Winches and Lines

I write this blog post in a vacuum most of the time.  It’s a diary in its own way, a collection of my thoughts written down, a solo endeavor, not a collaboration.  But it’s not a diary in that it’s published daily and people read what I’ve written.   I’m still and will probably always remain touched that people read this blog, spending three minutes of their day, reading about mine.   That being said, it’s fun knowing I have an audience.   It makes me work harder to make these posts more than a mundane detailing of our day.

I’m bringing this up because I get feedback from time to time on what I’ve written.   Yesterday’s feedback came from my shipmates (boat mates?), in particular, my husband.    He was reading the how to sail post from yesterday and he told me I’d made a grievous error.   There are no “ropes” on boats.   They just don’t exist.   If you see something on a boat and it looks like a rope, don’t make the mistake of calling it that.   Saying something such as, “did you mean this rope over here on the right side of the boat?”

Bad form, minus two points, go to the back of the class.   What you meant to say was, “did you mean this line over here on the starboard side?”   I was going get my computer and update the post last night but it was after the daemon had sent an email out to people who have signed up for email updates of the blog.   I’d do it in the morning, I told my husband.

This morning I found out my husband had been an incomplete editor.   Alice told me the things the lines wrapped around weren’t spindles.   They were winches.   Of course they’re winches, ugh.   There’s a crank handle and they winch the lines around them.   With those two corrections, the post on how to sail is mostly complete—with one exception.

The exception is a fairly large one.   There’s a whole component of sailing I didn’t cover at all yesterday.   Mostly because I was waiting for a picture from my husband that only he could get because he has a camera that can go underwater.   I needed a picture of the underside of the boat so I could finish my How to Sail 101 explanation.   Because sailing doesn’t just happen on the top side of the boat.   Those winches and lines do the job, but they’re orchestrated by what happens under the boat.

Here’s the picture my husband took.   He’s at the front of the boat.   You can see the two catamaran hulls and the large open area between them.   In the back you can see the two props (propellers).   The one on the right side of the picture (or to be technical, the port side of the boat) is shiny and new if you remember that it fell off and had to be replaced the second day into the trip.   You can also see the ladder we use to climb back onto the boat when we’ve been out swimming, snorkeling, or going to Lime Out for more tacos.



When we’re not sailing under wind power, the boat is moved by those two props you can see.   They might look small, but they’re very powerful and move the boat at a good pace.   The last thing I want to point out are the rudders.   There is one on each side a bit in front of the props.   They’re at different angles in the picture with the one on the left almost perpendicular to where the camera took the shot.   You can get a sense of the shape of the rudder from the one on the right.

The rudders are key.   Hoisting the sails, filling them with wind and tacking the sails to adjust for changing wind is the plan.  The sails move the boat forward.   The rudders turn the boat.   And those two little rudders can turn this big forty-four foot boat fast.

Here’s an example:   we’re sailing in the general direction we want to sail to get to a cove to anchor for the night.   Only the way we’re sailing with the wind filling the sails is heading us directly into the rocky cliff face of the island up ahead.   No good.   We can’t solve this with sails alone.   So the captain calls out, “ready about”.  We prepare the lines and winches and call back, “ready about aye”.   The captain steers, using the rudders, and the boat begins to quickly turn.   We adjust the sails to catch the wind and now we’re sailing away from the rocky cliff, on the next phase of our zig zagging path towards our destination.   We’ll do this procedure multiple times, taking best advantage of the wind, to get us where we want to go.   That zig zagging is part of the, “we can’t get there from here, but we can get there from over there…and we’re headed there now.”

The Big Boy Update:  My son has done a very good job of eating this trip.   He’s hesitant to try any fish, which we concur with now that we know he has fish allergies to a lot of common fish.   He’s been up for anything and everything else.   He’s tried a lot of new things, been flexible on food and has enjoyed a good bit of it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has barely moved in two days.   She gets up and participates when we’re doing things like swimming or eating, but she has no interest in anything else in the whole world, save for the Harry Potter audio book she’s listening to.   She finished the third book last night and is now listening to the first book that she elected to skip initially.