Manouvres In Tight Spaces

[Talbot]

Why cant you fit a bow thruster - I am going to in my Catalac this winter in one bow. I already know of one other such fit and they are very pleased with the result. Like me, they have a single engine and twin rudders, so manoeuvring in wind can get very fraught.

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[Robin]

Re: That\'s the whole point

Actually I agree with most of what you say. We always sail just 2 on board, we now have a 41' boat which makes most places tight (especially dedicated visitor pontoons). We always enter with lines and fenders both sides, plus centre spring lines ready. We stow the main (big, fully battened) in plenty of time and clear all the sheets and halyards out of the way in the cockpit and drop the sprayhood for maximum visibilty from the wheel. We will not go down a blind alley unless absolutely sure there is a berth we can get into OR we can either turn and get out OR reverse out safely (usually this is not a problem but it still depends on the wind direction/strength). With just 2 on board and 1 to step ashore who would even be available to hoist/tend additional sail aft, especially the storm jib tactic?

Our old boat was damaged in our regular berth by a modern boat engaged in marina handling tuition, 6 on board I think including the Yachtmaster Instructor in charge. We too see the antics of the un-prepared. Our neighbour that fitted the bow thruster though never gave us any cause for concern, despite the thruster being out of action more often than not, but he did things slowly and knew when to ask for some shoreside help.

If I saw a stranger coming down our row looking for a berth and hoisting his storm jib up the backstay of a likely to be un-manageable boat, I will admit to being more than a little alarmed. As I said we pay a lot of money these days to reside in a safe marina berth rather than out in the harbour on a swinging mooring and think it should be just that - a safe berth with much less risk of damage. Different perhaps in your home marina, with known and practiced procedures, but as a visitor somewhere else this is not a reasonable thing to attempt, very clever if it works but a potential disaster if it fails.





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[Robin]

Absolutely correct, nm

nm

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[Chris_Robb]

Re: That\'s the whole point

I agree with what you say. Being the owner of a long keeled ketch which has the unusual chracteristic of having almost no propwalk at all, I have resorted - when short handed to using the mizzen to help reduce the windage on the bow. Even when it is blowing somewhat - the mizzen - being fairly small - has little effect on moving the boat forward.

However there is no substitute for knowing your boat and each approach should be treated accordingly. If I have a competant crew member on board, who can use the rubber dinghy, I will go single handed with the crew in the dinghy as a tug, pushing the bows round. This works without fail, and provides the crew with entertainment - and onlookers wondering what is happening! until it happens without a problem!

I absolutley refuse to put a bow truster in - this would take away all the fun and planning of a difficult approach and departure!!!!!

The old adage Plan then Organise should be remembered and adopted more by skippers - many of whom get in to trouble becasue they don't stop to think about the problem - they just organised it, with predictable results.

Robin - I do agree that I would not want an incompetant skipper trying this near me! especially it he weighs 13 tons. However I do find that most of the entertainment in marinas is not supplied by the owners of heavyweights - because they have already learnt what can go wrong!



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[Chris_Robb]

Re: Whatever happened to warping!

We use warping almost every time we leave our occaisional marina berth. Also use a bow spring when leaving most berths to get the stern out to reverse out.

I am a great believer that if you are using a lot of strength to do a manouver - you are doing it wrong - use a warp and cleat.

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[Violetta]

Robin - it really isn\'t so hard....

You don't hoist the thing at the last moment. You PLAN. I've never tried the storm job on backstay trick - never had to. But if I did have to I would get it in place in good time and control it with the sheet. Let it flap and the power's off. Not so different from putting your engine in neutral. The care you take about choosing a berth etc. is irrelevant. You go where you know you can safely go. So do I - knowing I have various sources of power available. Engine, sail, warp......It is not "very clever" - it's very simple and it can be used anywhere. The home marina is not the issue. The issue is learning to use this aspect of your boat's handling with confidence, the way you do with the engine, propwalk, anything else.

Practicing manoeuvres in a marina is another matter entirely. That can be a poblem whatever is being taught. I bet the boat that hit yours wasn't practicing this particular skill, was it?

Your engine can fail. You can accidentally knock the thing out of gear. You can get a sheet round the lever. The turning power of a small sail is no more likely to fail than an engine - or it's driver. Lots of fine sailing boats are hard to handle under power and the wind is always going to act on our boats, whether we like it or not, so why not use it constructively and make a friend of it instead of a hindrance? I think if more people added this string to their bow we would probably have less mayhem, not more.

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[Robin]

Re: Robin - it really isn\'t so hard....

On a lot of boats a storm jib on the backstay or set flying aft would be slapping the helmsman in the face, that should help enormously! On our boat anyway we have goalposts/wind genny/radar scanner/aerials so it's not an option. I would feel (a little) less concerned with a small mizzen controlled by a 3rd person perhaps. Again my concern is why should my boat in her HOME BERTH should be at risk from a VISITOR carrying out this kind of manouvre, let alone someone being encouraged to practice it. By all means do it and practice it at home, but please, I am drawing an exclusion zone around my berth!

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[Violetta]

An analogy

I think you have put your finger on it. The issue is one of competence.

A couple of years ago I ferried a friend out to her boat in an Enterprise. She had no dinghy sailing experience and it was fairly windy - a good sail. She was extremely alarmed as I came alongside, thinking we were going much too fast and pointing straight at her (and her partner's) pride and joy - coming far too close at speed. She was equally astounded at the way the dinghy stopped gently and precisely by the ladder, without touching the boat's side - not realising how the turn, the spilling of wind and the tide would combine to stop the dinghy and tame the forces acting on it in such a precise way.

She thought (for a moment) that I was irresponsible and out of control of the boat and was genuinely afraid. I knew how the boat would behave and she didn't.

I'm well capable of making mistakes myself but I try to learn from them. And the person I don't want near our boat is the arrogant incompetent in charge of a lot of power - whatever the source of that power.

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[Violetta]

You\'re more at risk

from the modern 38 foot "starter boat" under the "control" of someone who has never considered the forces acting on it and puts all his or her faith in a big, powerful engine. We had a spectacular sideswipe (big Beneteau versus Hallburg Rassy) from one of those quite recently.

Maybe sailing the big, engineless barges on the East Coast is pretty irresponsible too. But, the thing is, they know how to do it

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[MainlySteam]

I think that handling a 130 foot crewed sailing vessel is not comparable to the yacht situation as Robin has pointed out.

To make a comparison, I would suspect that if you tried turning a 130 foot sailing vessel with the aid of sails in tight quarters in a marina between a few 130 foot superyachts you would soon be told where to put your own 130 foot vessel, and that would be into very tight quarters indeed.

John

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[Robin]

Re: You\'re more at risk

<Maybe sailing the big, engineless barges on the East Coast is pretty irresponsible too. But, the thing is, they know how to do it >

Which marina do they berth in, what finger pontoon number? I would like to take that place off my cruise destination list!

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[Chris_Robb]

Re: An analogy

The great thing is to be able to admit a mistake and talk it over after. I have met many people who will not admit a mistake - and consequently never learn.

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[Twister_Ken]

Another 2 cents worth

As the owner of one of those hard to manouever, underpowered boats I declare a vested interest!

What I didn't understand was the whole tenet of the article. It should have stressed that you don't go into a place you can't get out of, rather than saying once you're in the frying pan, here's how to avoid the fire.

It does seem that a lot of the 'masterclass' series has been a demonstration of the more arcane aspects of boat handling - catapulting astern out of a space was another example. In 30 somethng season of hanging around the Solent, I've yet to see a boat with a jib hoisted up the backstay, so I don't think John Goode is being very 'real' with this one. And can you name one helmsman who'd relish being whacked around the ears by a flapping sail when he/she was trying to perform a tricky manouver?

Generally speaking, the sorts of boats for which this is proposed behave well at close quarters, being slow and steady and not likely to skid sideways or pivot quickly when hit by a gust. Although they might have some failings in agility, they more than make up for this in predictability.

In my case, if I needed to turn between two pontoons as ST described in the last issue, I would do it by parking the boat, then spinning it in situ using warps. And I would endeavour like mad not to put myself in a situation where I had to spin in a blind alley through the simple expedient of asking the marina staff for precise directions to the berth which they had allocated me.

In Robin's case, where a training boat took a bite out of his stern ladder, I would be having very serious words with the marina operator for having allowed such training, in such conditions, to take place there at all.

I think it's fair, also, to criticise marina operators who put long boats on short pontoons, thus restricting the width of the aisle to considerably less that what they planned when they originally built the marina. Most marinas were conceived when the average length of a boat was nearer to 30 feet than 40 feet. Boats have grown, but marinas haven't.

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[Robin]

Re: Another 2 cents worth

Thanks Ken

The marina operator was my own Club when the marina first opened and someone had a smart idea...

I too wondered about the catapault idea from Mr JG, if you tried that out of my berth you might find the shallow mud bank with your rudder rather quickly. Like Viv you and others have mentioned, warps are nice and user friendly, it's amazing how you can use warps to get 80% of the boat out of a berth and into some empty space before casting off. Catapault indeed!

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[Twister_Ken]

A good example

We were in that very marina 10 days ago. When I contacted the marina to ask for a space we were fairly quickly given a berth number. I then asked if that was going to be OK for a long keeled boat which wasn't very handy going astern. "Just a minute, sir". In no time he'd offered me an alternative, which was head to wind, and had a slightly longer finger to help me walk the boat out when leaving.

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[Robin]

Re: A good example

That would have been Ian I suspect, nice guy and very helpful. One thing to watch is that on the very outer pontoon 'F' there is tide running across the fingers but NOT between them. You stick the bow in which stays put but the other end is still going for a tide ride. This is our home pontoon, the tide effect is not seen easily and still catches us from time to time, you will see most berths have fenders on the finger corners....

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[MainlySteam]

Re: Another 2 cents worth

We spent some time living in a marina which had a continual stream of world girdling visitors through it. It impressed me how the most competent and experienced of those (like having sailed eastern Siberia in winter, or retired senior naval officer and oceanographer, or southern ocean) were the ones never too proud to ask for help if their boats did not have the power to manoeuvre in restricted quarters or things were otherwise tight. Had a number of requests to help them warp their boats around or hold a line to pull their stern around as they backed out if they did not have the hands to do it all themselves. Even, on one occasion, a "I have to move my boat, would you come with me to fend off if I get into trouble"!

Never, ever saw one even consider using a sail.

John

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[Violetta]

Better not come to Maldon

Not a marina, but you might find the Edme or the Mirosa manoeuvring in a narrow space within a few metres of your boat. They use another force to turn - the tide (bow on the mud) Could be nasty if it all went wrong - but so could anything we do in our boats. On one occasion I saw it done by a man singlehanded in a 90 foot barge. No sweat. He knew the boat and he knew what to do. Competence!

The way I see it, the essence of your argument (apart from the separate one of training in marinas) is that you don't trust a way of handling a boat that is not part of your own repertoire. Because you can't do it (or, at least, haven't tried it - I bet you could if you did) it can't safely be done! Well, using the mizzen as a turning and balancing force is a standard part of my repertoire, so I take a different view. In a sloop, the same principle would apply if I should ever need it. And I bet you I could set it up without all the palaver you describe! The more tricks we have up our sleeves the better.

Well, I think we must agree to differ......

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[DeeGee]

Re: Another 2 cents worth

And I'm yet another sailing a 'difficult' boat...
I must admit, I would not be happy using a sail run up the backstay to come into a berth. However, with some of the help offered by marina operators in the past, sending me down blind alleys with scant space to turn, the use of an anchor has been the only way I could get the bow back round into the wind - and I wouldn't want to go hurting someone's pride and joy.
Coming out of my berth, when everything is far more predicable, I have often thought that a sail up the backstay, to get the stern to go down rather than up-wind might be a useful idea, but so far have found a warp does the trick quite nicely.
Don't condemn all those sailors who have, for one reason or another, chosen to have difficult boats. Bow-thrusters and more electrical/electronic gadgetry to rely on is the last thing we want. When you choose to have a difficult boat, you generally learn to be a pretty good boathandler in a heck of a hurry - ST's article tends to be read with amusement.
And let me add my comment about safety in the marina berth. My friend had his selfsteering clobbered and badly damaged by a manoeuvrable modern boat Bavaria 38, 2002 version, and the owner of said boat simply pushed off - in both senses of the word. Luckily, there were witnesses... It could be argued that out on the trots on a mooring is safer than a marina berth these days - most of the idiots use marinas!!

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[Violetta]

Funny that

The people from whom I first learnt to turn big boats in tight spaces without relying entirely on engine power were professional sailors - one of whom had a couple of circumnavigations under his belt. I always admired the range and depth of their knowledge of seamanship and their resourcefulness. We once sailed a 54 footer into and out of the lock at St. Malo without engine. Caused a lot of furore amongst the anglers and lock master, but the boat was under perfect control by a supremely competent skipper and a well briefed crew. Engine power isn't everything...

Of course no-one's going to start rigging storm jibs on backstays as a matter of routine or when there are simpler ways to achieve the same thing - like you holding the warp. In that case (unlike a two masted rig, where it is very simple) it's another resource.....for when it IS needed.



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