Dockline Shock Absorber

I have seen many forms of softening the blow of a snapping dockline.

Springs or large rubber rods with the line wrapped around it are common favorites sold in chandleries around the world. These devices provided needed elasticity to the dockline and prevent that awful SNAP when the line goes tight, jerking the boat in the slip!
My personal favorite is to use the correct type of rope for a dockline. All too often, I see boats with double braid docklines utilizing line snubbers on each line. Double braid doesn’t have the needed elasticity for this purpose; while it looks pretty, it’s not the right material for the job. Double braid stretches only 8% under load while Three-Lay stretches 20% under load. That will give you the needed elasticity, and at a lower price point when compared to double braid!

Sometimes, 20% elasticity is still not enough and you just need more cushion from surge that comes into the marina. Well, this is where those line snubbers (springs or rubber rods) can come in handy; but they are very expensive, especially when you need to buy a lot of them!
In Gibraltar, our neighbor has come up with a very creative and cheap solution to the problem: a discarded motorcycle tire.
Gibraltar might be famous for the rock, but when you spend time here, you will come to find that they should also be famous for their scooters! At some point, the tires will wear out and be thrown away, an opportunity when a cruiser can pick up a tire for free!
My neighbor tied the tire into the dockline to use it as a snubber, giving him wonderful elasticity with very low cost. He also has a safety line that runs uninterrupted from boat to pier just in case the tire fails and falls apart. The last thing you want to to break your mooring lines in a storm! Having spare mooring lines in place means that he won’t drift into his neighbors while Mediterranean Moored if his stern lines break!

While I am not a fan of the little contraptions that people add to their docklines (because they are expensive, bulky, and added points of failure), I do think this tire idea is creative and robust for someone who lives permanently in this marina.

The Best Can Opener

Canned food is an essential pet of cruising. It’s cheap, and it keeps for a long time, making it a staple in a cruisers diet. The problem with canned food is opening the cans!

Can openers are large and tend to die in the marine environment. We try to keep them alive but the salty air seems to kill critical parts in short time. If they don’t die if corrosion, they seem to just lose their ability to function!
I don’t know if it’s because cruisers use their can opener more than a dirt dweller or if it a combination of the constant use and the harsh environment, but in the end, the can opener will need replacing.

We picked up this little machine in France and I honestly think it’s the best Can opener ever! There are almost no moving parts and it’s very small, making storage an easier task! Best of all, it really works well, honestly better than any other Can opener I’ve ever used!

It just clamps onto the side of the Can and all you need to do is spin the little wings.
This can opener is small, made entirely of stainless steel, and works really well!

Several years ago, I did a blog post about “the best Can opener” but that one has slowly stopped working as well. This little guy really is a wonder machine!

Knowing where to work

For a long time, we have wanted to switch our only non-self tailing winch to one that is self tailing. This winch is on our boom and is very important while you are reefing in a blow. Having a self tailer would literally free up a hand!

The problem is new winches are expensive, so the project got put onto the back burner until we happened across an affordable winch. For 3 years, we have searched every consignment shop in 5 states, and 8 countries, all looking for the right winch.
One day in Almerimar, Spain, a fellow cruiser was having a yard sale on the back of his boat. He was changing gear and systems and selling the unused components. They had winches, but they were much too large or not self tailing, so once again, we had no winch to complete our project.
The night before they left, he came by our boat with one more winch that he was selling: an Andersen 12ST.

The family was doing some questionable modifications to their boat, such as removing all the booms from their ketch and replacing all the sails with Genoas. I know, it sounds strange and I personally don’t think it would work out too well, but he was selling the winch that was on the boom he had just removed!

Best of all was the price! They were heading towards the Americas and wanted to sell it for US Dollars, so we paid him $60 for this used but very functional winch.
Now we had the last of the components to install the winch on the boom!

I began removing the boom in the morning to mount the new winch on the side of the boom when I ran into a small problem. The screws at the front of the boom were rather seized on there. I tried to force them off and started to strip the head of the screw. I could cut the head off and replace the screw after but I needed to secure a replacement screw first.
This was the next roadblock. We are in Spain and our boat uses imperial sizes fasteners. The closest machine screw to what I need is an M6, but an M6 does not fit because the thread count is different. I stopped the project and put everything back where it was, and all the bits and pieces of the winch project will be stowed in a bag for when we arrive in a country that sells imperial fasteners.

How Long Should Your Docklines Be?

This is a loaded question with three answers to it.

First answer: for permanent docklines in your home slip, the lines should be the length from boat cleat to dock cleat and a little more to tie it off or an eye splice at either end to the exact length needed to keep the boat in the perfect position.
As you can tell, there is no set rule with this one about lengths since these are purpose made lines with one single application.

Bow and Stern: length from boat cleat to dock cleat

Spring: length from boat cleat to dock cleat

Second answer: for the day sailor or weekend cruiser, the lines should be made relative to the boat length. The bow and stern lines should be 2/3rds the boat length and the spring lines should be 1x the boat length. These lines will be used for tying up to new piers or to other boats when you are rafted up. The bow and stern lines will have a short run to their cleat and therefore don’t need a lot of extra line. The spring lines will run a longer distance for and aft so they will need to be a full boat length.

Bow and Stern: 2/3x boat length

Spring: 1x boat length

Third answer: for the serious cruiser, short docklines will not suffice. Day sailors and weekend cruisers have the opportunity to choose what weather they go out in, so they can choose to only sail on the good days! As a full time cruiser, you will be forced to sail in all the weathers: good days and awful nights! Your docklines will need to be up for the challenge.
The bow and stern lines need to be 1.5x the boat length and the spring lines need to be at least the boat length.
Why such long bow and stern lines? Imagine a horrible situation where you enter a port in the dark in a storm and manage to get the bow up to a pier where you can toss a line to shore and be held to a fixed point. You were smart and came up on the lee side of the pier but now the boat is being blown off from the pier and there is no way you can get the stern up to the pier under motor. How do you tie up in this situation? Easy! Having a really long stern line will allow you to walk the stern line up to the bow and toss it to shore. Now all you need to do is pull the stern in from land where you can get the proper leverage and angle to do so safely.
This may sound rather far fetched but we did just this one night in the Mediterranean where we were being pounded by 50 knot winds and short, close together seas. After being hammered for a day and a half, we sailed into a marina and tied up in 40 knots of wind. It was a horrible experience, but we made it through safely because we had a long enough line.
The bow and stern lines need to be long enough that you can toss it from the other position. Being able to toss the bow line from the stern or the stern line from the bow will make all the difference when those rare situations rise from the deep.
Once you are in the slip, you can then tie up the spring lines which should be at least the boats length (but longer is useful). Long lines are also needed if you sail into places with extreme tides. Tides greater than 10 feet are common on the Atlantic coast of Europe and the USA, and when you tie up to a quay and the tide goes out, you will need to constantly adjust your lines (if you tied to a close cleat). This is laborious and time consuming, so it won’t work out! You need to tie to a cleat that’s far away from the boat so that when the tide changes the line just changes angle slightly and won’t need any adjustments. Reaching a far away clear also means that you will need a long line to reach it!

An additional line that will be very handy is a Breast Line. This is a short line that runs straight out from the boat to the pier and is used to keep the boat close to the pier for easy boarding. This line is too short to setup to a fixed pier for a long time as tides will be a bother, but it can be left permanently attached to a floating pier (as the tide will not change the length from the boat cleat to pier cleat).

Bow and Stern: 1.5x boat length

Spring: 1x boat length (or longer)

Breast: 1/2 boat length (minimum 10 feet)

While many lines are convenient to have when tying up, you also need to store them when underway. Lots of thick heavy lines will get in the way when they fill up all your lazarette space! The ideal is to have 2 bow lines, 2 stern lines, 4 spring lines, and breast line.
When we are going to be in a place for a long time, especially if you are going to leave the boat unattended for a long time, it would behoove you to double up the lines. Thankfully, any marina you are leaving the boat in will probably have a chandler nearby which means you can buy some additional lines! When you finally leave the port, you can decide to bring them all with you or retire your older lines and keep the new ones.

How much work is Cruising?

The simple answer is: as much work as you want it to be.
When we started planning our cruising life, we wanted to enjoy the destinations as much as possible. This meant that when we got somewhere we would leave the boat and explore the land. To do this simple activity means that you can’t be fixing your boat when you get somewhere. We all have a finite amount of time and how we spend it is up to us. We can either be enjoying our time or repairing things with our time.
How do you fix less things? Have less things to fix!

We planned for simplicity. The less we have, the less we have to fix. The list of gadgets on a typical cruising boat is long, but the common items we hear other cruisers talk about fixing are:

1. Diesel motor

2. Generator

3. Water maker

4. Computer and on-board internet access

5. Bow thruster

6. Furlers

7. Chart plotter and instruments

8. Electronic autopilot

9. Dinghy outboard

10. Inflatable dinghy (usually peaking air somewhere)

11. Propane stove

To keep our cruising life simple, we simply did without.
Electric motor instead of a diesel, no generator, no water maker, no computer, no bow thruster, no furlers, no chart plotter or instruments, no electronic autopilot, a hard dinghy with oars instead of an outboard, and no propane stove (we did alcohol instead because it can burn a wider variety of fuels, meaning we can get fuels anywhere we go).

This meant that when we got somewhere, we were there and nothing complicated or time consuming could be broken that would distract from where we had just arrived. Well, life without is rather difficult and we kept it up for about a year, then we have in to the life of convenience.

The items we have added from the list are very limited, but we did give in.
First, we added a generator because sometimes the sun is hidden away for a long time and the batteries just need charging, especially when you have an electric motor.
The next thing we added was an outboard motor because rowing over a mile with currents and winds gets old really fast! Next, we switched from a hard dinghy to an inflatable because they are so much lighter and we can pick them up by hand to put them on the deck instead of a complicated lifting contraption. Lastly, we got chart plotters (Navionics on our phone).
All of our additions have one thing in common, they are disposable.
A built in chart plotter is expensive and goes obsolete in a few years. A plotter on your phone gets updated every time you get a new phone. This means that you have no installation and you get modern software with a simple app update.
We bought a small (cheap) inflatable and outboard that we can simply replace when they start giving us problems instead of constantly fighting a losing battle of time. The generator is also a small (inexpensive) portable unit that we can simply replace when it starts to give problems.
By keeping everything simple, we can enjoy where we go instead of slaving over the boat. As you plan to go cruising, be sure to keep in mind the reason you are going cruising. The less you have, the less work you will have and the less expense you will have!