Navigating the Blog

Welcome to the Blog!  Maddie and I have been living on a 1968 Morgan 45 for a few years before we set out cruising on her. She is our project, our home, and our adventure machine!

This blog covers topics pertaining to sailing and all the parts of a sailboat. There is a special focus on rigging, but rigging is just a small part of a sailboat, and the sailboat should always be the main emphasis of rigging. 

What is the point of perfectly tuning your standing rigging if it doesn't let the boat sail well? Rigging should always be thought of in a dynamic way, where it influences the sailshape as much as the running rigging. Together, all of these factors join forces to create a sailing experience! 

The blog is more of an "information dumping ground" rather than a carefully laid out book, the topics from one blog post to the next are typically unrelated. One day it might talk about cap shroud tension, the next post might talk about anchors, and the next one be about pets on a sailboat.

To help sort through the random array of topics of the blog, it is best to search exactly what you are looking for in the search bar, located on the top right of the blog page. 

When you type in your topic, it will search the blog for those keywords and tags to generate a list of that specific topic. If you want to look up how to tighten your standing rigging, type that in and look through the posts that it brings up. If you are more interested in Barber Haulers, type that in and enjoy the results. 

At the bottom of each post, there are tags that you can click on to bring up other posts that share the same tag. At the top of each post, near the title, there are categories that you can click on. The tags are much more specific while the categories are much broader. The categories of the blog are: Cruising, Electric Propulsion, Knots, Life Aboard, Navigating, Plastic Pollution, Running Rigging, Sails, Standing Rigging, and Tiny House.

Below the search bar is a rolling set of photos from our Instagram account. You can enjoy the passing images that we have taken while we are cruising, or you can click on them to follow us on our adventure through Instagram.  

We also have a YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/riggingdoctor where you can subscribe to follow along with our journey in a video format. 

At the very bottom of the page, you will see a black section and in the middle it will say "Life Aboard Index." This is the index to the blog which will pull up every post ever written and list them by the date they were published. If you feel like perusing the catalog of blog posts, you can click here and browse over the titles to see if anything strikes your interest. 

The blog may seem a bit confusing to navigate at first, being how there is no logical order to the posts you will find in it. We publish a new post everyday at 9AM EST about a different topic. I recommend stopping by daily to check out the latest post, this way you can broaden your understandings about the inns and out of sailboat living and all the components that make it work. If you have a specific topic you are researching, I would suggest starting with the search bar.

I hope you enjoy the read, and please share the website with your friends and family who might be interested in sailing and cruising. 

Riding a Storm Front

Weather is an unavoidable phenomenon to the cruising sailor. Day sailors have the luxury of choosing which days they wish to leave their marina berth to go sailing. Cruisers, on the other hand, are always out there. On blustery days, they will have to hunker down in a protected cove or rage on with their storm sails flying proudly.

Weather doesn't just creep up out of nowhere though. It comes in and goes out in a manner that is very visible. We found ourselves sailing along down the Chesapeake Bay between Chesapeake Beach and the Potomac River. This stretch of water offers few opportunities to duck in and wait out the weather, so we had to continue on as we saw our sky deteriorating.

We started off sailing along under clear blue skies without a cloud to be seen. As the day progressed, whisky cirrus clouds began to roll in and soon the front of a low pressure was chasing us. I laid down on the bow of the boat and stared up at the front, noticing that the clouds were moving at roughly the same speed we were, and if we could keep our speed, we might just make it to the anchorage ahead of the storm.

Usually, we reef down as a storm front approaches, but in this case, we kept on under full sail, riding along on a beam reach as the low pressure behind us slowly crept up. All went well until sunset. All of a sudden, the winds died down and our speed dropped. The moon became obscured by hazy clouds until it was fully blocked out. We were nowhere near our anchorage, but we lost the race with the sky. The low pressure front crept over us and we were now in its grasp. We quickly reeled the sails even though the winds were light because we knew that at any moment, strong gusts would start coming our way and we had nowhere to hide.

Danger of Carrying Dinghy in Davits

While stern davits seem to be the most popular way to carry your dinghy, they do have a dark side to them too. Yes, they are always present and so convenient, as they raise the dinghy from the sea, but when you head to sea, stern davits could actually damage your yacht.

A following sea presents many dangers. The approaching waves can push you into a broach as well as board your yacht. If you get boarded by a large enough wave, your yacht could be swamped and if the scuppers do not drain the water fast enough, you could be boarded again and eventually sunk! This may seem far fetched, but waves carry a lot of water in them, and this water will weigh down your yacht in under a second!

Carrying a dinghy in davits while sailing in a following sea is akin to dangling fresh meat in front of an attack dog, at some point, you will get bitten!

A dangling dinghy in davits will hold the water of a boarding wave very well, as the only way for the water to drain out is through that little drain plug in the stern. Waves in the ocean run in a wave period of seconds, meaning that the next wave is only a few seconds away! In the Atlantic Ocean, the wave period is usually around 4 seconds. If you get hit by a wave, the next one will strike in 4 seconds! There is no way the drain hole will evacuate that much water in such a short amount of time.

What will happen is the dinghy will get filled by the first boarding wave and the weight of it will either rip out your davits, creating a set of holes in your stern, or collapse your davits, causing you to drag a broadside dinghy in the following sea. Either way, your dinghy will turn into a drouge and you will have some costly repairs to look forward to.

If the dinghy doesn't break the davits, then another problem will come to light. The weight of the dinghy, full of water, hanging off the stern will pull the transom down, making the cockpit that much closer to the waves. This makes it even easier for waves to board as your stern squats into the water. The aft tilt will also rake your mast back, causing you to have a greater amount of weather helm, adding to more difficulty in steering.

As the first wave hits, the dinghy will fill with water and the immense weight will pull you down. In 4 seconds, the next wave will hit and come into the cockpit. In all the confusion, you might let go of the helm and try to figure out how to get all of this water out of the cockpit and dinghy, but 4 more seconds have passed and then next wave is striking. This wave boards as well and gives you a bit of a push. Combine this with the weather helm and the yacht will round up into the wind, broaching in the following seas.

This scenario may sound far fetched or rare, but it is only possible if you have a dinghy hanging in stern davits. Stern davits are ridiculously convenient to use while coastal cruising. You leave one anchorage, hoist the dinghy, arrive at the next one and drop the dinghy! But if you decide to sail a longer distance or cross an ocean where you won't be using the dinghy for a while, it would behoove you to hoist the dinghy onto the deck and lash it down upside down so that it can't fill with water from a boarding wave.

Ways to Carry a Dinghy

A dinghy is a vital extension of your yacht that allows you to go where your deep keel can not. How you carry your little landing craft is also open to various options.

The three most common places to carry the dinghy are: Towed behind the boat, On the stern in davits, and on the deck.

Each of these locations has its pros and cons, and where you decide to carry it is up to you!

Towing your dinghy may seem like the easiest of methods. It simply follows you along like a puppy, going everywhere you go. It also makes it very easy to use the dinghy, as it is already in the water! The problems with towing a dinghy though, are the added drag of towing it through the water behind you, and the constant tapping of your top sides at night when the wind goes still. The tapping can be negated by placing fenders between the dinghy and your hull, but it still presents one last issue at night: theft.

Just as it is easy for you to hop in the dinghy and head to shore, so can someone else. The dinghy is already in the water, all they need to do is disconnect it from your boat and slip away quietly into the night. Dinghy theft is a major concern for cruisers, as loosing your dinghy can present a major monetary setback.

Keeping the dinghy in davits off the stern is one step up from towing your dinghy because it gets it out of the water, which means you won't have to drag it along, and you won't have to be as worried about theft during the night. Thieves are looking for easy targets and a dinghy in davits is not as easy as the one already floating on the next yacht in the anchorage! Davits are permanently installed and always ready to accept your dinghy, all you need to do is connect the ropes and crank it out of the water.

The problem with davits is it keeps your dinghy right side up and hanging off the back of your stern. Should you find yourself in a following sea, a boarding wave could crash into the dinghy and fill it with water. The surge of weight would rip your davits right off and potentially cause damage to your hull as the davits yield under the weight. If the davits don't break, your stern will now be severely weighted by all that added water and this will cause it to squat lower, posing more risk to the following seas.

The last option is to stow the dinghy on the deck. Here, it is out of the water, making it less tempting to would-be thieves, and it can be stowed upside down, making it less of an issue with boarding waves. On deck storage may sound like a great idea but it presents a major setback: loading and unloading. To get the dinghy on the deck, it must be lifted and placed on the deck. If the dinghy weighs even 100 pounds, this will be a very difficult task. Light weight inflatables might only weigh around 50 pounds and can be lifted out of the water by hand, if you are strong enough. When placed on the deck, they will probably cover a hatch and this will reduce some of the air flow through he cabin.

While it may seem impossible to get a heavy dinghy on the deck by hand, it is quite do-able with your rigging. Attaching a halyard to the dinghy will allow you to lift its weight using a winch. Now you can carefully hoist and position the dinghy on your deck without breaking your back! This might seem like the easiest and safest way to store your dinghy but it does take some time to setup the rigging and carry out the launching and recovery of the dinghy.

All three places have their pros and cons, and they all depend on what you are willing to deal with. Most cruisers we see either tow their dinghy or carry them in davits. We choose to carry our dinghy on the deck while sailing long distances, and simply tow it if we are sailing short distances.

Where you keep your dinghy is as personal a choice as what kind of dinghy you choose to carry.

Hoisting Your Dinhy onto the Deck

It is a well understood fact that the safest way to transport your dinghy long distances is on your deck. The trouble with this is "How do you get it on the deck?"

While davits are wonderful creations to get your dinghy out of the water, it doesn't help get it on your deck. Instead it just lifts your dinghy up and presents it to any boarding waves.

Getting a dinghy on the deck is very easy, and doesn't require the purchase of fancy gadgets because every sailboat comes equipped with a massive crane system: the mast and boom!

You can raise your dinghy by attaching it to a halyard, but this will drag it into your top sides and bang up your yacht. To keep the dinghy off your yacht as you raise it, you can use the boom to help pull it off your boat. For this, you simply need an outhaul attached to the end of the boom that can be used to pull the dinghy along the boom and keep it in position.

Using the mast and boom as your massive dinghy davit, you can easily raise a dinghy above the lifelines, slide it towards the mast, and then swing the boom in to bring the dinghy over the deck. Winches will allow you to raise heavy dinghies with ease as you are able to use all your sail handling lines.

To carry this procedure out, you will only need two additional lines on hand. One will be the outhaul, the other will be a preventer.

The outhaul will be run from the mast (or wherever your main halyard winch is located) to the end of the boom and back towards the halyard that is doing the lifting. It helps to splice a thimble to the outhaul line that is large enough to slip the halyard shackle through it. This outhaul can be adjusted to control the position of the halyard along the boom, granting you the ability to slide the hanging dinghy in and out on the boom.

The preventer will pull the boom forward while the mainsheet will pull the boom aft. With these two control lines, you can position the boom out over the side of the boat without worrying about it swinging back and forth as the dinghy is raised.

These two lines are easy to manufacture and stow on the boat, making a cabin top dinghy easy to manage, launch, and retrieve.