My First Sailboat--Chapters One-Four (0f Four)

Posted By: Brian P., KS
Date: 2/11/00 3:04p.m.

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I knew as much about sailing as one learns through the stresses of reading about the technicalities and physics of the sport while resting comfortably in an armchair, sitting securely on a floor, in turn fastened tight to a concrete foundation set upon bedrock. That is to say, I understood how sailing workedöbut I did not, as the rest of this narrative will show, know how to sail. Having read ãInvitation to Sailing,ä ãLearning to Sailingä and ãIntroduction to Sailingä as well as the an old Boy Scoutâs Sea Explorerâs Manual, I was ready to buy a boat. At thirty, Iâd been on a sailboat but onceöwhen I drifted with a friend in near zero wind on a Sunfish the previous summer. While I was now in the market for a boat, unfortunately, a substantial portion of my budget for such things had been spent of books instructing me how to select oneöthe advise of which I fully ignored. Doubly unfortunately, I lived in rural Kansasönot the hottest market for finding used sailboats. After some months of scouring the likely sources, I looked in the classified ads of the Topeka paper during a trip to our capital city. I found a small (14') sailboat listed in the classified ads. It included, the ad read, a trailer and ãall accessories.ä I found when I got to the advertiserâs house that ãall accessoriesä meant sails and thirty- year-old sheets, slightly mouse-eaten. ãAll accessoriesä did not, however, mean to include a rudder or tiller. Of course safety equipment and gadgets were out of the question. The owner of the boat had acquired it rather accidentally, as he told the story. He bought an old Chevy Blazer, itself in barely useable form, from a man who had owned and sailed the boat many years previous. That man had parked the Blazer with the boat connected, and insisted that if one bought the truck, he must also take the boat. It was in that transaction, apparently, that the rudder had become separated from its rightful place. I mentioned to the seller that the rudder was missing, and that without it the boat had little value to me. He knew nothing of rudders, but, he claimed, his dad did, and could surely fashion a new one in his shop. This is where book knowledge and practical knowledge first parted ways. I knew what the rudder did, and understood how one used the tiller, but I did not know how big it needed to be to turn a small boat, nor how much force in needed to withstand. So I trusted the experience judgment of a diesel truck mechanic with a welder. The sellerâs father quickly fastened a 8" x 4" aluminum plate to piece 1/4 inch of stainless steel rod which had threads in the end of it. He pushed the rod up through the gudgeons and using a stud screwed into the protruding end of the rod, screwed on another stainless rod which he bent forward for a tiller. The result was wobbly a mechanism that, as I have since noticed in observing boats generally, is somewhat like the steering used on some inboard speedboats. However, I suspect the mechanics of speedboat steering have a strength greater than bubblegum. Lest I be too self-effacing (which is hardly possible, but the last leaf of dignity must remain), I must add that I never believed that the rudder fashioned in this size and manner would work. I had made the mistake, however, of buying the boat with the promise of a rudder and so when turning over my cash, I did not know what the rudder would look like. Nevertheless, I left the sellerâs house quite happily with an oxidized fiberglass boat the color of overcooked lima beans securely fastened to the hitch of my truck. We had, of course, had to inflate the trailer tires with their cracked and pealing sidewalls before I could set off on my 3 hour journey home. I must pause to explain a sequence of events earlier excluded. I first saw and bought the boat on Saturday, and then returned the next day with my truck to pick it up along with the newly constructed rudder. In the interim I purchased a PFD, an airhorn (the last one at the discount store and thus previously opened--a result of all of the graduation ceremonies at that time of year), two wooden paddles, and an assortment of hardware (¸" x 1" reinforcing plates, screws, screw-in hooks, L-shaped brackets, and a bolt). The two canoe paddles and hardware were for a backup deviseöI figured if the welderâs rudder did not work, I would cut the blade off of a canoe paddle and fasten it at an angle to the end of the severed shaft using the reinforcing plates. Iâd then screw the hooks into the shaft to use as pintles. Then Iâd mount this rudder and cut the shaft again at the level of the top of the transom, and against reconnect the severed piece as a tiller using the bolt. The savvy among you might recognize instantly that the stresses on a rudder demand far more rigid construction than a chopped up canoe paddle (made of some very soft wood), held together by a few screws can offer. But my considerable experience in my armchair (even in the heaviest of weather) had not taught me that. However, that is a lesson I would learn very soon, as I stopped at the lake on the way home with my new boat, took out my hacksaw, built the rudder, and launched the boat at what turned out to be the powerboat ramp in nearly 25 knot winds (I had not thought about that fact that to apply the Beaufort Scale one must have open watersöãNo whitecaps? The wind must not be that strongä). But that (mis)adventure is best reserved for chapter two. Chapter Two So there I was, ready to start my first sail. I pull the spars out of the cockpit and the sails out of the sail bag. I looked at the pieces in puzzlement. I tried to picture in my mind how to put this thing together. I had two identical length (10') aluminum spars and one fourteen foot mast of a larger diameter. The mainsail looked almost, but not quite, triangular. It had a pocket along the top half of its luff and along the entire length of the foot. Clearly, the spars went into the pockets, but then what? An idea struck me, like lightning. Keep in mind that some of the books Iâd been reading about sailing were published in the 1940s, and the drawings of the boats therein reflected the times. ãThis is a gaff-rig,ä I intuited. So I attached the sail to the spars, the spars to the mast, and raised the mast, dropping in through the hole in the foredeck for that purpose. I then backed the trailer into the water, churning with the wake of jetskis, and floated the boat off. Once in the boat the seamanlike thing to do seemed to be to raise the mainsail. I pull on the main halyard. After it finished stretching at all the mouse-chewed segments, the top spar slid up the mast, until the wind jerked the sail from my hand, causing me to let go of the halyard, bringing the sail crashing down off to the port. This wind had caught the sail enough to push the struggling boat and its captain away from shore by now. In fact, even with the sail down the hull had sufficient windage to continue an aimless drift sideways. ãThe centerboard!ä I realized that sailing should have more control, than this. I lowered the board and started again to raise the sail. Lakes are not indigenous to Kansas. We have to import them from Washington. And this Corp of Engineers project sat atop what used to be in part field and in part creek bed. The fields, before being flooded, were, like most fields, open spaces, growing crops or native grasses. The creek bed, however, had grown trees along its sidesötrees which the Corp left in place when it flooded the area. As a result, the lake, though largely clear, has vast spaces where tree trunks and branches rise from the water, vacant of leaves, and vacant of the flexibility they had in life. The hazard is not at all an invisible one and so is mostly manageable for anyone awake. That assessment, of course, requires an assumption easily overlooked. The hazard is manageable for anyone awake and in control of their boat. Control, in a sailboat, requires, as a prerequisite, a rudder. I knew I forgot something! Quickly I grabbed my homemade rudder from the cockpit floor and leaned over the transom. Sometimes the obvious is so obvious it requires stating. Wood floats. I muscled the rudder into position, only to have it pop out of the water and off the boat. Fortunately, Iâd not yet removed my hand. Quick thinking was required. Absent that, I had to substitute the next most available resourceöpanic. I turned the hooks I was using for pintles 180 degrees, so they were facing up, rather than down, pushed the rudder back under the water, and floated it into a semi- secure attachment to the transom. Grabbing the tiller, I tried to set a course away from the approaching trees. No luck. ãAh!,ä I realized, ãno steerage way.ä Back to the task of raising the sails. I tugged again on the main halyard until the top spar seemed to be in the right position for a gaff rig. Curiously, the boom hung down so low that at the end it scraped across the transom. Odd design, I thought. But quickly it became apparent that the wind would lift the end of the boom as the sail filled with 3 ¸ to 4 feet of belly. Back to the tiller. Still no luck. The boat as going faster now, but I still could not seem to get it to go where I wanted it to. I concluded the rudder must not be big enough and decide to work quickly, lowering the main, pulling off the rudder, cutting the blade off of my remaining paddle and adding it to the blade from the first paddle, all as the trees continued to approach. Working feverishly with a hacksaw and screwdriver I finished the job. The new rudder in place, I raised the main. The boat lurched forward. I returned to the tiller ready to avoid disaster and proclaim myself a hero. Confidently, I moved the tiller. The boat continued toward the trees, but I was able to deflect the course sufficiently to give myself what I figured to be two more minutes before striking anything. ãWhat am I doing wrong?ä I wondered, as I notice bits of broken plastic at my feet. It was only the cap of the airhorn. Sometimes it take only a faint smell to bring on a flood of memories so overwhelming that you breakdown in tears. It took nothing more than a broken piece of plastic to solidify in my mind the vague sense I had that I was out of my league. I was in the middle of the lake, no other boats around, heading for trees that could puncture my hull, I could not control my boat, I broke my air horn so could not summon help, and Iâd cut my paddle to pieces. For whatever, reason, and I cannot explain it, it was at that moment that another realization struck me. ãSliding gunter!ä Now chapter two must end. Chapter Three Before I explain my epiphany, let me digress momentarily to reflect on the process of writing this tale. The great advantage of non-fiction over fiction is that one need not be concerned about whether the plot is credible--credible or not it is true. And as we often proclaim bluntly when on the dispensing end, sometimes the truth hurts. So embarrassing is this whole series of events, that Iâve breathed not a word of it to a living soul till posting here under my newly assumed name. My wife is a little concerned with my entry to sailing. Sheâs concerned, it seems, with our budget. Its not that she fears exorbitant expenditures on a little boat. Such, I hope this story shows, I am not prone to. Instead, she fears our budget may burst on the other end--that our income may suddenly cease from my untimely demise, although there is a small insurance policy to get her and the two boy along for a little while. So I hope you understand that if you see me someday at the lake, and think, ãThat must be that Brian P.,ä that I prefer you not recount this adventure to my dear wife, for it will serve only to undo all the effort Iâve put in to persuading her how safe OUR hobby is as I agree that I canât understand why anyone would risk his life in one of those ultralight airplanes (wouldnât that be fun, though?). Back to the story. ãSliding gunter!ä--a rig much like a typical Bermuda/marconi rig, except that the mast has two pieces, the lower mast mounted on the deck, and the upper mast sliding up the lower, and swinging up until it is parallel, extending the mast height half again. As the upper mast is raised on a sliding gunter, there is a point where it resembles in position the gaff on a gaff rig, although the sail is not yet tight and remains very baggy (causing the boom to drag alone the transom and eliminating the ability to sail to the windward at all). Pull the halyard more snugly and the topmast comes into place, the sail flattens, and the boat sails. And in 25 knots of wind, the boat really sails. Before you think weâve reached the denouement, there are three more crises yet to survive. The first comes back again to the rudder. Once the boat started really sailing, the rudder really worked--once. The force on the rudder when actually on the go turns out to be greater than the force incurred when the boat is being blown around without steerage way. The first major correction in course turned the boat, but separated the paddle blades from the rest of the rudder, leaving them drifting off behind. ããGreat,ää I thought, beginning to lose my only recently acquired passion for sailing. Not all the books I read are about sailing. One recently finished before the purchase of my 14ââ nemesis was titled ããAccidentally On Purposeää and is a history of faked accident/insurance scam rings. It seems the faked accident business got its start in the sailing industry. Owners of deteriorating, unseaworthy sailing craft would overload them with goods, insure the whole lot at twice its value, sail up to a sandbar and scuttle the boat in shallow enough water that at least the captain could get safely to the claims office of Lloyds. The captains would often bore through the hulls of their wooden boats with a brace and bit. I looked around: a screw driver, a hacksaw, a hammer, a pair of vice grips, a pocket knife. No drill. Plan B. My short spurt of speed had moved me perhaps a hundred feet from the trees. However, it had moved me from the edge of sunken forest to a spot along side its thickest growth. Now without a rudder (again), I started drifting to the woods. At this point the sail seemed more a hazard than a benefit, so I took it down--somewhat like turning off the engine in an airplane when the pilot realizes the plane is plunging to the ground. Perhaps it provides a few more seconds to savor the beauty of life. Rarely do we learn just how precious those few seconds are. Depth. Having two eyes, both looking in the same direction, is a great benefit to man. It allows us to perceive distance between things that might in a photograph seem close together. It was only when I resigned myself to the inevitable, and decided to, having already put on my lifevest, enjoy the beauty or serenity of the crash, that I gained the perspective of depth. The trees had seemed like an impenetrable wall from yards away, but the closer I approached, the clearer it was that, though the field of trees was deep, it really was not that thick. I missed one, two, three, then four, drifting to the heart of the once dark forest. Then I saw, on the other side, a ski boat. I stood on the deck and waved my arms at its drunken occupants. Weaving through the trees (probably thinking they were going in a straight line) they came to my rescue, and threw me a rope to tie to my bow. Let me foreshadow two lessons from Chapter Four: (1) while sailboats might plane, they are not designed to water ski; (2) there are scarier things than drifting toward a sunken tree threatening to sink your new boat and leave you stranded in the middle of the lake. Chapter Four One other lesson deserves mentioning, although it is now somewhat out of sequence. If you donât know what a ãself-balingä cockpit is, donâtöDONâT--assume that it means that the little round hole at the bottom of the transom should be left open so that water can escape. The rubber plug in the sail bag is supposed to go in that hole. This lesson is another learned from my first sailing experience. When the boat floated off the trailer (without my weight in it) that hole was above the water (though beneath a black line someone had painted around the bottom edge of the boat for some reason). It was not until my rescue was in progress that I recognized that water in the floor of the cockpit was some inches deep. Never to worry, advanced planning was about to pay off. Iâd brought something to bale with for this very contingencyöan 18 oz. plastic cup. Of course, first the hole had to be blocked. I looked around for something to do the job. In retrospect, it would have made sense to look in the sail bag to see if ãall accessoriesä included, as it did, a rubber plug. I did not do that. Nothing lying around seemed appropriate, save my thumb. At the time I had no idea that Iâd be writing this as a story almost two years later. If that insight had been available, perhaps Iâd have used my thumbösurely it would have led to some other interesting twist. Instead, I did a more mundane thing. You will remember that I had stopped by the lake on the way home with my new boat. Fully clothed with blue jeans, a long sleeve shirt, and hiking boots, I was not dressed for boating. This turned out to be, for this part of the story, a fortuitous circumstance. I took off a boot, removed a sock, and tied a knot in itöthen threaded it through the hole in the transom until the knot was jammed. Now I was ready to start baling. At about this same time the alcohol demons started whispering in the ears of my would be rescuers as we arrived at open waters. I foreshadowed this part as the last chapter came to a close. On reflection, the brief description there does more justice to the experience than a detailed narrative could. Moreover, the psychologists say there is a phenomena called suppressed memory. All in all I do not believe them, and think it is just a clever syndrome when an attorney is faced with presenting a defense for a man accused of fourteen murders caught on film. However, if there is such a thing as suppressed memory, I know which memories I would have suppressed, and would have done so for good reason. Dredging them up now would defeat the purpose my subconscious was seeking to achieve. When we finally arrived at the dock I was quite wet, but not throughly soaked, bruised but not bleeding. I tied up my boat, got the truck, and put the trailer in the water. I looked over at the boat, tied to the dock some thirty feet away. Some thirty feet away. Separated from my trailer by some thirty feet of water. The shoreline was covered with heavy growth of trees, which extended into the lake. The Boy Scoutâs Sea Explorers Manual gave no direction on how to move a boat from point A to point B with no paddle. I had really believed Iâd followed its general mandate to Be Prepared. But now I was exhausted, devoid of ideas, shod with only one shoe, and taking comfort only in the fact that I was back on land and for the most part dry. But all good things must end. I returned to the boat, jumped in the water, and dragged it over to the trailer while swimming fully clothed. I put the boat on the trailer. Pulled the boat from the water, and removed the sail and mastöready now to go home. Remember the trailer tires, worn, cracking and needing air earlier? Of course one was now flat. The bicycle pump I threw in the truck for this very possibility proved slow and inefficient, but I got home. Books instruct. Experience teaches. Iâve learned I love sailing, and that having overcome adversity, once its been beaten away, may be the best part. Iâve bought new sheets, new halyards, a real rudder, and new tires. Now Iâve moved up to a bigger boat (21') and have the old one for sale. Itâs a good boat to learn on. Anyone interested? (Perhaps I should have posted this on the classifieds).