Note we do not have any financial arrangements or other interests in any the products mentioned here!
For just about every question, there are almost as many different opinions as there are sailors. And, most of these different opinions are in fact valid for the specific individual with their particular boat and their unique mission. That said, below are our opinions based on our experiences to date. We reserve the right to change them, or even admit they are wrong, at any later date :)
47. Do we really need four 300' lines on spools to cruise in the high latitudes?
48. For hard dodger windows should we use tempered or safety glass and what percent tinting?
49. Any tips on provisioning for our first offshore passage?
50. What do you think of spade vs. skeg-hung rudders?
51. What is the best paint strategy with an aluminum boat?
54. Answer to shortest turning radius question in Seamanship Quiz seems wrong?
55. How safe is offshore sailing?
MOST RECENT FAQs:
These lines are used to tie into small coves when there is not enough room to swing at anchor in the normal way. Typically you drop a bow anchor, back upwind into the cove while letting out anchor rode and when close to shore, take two stern lines to trees and/or rocks ashore.
This is a technique adapted to the specific conditions in Chile & the Antarctic, where the main harbors are quite deep and exposed to violent winds, but there are often very small but very well-protected coves around the edges of the harbors. It is certainly not necessary to use shore lines in every harbor in Chile, but there are a couple stretches in the canals where your anchorage options will all be uncomfortable and unappealing if you do not have shore lines. This technique is not widely used in the Northern Hemisphere, but if you have the lines and know the technique it can be a useful in specific situations (we shore tied a couple times in Scotland, and it is used on the west coast of Norway and Sweden and in some deep harbors in the Pacific Northwest).
Stern tying can be done with a single shore line if the wind is sure to stay directly over the stern. But it is safer and more stable to use two stern lines if the wind is shifty and could move to one of the quarters. If the wind could shift to the beam it is best to then put out a bow line to shore, and if it could shift all the way to the bow it is best to have two bow lines to either shore. We used more than two lines only a handful of times in our last traverse of the Chilean canals but were glad to have the extra lines and slept better when we used them.
We in fact carry a fifth extra long (220m) shore line in case we need to reach a long long way to find something strong to tie to.
So, the bottom line is that one line is pretty essential, two will make you comfortable in most situations and four or five will allow you to be bulletproof in almost all situations.
The boats permanently in Chile tend to have line spools mounted on deck. We do not use spools as we do not want them permanently on deck and they are heavy and difficult to stow. Instead we use tall, narrow mesh bags with wire hoops sewn into the opening. The mesh allows the line to dry and the wire hoop holds the mouth open so one person can easily stuff the line in. The tall/narrow shape with the opening on the top allows the line to run out without tangling (it will often tangle if stowed in the more normal duffle bag configuration with the opening on the side). Pictures of line bags (pic1, pic2).
Note: These lines can also be used when going thru the Panama canal (where four long lines are required) and for Med-mooring. (Top of Page)
Although both safety (laminated) and tempered glass are considered ‘safer’ because they have been manufactured for strength and, if damaged, to not shatter into sharp shards, there is a difference both in the manufacture and performance of safety and tempered glass.
Tempered glass is a solid plate of glass and is found in the passenger and rear windows of cars. In the tempering process, the glass is heated in a furnace past its ‘annealing point,’ and then immediately cooled down with air jets. This forces the surface to quickly become cool and stiff, while the core of the glass, because it is still much hotter, takes longer to cool down and finally harden. This tempering process makes it about four times stronger than normal glass and if the surface receives any stress, it does not carry through to the core of the glass, so a crack is unable to form. If the glass does receive damage, it shatters into small cubes rather than sharp shards. Under wind pressure, tempered glass is approximately four times as strong as annealed glass. It resists breakage by small missiles traveling approximately twice the speed as missiles which break annealed glass. Tempered glass is also able to resist temperature differences (200 ° F - 300 ° F) which would cause annealed glass to crack.
Safety glass is usually constructed of two thinner pieces of tempered plate glass bonded together with a plastic layer in between them. This lamination holds the glass pieces together when it breaks. Laminated glass is normally used when there is a possibility of human impact or where the glass could fall if shattered. Shop front glazing and auto windshields are typically laminated glasses. The plastic inner layer also gives the glass a much higher sound insulation rating, and blocks 99% of transmitted UV light.
Both are completely acceptable alternatives. Tempered glass is stronger for a given weight, but safety glass will hold together if it breaks. I have been convinced that 10mm (3/8") tempered glass is virtually unbreakable (Oyster has used it for their big saloon windows and never had one break) and is the slightly better choice.
Lexan and acrylic are lighter, and shatter resistant so why not use them? Two reasons: (1) They both scratch and need to be replaced about every 3-5 years, even with the best anti-scratch coatings. Our glass is still perfectly clear ,with no special care, after 10 years. (2) They both expand and contract a surprising amount with the type of temperature fluctuations most offshore boats will experience. That will break the seal of any available sealant and they will start to leak. We started off with Lexan interior side windows and they started leaking after 4 years. We replaced them with 10mm tempered glass as the seal on the glass hard dodger windows were (and have continued to be) perfect.
The level of tinting represents a trade-off between heat gain during the day in the tropics vs. the ability to see at night. For reference, US state laws set a maximum amount of tinting (percent of visible light that is let through) for front auto windows. This ranges from 70% in 7 states (AK, CA, DE, LA, NY, PA, RI) to under 30% in 8 states (MN, AR, OK, TX, CO, SC, FL, WY). We ended up with 50% tinting and think it represents a good compromise.
All window films start with the film, of course, which is always polyester, 2 to 7 mils thick. Quite often, several thin layers of film are bonded together. One side is coated with either a pressure-sensitive or water-activated adhesive. The exposed surfaces of most films are also treated with a hard, scratch-resistant coating. To filter out ultraviolet radiation, chemical UV blockers (cyclic imino esters) are incorporated. If the film's purpose is to provide only UV protection and shatter resistance, no other materials need to be added. Some brands offer 'safety film' as the tinting base layer (see Lumar for example) , which acts like the plastic layer in laminated safety glass and might be the perfect compliment to tempered glass.
Then three different kinds of tinting can be added to the film: Dyed film, which acts by absorbs light/heat, and two types of metal tint which reflect the light/heat - Deposited film (a reflective metal tint that can only be done in a relative dark tint) & Sputtered film (can be done in any tint with almost any metal). In addition there are Hybrid film (combining dyes with reflective metals). The worst dyed window film can show signs of color fading in the matter of months under intense sunlight. The average hybrid type film lasts for 5 years, and the best quality metallized sputtered or deposition window film can last for a decade. We have a high quality hybrid film and it is still perfect after 10 years (I don't like the mirrored look of the pure metal films). (Top of Page)
(1) Water issues. Each crew should have their own 1 quart (1 liter) water bottle with their name on it, and they need to drink it empty twice every day. The separate water bottles minimize the spread of germs and drinking two liters a day minimizes the risk of dehydration.
Do flush out the water tanks (a chlorine flush to kill the bugs and then several fresh water flushes to remove the chlorine taste). Even if you have a watermaker, using seawater for dishwashing, with a fresh water rinse, will greatly reduce the amount of time you have to run the watermaker/generator. Check the o-ring on the deck inlet cap to make sure it is still sound and will keep saltwater out of the water tanks.
(2) Meal planning. Precooking meals for at least the first five dinners will minimize galley time while still providing good hot meals until the cook finds his/her sea legs. There are three options for ‘pre-cooking: (a) frozen, if you have the freezer capacity, (b) pressure cooking in jars, and (c) freeze dried - expensive and probably the least tasty. Bring spicy sauces if going this route. Again, for the first five days its best to pack food in "one-day packages" as much as possible to avoid time digging around in the galley lockers.
Also, plan some bland menu options, and bring saltines or pilot biscuits, for rough weather.
A daily 'surprise' that people will look forward to is a big moral builder – anything that will wake up the taste buds – everything from pickles to ginger cookies to ice cream bars are good.
(3) Crews differ dramatically on how much they will want to eat. Some will want three big meals and others will just have a bagel for breakfast, snacks for lunch and a real dinner. You can get accurate input from experienced offshore crew how much they think they will eat but those new to offshore usually don’t have a clue about their preferences. In the mid & higher latitudes you need to be prepared to keep everyone full of hot food, but in the tropics you can usually plan on light breakfasts and snack lunches (with lots of liquids) unless you know you have big eaters.
(4) Use regular silverware and plastic dishes. Wide mouth cups with lids are good both for drinks and soup/stews. If you have one for each member of the crew, each person can be responsible for washing his own mug. Get a large pump thermos and fill it with hot water before the night watches for coffee, hot chocolate, etc. (Top of Page)
We have done circumnavigations with each. Either will do the job but our preference is for a spade rudder. Most people assume we built Hawk with a spade rudder to maximize sailing performance (which it does), but in fact our main reason was because they make a boat much easier to steer in reverse. Our biggest concern with Hawk’s size was our ability to maneuver her in tight marina spaces and we wanted to make her as maneuverable in reverse as possible. Our experience with skeg rudders is they have a lot of prop walk and are not very responsive in reverse, while Hawk with her large spade is extremely nimble & responsive.
After living with the spade for a while we have discovered another big benefit, which is that it is very easy to inspect & maintain. It can be easily pushed out of the boat, the rudder and bearings inspected, and reinstalled, all while the boat is in the water. A skeg rudder is usually quite difficult to remove and the lower bearing difficult to inspect.
Many ‘sailing experts’ say that spade rudders are inherently weak and unsuitable for offshore use. This is flat out ridiculous. If you take the weight of a skeg and put that same weight into extra material in the spade rudder shaft and bearings you will end up with an extremely strong, essentially 'unbreakable' rudder. We inadvertently proved this by bouncing our spade rudder off rocks in Iceland for an hour. It held up to the abuse, maintained watertight integrity and the bearings were still within 2/1000 of specification when we measured them 10,000 miles later. With (full height) skeg rudders the lower bearing is often quite vulnerable to this sort of grounding. The plain fact is that you can build strong & reliable rudders of either sort or you can build weak and unreliable ones. It’s simply a matter of proper engineering and construction.
Too many modern 'offshore cruising boat' rudders have been engineered to meet only 'expected sailing loads'. A cruising or offshore rudder must be designed (and constructed) to survive full speed impact loads and not just sailing loads. The rudder on an offshore boat WILL hit stuff - from rocks to large sunken logs to containers. The rudder must be able to survive these impacts without catastrophic damage and still bring the boat back to safe harbor. This can be done without great difficulty, expense or weight, but the customer must make it a priority. The rudder (shaft & bearings) are normally out of sight and are common places for builders to save money and/or weight.
The proper engineering of a rudder is a sophisticated/complex task, but there are two simple things that an owner/buyer can look for in both spade and skeg-hung rudders.
(1) The rudder shaft should be large diameter as, at the expense of a little extra wetted surface area, this provides vastly increased strength in both shaft and bearings (a 10% increase in diameter can increase strength by 33%). So, it is useful to compare the shaft diameter of the boat you are considering with that of other well proven 'benchmark boats'.
(2) I think it is best if the rudder is all made from one material - that is all aluminum or all composite (carbon shaft, e-glass blade) or all steel (note: if the shaft is carbon, it needs to be engineered particularly strongly to handle impact loads without shattering - metal shafts are somewhat less sensitive as they are less brittle and can bend rather than shatter). That way, the rudder blade can be effectively sealed, there are no 'mixed materials' corrosion issues, and the shaft and blade can be strongly bonded/welded together. The common approach of mixing a stainless shaft and glass blade creates many problems - it's difficult to keep the glass sealed around the shaft so water leaks into the blade causing corrosion on the welds of the frames that join the shaft to the blade and crevice corrosion in the shaft itself. (Top of Page)
There are three separate issues with respect to paint. The first is that paint does not adhere very well to aluminum. Even the slightest imperfection in initial surface cleaning or the slightest scratch through the paint or contact between the aluminum and stainless fasteners will cause small bubbling/blistering and then over time these bubbles/blisters will grow. No matter how well or carefully done, to maintain ‘Bristol condition’ the topsides of a painted aluminum hull will require repainting about every five years. On the other hand, unpainted aluminum topsides are essentially maintenance free and remove a lot of stress from docking on rough/nasty docks because you don’t have to worry about scratching the hull. Thus the practical starting point is to leave everything above the boot-stripe unpainted. We find bare aluminum decks quite hot (on bare feet) in the tropics and we find non-skid paint to be much easier to touch-up/maintain than gloss paint, so we think it worthwhile to paint the decks in a light/cool color. Beyond the decks, where and how much paint you add is purely a matter of trading off bare aluminum aesthetics with paint’s maintenance & cost. I would leave everything else unpainted while Beth prefers the aesthetics of some white trim paint.
To have the best chance of paint sticking the longest possible period you need to do a very careful and thorough preparation job. You need to start with a warm, dry, calm day in a clean environment. The aluminum needs to be cleaned down to bare, shiny metal. This is best done by sand blasting or stainless wire brush abrading, because sanding often simply pushes grease and dirt around or into the metal. Then the metal should be acid etched and cleaned. and then the primer put on. The primer is ideally applied within 30 minutes of sand blasting, so the paint gets on before aluminum oxide starts building on the surface.
The second issue is with bottom paint. You need to put on a good epoxy barrier coat, both to give the antifouling something to stick to (it will not stick well to bare aluminum) and to help insulate the aluminum from stray electrical current. TBT antifouling paint was both very effective and aluminum-friendly but this has been banned for environmental reasons. Most current ‘yacht antifoulings’ contain a lot of copper oxide and these should be avoided, because copper connected to aluminum by salt water can create a battery and cause hull corrosion. Some people trust their epoxy barrier coat to separate the copper and aluminum. While we have not seen a case firsthand where this has created a problem, we think it best to avoid copper oxide if alternatives are available.
Copper thiocyanate is not supposed to damage metal hulls, and we have sailed for three years using this sort of paint. But our experience to-date has been that it is not that effective at preventing growth. There are a number of new anti-fouling paints with no copper of any sort (E-Paint is one of the leaders). We have not tried any of these yet, but we have gotten mixed messages from friends who have used these paints. We have heard from several people that one can of paint will work well and then next (same manufacturer/brand) will be completely ineffective, so either the quality control is poor or the paint is very sensitive to small changes in environmental/sailing conditions.
The third issue is inside tankage. Most aluminum hulls have aluminum tanks. Diesel can and should be stowed in bare aluminum tanks, but fresh water tanks should be given an ‘FDA approved for drinking water application’ epoxy coating. (Top of Page)
The short answer is that the ORC category 1 rules are a very useful reference when prioritizing safety issues/equipment (the 2008-2009 update has just been released). They have been written by experienced sailors based on the combined experience of the world’s offshore racing fleet. For the most part, we have taken this hard-won advice very seriously and attempted to equip Hawk so that she is in compliance with these racing regulations. However, there are a number of areas (21 in fact) where our experience and judgment have led us to reject the recommendations. The longer answer which details our approach in each of the 21 areas where we differ from the Category 1 rules. (Top of Page)
I have two quite different reactions when I hear this question.
The first keys in on the word 'need'. It's is amazing what some people have done with the most unsuitable boats. Webb Chiles sailed most of the way round the world in an un-decked open boat. Sr. Henry Pigott sailed round the world in a junk-rigged, decked-over 18' life boat. A Russian sailed round the world via Cape horn in an 10' sailboat he built on the balcony of his apartment in Moscow. Shackleton sailed a 23' open boat from Antarctica 800nm to South Georgia. A couple Italians sailed across the Drake Passage to Antarctica in an 18' beach cat. Several people have crossed oceans in life rafts and rowboats. So, the simple proven fact is you don't 'need' much more than a bathtub to do even extreme sailing. The skipper's skill, endurance and luck are much much more important to the success of any voyage than the vessel.
That said, we don't all have the skill, tenacity or luck of these skippers. The rest of us sometimes need a bit of help from our vessels. And that's true on any long distance cruise or passage. Our 'extreme' cruising in the high latitudes explains Hawk's heater and hull insulation but really have very little to do with why we built her so strongly. The one time we most needed her to be strong (when we went aground and bounced her rudder off some rocks for an hour) did happen to be near the Arctic circle in Northern Iceland, but we could easily have made exactly the same mistake in, say, Mexico. It was just a stupid error on our part, and could have happened anywhere anytime.
There appear to be about a half dozen boats a year in the North Atlantic below 40N which lose their rudders offshore, and these boats are typically well regarded cruising brands. I have no idea how many lose them in groundings, but it could be many times that.
Many people outfitting for this sort of trip buy a used boat and assume the structure is fine and dump a ton of money into watermakers and bread makers and such. Any trip offshore into ocean waves and strange harbors can be tough - the trips out to the Caribbean or down to Mexico are not cake-walks. When preparing for these sorts of trips I think it prudent to start from the most fundamental basics (that the boat is really strong and watertight and sails well) and make absolutely sure these fundamentals are perfect before investing in the extras. Most people don't want to believe it but even well known and proven 'strong' brands like Valiant and Shannon and Crealock, and many custom boats from well known designers and boat yards, have structural weaknesses that should be addressed as a first priority before spending a nickel of extra gear and gadgets.
What's so hard to understand for people not out doing it (or even those who have done it but then have spent several years back ashore - we do forget quite quickly), is how tough the environment can be. Taking a 'normal' boat offshore, even a 'strong blue water cruising' design, is like taking a stock jeep or pick-up on the Baja 500 or Paris to Dahkar races. The constant wave cycling and occasional skipper error will find each and every weakness. You will read that 'world cruising is fixing your boat in a series of exotic ports' but most people do not believe that will happen to them. But it will - the best you can hope to achieve is to make sure the fundamental components of the boat are sound so the underway repairs are an annoyance rather than a major safety problem. Even that is difficult do to the lack of engineering, low quality in most marine products/services, and lack of experience/knowledge in many marine 'experts'. We tried our very best to ensure Hawk's fundamentals were strongly & perfectly built, but even then we almost lost her rig and had to completely rebuild it to correct a manufacturing error by the (well regarded) spar builder.
When a friend of ours asked Eric Hiscock what he should focus on when preping a boat for a long cruise, Eric answer was "make sure it will keep the keel, rudder and mast in and the water out." When Ellen McArthur was near the end of the design process with Nigel Irens for her 70' trimaran, Nigel ask her if there was anything extra he could add to the design that would make her more comfortable, thinking (he has said) she might want a heated boot rack or something like that. Her answer was 'what would make me most comfortable is if I can be sure the boat will not break'. The greatest possible luxury for an experienced sailor is a reliable boat.
Net net, (1) you can safely cruise pretty much any boat if you have the right stuff and respect the boat's limits, but (2) for most of us, money should first be spent on getting the structural basics right, and these can't be taken for granted with even 'good brands' or 'name custom designs'. (Top of Page)
| Injuries per million hours | |
| Himalayan Mountain Climbing | 120000 |
| Skydiving | 24752 |
| Skiing | 4225 |
| Football | 1900 |
| Motorcycling | 1692 |
| Squash | 1300 |
| Basketball | 1100 |
| Rugby | 844 |
| Soccer | 600 |
| Scuba Diving | 381 |
| Swimming | 206 |
| Water Skiing | 54 |
| Cricket | 52 |
| Bicycling | 50 |
| Offshore Sailing | 42 |
| Golf | 37 |
| Flying (scheduled domestic airline) | 29 |
| Home living (awake) | 5 |
| Home living (awake + asleep) | 3 |
For all at last return to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.