Your choice of which dinghy to carry aboard is pivotal to successful cruising. This is especially true if your cruising kitty is small. A good dinghy is a requirement for frugal cruising. 

Notice that I wrote carry aboard. I never tow a dinghy that I don’t want to lose. Why? Basic seamanship. Squalls approach fast. A swamped or flipped dinghy is a major problem offshore—for you and the environment. Painters can end up in the prop. Personal watercraft run over the tow lines. Towed dinghies get caught on navigational buoys, lobster pots and bridge fenders. 

Towing a tender is fraught with complications. Even a skillful boathandler can get into trouble approaching a slip while towing a dinghy. And being forced into your gyrating dinghy while at sea exposes you to extreme risk. Many a sailor has met Davy Jones just after pulling in their dinghy, casually hopping aboard, ambling aft, and leaning toward their outboard—just as the painter sharply takes up and catapults them over the outboard and into the water.

I’ve known three sailors who have ended up overboard this way. One was in the Lesser Antilles, without anyone in the crew even noticing. There’s one thing that every offshore sailor dreads: watching the transom recede as their vessel sails away. 

Yes, innocent choices can have severe consequences. And we haven’t even talked about the evil dinghies themselves. 

Offshore, dinghies can seem demoniacally possessed, ­especially while running downwind in heavy weather. They can hole your boat or wipe off its rudder or twist up the self-steering gear. I’ve even had dinghies pass me—then stop immediately ahead. Having a rigid-tender ­submarine zigzagging 50 feet beneath the surface like a berserk shark is no fun.  

One more tip: Never tow kids you love astern in the dinghy without an assigned watcher. Do this only with someone else’s bilge brats.

But seriously, the first ­question to think about when choosing a dinghy is: rigid or inflatable? 

I love to row, so we carried a Lawton-designed, fiberglass Graves tender for 15 years aboard Carlotta, our 36-foot Endurance ketch. Rowing is great exercise and a wonderful way to meet your fellow cruisers. It’s quiet and nonpolluting—two nice qualities if you reside on a warming planet like I do. 

If well-constructed, these dinghies are almost ­indestructible. At worst, you might injure one cosmetically, but it is almost impossible to destroy a Tortola-style dinghy, even in boisterous trade winds amid sharp reefs. 

Unfortunately, everything is a compromise. Well-constructed also means heavy. Of course, these heavy, rigid dinghies do more damage than the lighter, softer ones. So, I always tell my passengers to “keep your hands inside the dinghy.” They always comply until, suddenly, they don’t, and jam their hands between the surging dinghy and the immovable dock.

If you row a rigid tender, always remove the oar horns before coming alongside a ­vessel—especially if the ­graceful vessel has long ­overhangs. Dinghies yanked under a counter (or multihull wing) can do major ­damage in an instant during an ­unexpected wake. 

Ash oars are best. Oar leathers aren’t just about style; copper blade tips will greatly extend the oar’s life. Yes, the sailor and the length of the oar are related for best results. Of course, you should learn to feather your oars, and stow them in such a manner that they can’t be yanked into the water by the painter or float away if the dinghy is swamped. (Consider an oar lock through the thwart as well.)

Here’s a sad fact: If a dinghy rows well, it powers poorly. And vice versa. 

Stowage is another factor. Davits are cool on monohulls if you sail in, say, a swimming pool. It is best to stow a dinghy upside down on the foredeck while offshore in monohulls smaller than 70 feet long. We think of our foredeck dinghy as our backup life raft. And we put extra water and bulkier survival gear under it—in suitably tied-in watertight containers. 

Part of seamanship is to, again and again, prepare for the worst while expecting (and, hopefully, experiencing) the best. We’ve never used our dinghy as a life raft (or our life raft as a life raft, for that matter), which is exactly why we prepare it so diligently before each offshore passage. Just in case. 

In blue water, I carry a knife with me at all times (even sleeping), and I have dive knives made of 316 stainless steel in my cockpit and on my foredeck. Think about having to launch your dinghy while sinking, at night, naked and disoriented, after being hit by freighter. Those knives just might come in handy.

Currently, we have a 10.5-foot Caribe RIB for a tender, as we have for the past couple of circumnavigations. With a Tohatsu 9.8-­horsepower outboard (lighter than most and super dependable), the Caribe planes with both of us aboard, along with a case of beer and a full gas tank. This dinghy is small enough to hoist easily into our davits while coastal cruising in light-air venues such as Southeast Asia, or to bring on deck if we venture offshore. 

While initially expensive, the Caribes generally give us 12 years or two circumnavigations. This makes them quite affordable. How do we get twice the longevity that the average cruiser experiences? We always keep our tender protected by a Sunbrella cover, and we are careful where and for how long we leave it. 

The Achilles’ heel of modern inflatables isn’t abrasion; it’s puncture. Keep the tender away from sharp objects. I’ve poked a small hole from a nail sticking out of a dock, and my wife, Carolyn, barely touched a piling with a sole oyster that made a 6-foot slit in a ­dinghy’s starboard pontoon (that took three laborious attempts to fix). 

Sadly, some popular ­anchorages are regularly visited by organized dinghy thieves. An older guy, in his 20s, piles a bunch of local kids into his boat, gives them each a knife, and drops them all into the water. The kids cut the dinghy painters as they swim through the anchorage at 3 a.m. The older guy eventually collects all the drifting ­dinghies and swimming kids. 

We had our dinghy out of the water in South America when this happened in one anchorage, and were the only anchored cruisers with a dinghy left come morning. 

Now, about folding ­dinghies: They fold well. At least that’s what the guy with all the dripping cameras around his neck told me after I fished him out of the water off St. Barts. 

And while I love T-tops, ­center-consoles and fast boats, I keep my own dinghy as simple and light as possible. Sadly, too heavy and too light are both problems. When I had a lightweight 2-horsepower outboard on my inflatable, it would flip so often that I painted the outboard with antifouling inside the case. (To avoid this problem, pull the transom plug at anchor during a sudden squall. The inflatable dinghy won’t sink and will never flip, even in a gale.)

Another bonus of inflatables is that other yachties don’t cringe like they do if you approach their boat in a rigid tender, especially one lacking a soft rub rail. 

I was amazed in Western Samoa to have a fellow Virgin Islander come up and rail-cling while his heavy wooden tender banged repeatedly into my delicate gelcoat. When I said something like, “Careful, don’t allow your dinghy to hit my boat,” he just grinned, took another swig of his bottle of rum, and replied: “Don’t worry, Fatty. My rail is air-dried oak and through-bolted. Not a problem.”

Sure, for him.

One of the reasons we love our inflatable so much is because it saves us money while providing us with so much peace and tranquility. Marinas can be expensive, noisy and hot, so we almost never tie up. However, the anchorage closest to a marina is often also crowded. Our lightweight dinghy and its powerful engine allow us to anchor amid nature a couple of miles away, and yet have all the benefits of civilization when we want and need them. (We also have good ground tackle, a stout companionway locking system, and a loud burglar-alarm system on the main boat.)

It’s great to be able to sail a couple of miles to the inlet, catch a hundred pounds of grouper and snapper, and sail back again without raising a sweat.

Sailing tenders are another option, especially if you spend four months in deserted Chagos, as we did. It’s great to be able to sail a couple of miles to the inlet, catch a hundred pounds of grouper and snapper to share with the entire anchorage, and sail back again without raising a sweat. Or making noise. Or polluting in a pristine paradise. 

Alas, everything is a compromise. Rigs, a rudder, sails, and centerboards all take up room and cost money. I love sailing tenders dearly, but the confusion and weight of the gear doesn’t help you while passagemaking. Having clean, clear decks is a safety advantage offshore, especially in a breeze. 

On the plus side, there’s no denying how romantic sailing tenders are. If we have long-term guests aboard, we often disappear for an hour or two because (we tell them) the wind dropped on the other side of the island.

One more thing: If you haul out your dinghy each evening, as we do, it probably will never be stolen or acquire too much growth. However, it you leave it in the water, the clingy barnacles will certainly discover it. Sure, you can paint it with antifouling, but then, on passage, you, your sails and your sheets will gradually turn blue (as happened to us). 

If you don’t paint it, you’ll have to take it to the beach regularly, empty it, remove the outboard, and flip the dinghy over to scrape it. That’s not the bad part; the bad part is that it is easy to damage the RIB’s fabric while cleaning it. We’ve learned this the expensive way. Thus, we hoist at sundown, a nightly ritual in my life for 63 years now. 

The bottom line is that a proper tender, properly tended to, will save you money and time as it brings you joy. Seamanship is important. The wrong tender in the wrong sea at the wrong time at the wrong end of a tow rope can cost a life.

The choice is yours.

The post On Watch: Tender Feelings appeared first on Cruising World.

While I’ve almost never lived ashore, I have visited my wife’s mother’s house in Chicago, where she would send me scurrying to the basement to hastily retrieve odd, nearly forgotten household objects. Bilges are like that—we know they’re there, we stow stuff in them, and we seldom think about them. When we do think of them, it’s usually in a negative way: because they stink, are oily or have water leaking into them. 

Let’s start off with one central, indisputable fact: The bilges of a daysailer and a liveaboard vessel have little in common. Example: It is possible to keep a daysailer’s bilges sweet, but this is almost impossible aboard a vessel inhabited by Homo sapiens, a notoriously messy species. 

The problem starts with the largest organ in our body: skin. We shed our entire epidermis every two to four weeks. Each hour, your average sailor sheds around 200 million skin cells. This isn’t mentioning the 100 or so hairs we shed a day—unless we are stressed, when we’ll shed considerably more. 

Don’t worry: We’re not going below the hirsute belt in our discussion. This is a family magazine. Ditto our nasal mucous membranes. Offshore, there’s little actual dirt, but there’s a lot of salt in the air. And, in the tropics, sailors sweat profusely—especially when cranking sheet winches and hoisting sails. 

My wife, Carolyn—of Sicilian descent—is a gourmet cook. She also bakes daily offshore: bread every other day, and tasty treats in between. We’re both hedonists in every way. I always grab a cookie, cupcake, brownie or doughnut as I dash below. (No buns—I don’t grab buns!) Often, it’s rough in the mid-Pacific. My doughnut and I are tossed around. We bounce off bulkheads, companionway ladders and nav tables. Sugar and crumbs fly. 

Ganesh, our 43-foot ketch, has been to a dock for only 24 hours in the past three years—when some rich guests insisted that we visit a posh marina so they could take selfies with megayachts in the background. (No, they weren’t invited back.)

Anyway, while we seldom touch shore and have neither rats nor roaches, we do bring fresh food out to the boat, and thus have ants. And these sneaky ants do what ants do: They play nocturnal shell games with our crumbs. 

I know, I know…that’s gruesome to think about, but it’s a reality of our cruising lives. Yes, we can poison them to death, but not without poisoning ourselves to some degree, something that we’re not eager to do. I’m a child of the 1960s. I have no brain cells to squander.

Now, I hate to admit it, dear reader, but we regularly smear ourselves with various goop. Sunblock, for example. Cold cream. Aloe. Talcum powder. Hairspray. Mascara. Lipstick. Ditto the boat. We’re always smearing chemicals and compounds inside and outside the vessel. Hell, Carolyn just spent four days sanding the million square feet of varnish (well, that’s what the square footage seemed like with numb hands) in our aft cabin alone. 

We have clothes, bedsheets, blankets—and we all know that fabrics shed. 

Have you ever seen an Italian woman knead bread dough in 18-foot seas? I have, and it’s a messy business. Ditto frying flying fish for breakfast. 

Here’s another secret nobody speaks about from the days of yore when vessels were wood and the men were steel: In the deep, dank, dark bilges of the schooner Elizabeth that I grew up aboard were… actual fish. Their fertilized eggs would ­evidently get sucked in through our rotten butt blocks and soft plank ends.

At least the fish knew their place and were silent. Not so the crabs. The sound of their scurrying at night terrified me as a child. 

How many leaks did Elizabeth have? Well, as my father used to say back in the 1950s, “more leaks than the White House.” He loved to joke. Each time he’d spot a spaghetti colander while shopping, he’d wave it around and say loudly, “This reminds me of an ol’ carvel-planked vessel I used to own.”

If all this weren’t awful enough, suspended above an 8-foot section of our bilge on Ganesh is a Perkins M92B that brims with salt water, coolant, diesel fuel and lube oil—all under pressureat a temperature near boiling.

Now, of course, all offshore sailors know to sit down in the head. Sitting down is a must. Not sitting down is one of the few things that will get you tossed off Ganesh immediately. Sitting is an absolute rule. 

I’m not alone in this. There’s a famously fastidious female yacht-racing skipper in San Francisco Bay who, when a male sailor goes below, cautions him with the business end of a sharp fish gaff should he think about standing, swaying and potentially soaking the entire compartment in yellow as the boat rolls. 

Damn, yachting is a complicated sport.

But all this debris, garbage, trash, dust, dirt, dribble and hair ends up in the bilge pump—often choking it into submission. Also, a bilge at sea often has oily, filthy water in it that is being sloshed with great force under bunks and other storage areas. Yuck.

Back in the day of wooden boats, bilges were deep because the keel had to be supported. Nowadays, because many production builders have realized that supporting their detachable keels is really a viable option for only the most expensive yachts, bilges have become as shallow as their naval architects. 

This brings us to the subject of bilge chains and limber holes. On wooden boats, each frame (there are no ribs on a boat, dammit!) ended on an athwartship “floor” timber that spanned the bilge, tied together the frames, supported the garboard, and held the keelson in place. Thus a “bilge” wasn’t one bilge so much as many bilges. If you weren’t careful, they didn’t drain. It was common while sinking (I’ve been in the process of sinking many times) for the compartment with the pump to be dry while all the others brimmed with water. 

Thus, limber holes were drilled in these “floor timbers” to allow the water to drain. Why the name? I don’t know for sure, but you had to be pretty limber to clean them in a full gale while sinking.

Therefore, on Elizabeth, if you started to sink and the compartment that the bilge pump was in was dry, you just reached down and yanked the spring-loaded bilge chain. Instantly, the limber holes would be cleared. 

Now, here’s what happens when a modern boat sinks: Everyone is having a great time in the cockpit, and the floorboards begin to float. At the same time, a million other things begin to float: clothes, foodstuff, plastics, fabrics. Eventually, someone glances below and says, “Oh, dear!” 

The captain, of course, does the worst possible thing—as a rule, he flips on his high-capacity, 1,500-gallon-per-hour bilge pump, which stops within minutes because someone’s long-lost skivvies have been sucked into it. 

Here’s the truth of it: If your vessel is taking water and you are pumping it out as fast as it comes in, you are leaking. You might even be leaking massively—but in this situation, the status quo is being maintained. However, once you’re leaking faster than you can pump out the water, well, you’re sinking. 

And then, it is time to panic. A common way to panic is for a crewmember to jump below and snap his ankle on an unseen object under a wet floorboard that surfs away. Another is for the skipper to slip on the oily surfaces. 

While spotting the leak is dead-simple aboard Ganesh because it is equipped with a bilge alarm that rings if she takes aboard more than a few gallons, most vessels don’t have such an early-warning system. Once the floorboards float and the bilge sump is awash, it is almost impossible to find the leak, let alone stop it. 

Don’t forget: Everything in the boat that is buoyant will be floating. You won’t be wading around in water so much as logbooks, pillows, old wedding photos, shattered bottles of acetone, oozing boxes of couscous, and old clothes. 

We met two guys in South America who developed instant post-traumatic stress disorder in exactly this situation when one said to the other while foundering off the coast of Colombia, “We’re gonna die; what could be worse?” just as the half-full holding tank broke to the surface inside the waterlogged vessel, struck the fore bulkhead, split open and disgorged its contents. 

“You had to say it, didn’t you?!” the other shipmate screamed. 

Oh, there’s never a dull moment offshore. You really haven’t lived until you’ve been shouting your lat/lon into the VHF radio as your main battery banks go underwater. 

And to think that we haven’t even gotten to the subject of stuffing boxes. There are two types: one that drips, drips, drips a sailor into the psych ward, and the modern, more expensive type that sinks the vessel within minutes of having something falling on its ­always-ready-to-gush bellows. 

Are some of your seacocks frozen open? Are you sure? Why not, in an emergency, grab one by the handle and snap off its through-hull, just to be sure? Speed impellers are other fun bilge gizmos that have enlivened many an offshore passage. 

One thing I love is meeting a new yachtie who tells me, proudly, that his bilge is empty. I smile to myself as I think, No, it is not; it’s filled with terror. You just don’t know it yet.

Fatty and Carolyn are currently in Langkawi, Malaysia, slapping paint on their bottom. (Did that come out right?)

The post The Dirty Little Truth About Bilges appeared first on Cruising World.

It was just after dawn on September 17, 1989, and I wasn’t panicking. I was, honestly, rather proud of how calm I was. 

I know, I know. Vanity comes before the fall. 

We were anchored off Culebra, Puerto Rico, in the Spanish Virgin Islands. The breeze was a steady 110, gusting to 140 knots. Hurricane Hugo, now stationary, had built to a Category 4. A large tree from the eastern ridgeline was caught in our rig, having just cracked the starboard spreader. 

Not good. 

My 7-year-old daughter, Roma Orion, sat in the dinette in her life jacket, gripping a strobe light in one hand and a 100-foot coil of line in the other. Around her body, we had duct-taped a waterproof bag containing her passport—if need be, for the convenience of the coroner. 

My wife, Carolyn, wedged herself at the nav station. I perched atop the companionway ladder, occasionally sliding the hatch forward to check on the tree’s progress of eating our rig. 

I happened to look up just as a center-console Boston Whaler with a 40 hp outboard went spinning over our masthead, its fuel tank improbably twirling alongside, still attached by the rubber-banding fuel hose. 

OK, OK—I was worried. We were going to lose the boat, a 36-foot ketch I’d built with my own hands over the course of six long, hard years. We might die. So, yeah, I was kind of uptight. But I was not panicked. Panic is when your fear overcomes your rationality, when momentary stupidity overrides your brain’s ability to process. I’d never panicked afloat—and certainly not in front of my wife and child. 

I was about to. 

When I saw the appropriately named 68-foot ­schooner Fly Away dragging off our port bow, I didn’t think the boats would hit. That boat would have to “sail” with all its hooks down a considerable distance to starboard. 

It sailed. 

Once I realized that our ground tackle was entangled and we’d collide, I still didn’t panic. Even if our boat sank, we’d be able to swim ashore. Hey, we were sailors, right? Water was our medium. 

Alas, when we came together, Fly Away’sstarboard aft chainplate was just forward of my stout bowsprit. We were now just about as tangled as two heavy-displacement cruising vessels could be. Fly Away would have to snap off my bowsprit and I’d have to tear out its chainplates before we’d separate.

It took a while—a gut-wrenching while. 

The sound was amazing, and not in a good way. Roma Orion started screaming. Carolyn was yelling something that I couldn’t catch. Rigging snapped. Chainplates tore. Our bowsprit split. At one point, our masthead became entangled, and we repeatedly separated and smashed back together violently, like two rhinos careening toward death. 

Rational thought ­became difficult, but still, I did not panic. In fact, it was rather awe-inspiring. At some point, I giggled. Why not? My chainplates hammer-­clawed entire topside planks out of Fly Away, revealing her varnished interior, beautiful rugs, and gimbaled kerosene lamps. Somehow—­impossibly—one of our stanchions and its base punched through our deck. It wiggled there, its lifelines still attached, as major water began pouring into our vessel. 

No panic. 

Fly Away’s skipper appeared on deck. I was worried he was going to try to deploy fenders between our vessels—we were way beyond that now. I slid my hatch and shouted at him over the howl: “Careful! Don’t get hurt!” He was sobbing. 

All this madness seemed to have a calming effect. We were going to lose the boat and be driven ashore. Oh, well. 

Then, Fly Away’s bowsprit started clubbing us, with huge wooden smashes from a 12-foot-long demonic club. 

My companionway hatch was shattered. It was crushed. It wouldn’t open. But it had to open, or we’d die like sinking rats in a trap. And we were taking on water. 

The thought came to me wholly unexpectedly, like a rising bubble of fear within my churning stomach, up through my chest: We were going to drown inside our vessel, wet and entombed. 

I panicked. 

First, I tried pushing and pulling the hatch. I tried punching it as hard as I could with my bare fist. Nothing. “Oh, God! Oh, dear God! Please, God!” 

I began smashing my head savagely into the hatch—­using the full force of my leg muscles to do so. 

Now, dear reader, the chances of me headbutting my way through this particular hatch were nil. I’d built it with my own hands to survive Cape Horn. But I tried, as hard as I could, with as much force as my legs could muster. 

Then, a moment of blackness. A sensation of falling. And a reawakening of clutching—no, hugging—the ladder. I took a deep breath, then another. This gave my brain a chance to reestablish its dominance. 

We had three hatches on Carlotta. Two still worked. There was nothing to panic about. 

I have not panicked since. And as gruesome as those couple of moments were, they taught me compassion for those unfortunates in the grips of such momentary irrationality. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t been around other people panicking at sea. I have, all too often. So frequently, in fact, that I now often realize the signs early enough to head it off. 

But before we get to that, we should note that modern cruising skippers have a tough job. Back in the old days, a skipper could bark orders at his crew. He could make them do what he wanted. His job was clear: to bring the boat, crew and cargo into port—not to be liked. 

Today’s skipper has all of that on his shoulders, plus the fact that, in pleasure boating, there should be, by definition, pleasure. The crew is supposed to enjoy themselves—even as the Grim Reaper swims aboard. And if they ain’t, then that too is the skipper’s fault.

One common scenario is the ratcheting up of fear among two or more of the crew. One says, “Gee, it’s ­really blowing.” 

The other says, “Gusting to gale force.” 

“Gale?” chips in a third. “And come to think of it, isn’t this hurricane season?”

Then it becomes, “What about the life raft?” or “Why not signal the freighter?” or “Why not call a mayday, just as a precaution?” 

A good skipper learns to head off these fear-blooms quickly. 

Think team. Get everyone doing something productive during an emergency or heavy weather. They’ll be less frightened if they have a task they must perform. 

Talk to them. Reassure them. While remaining fact-based, make light of the situation. I always make silly jokes about taking reefs in the ensign, or having the paint peel off the topsides in a blow, or finding the ­barometer in the bilge because the storm pressure dropped so low. 

The subliminal message is: This is a gale, yes, but it is also an escapade. And, once survived, it is a feather in your cap, a wonderful story for your grandchild. 

I have an independent on/off switch on my windspeed. There’s nothing worse than a fearful landlubber saying aloud to the rest of the crew: “Here’s a huge gust, 44 knots, 47, damn, that’s the worst yet! And the baro is still falling! And these seas aren’t even mature now—just wait until night! Why, I’ve heard of boats pitchpoling in less breeze!”

Don’t let it happen. Give that crewmember a good job, perhaps flaking down the Jordan series drogue so that it will come out of the bag without snarling, for example. 

Always inspire confidence. You have a plan, and you’re sailing it. You’ve been here before and lived to tell the tale. 

If you’re running off before conditions become extreme, then say: “When it gets rough, we’ll think about streaming a slowing drogue. Of course, we could deploy our Jordan series drogue and then be perfectly safe.” 

If you’re hove-to in building conditions, then mention how easy your Paratech is to deploy and how, once it’s streamed from the bow, life is a cakewalk. (Such devices off the bow can be very safe if the vessel can stay attached and doesn’t snap off its rudder. However, the motion is extremely violent without a steadying sail.)

Never, ever allow the escalation of any talk about getting into a life raft—many, many people have died because they got into a life raft when they should have stayed with the ship. I think of life-raft talk as siren calls—words that lure sailors to their deaths. “We’re only going to step in a life raft from the spreaders,” I say. 

Ditto with distress calls on the single sideband radio—save your breath. As skipper, bear these great truths in mind: Your vessel is your life raft; and you are the solution to all your problems. Look first within yourself for proactive solutions, not outside for rescue. 

A friend of mine owns a cruising ketch in the 70-foot-range with twin satellite domes in his mizzen. During gales offshore, he boots up real-time radar images of the storm, and tries to push them away from his vessel with his cursor. 

I kid you not. 

Don’t be that guy. He spent all his money on his vessel and its glitzy cockpit display, and nothing on safety equipment. He was so busy updating the firmware to his software that he forgot to learn how to heave-to. 

Being an offshore skipper entails serious responsibility. Psychological crew management—a fancy phrase for keeping your crew safe, calm and happy—is part of the job. If a crewmember is having a particularly tough time, offer a hug. Engage. Shower attention and affection. Ask about a kid—did the daughter really hit a Little League home run? Is it true the son has an interest in ballet? Did the family ever buy that car they were talking about? 

Get the mind off the blow. Focus on the everyday mundane, and the fearful what ifs lose their bite. If the mast is up, the keel is down and the bilges are dry, then chances are, you’ll all see the dawn. 

Most of all, tell the truth—but wrap it in a confident, in-control smile. The difference between ordeal and adventure is attitude.

Fatty and Carolyn Goodlander are currently dusting off their pilot charts in Singapore, yearning to chase the horizon once again. 

The post The Secrets of Psychological Crew Management appeared first on Cruising World.

We Goodlanders love boats and kids in equal measure. My two sisters and their husbands had little ones underfoot when each family built a boat to go live on. And my Left Coast brother, Morgoo the Magnificent (best brother ever!), raised oceangoing daughter Marelle upon, natch, Ocean Daughter in San Francisco Bay before eventually teaching her to sail aboard his 35-foot Swedish-built sloop, Maxi. Morgan always thinks slightly out-of-the-box. After naming one his boats after his daughter, he named his next daughter Carlotta, after one of my family’s most beloved vessels.

The four of us siblings were raised aboard the 52-foot, 1924 wooden schooner Elizabeth, and to this day, we sail together whenever possible. And my wife, Carolyn, and I raised our daughter, Roma Orion, aboard our home-built Endurance 35 ketch, the aforementioned Carlotta, and the Sparkman & Stephens-designed Hughes 38 Wild Card. Carolyn and I now sail weekly around Singapore with Roma Orion and her two daughters, Soku Orion and Tessa Maria, aboard our beamy 43-foot French Wauquiez Amphitrite ketch, Ganesh.  

While none of us pretend to be particularly moral or even nice, we have all managed to stay out of jail, rehab and the poor house—no mean feat in the circles of waterfront reprobates we often hang with. 

The bottom line is this: In my 62 years of living aboard and offshore sailing, I’ve either been a kid or had a kid aboard the vast majority of the time. 

Here’s the first key to children and boats: Always remember that kids don’t give a poop what adults are interested in, nor should they! Kids have their own fluid reality, and if their marine environment reinforces that fluidity, they’ll instinctively love it. If it doesn’t, or worse yet, if some adult is attempting to teach them something, they will not. 

Here’s key No. 2: As with everything, arranging for kids to love boats and cherish their marine environment takes sustained, focused work. 

For example, as we sail the world, we collect art at the $5 and $10 level. Since a lot of small islands have little but driftwood tossed upon their penniless shores, we have ended up as connoisseurs of carved tikis. Our favorite is Freaky Tiki. He’s big enough to wear a hat, and also big enough to intimidate a small child. So, when 2-year-old Soku Orion came to sail offshore with us for three weeks (in the Med? Caribbean? South Pacific? Who can remember?), she was a tad taken aback by Freaky, who was, admittedly, larger and more imposing. To remedy this, Carolyn tossed a modesty skirt on him and some friendly love beads, while I flipped a cool-looking hat on his mahogany head. 

Freaky suddenly looked a bit less freaky, and Soku began to play with him. All was well until she inadvertently knocked off his hat, and I rushed to put it back on. “Freaky Tiki is a wonderfully warm and friendly Polynesian fellow but he gets really, really angry if a wave or anything knocks off his hat,” I told her. 

“Why?” she asked, and I proceeded to explain about his difficult childhood in the Marquesas. I told her that his father, a fisherman, was lost at sea; about his poor mother being forced to move to Tahiti to work as a maid; his running with a bad crowd on the mean streets of Papeete; and his eventual redemption in Cook’s Bay, Moorea, where he joined our crew and became a Goodlander forever. 

As a 2-year-old, Soku didn’t realize that I was giving her a history lesson on the Society Islands and a literary lesson on three-act story structure. She knew only that an adult was catering to her, which is all a kid needs to know at that age to feel warm and fuzzy. 

Everywhere we sail, we shop at resale shops (as our cruising budget demands), and I make a point of buying heaps of costume jewelry. When we would play dress-up in the aft cabin, Soku would occasionally glance up and shout, “Grandpa!” Glancing up, the minute I noticed Freaky Tiki was sans hat, I’d scream. Carolyn would rush into the cabin, also screaming. Roma Orion as well would drop whatever she was doing, totally losing all motherly composure. The whole freakin’ crew would be there freakin’ out at Freaky Tiki, until Soku would manage to find his hat and make our watery world right again. 

That was an incredible gift of power to give Soku, and, of course, it intoxicated her. And we adults got creative. Carolyn would pretend to knock herself out in the walk-through to Tiki’s cabin, I’d spill my coffee all over my T-shirt, and Roma would arrive with grape jelly all over her face. 

Gradually, after I told Soku all I could tell her about ocean currents in the Pacific and how island migrations are often revealed by the evolution of local musical instruments, I had to branch out into other, stranger stories—for example, Charlie the Cowboy, who ate motorcycle parts. Why did he eat motorcycle parts? I have no idea, except that Soku and I had a sort of mind meld, and I realized that a cowboy munching on Harley pistons would appeal to her.

One fun game that lasted almost an entire passage was called Playing Guard. While sailing, Soku and I would make sure that Freaky had his hat on, and then protect him by closing the door to the aft cabin walk-through. Soku would stand (sit, actually) guard in the semidarkness. I’d be navigating topsides and occasionally ask her through an open porthole in the side of the cockpit, “Is Freaky Tiki OK?” She’d carefully crack the door, glance in, and tell me, “He’s fine, Grandpa.” 

After an hour or so, I’d grab a little stick I kept in the cockpit, poke it through the hatch, and knock off Freaky Tiki’s hat. 

“How ’bout now?” I’d ask. She would check again and dutifully report a hatless Tiki, then all the adults aboard would totally freak out screaming and bumping into each other Keystone Kops-style in a mad dash to help Soku get Freaky’s hat back on!

Crazy? Sure. But has any other kid ever loved being aboard a boat more than Soku Orion? I doubt it. 

Even better, around the age of 4, Soku came to me and asked matter-of-factly, “Freaky Tiki isn’t alive, is he?”

I assured her he wasn’t. I said that he was just part of a make-believe game we played aboard. She didn’t bat an eye, and, for our part, we didn’t stop freakin’ out as, with maturity, she gradually lost interest in the game. Then when her sister Tessa Maria came aboard at approximately the same age, Soku made a special effort to teach Tessa about Freaky Tiki’s care and feeding, and, of course, about the ­importance of his hat. 

Here’s the truth of it from an adult ­perspective: Our most cherished memories of cruising offshore revolve around raising our daughter and granddaughters aboard. Silliness isn’t something we frown upon; it is something we aspire to daily. The miracle isn’t how much we’ve helped them mature, but rather how much they’ve taught us about staying young. 

Wild Card, the 38-footer that Soku’s mother grew up aboard, was basically a narrow, one-cabin vessel with a tiny V-berth. My wife and I are avid readers, and Roma would often be bored. “We feed you and we clothe you, but we don’t entertain you,” Carolyn would tell her. (Thank God we didn’t have screens back then—and had a reasonable chance of raising a reasonable adult.) 

I’d be reading on the port settee, and Roma would come over for a snuggle and ask, “What are you doing?”

“I’m wrestling a lion,” I’d say. 

“No, you’re not, Cap’n Daddy-O!” she’d laugh. 

“Yes, I am,” I’d say and show her the cover of my Wilbur Smith novel. Then I’d tell her a long story about Africa, not because I wanted to or because it was a good time, but because it was the best time for her. You feed a kid when they’re hungry if you want them to gain nourishment.

There is no better place to teach a child about responsibility than a boat. At about age 7, Roma wanted a cat. I refused. But Carolyn guided Roma through the process of making a pitch, and eventually I succumbed to her logic and myriad promises. But before we brought a kitten home from the local animal shelter on St. John in the US Virgin Islands, Roma had to earn and save the money for the kitty-litter box and cat food by doing her boat chores. And, of course, she and her mother had to laboriously make a ­macramé ladder for the transom. 

Roma picked out the cat herself. It was a black one she dubbed Joker, in a nod to Wild Card. Even before we allowed the cat below, we gave it a tour of the cockpit litter box. And then we had Roma gently lower the worried cat in her open palm into the harbor water, right next to the rope ladder she and Carolyn had made. Tiny Joker immediately freaked out and climbed out of the water. Roma gradually moved the cat farther and farther away from the ladder each day, until whenever the cat ended up in the water (from, for instance, trying to catch a passing seagull), it would calmly swim to the transom and climb up—not happy, perhaps, but totally safe. 

The cat learned. 
Roma learned. 
And I learned. 

On ocean passages, Carolyn and I would be clipped onto a tether in the cockpit. Roma also had a harness, but most of the time that she sat in the cockpit, she was clipped in with a sort of marine seatbelt device I’d created for her. It was super easy to get in and out of, and totally safe while she was snapped into it. 

The important point is that Precious Cargo, one of our many affectionate names for Roma, was always clipped on while on deck. Joker, however, was a wild animal. One evening, while steering in boisterous trade winds, I heard Roma wake up a confused Carolyn. “Mom, Mom!” she said frantically. “Joker spit out his tongue in my hand!” 

Carolyn said groggily: “Don’t be silly, Roma. Joker didn’t spit out his tongue.” 

“Yes, he did,” Roma said as she handed it to Carolyn, who immediately let out a blood-curling scream in the darkness.

I dashed below and flipped on the light. Both girls were sitting up in bed wide-eyed, with a large flying fish wiggling in Carolyn’s hand. 

Joker the Hunter, of course, had proudly brought his catch down belowdecks to give to Roma, his Lord and Master.  

Once, when Joker dashed out of the companionway to fish in a full gale, Roma put a foot outside into the cockpit in a desperate effort to grab him. I grabbed her, set her down, and said simply, “If you ever go on deck without a harness or expose yourself to danger in any way because of that cat, I will get rid of Joker.”

We stared at each other. 
She knew I meant it. 

For years afterward, we observed her internal struggle as she watched Joker leaping around the wave-swept foredeck after flopping fish. I believe this was the beginning of Roma’s iron discipline that allowed her to graduate with honors with a double major from Brandeis and now work successfully at Singapore Management University. 

And, I might add, she (and her daughters) all love the Dunkin’ Chair, which is a castoff bosun’s chair suspended from an aluminum pole over the water. Though you didn’t ask, I built her a single-sheet-of-plywood dory for her 4th birthday, and she quickly learned to captain it herself. And, naturally, we took her swimming with sharks as a toddler, which is probably why she is a ­PADI-certified rescue diver to this day. 

Take it from me: The only thing that improves cruising is cruising with kids. And Freaky Tiki, of course!

Thanks to the pandemic, Carolyn and Fatty are enjoying an extended visit with their daughter, Roma Orion, and her two children in Singapore.

The post School’s In: Cap’n Fatty’s Take on Seamanship for the Kiddos appeared first on Cruising World.

COVID-19 has taken away much, but at the same time, it has given us vast stretches of uninterrupted time. I’ve used mine to catch up on my reading and to putter around my boat electrically. Since we’re particularly blessed with cheap LED components here in Southeast Asia, where my wife, Carolyn, and I are sitting out the pandemic aboard our Wauquiez ketch, Ganesh, I started out by focusing on lighting.

We now have nearly hidden red night lights gently illuminating our teak-and-holly cabin sole. They’re on two switches just inside the companionway. One we use if we’re headed forward from our amidships cockpit, the other if we’re going aft through the walk-through into the aft cabin. Obviously, both circuits are independently fused and the wires loomed away from any water or dampness. Each LED bulb is placed behind something—a door, bulkhead lip or ledge—so that coming below at night, we don’t see bulbs directly, only the glow of faint red illumination.

The new lighting makes it easier and safer to move around the boat at night in a seaway and helps preserve our night vision. It has the added benefit of making our varnished mahogany interior look stunning.

Speaking of our walk-through, it is quite dark in this area and easy to trip on steps built into the sole. It’s an airless, stuffy part of the boat, and we had replaced the sea bunk there with our offshore safety gear. The Paratech sea anchors, Jordan series drogues and various other slowing devices (and their rodes) take up a lot of space. Anyway, the bottom line is that this area not only needed gentle red illumination that preserves our night vision while we transit it, but also bright illumination if we need to access our portable Edson bilge pump, our ditch bag or our three dry bags of life-raft supplies. The problem is that anywhere you put a light switch would be wrong. The solution was a double-pole double-throw switch that can be turned on and off at either end of the passageway.

Too posh? Perhaps, but kind of cool as well. Why not do projects and make repairs that make you smile? (Actually, our 43-foot cruiser had something like this as original equipment, we just had to replace the switches and run new wires.)

Since we have little money, we do a massive amount of entertaining aboard for two reasons: One, we can control the cost, and two, we can repay the favors done by others who picked up a bar tab or paid for dinner ashore.

The good news is that our folding cockpit table is massive and sits six, but illuminating it wasn’t easy. To correct that, we used a strip of warm-yellow LEDs that now spreads the illumination and still allows the food to look good. Carolyn isn’t merely a good cook—her dinners are as visually pleasing as they taste. And I like to see my food, so this strip is fairly bright.

After dinner, however, we switch it off and turn on a single, softer warm-yellow LED cocktail light, which is totally waterproof as well. As an aside, I’ll say that dim lights and romance go hand in hand, especially at 70 years of age.

I’ve installed a 360-degree anchor light on our mizzen that automatically turns on at dusk and shuts off at dawn.

Since we regularly sail in the Indian Ocean, our cockpit is often awash and fire-hosed by breaking seas, so using top-quality waterproof components here is a must. I not only use heat-shrink terminals, but I also put an additional, longer piece of heat shrink over them so I have double the chance of keeping out the aerated salt crystals that eventually cause bad electrical connections.

From time to time, we have to throw our rum-guzzling friends back into their dinghies at some point in the evening. Now we have a dedicated mizzen LED spotlight that shines down on the aft deck area by our stern ladder. In addition, our stern light is mounted on our transom and arranged in such a manner that it illuminates the dinghy and the ladder as visitors board or tipsily debark.

Just in case we pass out with relief once our guests leave, I’ve installed a 360-degree anchor light on our mizzen that automatically turns on at dusk (or even during dark squalls) and shuts off at dawn. This is in addition to our brighter main masthead light, which is manually switched.

Because we spend so much of our time in the tropics, all of our boats have featured fans at the berths, galley and nav station. In the name of efficiency, we use cageless 12-volt fans with on/off switches conveniently located so that our sleepy fingers don’t get bitten by the spinning blades.

At this point in our lives, we’re more interested in small projects with immediate benefits.

In both heads we have a normal light, a reading light and a muffin, or computer exhaust fan, to carry away odors.

Strangely, since we often sail in high winds, our windspeed instrument is both dirt cheap (it’s a nonmarine Maximum) and manually switched. Yes, I want to occasionally know the windspeed during a gale, but only at times. The last thing I need is for nervous guests to watch the wind gust into the 40-knot range and have their blood pressure rise with the breeze.

Since we’ve lived most of our lives at anchor near islands in developing nations, we have a panic button—a doorbell, really —by the side of my pillow. The idea here is to passively and non-confrontationally scare away boarders before they get below, especially if they’ve swum out to our boat with a machete in their teeth. This button unleashes loud sirens and bright strobes at both the companionway and on the ­mizzen mast. I’ve used them four or five times over the years, and they are so bright and loud, they are panic-inducing. I’ve found that they’re particularly effective if da teef’s dinghy has just “touched” our hull and the bad boys are still in it.

Since we earn our pennies as we sail, we have to have our computerized tools conveniently with us wherever we work. We have 5-volt chargers in the aft cabin, saloon, nav station, tool room and cockpit. Whew! We’ve gone on daysails with eight or 10 executive-type paper pushers, and just keeping up with their iPhone charging needs is a full-time job.

While we now use wireless Bose portable speakers in our cockpit for music, we just installed a removable RAM3 remote mic and speaker there for our Horizon VHF radio. We seldom chat on our VHF, buddy boat or convoy with other cruisers, but I find that having a cockpit speaker and remote mic is extremely useful during boat-to-boat rescues or in other situations where immediate communication becomes necessary.

Meanwhile, down below, we now have two lights in our engine room. One provides soft light that we use when routinely checking our fluids; the other is a bright one in case we’re chasing a major ­mechanical problem or leak.

In addition to the panic alarm I mentioned earlier, we also rely on our $17 burglar alarm system, though not while in Singapore, because in this ­city-state of 6 million people, we never lock our vessel, dinghy or even our bikes. How crime-free is S’pore? To reserve a table in one of the busy food courts, elderly male Singaporeans will leave their iPhone to mark their spot, while the ladies just drop off their purse amid the sea of strangers. Ah, Singapore is utterly amazing. The last item that went missing off a boat at the Changi Sailing Club was just after World War II!

However, while cruising Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, we do set our burglar alarm as we leave our often-­solitary anchored vessel. Thus, we feel the $17 dollars we gave Amazon was well-spent for the relay timer that automatically shuts off all our bells, sirens and strobes after five minutes of unbearable racket. The alarm is triggered by a high-tech pressure-sensitive switch made from two broken sail battens wrapped in copper that make contact as you step into our cockpit. We also have a trip thread at the boarding ladder that we can add if we’re in a particularly worrisome area.

Here’s the truth of it: I’ve built entire boats from a few sheets of paper plans, and I’ve made expensive repairs to other vessels. Sailboats are complicated, and maintaining them is time-consuming. But there’s nothing like sailing across an ocean on a vessel that was once just a glimmer in your eye as you stared at a ­distant horizon. At this point in our lives, however, we’re more interested in small ­projects with immediate benefits. We need gentle lights to hide our wrinkles. Most of these projects cost almost nothing, only time. Carolyn and I often work on them together. Romance, after all, can be fostered while stripping wires as much as anything else.

And we keep our sense of humor while doing so. Every time I ask my wife a ­question, she says, “Watt?” As former hippies, we love our om-meter. Nothing impedes us. Don’t be shocked; we still get a charge out of making each other smile.

Fatty and Carolyn Goodlander report that they are beginning to go stir-crazy sitting aboard Ganesh in Singapore in Year Two of the pandemic.

The post Switching to LED Lights appeared first on Cruising World.

There are two situations that accelerate vessel maintenance: one, using your sailboat too much, and two, using it too seldom. For the past six decades of living aboard, I’ve erred on the too-active side of this equation. During the past 20 years of our cruising lives, my wife, Carolyn, and I have averaged between 5,000 and 8,000 ocean miles annually. That’s a lot of wear and tear on our sails, chafe on our running rigging, and hours on our Perkins diesel. Now, totally unexpectedly, we find ourselves staying put, tethered to a mooring at the Changi Sailing Club in Singapore due to the new normal of COVID-19 international-travel restrictions.

The result is, simply put, electrical issues. That’s right—I used to wear a rigging knife, but now I’m thinking of getting a holster for my ohm meter. I’m surrounded by bad electrical connections.

Part of the problem is that Ganesh, our 43-foot French-built ketch, grows ever more complicated electrically, with burglar and bilge alarms, automatic anchor lights, and 5-volt USB charging outlets springing up from the bilge like weeds. Yes, I attempt to keep our vessel simple. Despite this, we now carry 12 computer hard drives and three DSLR cameras, each of which is stowed in a humidity-controlled environment. Worse, we have more Apple products than a floating orchard. But our laptops, tablets and mobile communication equipment, along with our cameras and digital-storage devices, allow us to be digital waterborne sailing nomads, as Carolyn likes to say. Not only are we able, but we’re required, to keep in touch in order to earn our living daily in the far corners of our planet.

Another contributing factor electrical-wise is our abhorrence of marinas. We just don’t like the ­trailer-­park lifestyle, even afloat. Plus, the ­meanest trailer park in America doesn’t pack its ­residents ­toe-rail-to-toe-rail as tightly as a posh ­marina in Monte Carlo. Thus, we’re always on our own hook or hanging on a mooring ball, which has the additional benefit of being able to pivot into the wind, eliminating the need for electrical air ­conditioning. (Thank God for wind scoops!)

Needless to say, we have to share our natural resources. Currently, in Singapore, we are joined in our Changi anchorage—actually, it’s just a bulge in a constricted commercial waterway—by moored yachts, passing fishing boats, cargo ships, ferries, entire fleets of government craft, cruise ships, and international warships from numerous nations. My point? We regularly get wakes—big ‘uns. Often they slop on deck, and more than once we’ve had salt spray bound aboard through our fore, midship or aft deck hatches. We regularly roll from rail to rail. This is the price we pay for living almost for free in the most expensive, most sophisticated city nation on our planet.

Here, there’s a long fetch to both the west and northeast, and a strong tidal current is a factor as well. And while the winds are generally light, the nor’easterlies during winter are brisk and the summer squalls severe. And we’re often tide-bound and sitting sideways to the seas in a heavy haze of tropical salt spray.

Actually, as challenging as this sounds, we love this place. It’s like living in a three-ring aquatic circus. Something exciting is happening every second, day and night, just outside our portholes. However, as much as we’re enjoying our salt-laden environment, our electronic doodads aren’t. The aforementioned haze of tiny specks of sea salt eventually settle on every surface of Ganesh. Worse, salt is hydroscopic, and the warmer the temperature, the greater the effect. Not only do these drifting salt molecules ­attract water to all our wires and electrical connections, but they also bathe and boil them in a mild acid solution as well.

The unfortunate result is, as my wife Carolyn jokes, “Christmas year-round.” Our cabin lights blink on and off—and then don’t function at all.

Luckily, I’m a regular Sherlock Holmes of bad electrical connections. I can sniff them out either by testing for voltage or checking for continuity. The trick is to remember that electrons don’t just have to arrive at our 12-volt devices, but they also have to return to the other post of the battery to complete the circuit. To put it another way, it’s not just the two wires that deliver power to, say, our depth sounder that must be in solid contact with our main battery bank; it is the entire circuit that must be making contact. Think battery terminal, monitor shunt, main battery switch, terminal block, panel switch, fuse or circuit breakers on the positive side, plus any surprises on the negative ground side as well. (Note: This is a best-case simple example; many branching and re-branching circuits on Ganesh are far more confusing!)

Of course, a circuit, like an anchor chain, is only as good as its weakest link. Let’s consider our nine mismatched solar cells. Obviously, they’re outside. That means they’re not only misted with salt continually, but they’re occasionally struck by exploding seas as well. And they come from the factory with short wires but are mounted a long way from our batteries. This means that they have to be connected to each other and the vessel’s electrical system in such a manner that they (hopefully) function for long spans of time.

And whose job is this? Well, at our ­income level, it’s mine, and over the years, I’ve used a variety of ways to keep power flowing: marine-grade crimp connectors, soldering and, occasionally, twisting and taping. The latter is crude but cheap, and works—for a brief while. But the problem isn’t connecting the wires; it is keeping them connected or, to put it another way, to prevent the intrusion of those dreaded salt crystals that lead to corrosion.

Crimping on a quality connector is a good first step, for instance, but sealing it is the real challenge. Don’t forget: When two pairs of wires are joined, not only is a firm connection necessary, but each crimp needs to be moisture-proof, and negatives and positives must, of course, be kept separated.

Think about this real-life challenge: When I bought her, all of Ganesh’s mast wires had been cut to remove the main and mizzen spars. I could have spent the time and money to fix this correctly, but I sailed around the world instead. Am I sorry I did this? Not really. I have only a few dollars and a limited amount of time. I don’t want to squander too much working on a boat that I could be sailing.

But back to my wiring example. Mast wires are located in a very active and very damp part of the boat. The masts vibrate, the deck flexes, the sun beats down, the rain pours. Yikes! So here’s the bottom line: Crimping on a connector and saying “good enough” doesn’t cut it if you want the electrical connection to still be conducting when you return to safe harbor.

Personally, I live in a practical world with only a handful of pennies, so ­throwing money at the problem isn’t practical. My solution is to use a redundancy of techniques. So, back to the mast wires again. If I’m using a crimp connector, I use liquid tape to seal each wire into the connector once crimped. Then I add a heat-shrink tube over the top of that, and another, longer heat-shrink tube to cover the first. Thus, I have three physical barriers against moisture absorption. Enough? Probably. But on certain critical wires, I don’t stop there. I coat the heat-shrinks with silicone seal, wrap the whole gooey mess with plastic wrap, and then tape it.

Crazy? Yeah. But effective. I’ve had exterior connections such as this last more than a circumnavigation.

Why not solder? I often do. However, soldering on deck in a breeze isn’t easy. Temperature is critical. If a connection is not hot enough, the contact isn’t good; too much heat, and the insulation melts. Of course, I attempt to use quality marine components such as tinned, double-­insulated marine-grade 12-gauge stranded wire. But I’d be lying if I told you that I’m as careful wiring a cabin fan as I am our GPS, bilge pump or starter motor.

While in cruising mode, I find it ­relatively easy to keep everything humming electrically. I just slowly fix, fix, fix until it is all good, then immediately deal with anything that ceases to function. However, if I’m not in cruising mode, things gradually deteriorate without me realizing it.

The way I deal with this is by having a weekly, monthly and quarterly maintenance routine, in addition to our normal haulout-work checklist. Every week as I wind my eight-day ship’s clock, I also run the engine and bilge pump, and physically look into the bilge. Before I crank the engine, I check all its fluids, and feel under the transmission and pan for any early signs of leakage.

The moment the engine starts, I check to see if it is pumping raw water, and then I stare at its flow for a while. Does it appear to be pumping the same amount as last time? Is the exhaust gas invisible? If not, white smoke has a different meaning than black. I allow the engine to get up to temperature, then shift it into forward and reverse under mild temporary load to lube the transmission and keep the rear seal moist.

Next, I exercise my electronics by ­turning them all on and, for example, ­keying the mic of our SSB, etc. This not only keeps the copper surfaces of the switches clean, but the heat from each device dries out the electronics as well.

On a monthly basis, I spin the ­anchor windlass and steering wheel, and ­momentarily engage the autopilot. Ditto our burglar alarm (which is useless in ­zero-crime Singapore). On a quarterly basis, I check the lower-unit lubrication on our tender’s outboard and basically spin or move everything on the boat, specifically all 12 winches and Monitor self-steering gear. I move and rotate the sheave of every block on board, paying particular attention to aluminum masthead and boom sheaves that can freeze up in the blink of an eye. I also confirm that my bilge float switches are working and check my life rafts for water intrusion.

There’s a great irony here: After a lifetime offshore, not sailing my boat is the only thing I’m uncomfortable with. But we cruising sailors must embrace change. In a sense, that’s what our lifestyle is all about. An avid sailor by the name of Charles Darwin agrees. To paraphrase his writing: “Adaptation is more important than intelligence.” On a warming ­planet, while anchored directly below the ­equatorial sun, this is a life lesson I cannot afford to forget.

Cap’n Fatty Goodlander’s most recent project is to figure out how to remove the bilge pump from the sump under his engine, which he installed when the diesel was out.

The post Digging into Sailboat Wiring appeared first on Cruising World.

While I raced competitively as a youth in Optis and Lasers—and loved to sail big boats in all the Caribbean regattas during the ’80s and ’90s—I fell out of Grand Prix yacht racing as I began to focus on circumnavigating a couple of decades ago. The few times I hopped aboard others’ boats and raced in the Med, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa were unsatisfying on two fronts: One, I didn’t seem to be able to completely focus on winning for the entire duration of the event; and two, the vessels and crews were disappointments as well. Once you’ve raced on top-notch racing boats that are designed, built, financed, campaigned, and equipped to win against similarly serious craft, well, it’s hard to go back to the mom-and-pop beer-can races.

Thus, my racing skills atrophied—delightfully so. Where I once would adjust a boat’s cunningham as we accelerated after every tack, as a cruiser, I set it for winter or summer, if that. On the racecourse, I used to joke about yacht racers “rushing to get it over with”; then I adopted a go-slow philosophy and took it to heart. I was in no hurry. I didn’t want to beat anyone; I just wanted to be. I wanted to happily exist in a watery world where God’s smiling face is reflected in every wave.

When a salesman at a marine-supply store in Cape Town boasted that a certain $100 gizmo would “save you at least a day, or perhaps two” on my upcoming nonstop passage back to St. John in the US Virgin Islands, I smiled and asked, “Do you have anything for $100 that would allow me to spend an additional week at sea?”

After all, racing aside, the sole constant in my 61 years of living aboard is the desire to be at sea. For me, Mother Ocean always works her magic. Who needs Zen when there’s a tiller in your hand?

Then COVID-19 reared its ugly head. Not only were my wife, Carolyn, and I forced by logic and common sense to stay put in Singapore, our options to use our heavy-displacement ketch that’s set up for offshore voyaging were slim. Sure, we sailed to Lazarus Island and Pulau Ubin many times, but we practically could have swum there as well. Thus, our bottom fouled. And, as the saying goes, we ended up aground on our coffee grounds.

This is the reality of world cruising: Sh-t happens, occasionally and pandemically! As lifelong cruising sailors, our job is to roll with the punches. So Carolyn and I manage to eke out some watery fun in whatever manner we can in whatever port we happen to be anchored.

Does “eke out fun” sound frivolous? If so, it is because, dear reader, you’re not in cruising mode. For a sea gypsy, smiling blissfully at the horizon is what it’s about. We carry our joy aboard and, if we’re lucky and skillful, our joy never runs out.

Which brings us to the charming Changi Sailing Club, where we’re sitting out COVID and where no stink-potters are allowed. Its roots go back almost 100 years. For Carolyn and me, having a sundowner on the palm-shaded veranda is to experience a taste of classical colonialism, set within the diverse cultural rainbow of the ultramodern nation state that is Singapore. Think Bogie and Bacall. While the club’s core membership is Singaporean, Chinese, Indian, Indonesian and Malay, there’s a smattering of imported expats from England, France, Italy, Holland and America as well.

Singapore is tiny. Land is scarce. Most homes are minuscule. And families often live multigenerational under the same roof. Thus, the British club concept never faded here in S’pore, and the pool, beach, clubhouse and three bars/eateries teem with family fun on the weekends. You can even rent a chalet for a mere $50 per night if you want a watery getaway from home.

At Changi, the focus is on affordable family sailing. The club has an extremely active fleet of big boats in the 20- to 40-foot range, and nearly 100 dinghies for rent by the hour. There are clouds of Optis, Lasers, Toppers and beach cats that flit through the large river anchorage seven days a week. The affordable sailing scene is further buttressed by the fact that a lot of expat sailors from Europe are stationed here by their global corporations for only a year or two, and they tend to buy expensive boats that they then have to sell quickly at a huge loss when transferred to their next high-paying assignment. As a result, boats are cheap in expensive Singapore.

As the pandemic restrictions dragged on from weeks to months, I, of course, could watch the local race boats milling within feet of our 43-foot ketch Ganesh for only so long without itching to be aboard.

And compared with other harbors we’d visited, in many ways the Changi Club goes to extraordinary measures to facilitate the racing. You don’t need a dinghy or tender because the bumboats, or launches, run 12 hours a day, seven days a week. There’s a small shipyard and launch ramp if you want to dry-sail. Gear lockers are available for your racing stuff, and after racing, nearly 20 sailors can shower at the club at the same time. During regattas, with three to four 16-foot Boston Whalers powered by 60 hp engines in use at all times, if a small boat capsizes or a larger boat runs aground, experienced assistance can be on-site within moments.

Best of all, there’s a permanent sea buoy for the leeward starting pin, and race-committee officials work from their own shaded world of flags and horns on the long T-pier that extends into the mooring field at the other end of the starting line.

Read More from Cap’n Fatty Goodlander: Cruisers Stuck Aboard in Singapore

But the most remarkable thing about racing in Changi is the course itself. It teems with freighters, cruise ships, sampans, junks, kayaks, windsurfers, kiteboards, pilot boats, resupply boats, fuel tenders, floating cranes, full-on oil rigs and, of course, the local fishing fleet. If it floats, it is zooming around crazily past the beach at Changi.

But those aren’t the only challenges to yachtsmen. Plentiful numbers of 7-foot-long monitor lizards are common; perhaps that’s what has driven away most of the crocs. And there is a major tide in S’pore, and the ebb current in particular is quite strong. Then, just to make the racing a tad more exciting, rocks and volcanic shoals lurk everywhere. There’s never a dull moment when waterborne off Changi. (For those readers who can’t recall where they’ve heard of Changi before, our current mooring is within sight of the Changi Prison of James Clavell’s novel King Rat. Or, if you’re a World War II buff, this beach is where the Japanese slaughtered 10,000-plus Singaporeans at low water so the rising tide would carry away the bodies—first into town, then out to sea.)

Yes, Singapore history is rich with blood, sweat and misery.

But all the grimness of the island’s past and the pandemic’s presence is now forgotten as the starting gun sounds. If I’m feeling multihull, I race with the large fleet of dry-sailed Corsair trimarans or swing from the trapeze aboard one of the many Nacra beach cats. If I’m in a one-design mood, it is a Laser with my American pals or a Topper if I want to share sea yarns with the Brits. Last week I helmed an Olson 34 named Sapphire Star so that its owner, a Brit named Simon, could sort out his asymmetrical from his symmetrical spinnaker running rigging. Winds tend to be gentle in Singapore, so light-air rags are a must on the downwind legs.

Of course, Singapore sailors are smart—as befits a country with such a high educational standard—so the races are short and the parties long. And they’re also more civil: At the mark roundings, we politely discuss what “clear ahead” means so that no sailor loses face. Back ashore, the awards ceremonies have so many grinning nationalities involved, it’s like a drunken UN meeting for sailors.

So, yeah, I’m getting in some laid-back, emphasis-on-the-fun club racing while learning that in the age of COVID, stopping for extended port stays is now part of the global cruising game as well.

The Goodlanders are spending spring weekends being entertained by the racing scene in Singapore.

The post Sailboat Racing with Singapore’s Changi Sailing Club appeared first on Cruising World.

A wealthy Dutch doctor asked me a few years back, “Can I retire and cruise on 20 grand a year?”

“Yes,” I said without hesitation.

I was confident that I was correct because my wife, Carolyn, and I were cruising on considerably less at the time. But then I added this sobering kicker: “The trick isn’t to cruise into the sunset on a modest amount of money; the trick is to maintain your vessel to your personal standards as you do so.”

Ah, there’s the rub!

No one has ever starved while circumnavigating, yet many an extended cruise has come to grief on empty coffers.

Let’s take the Dutch doc as an example. He not only owned an expensive German car, he also had a full-time chauffeur to drive it between five-star eateries in Amsterdam. His wife wore Jimmy Choo heels and sported a Rolex big enough to require its own PFD. Could they live and cruise on 20 grand a year? Sure! Were they going to? Not likely.

The bottom line on offshore cruising budgets: Sailors usually spend what they can comfortably afford to, often citing the familiar refrain of “You only go around once!” Maximizing your fun is human nature, as it should be.

One thing that should be taken into account when voyage planning is that people are vastly different. Couples are different, families are different, and crews are different. And a long-term cruising budget and financial plan should embrace these enriching differences, not deny them. Example: The moment we reach a port Carolyn begins planning our shore trips, both near and far. While I love to check out the local museums and historical sites, I’m often not as keen to hop on a plane, train, or rent an expensive car to do so. Nonetheless, we’re a team, and she goes through more gales at sea than she’d like. So I tag along on more historical walking tours than I’d prefer. We’re different, and both of us need different payoffs to fully enjoy our cruising lives.

Food ashore is another variable factor. The chances of starving to death while cruising developing countries populated by folks earning the equivalent of $2 a day are nil if you eat what the locals eat. Often the regional food of Oceanis is plentiful, delicious and nutritious. However, if you sail to Madagascar and want to eat off the Stateside menu at a fancy hotel, well, it is going to cost you a pretty penny to consume imported foodstuffs.

Which takes us back to my opening hedge about maintaining your sailboat to “your personal standards.” Ashore, our Dutch doc had his chauffeur wash his car once a day, and he had it professionally detailed every month or so. It sparkled, and the good doc really appreciated that. He felt his pristine auto was, quite naturally, an extension of his personality, and that it indicated his personal and professional success.

When he moved aboard, he transferred this concept to his vessel. The result had maintenance costs that were four to five times higher than the sea gypsy anchored next to him.

Interestingly, he told me a decade later, his glorious yacht didn’t impress the people he wanted to impress. Oh, sure, if he tied stern to at Portofino in the Med amid the mega power yachts with their toy boxes open (huge doors engineered specifically to show off the owner’s glittering leisure possessions for the edification of strolling dock gawkers), his new sailboat attracted plenty of admiring landlubbers. But the folks who the good doctor now wanted to impress were the offshore sailors who regularly transited oceans. And they didn’t give his vessel a second glance. Why? Because they were interested in practical globe-trotting boats, not ostentatious displays of wealth.

I, for one, have never been impressed by owners of yachts who pay others to bring them to Haiti and then tie stern to in Port-au-Prince to watch the locals die of dysentery. To each his own, of course.

Let’s come at this from a different angle though. Race boats have to be fast because they have an obvious yardstick with which to measure their split-second success. Race boats can’t just look fast; they have to actually be fast.

Cruising vessels are more diverse in aim and application. There are no easily defined criteria. During my last boat show, I stepped aboard a half-million-dollar “offshore world voyager.” While talking with the broker, I leaned down to open a galley drawer to see how far back it went (to judge wasted interior space), and the entire front of the wobbly drawer came off in my hand. It was made of quarter-inch door-skin Meranti plywood, stapled into soft pine with too-short staples.

Yikes!

But, on the other hand, she gleamed! And had a generator, air conditioner, electric heads, Bose cockpit speakers, and a huge OLED screen mounted on the main bulkhead in case the cruisers buying the boat were feeling adventurous enough to watch old reruns of Sea Hunt on YouTube.

My current vessel, the 40-year-old, 43-foot Wauquiez Amphitrite ketch Ganesh, cost us $56,000 and a year of sweat equity. Am I saying that she’s currently more seaworthy than some of the new boats being sold today?

That’s exactly what I’m saying.

Read More from Cap’n Fatty Goodlander: Cruisers Stuck Aboard in Singapore

Here’s my viewpoint: Harbors are filled with failed fancy-looking yachts that don’t go anywhere, haven’t gone anywhere, and may never go anywhere. At the same time, right now there are dozens of happy circumnavigators aboard $20,000 to $50,000 craft in Mexico, Tahiti, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Tonga, Thailand and Madagascar who have calluses on their hands and epoxy on their sailing shorts.

“How is this possible?” you ask.

Most successful sea gypsies on limited funds have learned how to prioritize their spending. It’s that simple. Why spend money when it buys only paltry convenience? Instead, they focus their finite freedom chips on strength and safety issues—and occasionally allow marine cosmetics to briefly suffer if need be. I, for instance, don’t allow my sailboat to look like a garbage scow. It just appears to be what it is: a seaworthy vessel with a low-income skipper who can’t afford frills (let alone extravagances) because he sails more than he earns.

We haul out only once every two years, and we do all our own work. Is grinding fiberglass and inhaling antifouling fumes fun? Not really. But being able to endlessly cruise internationally is, and this is the only way we can afford to do so on my modest writing income.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying don’t maintain your vessel; I’m merely indicating that every offshore skipper should consider prioritizing their budget, and the more limited the kitty is, the more important the scrutiny.

Let’s return to the Dutch doc once again. At first, my 40-year-old “dumpster” vessel was far better prepared for offshore sailing than his $800,000 brand-new one was.

Is that my ego talking? No. Did he waste his money on a piece-of-crap boat? No, not at all. In fact, he purchased one of the three yachts I suggested to him.

Then how could this be? Well, quite understandably, Doc had little experience offshore. He simply didn’t know how to prioritize his spending, even though he had plenty of money.

For instance, our Ganesh has over 1,000 pounds of safety equipment aboard. We have a storm trysail on a dedicated track that has its own halyard. Ditto, a storm staysail. Both our main and mizzen sails have three sets of reef points. We have running backstays on both masts that we can set up in extreme weather. We have an inspected four-man life raft ever ready to tip over the side, but we also have a pristine six-man German raft below that is totally out of the weather.

Overkill?

Precisely!

Aboard Ganesh, are our three main cameras and 14 hard drives kept in humidity-controlled environments? They have to be or they wouldn’t work after a year or two. Do we carry four anchors, two of which are oversize? Yes. Lofrans windlass? Check. An all-chain rode and spare nylon rodes? Of course.

We have three electric bilge pumps, a bilge alarm, and a manual pump that can be operated from the cockpit. But we also have a large, portable Edson manual pump on board as well. And while this pump has never been used in anger aboard Ganesh, it has saved many another sinking vessel.

Does our cockpit have surround sound, which the doc’s boat has? Occasionally, especially when we invite other guitar pickers aboard for world-music acoustical jams in, say, Borneo.

Lots of modern boats have no SSB radio. We have two, one that we use primarily on the marine bands (an Icom IC-M710) and the other, an Icom IC-706MKIIG, which we use for our ham contacts. (I’m W2FAT and Carolyn is NP2MU.) And I should mention that some well-intentioned publication gave us a satellite phone, which we appreciated—at least, at first. But then, in midocean, an angry editor called us and started yelling at me. What the heck? After hanging up, I thought about invasive technology and how to harness it and not have it harness us. Why have a device aboard that allows a frustrated dirt dweller to rattle my ocean-blissed brain? That unit made a very satisfying splash 1,000 nautical miles southeast of St. Helena.

There’s something to be said for poverty. All of our winches on Ganesh are manual, and only one is self-tailing. These days, we both spend about four hours in the water per month scraping our bottom and prop of fouling. Each evening, we hand-over-hand hoist our dinghy up on davits. Ashore, we walk or ride our bikes; we almost never rent a car.

All this just because we’re cheap? No, such daily physical activity keeps us both spry and sensuous as well. Just ask the surprised mugger I encountered who was half my age. I am a man of peace, but the surprised look on his face as he went down was gratifying.

Yes, health and spending decisions have consequences. We haven’t spent our cruising lives chasing the false god of convenience, which is why I’ve been able to live aboard and sail the oceans for the past 61 of my 69 years. Or, as I smugly tell my lovely wife, Carolyn, “Isn’t it marvelous the level of international poverty I’ve grown you accustomed to?”

While weathering the pandemic in Singapore, the Goodlanders reported many restrictions during Chinese New Year festivities.

The post How to Stay Within Your Cruising Budget appeared first on Cruising World.

As a liveaboard child in the 1950s, I didn’t get ashore often, so I clearly remember the first time I played musical chairs. It was a strange game, but almost everything the dirt dwellers did struck me as strange back then.

For one thing, we didn’t have stand-alone chairs aboard our 52-foot schooner, just places to sit on deck, in the galley, or around the cockpit. But ashore they had these individual chairs, and when the music stopped, you fought for a seat or you lost. I didn’t like the game. It was exclusionary. Somebody always lost. The game eventually turned all but one of us into a loser.

In March 2020, the music stopped globally for us international circumnavigators. Around the globe, each vessel and its crew had to unexpectedly fight for a chair in an anchorage, if you will. And with out a doubt, some spots were far more preferable than others.

Aboard our ketch, Ganesh, my wife, Carolyn, and I, for instance, lucked out because we had planned on being in Singapore in late 2019 to visit our daughter, Roma Orion, and grandkids Sokù Orion and Tessa Maria.

I always say, “I’d rather be lucky than smart,” primarily because I have such little hope of the latter. Nonetheless, we truly were fortunate. At the time when the music stopped and the cruising curtain fell, we were exactly in the right place at the right time: in COVID-free Singapore, with a mooring and a multiyear visa that allowed us full shore privileges.

Not all globe-trotting cruisers were so lucky.

Take Peter and Ginger Niemann as an example. They circumnavigated from 2006 to 2010 aboard a 47-foot “slutter-rigged” boat (a sloop/cutter they’d converted from a schooner) named Marcy. Then they left Seattle again for circle No. 2 on Irene, a stout 52-foot fiberglass C-Flex ketch, in 2016.

Not wanting to follow their former westabout route, they instead banged a right and transited the Northwest Passage west to east. This is a notoriously rough trip, and they experienced hurricane-force winds in exposed anchorages numerous times. And the timing was tricky. The ice-free window was brief between Canada (to starboard) and the ice pack (to port).

Three-quarters of the way along their passage, they almost turned back at the choke point of Bellot Strait, on the edge of the ice pack, where there was a real danger of either being crushed by or entrapped in the frozen brine. But they persevered and eventually made it through without assistance by laboriously hopscotching through the bergs amid the thickening slush—occasionally almost within touching distance of polar bears.

At the time, theirs was only the 30th American vessel (there have been 267 vessels in total) to transit the Northwest passage, according to the local record keepers.

Then, just to make matters even more challenging, the remnants of tropical hurricanes Irma and Maria forced them to Greenland before heading down to the States. When they finally arrived in chilly Maine, they thought they were in the balmy tropics!

Next stop was the Med. But by early 2020, they were under COVID-19 quarantine in Turkey, though eventually they were allowed to clear out, bound for Batam, Indonesia. Officials there assured them repeatedly that they’d be welcome. Two months and a few thousand miles later, however, when they actually arrived at the Nongsa Marina, Batam officials had changed their minds and allowed them only to briefly reprovision.

Nearby Singapore was their only reasonable port of refuge. But while S’pore would allow them and their vessel to clear in, they would not be able to go ashore because of the pandemic.

They had no choice but to roll with the punches.

As I wrote this, Ginger told me, with a twinkle in her bemused eye, “Gee, Fatty, I really didn’t think this second circumnavigation would involve a 235-day stretch of never being allowed ashore in any country!”

Their hope is to sail home to Seattle via Japan sometime in 2021.

And then there’s the growing family aboard Adamastor.

Decades ago, an artist named James Mostyn was skipping around South America, as artists (and descendants of the Duke of Wellington) tend to do. One drunken night, he hooked up with a bunch of sea gypsies partying on a beach in Central America and unexpectedly fell in love with the cruising community, us included.

An architect by trade, James returned to Jolly Ole England to earn some freedom chips. It took him a number of years to find his dream vessel, the 42-foot Bermudian sloop Adamastor, built in South Africa in 1990.

Hooking up with Jess Lloyd, a fellow artist with a delightfully bubbly personality, they left London for a “two-year cruise nine years ago,” as Jess explains it.

Now, as strong as their combined knowledge of design and art might have been, biology and reproduction weren’t their strong points. Or perhaps they were. Regardless, their oldest daughter is Rocket. She’s as smart as a whip and a budding artist as well. She was born in Mexico, along the way toward the South Pacific. Their son, Indigo, was born in New Zealand. He’s 5. And Autumn, their youngest, just turned 2, but swings around the boat like she’s a teenage trapeze artist instead of a graphic one. (The interior of their vessel is like a floating Louvre of children’s paintings.)

They’d been drifting around in Indonesia for three years and were checking out the Komodo dragons when they got a whiff of a rumor about the approaching COVID-19 pandemic. That’s when Indonesia promptly tossed them out as a result of border closures. Or, more accurately, wouldn’t renew their visa.

They too were at loose ends and in dire straits while near the Singapore Strait. They too needed to stash themselves and their boat for a while to figure out their next move.

Now Singapore isn’t exactly yacht-friendly, but it has a huge commercial-freighter industry, and the ships enjoy a type of “seaman visa” that allows transiting crew to enter the country as long as they don’t get off their vessel.

Thus, at the Changi Sailing Club, where we hang out in Southeast Asia and where we are long-term members, these two unrelated cruising vessels suddenly appeared on moorings like ghost ships.

Both crews were legal-eagle with the local laws and, thus, were in strict quarantine for the first 14 days. They couldn’t leave their vessels, and we couldn’t board. However, once we realized their plight, we started spontaneously delivering them shore treats such as fresh juice, fruits and bakery goods.

In order to do this, we’d just holler from the dinghy, wait for the respective crews to gather in sight on their aft deck, then place our unasked-for-but-greatly-appreciated offerings on their bow with our 12-foot-long boat hook. It was not only legal under Singapore law, but completely COVID-safe as well.

Meanwhile Carolyn and I, not realizing their strict visa limitations, waited patiently for the 14-day quarantine to be up so we could show them the town. (We’re head over heels in love with S’pore and enjoy introducing newcomers to its delights.)

The only problem was that even when the time was up, they couldn’t go ashore. Instead, they were confined to their craft for the duration of their visit. Of course, they and their vessels could leave at any time, but instead they chose to stay because they were safe from COVID and, well, no other country would have them.

Strange, right? Limbo? Purgatory?

The crew on Irene have now been here for over two months. Peter and Ginger haven’t been ashore except to deal with officials. In fact, it’s been nearly five months since they’ve wandered down any beach hand in hand. Plus these high-latitude sailors are Arctic-explorer types. Living in the tropics isn’t their cup of tea. The cabin heater on Irene, ordinarily a top priority, is designed to be the social heart of their happy, stout ship. Cheery cabin heaters, though, aren’t much good directly on the equator.

Ordinarily, their idea of a pleasant day in the cockpit involves snow on deck and icebergs over the bows. And yet here they are—grateful for the resting stop but unable to stretch their legs ashore.

But it is the artists James and Jess and their three-member playpen crew that blows Carolyn and me away. I tried to count those kids from my dinghy once—and stopped when I got to 18 and realized I was counting the same three over and over again because they were popping and repopping out of the hatches like jumping beans.

“Yeah,” James admits wryly, “it is kinda strange to be cruising around and always eyeing the next port to pop out a baby in.”

I mean, a 42-foot sailboat must shrink 10 feet per kid, right? And since the entire family is art-struck, each would, of course, like to lead you by the hand to where their pictures are tacked up on the bulkhead.

Glancing through a porthole, I realized I’d forgotten what it is to see a young child without their face illuminated by the glow of a screen. We watch Rocket and Indigo endlessly play on deck, able to amuse each other seemingly forever. (All under the watchful eye of their careful parents, of course.)

So yeah, we do a lot of rail hanging, and we’ve all become great, if socially distant, friends. Since James, Jess, Autumn, Indigo and Rocket number five souls, we can’t visit them because no private vessel can have more than five people aboard.

However, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Last weekend, Carolyn, Roma, and our two grandkids anchored our dinghy not too far off their portside and sort of allowed the kids to co-party within sight of each other. We also dumped off a ton of old books and used toys from Roma’s house, and a good, if weirdly strange, kiddie time was had by all.

The truth is that the cruising community is adapting to new circumstances and travel restrictions in entirely novel and diverse ways. We all love each other in the sea-gypsy sphere, but we have to be more creative during a pandemic.

For the record, no pint-size crew could possibility be more lovable (or creative) than Rocket, Indigo and Autumn. Now if we could only figure out a way to broach the subject of birth control with their parents!

Cap’n Fatty and Carolyn are still having a ball despite being forced to keep a safe distance in Southeast Asia.

The post On Watch: Cruisers Stuck Aboard in Singapore appeared first on Cruising World.

It is difficult to describe the utter devastation of a Category 5 storm such as Hurricane Irma because any accurate attempt seems like wild exaggeration. An 80-foot twin-engine catamaran with a generator and full fuel tanks blowing through the air like a 40-foot-wide tumbleweed? A 50-foot monohull whose barometer momentarily functioned as an altimeter before the boat landed on the roof of a government building? Entire harbors a sea of blue from the antifouling of the capsized rental catamarans?

Crazy, right?

Thatcher Lord and his wife, Vicki, couldn’t believe their eyes on September 6, 2017, as they forced open the door of their battered home enough to escape. The hillside on St. John, in the US Virgin Islands, appeared to have burned, as if magically incinerated during the torrential rains. There wasn’t a speck of greenery. Mighty trees were gone. Ditto the stone walls of sugar plantations that had stood for centuries. Thousands of houses were now mere smears in the dirt. Giant trucks had been swept into the sea. There were businesses so flattened that you couldn’t tell where they’d once been. Whole roads had slid into the valleys below.

“We’ll never make it, Thatch,” Vicki recalls telling her husband. “Bjork Creek is too far. Besides, sections of the road are missing and the rest of Centerline is so cluttered with debris that transiting it is more a climb than a hike.”

“I just want a look,” she remembers Thatcher telling her doggedly, as he climbed over the trunk of a tree in the middle of the asphalt in front of their house. “I know there’ll be damage. That’s a given. All I want is to make sure she’s floating. That’s all.”

Thatcher is a soft-spoken man, though the softness of his words somehow communicates strength. He wouldn’t be able to sleep until he knew his beloved Rhodes Reliant 41-foot fiberglass yawl, Trinka, was OK. They’d owned her for nearly three decades. All their spare time had been lavished on her; all their pennies too.

About two hours into the eastward hike down Centerline Road, Thatcher crested a pile of debris that had once been someone’s house and came face to face with Bad Nate. St. John is a small island with only a few thousand residents. Bad Nate’s eyes were dilated, and his teeth chattered as if he’d been staring into hell’s fires.

“She’s gone,” he croaked to Thatcher.

“What do you mean, gone?” Thatcher asked.

“Gone as in not there,” Bad Nate said. “Only one boat survived in Bjork Creek, the red-hulled Shibumi.”

Shibumi was owned by Dick Burks and Mary Tyler, two of Thatcher and Vicki’s best friends. Thatcher was happy to hear their boat had survived, even if the news came in such a backhanded, gut-wrenching manner.

Vicki was a few strides behind, but she’d heard as well. Worse, she’d seen Thatcher flinch as if he’d been whipped. Vicki wondered if her husband could handle all the drama, all the stress. He’d spent a decade wrestling with cancer, which he may have licked. But the long hospital stays and the bone-marrow transplant had drained them emotionally, physically and financially. Thatcher was a shadow of his former strapping self.

Two hours later, they rounded the point by Estate Zootenvaal and peered into Bjork Creek. Bad Nate had been right but also wrong. Trinka had been lost, but Thatcher knew exactly where she was: directly under those masts standing above the water that he’d once taken apart and reglued himself.

Thatcher waded into the now-still creek and swam out to his boat. Trinka was hard to look at. There was something obscene about her this way. It was too intimate, as if he should, as a gentleman sailor, glance away. He dived down and felt her wounds. She was holed and cracked and crushed. Sections of her transom had been eaten. Huge chunks of her rails had been pounded off. Only a tiny bit of her transom protruded forlornly above the water.

It wasn’t a judgment call. If she’d been insured, she’d be a total write-off, but of course, she wasn’t. It made no sense to attempt to fix her; the cost in both money and time would be astronomical.

“What do you think?” Vicki recalls asking from the shore.

“What do I think?” Thatcher snapped. “I think I want to cry.”

Over the course of the next month, Vicki researched their situation. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers quickly started removing all the sunken vessels in nearby Coral Bay without charge, Bjork Creek was in National Park Service waters. Almost a year would go by before the NPS would bring in a crane. So, in a sense, the Lords could do nothing but walk away.

But somehow walking away to callously leave Trinka’s corpse on display for a year didn’t seem right.

Thatcher bristled at the idea. He couldn’t decide whether to do the logical, sensible thing or the silly thing, so he asked a few of his knowledgeable friends for their opinion. I was one. I dinghied out to Bjork Creek and looked at the remains of the now brown-and-green Trinka. Then I gave him advice: “Forget it, Thatch,” I said. “It would take years and every penny you have, maybe every penny you will ever have.”

It was unanimous. Everyone agreed. Walk away, Thatcher, walk away!

And Thatcher agreed. But then, one afternoon, he and Vicky were driving past the Coral Bay Lumber yard, and, on a lark, Thatcher pulled in. A West Indian friend named Rupert greeted them with a wide smile. Thatcher asked if they had fir 6-by-6-inch lumber, 20 feet long. Rupert said they did.

Vicki was shocked to see Thatcher’s credit card flash in his hand. And so, the project began.

Plugging the major hole underwater with a sheet of plywood and Vicki’s yoga mat wasn’t easy. Thatcher found he could hold his breath long enough, but it was difficult to stay in place with the awkward materials. His friend Dick Burks dived into Bjork Creek to assist and held onto the side of the slimy cap rail of the sunken boat. Thatcher then dived underwater and sort of allowed Dick to stand on his shoulders to keep Thatcher in place with some stability. It was tough work. It took many hours. They managed.

Then came raising the sunken boat with float bags, bringing her to surface, and pumping her out.

A month underwater hadn’t been kind to Trinka. She looked like a slimy prop in a horror movie. And she apparently seemed angry at having been disturbed. The next day when they returned to the creek, she was on the bottom again. And a few days later, again she sank! But Thatcher was totally committed to the rebuild. He’d stay the course—even if it killed him.

“Once I purchased the big timbers for the cradle,” Thatcher said later, “that was it. I knew that if I started, I’d have to complete the project. Once I began, failing wouldn’t be an option.”

As mentioned, Dick and Mary of Shibumi were friends with the Lords, but that is an understatement. Dick and Mary were delighted to still have their home afloat, and translated that joy into hard, sustained work assisting in Trinka’s reincarnation. They didn’t just “kinda” help salvage the graceful yawl; they and a dozen other St. Johnians pitched in for days, weeks, months—and a few for years—of regular labor.

Once Trinka was moved from Bjork to nearby Coral Bay, work began in earnest. It was December, and Thatcher, a wood butcher and furniture-maker by trade, sliced and diced up the 6-by-6s to fashion a cradle that wasn’t merely strong enough to support the heavy-displacement Trinka, but it was also rugged enough to be dragged ashore with her in it.

Read More about Vicki, Thatcher and Trinka: Virgin Island Sailors Bounce Back

If building the cradle ashore weren’t difficult enough, it had to be floated out to Trinka, then weighed down and sunk so that Trinka could be loaded into it.

In mid-January, four months into the two-year project, the boat was firmly fastened in the cradle and she was skidded out of the water on plywood, using come-alongs and tractors, not to mention the help of half of the island community, both West Indian and continental.

Like the West Indians say, “Hurricanes blow all skin one color!”

While Thatcher stared at all the hull damage, Vicki and Mary went inside the dripping vessel with buckets and worked for three days. Wearing the same odoriferous clothes, they mucked the mud, oil, grease and diesel fuel out of the interior. Stinking barnacles were everywhere. Pieces of Thatcher’s six-string guitar floated in the bilge, along with a shoe and bits of the Lords’ Maine wedding pictures.

“I couldn’t think of all the projects required,” Thatcher confessed. “It was too daunting, too impossible. I just did one thing at a time. I didn’t look ahead; I just looked down, and put one foot in front of the other.

The big hole in the hull was gaping, and had lots of compound curves, so he made a mold and fiberglassed over it. Then he removed the mold and glassed the other side. Then, and only then, did he think about the cracks, another hole and the pulverized area by the rail.

Most of the bulkheads were salvageable, but much of the interior plywood was delaminated. The settee, galley and all the cabinetry had rippled from the immersion. Thatcher laboriously cut it way with a chisel until he found good wood.

He had some bits of luck. He stumbled into a pile of air-dried Burmese teak. The owner of a destroyed CSY 44 sold him its mainmast cheap. Thatched used the Sitka spruce from his box-section mainmast to repair his mizzen mast. And a sad sailor on St. Thomas had a brand-new 30 hp Yanmar diesel still in the carton because his boat had sunk before he could install it. One man’s bad luck is another man’s good.

Thatcher had built his house primarily because he wanted a woodworking shop. It was here he band-sawed teak planks into 1/16-inch slices, attached them temporarily to other blocks of wood, and then ran them through his joiner/planer, making his own teak veneer.

He and Vicki worked side by side, day after day. When they began, she wondered if this project would, literally, kill Thatcher. But as the months wore on, she realized that her husband was no longer obsessing about his health because he had Trinka to worry about. He became stronger and more confident. He not only gained weight, he gained muscle. Within a year, Thatcher once again resembled the handsome Viking he’d once been.

He tossed in the new engine, and replaced all the wiring, plumbing and tankage. There was a new stove and LED fixtures, along with solar panels and controllers, of course. All the sailing and nav instruments were deep-sixed and replaced as finances permitted. Ditto the windlass and roller furler. While he was at it, why not replace the original chainplates? Thatcher wasn’t making Trinka as good as new—she’d be even better.

The longer the project dragged on, and the more the local landlubbers thought Thatcher and Vicki were crazy, the more local Caribbean sailors chipped in to help. It was almost as if Trinka had morphed into the local sailing community’s vessel; Vick and Thatch just happened to skipper her. And when the work was done, it seemed as though the whole island showed up for the flag-snapping launch.

Then, on Christmas Day 2019, they went sailing—Vicki, Thatcher and Trinka. Crazy, right?

The Goodlanders are staying put in Singapore these days and enjoying time with the grandkids.

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