Swinging the lead

prv said:
You must have some kind of spanners though, surely?

Pete
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Good quality sockets, and a few spanners, mainly in small sizes. I also have a good quality adjustable. Don't fancy dunking the adjustable, and the others are all rather light. I do have a set of spanners that I take to the boat as required, but they live at home unless needed.
 
Yes.
Yes.
No.
It's one that I made for my first proper yacht, a Folkboat, on which we had no electrickery.
I use it quite a lot on dinghy expeditions to find new anchorages, or tricky passages. Great fun.
 
A pedant writes:

The action of taking soundings using a lead line is called "heaving the lead".

"Swinging the lead" is a phrase used to mean skiving, or looking busy while actually doing nothing.
 
Once used a proper one to sound the way from a dinghy for the following 3-masted schooner with 4m draught in a shallow passage in the Baltic. Frequently use a hammer lashed to some cord to figure out what the echo sounder on a charter yacht is referenced to.
 
Yes.
Yes.
No.

Handy for working out where the shallowest/deepest water is around your boat by taking a series of soundings around the deck. So a useful adjunct to the fixed position echo sounder. Also more accurate - e.g when we were well aground a year or so ago and the echo sounder (confused by the soft mud, perhaps?) insisted we still 1.5 metres under the keel!

Another trick for East Coasters and other creek crawlers is to tie it, with a little more depth than your keel free, to the end of a boathook (or preferebly something just as long but a little lighter). By holding it out forward from the bow of the boat and repeatedly dipping it down and side to side, you can work out where the channel is and when you're about to run out of depth before you actually do so.

The leadline I have I bought for my first, echo sounder-less, boat, and have used it on every boat since (and all of the rest had echo sounders). Certainly had my money's worth, and it's a bit of kit I'd certainly replace if I lost it.
 
Yes.
Yes.
and Yes.

My first experience with it I will never forget. I swung it and the lead and the cord parted company. It went flying through the air and the lead landed in the sea with an embarrassing Plop ! SWMBO roared and so did the rest of them. I hid the line and quietly acquired another lead. But I have never been able to live it down.:(
 
25931 said:
Do you have a lead on board ?
Do you ever use it ?
Have you ever armed it with tallow to check the bottom ?
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Yes.
Yes.
No, we use Vaseline. Invaluable in an unlisted ancjorage.

sandybottom.jpg
 
Yes, I actually carry two - one is in fathoms and the other in metres. I also have the East Coast Special - a twelve foot ash boathook marked off in feet with a thick red line at the boat's draft.

Yes I use all three.

Yes I have armed a lead with grease (tallow doesn't work in low temperatures) to check the bottom.

And I've used a lead line off a 65,531 ton container ship - to check the draft alongside when we couldn't get on the berth.
 
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