Tom Cunli e

Tom Cunliffe

The magic of the internet presented Tom with a downwind dilemma unfolding many miles from the comfort of his home

Time was when ocean sailors cast off the shorelines knowing there would be no communication with the outside world until they fetched up on another continent and toddled off to the poste restante.

With luck, news from home would be waiting and letters written on passage could be mailed which might, or might not, arrive before they returned.

That’s all history now, life has have changed and I have to chuckle when I read of ocean warriors south of Cape Horn calling their local chandler for advice on a leaking valve or asking the weatherman when they should tack. It’s even started to happen to me. One of the fun things about running my internet club (www.tomcunliffe. com) is the emails from members in unexpected circumstances. I had a note yesterday from Jon who I had last heard from discussing return routes from an ARC voyage. That was pretty routine stuff, but this latest communiqué really had me thinking. The issue was a technique discussed in one of our online forums. What made the exchange different from the mainstream was that he was now in mid-Atlantic, careering along in the trades. I have to admit that I’m still in awe when my screen dishes up a live message from far out at sea. From the perspective

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“Nobody in possession of the sense they were born with wants to round up to shorten sail, especially in a ten-foot sea with the preventer on”

of my early ocean walloping in the 1970s, it might as well come from the dark side of the moon.

The question was about reefing a bermudan mainsail when running. The first requirement for this is that the yacht doesn’t suffer from those severely aft-swept spreaders that become the bane of your life off the wind. With that proviso, shortening down on the run may be possible with some forms of in-mast furling, but old-fashioned slab reefing still offers the best option. I’ve never tried this on a boat over 45 feet and it can’t work with single-line reefing, but on smaller yachts rigged conventionally I have achieved it many times with complete happiness. After all, nobody in possession of the sense they were born with wants to round up to shorten sail, especially in a ten-foot sea with the boom preventer on, the headsail poled out to windward and the true wind at 25 knots. The trick is to ease the halyard with the vang still on to keep the boom from kicking up; one crew heaves down the luff while a second winches in slack on the clew pennant to keep the sail from snagging the spreaders and standing rigging. With sound teamwork this works a treat and Jon and his mates had snugged right down using their permanently rove tack reefing lines led aft to the cockpit. This saves having to scramble up to the mast to rip your fingernails at the luff. So far so good. It was when the boys tried to re-hoist the sail that the trouble started.

They’d tackled the job in reverse order and it had gone like a breeze until the main was nearly up. Then, with the head a foot or so short of what was needed, the halyard winch started groaning, the sail stopped short and damage seemed imminent. It looked horrible, Jon said. Had I experienced anything similar, and what could possibly have gone wrong?

Not being on board, of course, I could only speculate. I made a few random suggestions including liberal applications of MacLube, that wonderful oil-free lubricant designed for sails that all yachts should carry. I clicked my mouse and the message whizzed off through the mysteries of cyberspace to land on his chart table. It can’t have helped much because the mail box went quiet for an hour or two before, ‘ping’. In came an answer. They’d found the problem.

In a sense, I’d been right. It was all about friction, but it had nothing to do with the luff. One of the cockpit crew had decided to snap the brake shut on the jammer controlling the tack line in a moment of misguided diligence. The sail was then halfway back to full hoist and the halyard never stood a chance. The miscreant was immediately awarded ‘heads duty’ for two days with his rum ration halved. Rough justice, you may feel, but he won’t make that mistake again. The final missive announced obscurely that the fellow was locked in the focsle with a 3ft wahoo. Whether the fish was dead or alive was not specified.

I first discovered the technique for downwind reefing many years ago on a delivery from the south coast to Gibraltar. The lady owner had decided to make the trip and had brought her own crew. She was a woman who’d seen more than her share of action and was up for anything. Her shipmates were a long way from the usual scratch delivery crowd. One was a North Sea oil-rig roustabout and the other was a tugboat skipper from the Port of London. Together, these three made up the sort of team you’d want beside you if ever you ended up in a fox-hole in No Man’s Land under heavy fire.

The boat was around forty feet long and, despite the fanciful title on the manufacturer’s propaganda sheet, nothing about

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All very well, but do you really want to round up and reef?

“As we swept round Finisterre 50 hours later we were running in a full gale under a scrap of genoa”

the accommodation was any good at all once the waves got to work. There was absolutely zero to hang onto and nowhere to sleep. The aft cabin had one of those lovely double beds you see at boat shows which are great in harbour because, no matter which side you are tucked in, you can always slip out to attend to nature’s call without having to clamber over your luckless partner. The boss opted to kip back there behind doors closed for privacy. It all looked fine in Poole, but by the time we were rounding Ushant she’d given up on the bed, dumped her duvet on the cabin sole and was crashed out between the bunk and the bulkhead. This combined the advantages of not rolling around all over the place with the security of being unable to fall any further. The hands had unwisely decided to sleep in the vee berths forward where the motion must have been near intolerable. They erected a plywood sheet between them to maintain modesty which struck me as quaint, but when I inspected the ship in search of a berth for myself and found there wasn’t one, I started to realise that these two professional seamen weren’t just dug up. The saloon boasted two lovely armchairs on one side - totally useless at sea - and a small, curved dinette on the other, so I dumped a spinnaker bag on the floor under the table, installed

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We nipped inside Ushant (pictured here on an altogether more tranquil day) and roared on before the building gale

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Dead downwind and blowing hard

TOM CUNLIFFE

Tom has been mate on a merchant ship, run yachts for gentlemen, operated charter boats, delivered, raced and taught. He writes the pilot for the English Channel, a complete set of cruising text books and runs his own internet club for sailors worldwide at tomcunliffe.com my ‘scratcher’, and called it home.

We nipped inside Ushant under full sail in a rising northeasterly breeze with the main vanged down and a preventer on, the pole properly rigged with fore guy, after guy and topping lift, and the sheet running freely through the bayonet fitting at the end. The shipping forecast wasn’t encouraging. A lot more blow was promised, but it was a fair wind. With such a crew I wasn’t tempted to hide in Camaret and await an improvement, so on we went into the wilds of Biscay.

As the wind rose, we started by rolling away the genoa, bit by bit. When the time came to shorten down the mainsail I was about to ditch the pole and round up, but the tug skipper, who had never before served under sail, showed that he was a prime seaman by suggesting we try the method used just now by Jon in another world. We did, and it worked.

As we swept round Finisterre fifty hours later we were running in a full gale under a scrap of genoa. With the main all the way down we’d slacked the preventer and sheeted the boom in, but the pole guys remained untouched and the little boat had done an honest job despite her silly sleeping arrangements. It was still blowing hard when we ripped into Gibraltar. The wind was blasting at right-angles across the stern-to marina berth and we had no bow thruster. You’ll know the feeling. It looked downright ugly, so I handed the wheel to the tugboat skipper. He slotted her sweetly into a finger without turning a hair.

However we may fancy ourselves, sometimes it pays to recognise a higher authority.