'Blue Mistress'

Calm morning

/ Bill

This is the first time I’ve been able to get to the boat since Christmas. There have been at least three ferocious storms and I was anxious to see how Blue Mistress had fared – particularly the port stern line which chafed badly against the Windpilot during the Autumn.

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Strong winds are forecast again, but this morning all was calm.

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Blue Mistress is just over the stern of the red-sailed Cornish Shrimper.

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The extra tubing on the stern line worked. All is slack on the incoming neap tide.

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The boat cleans up well. The hand pump sucked dry – great. The no.2 battery was almost flat – not so great. But the engine started on the no 1 battery and I ran it for over an hour. We shall see how far it runs down next time.

Dear George: singlehanded

/ Bill

Dear George

I am sorry it has taken so long to reply to your letter. As I mentioned the other day, the day job is proving a handful. You work hard throughout a long career and, at the very end, with the next step beckoning, you find yourself jumping through endless regulatory hoops that appear to have been created by someone in a hurry to finish a school project. One day I’ll tell you about it – ‘nuff said for now.

– – –

You say you want to sail and you are thinking of buying a boat of your own. You have sent me a lot of questions. Of course, I am flattered to be asked, but it would take a master mariner and his mate – the gnarled old yachtsman, a year to answer these – and still give them an excuse for another beer. So, before I wade in . . .

  • I am neither a master mariner – nor an old yachtsman (let alone gnarled);
  • What you get is not an expert’s guidance, more a fellow crew’s comments;
  • All my answers will come from my own experience such that it is – and if I quote someone else I will tell you (whether I can remember who it is or not);
  • You have to decide whether it is useful or not – and if you want to come back at me, that’s OK. We’ll both learn something.

– – –

You bring up the single-handed question.

Here’s my answer: “If you have to ask whether or not you should sail single-handed, the answer is no, don’t – go to sea with a crew and enjoy the company.”

The whole point of being single-handed is to be able to make those decisions for yourself. You do the preparation beforehand, you work out the potential problems, you solve the extra challenges as they come along. You run the boat – every aspect of it. You can seek answers from as many people as you like, but ultimately the responsibility is yours and yours alone.

Among many other things, (and we can talk about these later), you have to enjoy your own company. You have to live with your own mistakes, and your own triumphs. There will be no applause.

I agree with Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s comment, “ The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn’t subdue you and make you abject. It’s a stimulating loneliness.” I might even substitute the word ‘aloneness’ for ‘loneliness’.

A crew is a different matter.

Here is a question for you. Family aside, if you had a choice, who would you have aboard? Someone who can stay focussd, someone who knows one end of a rope from another, someone who can work close to other people without getting their ego in the way – (that’s a misquote from a sixties film by the way).

Do you want a crew that is excitable and can’t sit still? Someone who is always on the move? You might if you are in a twenty-minute America’s Cup race, but perhaps not if you are on a gentle cruise down the coast to Falmouth. It depends how long you intend to stay together, doesn’t it.

Of course, you don’t always get the choice. On s boat, you have to learn to live close with all sorts of people. Now there’s a topic . . .

I hope this is the sort of reply you are after.

I will sleep on your other questions and get back to you later.

Bill

On being left-handed

/ Bill / 2 Comments

On being left-handed

Have you ever been shown how to tie a knot by a right-handed person? “The end goes round this, over that, round again and under the other.OK? . . . Now you do it.”  Good teaching, useful learning – if you’re right-handed.

But it can be a real trial if you’re left-handed. A left-hander will pick up the rope and find that what s/he sees in front of him/her is different from the demonstration. It’s not necessarily the fault of the teacher, from the start it just doesn’t “look right”. S/he has to think it through again. Sometimes this takes time and the student appears slow, sometimes not.

I have spent most of my life bemused by the gap between how I am told I should be doing this or that task and how I end up doing it. I have driven several severely right-handed teachers wild with frustration. Older now and hopefully a little wiser, I am still left-handed and that gap between theory and action has not diminished.

In fact, I have come to enjoy it. Within what I always think of as a deceptively slow approach, life neither follows a straight line nor flashes by in black and white. There is an opportunity to stand back and observe. And there is an opportunity to be creative.

On the boat, it is not the left or right hand that is so important, it is the wish to observe, and, from that, the desire to create.

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The Eye of the Beholder

/ Bill

Thank you, Max, for your comment. I have taken it on board. This is for you.

I stopped writing the blog for a while because the rest of life took over. Now I’m looking back again and wondering where the cumulative experience lies – what am I learning? Hence the following:

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I slipped the mooring and motored the mile down to the Citadel. There was no wind, and very few boats out this early. I had Plymouth Sound more or less to myself.

With sails set – mainsail and genoa, we barely made headway, the tide doing most of the work. I poured a coffee from the flask and found a biscuit. Time to enjoy the moment. Time to reflect.

Two or three fishing boats emerged from Sutton Harbour, hustling their separate ways past me and out to the open sea.

This one caught my eye.

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They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Well, there is beauty here but not necessarily the beauty of lines and colour, not in the magazine-image sense anyway. The beauty here comes from all that has gone before and all that is to come from this boat. It’s not so very different from the Ceres that I have posted on a number of times. We do like her lines but, in reality, she was a Westcountry trading ketch – it was the work she did that made her. (Tugster will understand this).

Passing in front of me now was someone’s livelihood – with all the political, economic, environmental, maritime safety, health and safety, technology and science issues that surround it. Those same issues that are increasingly pressing on you and me.

But, even in the face of all that, there were still elegant lines. For this one moment, for me only, this slightly ungainly metal workshop had created an almost perfect wave in an otherwise table-flat sea. And it was beautiful.

It’s those moments that I go to sea for – not to forget all the other stuff, (how can we?), but to add to the total experience of life.

Single-handed

/ Bill / 1 Comment

I want to write about sailing single-handed. But now I wonder how self-indulgent that might be.

By definition, if I sail single-handed, it’s just me. All other sailing is team-work – (or crew-work).

So who on earth but me would be interested in my version of single-handed? Surely, it’s irrelevant to everyone else.

Writing about it is me imposing my version on the reader. Plenty of other people sail single-handed and enjoy it in their own way. When you enjoy something so personal, to be faced with another person’s assertions invites a defensive stance:

“Thanks very much, but I am confident in my own competence, I don’t need you to tell me this or that is a better way of doing it. Yes, of course, I am always interested, but I want to find out in my own way, in my own time. So write it down if you want, but don’t expect me to want to read it – and certainly don’t expect me to agree with you.”

OK, so be it.

Living the dream

/ Bill

People talk about  “living the dream”.

But, as good as that might sound, there is another view – for some people, achieving the dream only creates the need for a new dream. For them, the gap between reality and the dream is the key. As the circus artist said, “Living is walking that tightrope. Everything else is waiting.”

The boat, of course, is my dream and every time I go aboard I am living it.

I have never ever had a ‘bad’ sail – plenty of challenges, plenty of problems to solve, exciting times, but never a day when I have haven’t come ashore lifted in spirit.

But I have been fighting to find any time for it lately. The day-job has taken over.

I enjoy the day job too – much more people-oriented, more intense challenges, plenty of problems to solve, and, lately, a lot more of everything.

But, in the background, the boat still holds me – the tension between reality and the dream  becomes stronger than ever.

It carries me when I am at work.

It’s a good tension.

Seb and Maya

/ Bill / 2 Comments

Back in the fifties, my dad bought an LP. He played it a lot – Uffa Sings.

As a young boy, I remember being fascinated by Uffa’s introduction to one of the sea shanties:

“‘A Roving’ – that’s a rollicking song but you can only sing about the first three verses of that because this is a song the sailors sung at sea and they weren’t always virtuous in their words.”

How I longed to hear the fourth verse!

I was reminded of this while watching Seb’s clips on You Tube.

Earlier in the year, Seb and I met at Newbury train station. He bought Blue Mistress’ old spray hood which is now attached to Maya somewhere in the Mediterranean.

I mentioned Seb at the start of his voyage. He is on a great adventure that he should one day look back on with pride. The lessons learnt will be there for ever.

He is sharing those lessons with us via short video clips from his phone. Perhaps, one of those lessons should be that because he is ‘less than virtuous in his words’, what works at sea doesn’t necessarily work for those us on land, sitting on our comfortable chairs gazing at glasses screens. (To be fair he has toned it down as time has gone on).

Here is the dilemma in the use of language. Is he recording events for himself and a small group of friends, in which case he has the right to say what he likes – (always remembering it’s difficult to put anything on media without someone misunderstanding you –  it’s totally unrealistic to think that no one else will see it – and better your friends see it first), or for a wider group – us.

I am sure we can all handle the language individually, but I would have avoided watching the clips with my mother if she were still with us – and I am certain my children would prefer to watch with me out of the room.

All the above because I, for one, am fascinated by these clips, firstly because Seb is sailing a boat like mine, secondly because he is doing something I’ve always wanted to do, and thirdly because he has found a way of recording the voyage with an intense immediacy. If he takes care in putting it all together it will be a valuable resource to him in future.

Here is Maya rounding Cabo Vincente:

You can find the rest of his clips by searching Sebinasia on You Tube.

Be(a)ware and enjoy

When all is said and done,  I’m home here talking about it, Seb’s out there doing it.

Wherever they go, I wish him and Maya fair winds  – (whenever they blow).

Chafe

/ Bill

” Strong winds are forecast. Southwest 4 or 5 veering west 5 to 7. Slight or moderate becoming moderate or rough. Rain for a time, then showers. Good becoming moderate or poor for a time.”

I have been busy with the day job and haven’t been aboard for the past two weeks.

So, with the weather forecast in mind, I rowed out to Blue Mistress this morning and, as you do, turned to admire her and check her over from a distance.

The camera was in the bag so I drifted a while – took a couple of pictures.

Something wasn’t right but it took a few moments to see it.

The weed-covered line rope is the trot line which joins the buoys together and doesn’t take any strain.

The line of buoys are laid in line with the river current, but the tides are strong – especially the spring tides, and though the two stern lines theoretically hold the boat evenly onto the buoy, at different states of the tide cross currents and cross winds contrive to push the boats one way or another.

Logic says the line caught on the self-steering gear. I worried about this possibility when we set it up last year.  However, we stayed on the water through the winter storms  and this is the first sign of chafe.

There is plastic tubing where the lines cross the sten and its tempting to add another length mid-line. But this may make the lines cumbersome to retrieve single-handed where a certain amount of deftness and speed is called for to get at least one aft line and one fore line aboard before the current takes her.

The splicing practice will be good.

~~~

The rain set in shortly after I went aboard.

Fair winds

/ Bill / 1 Comment
I bought a boat in 2006 – a Folksong 25. I knew little about the class and started this blog in search of other owners.
The boats were built for home completion – a different pedigree from modern production boats. After the hulls left the yard, personal preferences and individual skills took over. The preferences were as varied as the skills. It would be rare to find two identical Folksongs.
People found the blog and kindly contacted me. They have been helpful and resourceful, and I have learnt a lot that is now built into Blue Mistress for which I am very grateful.
Five years later,  a younger generation has come into the picture. The Folksong Yacht group exists. The mobile phone has taken over from blogging, instant access being the key. One person can contact the whole group and get an appropriate reply in a minute, an hour, a day.
Now one of those members has begun a voyage – Seb Rogers on Maya, last heard of in Falmouth at the weekend, looking for weather to take him across Biscay and beyond.
The excitement in that phrase!
Seb has taken on a challenge that most of us just think about.
Fair winds to him and a successful voyage. I look forward to his colourful clips and news from wherever, whenever it comes.

On sailing a Folksong – Self-steering gear

/ Bill / 4 Comments

Earlier in the year, Seb (Mischief) asked about self-steering gear on a Folksong. He was interested in a bracket to carry it.

I know he has now fitted a Hasler gear and has since sailed from the Tamar to Portsmouth with it, so I hope to hear how he got on.

In the meantime, this is the gear I picked for Blue Mistress – the Windpilot Pacific Light.

One of the reasons I like the Folksong is that there are no predetermined class rules. You have to make up your own mind. So, having  decided which self-steering would suit me, then comes the problem of how to mount it on the stern with a rudder post that stretches as far aft of the transom as that on the Folksong?

This is what we eventually decided:

The Pacific Light is relatively simple to fit on most boats and Peter Foerthman of Windpilot is immensely helpful. However, there are always problems to overcome in any project like this. If anyone with a Folksong would like more detail, let me know.

There is a learning curve. I have already discovered a great deal about sail balance using the gear . . . but there is a long way to go, and, as only way to learn  is to get out there and do it, I am going to keep Blue Mistress in the water through the winter and stick at it.