Pilot Charts

When you think of a chart, you probably imagine a piece of paper with tons of numbers on it that tells you how deep the water is and where rocks are. This type of chart is known as a Nautical Chart, and these charts are very useful for navigating in a specific area. While Nautical Charts offer a very narrow view of the world, focusing on a small area of coastline and water, Pilot Charts offer a much broader view of an entire body of water.

Pilot Charts do not give information about depth and obstructions, instead they offer information about weather. Pilot Charts denote wind directions and strength, likelihood of encountering a gale, ice, or fog, as well as the typical direction and intensity of currents. Pilot Charts are about the weather what Nautical Charts are about the water.

Pilot Charts are organized by region and by month. Each month has its own weather patterns and needs to be represented on its own chart. When you look at a pilot chart, one of the first things that will jump out at you are these little wind roses placed all over the page.

Wind roses are set every 5 degrees and represent the average wind for that area via their arrows and feathers. The wind strength is denoted at the end of the arrow with the feathers according to the Beaufort scale. Each feather represents 1 force.

The arrow points into the wind, telling you the prevailing wind directions that month. The more often the wind blows from that cardinal direction, the longer the arrow will be. If the wind is particularly prevalent from one direction, it will be written on the arrow. In our example, Force 4 winds will blow from the NE 67% of the time. If it is not blowing from the NE, it will be blowing from the E. Looking at the rose, you can see that the winds tend to be Force 3 or 4 for the month of January. 

The number in the middle of the rose represents the number of days that month with absolutely no wind. 

If you are planning a cruise, choosing a route where the prevailing wind will be a broad reach with no becalmed days would prove ideal. 

If your planned route follows along wind roses that look like this, you may want to look for another route. This wind rose denotes that 1 day out of the month may be becalmed, but otherwise the wind blows from any direction and very strongly. The average winds in this area are Force 5 and Force 6!

Aside from prevailing wind information, Pilot Charts denote average currents and their strengths using green arrows. 

When choosing a route, try to find a course where you are not only on a broad reach, but also sailing with the current. The current can either be your friend or make the entire experience much less enjoyable. If the wind and current oppose each other, you can expect to encounter much larger seas! 

Picking a route where you sail downwind and down current will make passage making much easier as well as much faster than if you choose a different route where you are fighting the elements as you voyage.

---

Below are links to PDF copies of pilot charts for the entire world. They are organized by ocean, and sub-organized by month. Clicking on the desired month will open the link to that pilot chart in a new window. Using these pilot charts, you can plan the best time and route for any ocean passage.

North Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, Mediterranean Sea

South Atlantic Ocean

North Pacific Ocean

South Pacific Ocean

Indian Ocean

Cost of Conversion

One of the first questions I am asked by clients is: "How much will it cost to convert to synthetic standing rigging?"

The short answer is: Around the same price as 1x19 SS rigging if you have me do all the work, and much cheaper than 1x19 SS rigging if you do the work yourself.

The cost of materials is significantly cheaper than stainless steel, mostly due to the fact that stainless steel is made of metals that need to be mined and processed. Synthetic standing rigging is made out of UHMWPE (Ultra High Molecular Weight Poly Ethylene), otherwise known as plastic. Plastics are cheap and as manufacturing processes and techniques improve, costs go down!

Since the costs of materials are so much cheaper, the total cost to re-rig your yacht is also cheaper. Turnbuckles cost around $100 each where the materials to make a deadeye cost around $24 each. The fittings at the end of stainless stays cost between $100 to $400 each, where the fittings at the end of synthetic stays cost around $1 to $12 each; significantly lowering the cost to re-rig.

The major difference is the cost of labor. Splices are more labor intensive to perform than a swage or compression fitting, and tensioning standing rigging with deadeyes is a lot more labor intensive than with conventional turnbuckles. The cost of labor is significantly higher than with steel rigging which offsets the cheaper material costs to give a similar end price.

If you are the type of person who will do it yourself, you can save a significant amount of money by doing the conversion to synthetic standing rigging yourself. If you need to pay someone to do it, the costs will be around the same in the end.

Using the Islander 36, which fits the mold of an average 36 foot cruising yacht with a double spreader rig, the material costs were:

• $861.49 for the stays
• $64.60 for the deadeyes
• $379.62 for the lashings
• $156.84 for the thimbles

At this point, the materials only cost $1,462.55

If your mast has regular tangs that can accept a clevis pin, you are set! If your mast has t-ball fittings or some other connector, the costs will go up as you need to include the costs of adapters into the cost of conversion.

• $1,303.76 for 8 T-ball fittings and toggles to connect to the synthetic stays

Now the material costs have nearly doubled to $2,766.31. This is significantly less expensive than if you were to re-rig with stainless steel, as long as you do all the work yourself and don't need to pay anyone for labor.

Fabrication of a backstay and eight shrouds (Cap, Intermediate, Forward and Aft Lowers [Port & Starboard]) and all 9 deadeyes took me 30.14 hours on the Islander 36. This number doesn't fluctuate very much because the length of the stay doesn't add considerable time to the job. I work at the ends of the stays and the space in between doesn't affect my working time. On average, it takes me around 32 hours to fabricate the rigging for a double spreader sailboat. Single spreader sailboats are quicker because they have two stays fewer and only need 2 areas serviced instead of 6 with a double spreader rig. 

Being how I currently charge $105 per hour for labor, 32 hours of labor adds $3,360 to the cost of re-rigging.

In the case of the Islander 36,

• The material cost was $2,766.31
• The labor cost was $3,164.70

This brings the cost to re-rig the Islander 36 up to $5,931.01. This number is significantly cheaper than the cost to re-rig a 36 foot yacht with stainless steel, but the job is not finished yet. At this point, the new rigging is sitting in a box awaiting installation. If you install and setup the rigging yourself, this would be the final number in the cost to re-rig. If you don't want to do it yourself, you will need to pay someone to continue doing the work.

Average installation and setup takes around 30 hours (at $105 per hour), which would add another $3,105 to the bill, bumping the cost to re-rig up to $8,010 for an average re-rig.

This number is reached by assuming that the average cost for materials is around $1,500, 32 hours to fabricate the rigging, and 30 hours to install the rigging. As you can see, there is a significant difference between the $1,500 price point of doing it yourself and the $8,010 price point of paying to have it done professionally.

$8,010 is an average amount to pay to have the standing rigging replaced with 1x19 stainless steel on a 36 foot yacht. The prices are currently around the same level, but the savings in weight are quite great! Steel is very heavy and dyneema is very light, 1/4 inch 1x19 SS weighs 0.15 pounds per foot and 6mm dyneema weighs 0.017 pounds per foot. In this example, dyneema is 8.8 times lighter in weight than steel!

Looking back at our example with the Islander 36, the final cost of materials was $3,454.56. I did the fabrication and the owner did the installation, followed by me doing the setup of the standing rigging. Lastly, I climbed the mast to inspect everything and seized the spreaders in their correct position. The total labor time was 49.74 hours and the final cost to re-rig was $8,677.26. 

The owner showed me other estimates he had received which were right around this number as well for 1x19 SS standing rigging. Once again, the cost of materials is significantly cheaper, it's the cost of labor that brings the price of re-rigging right up to be comparable with that of steel rigging. 

If you need to pay the same amount to re-rig your yacht, why would you choose a material that is heavier and prone to corrosion over a material that is so much lighter and immune to corrosion?

Islander 36 Conversion: Seizing the Spreader Tips

Seizing the spreaders is a simple concept: you tie a knot that will hold the shrouds in the tip of the spreader and prevent movement of the spreader on the shrouds!

This may sound easy enough, but each spreader tip is different, and your boat may look different from this tip. You need to look at your spreader tip and evaluate how you can attach the seizing line to the shroud to the tip without damaging any of the components. This spreader tip had holes drilled through next to the shallow notches to hold mousing wire. Mousing wire will prevent the shroud from jumping out of the notch but it won't prevent movement on the spreader tip. 

By tying the spreader tip up with dyneema and taking advantage of the holes in the spreader tip, it is possible to hold the shrouds in place and prevent movement at the spreader tip. The basics are to tie the spreader tip to the shroud and then to the shroud, this will hold the shroud in the notch and keep anything from moving at the same time.

You can easily visualize the damage that movement of the spreader tip can cause by observing the severe chafe in the lower portion of this photo. The spreader tip rested there during the initial setup of the synthetic standing rigging. Once the major adjustments were taken care of, I climbed the mast and positioned the spreader so that it would bisect the angle to the shrouds. This results in a slight up-sweep of the spreader (which places the drain hole at the lowest point to keep water from collecting in the spreaders if they are mounted correctly). The spreader was tapped and pushed into its correct place, several inches higher than where it was originally sitting and then seized in that position.

By removing any movement between the spreader tip and the shrouds, it is possible to reduce the chafe that will occur to the shrouds. Any damage that does occur between the shrouds and the spreaders will be limited to the serviced area. This sacrificial layer will protect the structural stay within from chafe while still being easy to repair if the chafe ever becomes too severe.

Broken Spreader

While aloft for the final inspection, I noticed that the lower starboard spreader was in serious trouble!

First, the spreader was mounted upside down. The trailing edge of the spreader was facing forward and the forward edge of the spreader was trailing. The distinction in directions is only evident due to the air foil shape of the spreader. Round and square spreaders create a lot of drag and wind resistance, air foils create significantly less drag. An air foil creates less drag in a specific direction, and slightly more drag if it is set backwards (though still much less than a round or square air foil). Being how this is not a racing yacht, a slight increase in drag is not going to be detrimental to the sailing performance of a cruising yacht.

The reason that the direction of the spreader is so important is due to the drain hole for water in the spreader. The spreader has a drain hole near the mast on the bottom side. If the spreader is mounted with the trailing edge leading, the drain hole will now be on the top side of the spreader and instead of a drain, it would act as a water fill hole. Water inside a spreader will cause more weight aloft but more catastrophically, it will hold water that can turn into ice during the winter. The expansion of the freezing water inside will place great and unnecessary stresses on the aluminum air foil spreader and lead to its eventual and apparent failure.

The other factor that came into play with this particular spreader is the location of the spinnaker halyard and flag halyards. Both of these halyards (which look like they haven't been moved in 30 years) were rubbing on the front of the spreader. While the lines themselves were not significantly chafed, they did grind away at the soft aluminum of the spreader. The lines are full of dirt which acts like sand paper rubbing on the thin trailing edge of the spreader. If you have spare halyards installed on your mast, be sure that they are not contacting anything on their run. Over the years, either the halyard or the rig will become chafed and lead to costly repairs in the future.

The combination of the thinner metal of the trailing edge of the spreader being ground away by the halyards and the ice expansion inside the spreader may have led to the opening of the spreader.

Upon this discovery, the shrouds were relaxed and the spreader unbolted. It was then taken to a metal shop to have new aluminum welded onto the trailing edge and then ground into shape. The spreader was then painted and reinstalled the next day! With the repaired spreader in place, it is time to position the spreaders and seize the tips.

Islander 36 Conversion: Deck Clean-up

With all the stays up and tensioned, it is time to do some tidy work to the stays around the deck. 

If I were to leave his rigging looking like this, I wouldn't get hired! This rats nest of rope is only acceptable during the tuning process when the stays are frequently untied and retied. There is no point in tidying up the lines if you are going to retie them tomorrow. Now that we are putting on the finishing touches, it is time to clean up the deck since we wont be messing with the lashings for some time.

The tails of the lashings were tied to cover the shroud frapping knot and to consume all the long free ends that used to hang like Spanish Moss from swamp trees.

All the shrouds are finished and tied off, the backstay is set and tensioned, and this job is almost complete! With everything tied off and tidied up on the deck it will soon be time to go aloft and seize the spreader tips and perform a final inspection of the rigging conversion.