What Do You Need to Know About Living on a Boat and Cruising the Oceans

Gryphon plies the warm waters of the Virgin Islands after her voyage downwards from Maine

Photo past Yachtshotsbvi.com

After crewing on the 2015 Caribbean area 1500 rally, I bought Gryphon, my 1993 Morris Justine 36, with a specific goal in listen—sailing from Maine to the Virgin Islands, with pit stops in Annapolis and Portsmouth, Virginia, where I would join the Caribbean 1500 for the last leg. Gryphon is not my first sailboat, but she is certainly my first ocean-worthy boat, and this would be my get-go serious voyage as skipper of my own boat.

The prospect of sailing 1,500 miles, up to 400 miles from land, in a boat that was new to me made me focus on my lists of proactive maintenance and arrangement improvements every solar day for six months earlier departure. Despite this intense focus, I was still not able to larn what I needed to make the voyage until I actually made the voyage.

While my learning curve was steep in the months before the trip, it became even steeper once we left the dock. The intimate agreement of a boat that is necessary to prepare her seemed but to come to me after situations in which things were not working correctly. I read as many books as anyone could, and I asked questions until I feared I had become a pest. Still, I needed to get out there and have parts or systems fail then fix them before I understood them sufficiently to go offshore with them. The fashion I would prepare for going offshore was past getting browbeaten upwardly offshore.

Preparations for the voyage seemed neverending

For case, in that location is a tangle of wires behind the companionway curtained by a panel that takes some determination to remove. I did not appreciate what was going on in at that place until the autopilot and GPS quit working early on into the Gulf Stream crossing. The only clue to the source of the failure was an accessory display for air current and navigation data that read "insufficient voltage." Nosotros chosen Morris Yachts Service for advice; they suggested nosotros use our multimeter ("I'g assuming you lot've got i?") to track downwards a presumed brusk circuit. Past the fourth dimension we constitute the brusque, we had tracked most of the wires from that tangle to all over the boat. You could say I prepared for the GPS failure by having a handheld and buying a new fuse for the multimeter earlier we left, but I but began to understand that system once I had to fix information technology.

My system for spare parts storage had consisted of several garbage bags that were gradually getting ripped apart by their contents. On the passage from Maine to Portsmouth, I accessed these and then oftentimes that by end of the trip I had the parts organized into bins repurposed from my children's onboard toy collection. Amidst those spares were several extra fuel filters the chief mechanic at Morris had thrust into my mitt at departure. When the engine quit and we saw what looked like phlegm through the filter glass, I pulled out the books and figured out how to modify a filter.

By the end of the voyage the writer was intimately acquainted with every wire

My understanding of what to do in high winds followed a similar pattern. Not until I was in them did I become convinced of what I needed. The serene waters of Maine where I had sailed with my family about of the summertime, gunkholing between Northeast Harbor and Camden, had lulled me into a sense of security with my existing sail-control systems. A sled ride from Annapolis to Portsmouth, by myself in 35-knot winds, moved a few things college on my priority list. All summer, I had debated whether or not to install running backstays. Deploying the staysail in that much wind showed me how much the mast tin pump when a force pulling at its midpoint is unsupported by running backs. At least I learned while I was still in the Chesapeake Bay.

Before those high winds, I figured I could get by with "piece of work-arounds" rather than secondary winches. Work-arounds are fine until stuff hits the fan and you lot need all the mechanical help you tin can get. I realized I couldn't beget to relieve the coin when I was upwards on the bow trying to manage the disaster created by failed work-arounds. I had to turn downwind to go on the headsail blanketed by the mainsail, but as I was running out of sea-room there wasn't enough time to gear up upwardly the clunky preventer organisation and when I watched the gunkhole gybe, in that location was zip I could do but hold on.

I needed the power to control lines with plenty redundancy to manage multiple things at one time. A situation might outset with just one affair going incorrect, but that can very quickly escalate into several things going awry if not brought under control.

I continued to notice the demand for upgrades right up to the time I departed, almost to the bespeak where they compromised the overall management of the entrada. I had the boat hauled out of the water in Portsmouth to audit and repair the keel because I had hit a couple of rocks difficult on the manner downwards. We launched as presently as I returned and I was back to my lists. The biggest job was installing those secondary winches and I thought I had everything set to become until people started telling me I needed backing plates, making the project complicated to the point where it almost did non go washed.

Boat projects always seem to have complications and actress considerations that make them take longer. I was blessed with a crew member who could take on projects independently and I took full advantage of that. The condom inspection constitute some deficiencies nosotros had to address, I needed charts and we had to provision the boat with food for twice the length of our anticipated trip. I was determined not to go out the dock with projects we notwithstanding needed to do, having learned my lesson by leaving Maine with piece of work undone.

Mechanically, I suppose things worked out alright. Nosotros got our autopilot back once we figured that the brusk was in the GPS antenna cable and that all we had to practice was disconnect it, and we felt pretty smart. But now we were tired. For a full twenty-four hours we had hand-steered, one man always at the wheel, with waves the size of the sledding hills at home in Minneapolis, while the other 2 tried to get multimeter readings in inconvenient places. A couple days later we found the actual frayed spot on the antenna cablevision, which could only be seen using a mirror and a flashlight, and bypassed it and so we could utilise our electronic navigation again. Nosotros were on a roll. We got the engine running again when it quit and I learned how to bleed fuel lines while wedged in a corner to go along from being thrown effectually. I kept devising various rigging experiments, similar my continual improvements of the preventer system. Until the blast's gooseneck broke we had been able to fix most things, and even then we had enough fuel in jerry cans to let us to motor-sail the rest of the manner to Nanny Cay without a mainsail.

Gryphon at rest in her home waters before leaving for the BVI

But the challenges of open up-water sailing become beyond figuring out how to control the boat and continue it going. I too needed to manage a coiffure. Early, I did not appreciate how important it is to clearly communicate the way in which I wanted things washed and maintained. Lines have specific uses and sometimes need to be employed immediately and I do non desire those lines used for random jobs. Equipment storage is tight and moving one item can create a domino upshot of other items being moved. The ready-up of a sailboat is function science, but office fine art, likewise and this blend of fine art and science creates a system. Well-meaning deviations from that organization by new crew tin can accept repercussions that interruption it down.

Earlier I had a chance to fifty-fifty consider those issues—I was having a difficult fourth dimension but finding crew. Without crew, I would not exist able to sleep, and so I wanted at least one person to sheet with me and so decided I needed two in instance someone got sick or hurt. Past October four people had backed out and another turned out not to exist a proficient fit. Each time I was downwardly a person I was left slightly panicked near who else I could notice. I was request people to take a three-week trip out on the ocean with a captain new to ocean sailing and on a new gunkhole. My list of friends to call was getting short.

I could certainly tell prospective crew that Gryphon was a well-built gunkhole and that I had taken every step to brand her safe, but I was also enlightened that I might not be offering the level of modern conveniences that some people look on a cruising gunkhole.

My personal taste is to have more of a wilderness-out-in-nature type of experience than a pampered one. I chose and equipped Gryphon accordingly. She is a stiff seagoing boat, simply she is likewise small-scale, which means that the surface area where the people alive is closer to where the sharks live. There is no shelter backside which to steer without being exposed to the elements. We accept an autopilot and a new electric refrigerator so we are not living primitively, but I do not have a microwave and cannot run a hair dryer, much to the surprise of some prospective crew. I crank my ballast upwardly manually. I accept an electronic navigation system but prefer to employ paper charts.

Prior to divergence I worried about losing crew, and became frustrated as I realized that my dependence on crew cut into my coveted independence. Past the time we started I had go excessively accommodating. I would non speak up when nosotros dropped below my standard of neatness. I did not enforce equality in cooking or cleaning. I agreed to fishing late in the mean solar day just equally conditions were almost to deteriorate. I let people change where things were stowed. I let myself exist convinced past the crew to get out the dock when we weren't set up, based on an assurance that we could go things done underway. As we approached Tortola I was going to take a chance making landfall at night, cutting through some narrow channels, because my crew had been counting the hours until our inflow. I succumbed to force per unit area in how much nosotros ran the engine. I took chances with the crew, like letting someone steer with the spinnaker, which developed into a situation in which I idea we could lose the mast 400 miles from shore. Worst of all, I deviated from a safe course to i that was much more than dangerous when a coiffure member threatened to go out the gunkhole if I didn't, and I was going to keep that crew even later on he openly questioned my part equally captain.

I am not especially interested in existence an disciplinarian captain, but I tin can appreciate how that tradition came to be. With a new crew on lath routine has to exist enforced. Likewise, it takes a considerable amount of confidence to captain a boat. Threats to my confidence make me less able to come across solutions to bug. I was already uncertain of my own ability.

Interestingly, I think a friend was trying to help me with just these aspects of preparation in the weeks before I left. He recommended some reading and I was surprised that it dealt with how to run sailing campaigns, not well-nigh actual sailing. When he talked to me about my training he asked me most my watch schedule, concerned about how we would get balance, maintain agile roles and facilitate communication. I thought he nevertheless needed to teach me about technical stuff like the wind speeds at which I was going to reduce sail. The twelvemonth before, I had noted the measured intensity with which other captains had approached the days before difference, and was aware that my busyness was making it hard to achieve that level.

We finished the Caribbean 1500 at the back of the pack, which was expected as we were the smallest boat in the fleet. Only I'd thought my childhood of dinghy sailing and a more recent history of keelboat racing might help u.s. proceed up. I learned that people who accept done sea sailing know how to go on their boats moving.

People tend to presume I would feel a sense of accomplishment, only more than anything I was humbled past the experience. I needed to do all the preparation that I eventually did, and I needed the pressure of the trip to strength that level of preparation. Merely no matter how much I prepared the boat, I was non going to be prepared for a cognitive and emotional challenge in ane of the well-nigh remote places on earth until I had done information technology myself, in my own boat, responsible for all major decisions. I could have hired a captain or stayed close to shore, but had I not done this trip the way I did, I would never take known how much I didn't know.

In the offset year he owned Gryphon, medico Dr. Walter Blitz cut back on his practice and spent 95 days onboard—at his wife, Kate's, instigation!

January 2018

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Source: https://www.sailmagazine.com/cruising/be-prepared-if-youre-new-to-ocean-sailing

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