditions allow you to fake it.)

6. Going around the outside of Cape Cod southbound/westbound is not so easy, and more risky, and I didn’t do it. Problems are that an ideal wind for entering Nantucket sound could, if things went badly, push the boat onto the lee shore of Cape Cod (littered with previous shipwrecks); after entering Nantucket sound there is still a substantial distance, filled with fussy navigation, before reaching a harbor where it’s possible to rest; the alternative, going south around the outside of Nantucket, means going far enough south to round Nantucket Shoals – you and all the shipping traffic.

7. Going through the Cape Cod canal southbound/westbound is also not easy with a minimal motor; if they close the railroad bridge at the west end, with the westbound current running, a minimal electric motor and appropriate batteries will not hold the boat against that heavy current for the 40 minutes required to wait for the train. Further considerations are that there is no anchoring allowed, and there are no back eddies in the irrigation ditch-straight riprap along the canal edges east of the bridge. Except for that one possible hollow just before the bridge – with the “do not cross this line when the bridge is down” sign, barring access to that spot just when you would need it.

8. Hooray for boat ramps on the coast, north of Cape Cod!

9. Motorless coastal cruising would be a lot easier with another person also on the boat. A LOT easier.

10. A yuloh makes it possible to refrain from the motor and still get to where you’re trying to go. Into tight harbors when the wind dies, or when the entrance channel is 20 feet wide and the breeze is blowing straight on the nose. Even against a little bit of current.

11. It’s possible to love the yuloh too much, forgetting that patience, and judgment, will get one there by wind power. This mindset can become almost like the desire/willingness to start the motor – hyper, rather than easy, making one “quick to jump.” Quick to unship the yuloh and start pressing. Missing the opportunity for a peaceful, ghosting ride into a quiet harbor, on that surprise puff of wind.

12. I still love the yuloh.

13. If there’s not enough wind to get out of a harbor without the motor or the yuloh, it’s probably better to stay put! I had a rule about that with the motor in 2012, after saying “I’ll just use the motor to get outside the narrow harbor entrance.” And then sitting for hours on the glassy water. I forgot this lesson once I had figured out the yuloh, and proceeded to get myself out of harbor, motorless, only to, again, sit for hours on the glassy water. I am so easily fooled by that half hour of breeze just after dawn!

14. Current is your friend, so long as you attend to the relationship. Know its habits, pay attention to the rhythm of its music, and for heavens sake, let it lead! This year, it was like a switch flipped. Suddenly I could see the swirls, the wild kaleidoscope of variation at the edge of the water. Back eddies that would carry the boat against the primary current’s direction, at least for a time. The shear line, moving gradually toward the shore, after the change of tide. I’d been looking, and looking, for this, with years of book learning. But it took shutting off the motor, and sailing through dying wind, over and over, before all of a sudden it blinked on – suddenly, I could see it, looking so obvious, as it had indeed been in front of me all along. For this alone, all these long, glassy hours of a perfectly good motor, tilted out of the water, have been worthwhile.

15. Know your limits. I’m not so good at this one (for better or worse) – I want to leave the motor in the garage. Jerome “Jay” Fitzgerald, guru of motorless sailing, goes on at some length in his various books, saying that a motorless sailor should have great physical strength. That strong, trained muscles are a crucial ingredient to safe motorless sailing. Of course, he also thinks that you need a yuloh with a handle made out of a 4 x 4 in order to move a boat. And this just hasn’t been the case aboard AUKLET. The more delicate yuloh suits my more delicate strength, and still the boat moves. However, there are limits, to both strength, and stamina. Perhaps the motor should stay on the boat, in deference to those limits. Or if the motor is off the boat, perhaps the boat should be in more sheltered waters. But that wild freedom, of being one with the unburdened Earth, is so wildly tempting.

16. If I would spend more time stopped, resting in one harbor or another, I might have the pep to do this well. I keep thinking that this is a function of health issues, this need for stopping and resting. But perfectly healthy sailors talk to me in person, or write in books, about the energy expended, and the need for rest, that comes of this activity. Motorless liveaboard sailors talk to me about spending a week – or two – in a nice location, before they are inclined to go out and sail again. Motorless sailing, because I want to do it so much, may be the one thing that finally teaches me how to really slow down. I know how to move slowly with the boat; what I need to learn is how to come to a full stop often enough, and for long enough, to have the energy to sail.

Conclusion: Nobody ever said sailing was easy! But oh what a fascinating, rich, and generous opportunity it presents. Leaving the motor off simply expands the opportunity – by hundreds.

Invitation!

14 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by in Uncategorized

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Two or three weeks ago I learned a new trick with the blog, and as a result there are now a couple of additional headings that you can click on at the top of the main page. One of them says “Say Hello!” But it hasn’t been getting much traffic, and I think that the folks who “follow” the blog don’t see it at all. So here’s a link: http://sailingauklet.com/say-hello/

It’s utterly intriguing to me, the question of who’s actually reading this stuff. If you’d like to say a quick hello, or introduce yourself more thoroughly, it would be a real treat. And thank you to all of you who have been in touch already! I think that it’s fun for other readers, as well as for me.

So please do consider yourself invited… Here in the northern hemisphere – and especially for those of us in the somewhat more northern part of the northern hemisphere – it’s now snowy and cold. I’m writing this at one in the afternoon, and it’s 15°F outside, with snow falling. What better than to hang around and visit! I hope you’ll join in.

With very best wishes for wonderful holidays,
Shemaya

Floods toward the Sea

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by in Trips

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First photo is Dix Island, looking southwest.

Some funny things happen when the tide runs in and out among the islands in Maine. Current directions are often not what you would expect, as the currents are shaped as much or more by the underwater topography as by the surface outlines of the chunks of land. In a complicated group of many islands, it turns out that the current can appear to run backwards, flooding toward the sea, and ebbing up the bay. This can come as quite a surprise!

Birch Island is part of a group of islands at the southwest corner of Penobscot Bay. In the chart up above (click on the photo to make it bigger) you can see both a detail of the island group, and where that group sits in relation to the much larger mouth of Penobscot Bay, which opens to the south into the Atlantic Ocean. Birch Island itself forms a nice harbor, together with High Island to the north, and some shelter from Dix toward the southwest, as well as other bits of land and rocks to the east. This is a sweet corner in which to spend a few days, but not so much fun if the wind goes to the west and northwest.

On my way east this summer, after a couple of lovely days in that anchorage, a squall line followed by strong northwest wind was forecast to arrive during the night. I decided to move around the corner to a small cove on the southeast side of Dix, which was a short sail, less than a half mile, south through a narrow slot between the islands. Since I had all day, it was easy to check the current tables and plan to let the current do the work to tack against the light southerly wind. Feeling very well organized, I waited until the tide had had a chance to get more than halfway down, and then pulled up the anchor and started sailing.

Turning the corner around Birch Island, I was a little surprised to find the current still running toward the north, but figured that it was just a major lag in the current change after the tide started to fall. I didn’t have far to go at that point – a few hundred yards – and started tacking in the narrow channel, making a bit of progress with each round. The tide runs pretty strongly in this part of Penobscot Bay, but I figured that it should be easing and then eventually turning, so why not continue with this little tacking clinic, waiting for the change and making tiny bits of progress.

The funny thing was, the opposing current was actually strengthening! First I attributed this to that I was getting into the narrowest part of the channel. Finally, when I was making no progress whatsoever, I decided to anchor on the shallow side, and wait for things to change. Right there in that spot, the current continued to increase. So much for my theory that I was moving into the stronger flow!

Eventually it was truly obvious that the current I was experiencing was the one that was going with the main body of the ebb tide. But if you look on the charts, you’ll see that this ebb was headed straight north, up the bay, away from the open ocean that you could clearly see through the islands. Fascinating!

I had been quite determined to not use the motor, and was happy to wait this out and watch the physics show to which I was being treated. Then some truly enormous, very black clouds started to come up in the west, headed our way. By this time it was about four o’clock, and evening would soon be approaching. Where I was anchored was going to be a terrible lee shore when the northwest wind filled in, and I didn’t want to just go back to where I had been. The old spot would have been safer than where I was, but miserably uncomfortable, and with potential for trouble if the wind became stronger than predicted.

Up came the anchor, and for kicks I tried some more sailing against the current, losing ground on each of two tacks. Motor on. This is why it’s there – for getting out of tight spots, and having the opportunity to think through what I could have done differently that would have avoided this particular motor use.

Once the little electric motor was going, in five minutes I was around the corner into that cove, and sailing again, turning circles and taking soundings. After finding a good-looking spot, down went the anchor, in time to watch the squall come through. Dix Island has a nice bit of a bluff, and lots of tall trees, so it was a great spot for hiding from west and northwest wind.

Thinking back, of course what I could do differently in the future is to try that move when the tide is flooding, and flowing toward the sea! But if I had this original situation again, when I started to lose ground during the first attempt I could have picked up one of three empty moorings on the west side of the channel, asking whoever came along if that was okay. I hesitate to do that sort of thing when I have a perfectly good motor on the back of the boat, that could get me to a very nearby safe anchorage without imposing on somebody else’s gear, but it really was an option. Anchoring adjacent to the moorings would not have worked, as it’s the deep side of the channel, and with enough anchor line out the boat would have swung into the frequently used path for other boats. As it turned out, Reilly (of the delicious lobsters) came by later and said that it would have been fine to use one of the moorings for the night. But it was nice in the cove I ended up in, and I was very happy to be there.

The next morning, when it was time to leave I was headed for the ocean, to go further up the coast. There was still the network of islands to pass through, in order to get out to that open water, and still the question of current. In the Muscle Ridge channel, which you can see on the chart to the west of the islands, the tide runs strongly, in the direction that you would expect. I guess in among the islands there are some giant back eddies, or some other trick of hydraulics in the complicated network of passages.

Anyway, at 6 AM the tide would be about an hour into rising, having been low around five. I made a plan to take a chance and depart at that time, headed south between the islands just after dawn, toward the ocean. At least the tide would not be running strongly at that time, whatever direction it was going, and if I was lucky, I would get a ride in the right direction. And it was true! That tide, flooding, ran straight toward the open water. I went out just west of Andrews Island, and the tide stayed fair until the last bit just before it cleared the islands.

This is the sort of thing that one doesn’t forget, especially with the minimal motor. The title has been on my mind for months, and I’m glad to have finally written down the story. I’ll be even more glad to go back to that area, and to ride the tide backwards between Birch and Dix islands, going with it rather than against. I still don’t quite believe that it does it this way every time, but it’ll be fun to go find out.