Trimming Your Sails on the Ocean

While tell tales will let you know how to trim your sail for peak performance, ignoring them for the sake of comfort may also be wise. Having poorly trimmed sails will cost you some speed, but the peace and tranquility it brings could be worth it to you.

When sailing downwind in light winds, the main steals a lot of air from the headsails. If you have the sheets on the headsails eased, these sails will lift with wind and then slat as you come down a swell. When the sail falls, so does the tension on the sheet. The sheet block will then fall onto the deck and make quite a bit of noise.

Being how the wave period in the Atlantic is around 8 seconds, this means that every 8 seconds you will hear a "TWANG!" on the deck. Do this for an entire day and you might go crazy!

In situations like this, you are faced with two options:

1. Either drop the headsail so it stops slating.
2. Over tighten the sheet to avoid it from going limp.

When you drop the sail, you lose all of that sail area entirely and unbalance your sail plan. This is far from ideal, especially on a broad reach, where you need the headsails to provide lee helm.

Over tightening the sheets will keep the noise from happening, but it will make your sails less efficient. This might cost you a fraction of a knot in light airs.

If you are deaf, or willing to put up with the noise for the small amount of speed gained, then by all means, trim based on the tell tales. If you prefer peace and comfort, then it would behoove you to over tighten the sheets and keep the peace inside the cabin.

AIS CPA Alarm

AIS is a wonderful invention that allows your radio to display all the vital information of any other vessel that is broadcasting AIS.

This changes a night time encounter from plain navigational lights to something more useful, like the vessels name, speed, and heading. With this information, the computer in the radio can also calculate how close you will come and when this will occur.

Closest Point of Approach (CPA) is very helpful. It will tell you if that ship on the horizon is going to be a problem, or if they will stay far away. Best of all, some radios have alarm features, so if a ship will come too close, it will sound a very loud audible alarm to bring the situation to your attention.

We usually set the alarm to 2 nautical miles when we heave to at night. This gives us plenty of time to wake up from the alarm and rectify the situation. Two years ago, when we set out into the Atlantic, the other ships were very courteous, always responding when hailed and being more than accommodating  to avoid a collision.

This year though, it seems that no one wants to answer. We have done a radio check, and other boats far away can hear me loud and clear, but they just seem to play the silent game.

Seeing a massive tanker approach you at 20 knots can be a bit unnerving, especially when you are hove to with no wind to move you if you needed to. At night, I have found one tactic that seems to get an instant response when words fail: a strobe spot light.

You know, those "tactical flashlights" that they sell with the high powered LED light and focusing lens. These things are bright! I simply shine it in their position and then up at the sails. Then when I go below deck to check the AIS display, they have inevitably changed course and steered away from a collision course.

This alarm does not replace a good watch schedule, as not all vessels transmit AIS, but it does alleviate the anxiety of wondering if you are going to bump into someone while you sleep between watches.

Dolphins

Out in the ocean, one of our favorite creatures to encounter are dolphins. These majestic mammals seem to always have fun as they play around in the water. You will see one jump out of the water, and then two, and then five! It seems like they want to play follow the leader as they bound through the waves.

Then all of a sudden, the dolphins disappear for a few minutes and you might be thinking that the show is over. All of a sudden, the entire pod will jump out of the water at the same time! It almost looks like they were playing a game where they all hold their breath and then surface in synchronized fashion!

While we may be the dominant species on land, killing any creature that opposes us, they are at home on the ocean, and we are merely meek visitors into their realm.

Cruising to the Bahamas: Day 3

At dawn, I raised our anchor and we began drifting out of the mouth with the slight wind that was present. I quickly got the sails up and set to get us as far from land as fast as possible, but there was no wind!

We simply bobbed around as we drifted along with the waves out to sea.

The Monitor windvane did all the work for me. I knew that the winds were going to start out from the East and shift to be coming from the North, so I set the monitor and the sails for a broad reach. As the wind shifted, so did our path and we effortlessly and slowly made our way from land.

We sailed out beyond the entrances to the shipping channels that enter the Chesapeake Bay, so commercial traffic was not an issue as we were always outside of the channel.

While the sail was slow, the spectacles were far from it. We saw a massive school of jellyfish that were just below the surface, drifting along on the ocean currents. While this was interesting, it paled in comparison to the pod of dolphins that we encountered.

We were 7 miles out at sea at this point, and these dolphins were playing around in the waves like children playing in the surf on a beach. It reminded us that we are in their home, and they live here. We are merely visitors.

The winds were light, so we decided to make the most of them and sail through the night since the Monitor had been doing such a good job and we hadn't touched a thing all day. This was a sound plan, but the winds did not agree. As the sun set, the winds disappeared. Our plans to sail through the night quickly vanished and we were forced to heave to through the night.

Cruising to the Bahamas: Day 2

Before dawn, I had the anchor up and we were once again motor sailing along in the light breeze. The winds were a little more prominent today, and we were able to make the last bit of the journey to the bridge by 5pm. At that time, the tide was rushing out, and the current was rather strong as we came up on the bridge.

The current listed on the chart plotter was 2 knots at that moment, and we were indeed moving along at 2 knots with no wind in our sails.

Then we came across a fast moving river filled with trash, muck, and debris. When we entered that river, it felt like we were riding down white water rapids! Wisdom quickly sped up to 5 knots and we were blown out of the bay with fury! Instead of trying to steer us out, I used all the power we had in the motor to push us side to side and avoid the bridge abutments.

That was honestly the most stressful moment of this trip, watching a bridge piling approach your beam at 5 knots while you frantically full throttle yourself sideways and you see the shore in front of your bow slipping sideways past your view. It felt like we had no control and it planted a very deep respect for narrow waterways with high currents. I used to always try to time our journeys with peak tidal flow, but these have always been in wide open rivers with currents around 1 knot. After encountering that little bonus river in the water, I will be sure to investigate any new passages before attempting them with a strong current. I feel it would even be best to attempt these narrow passages at slack tide when the water is still and you can move through it unaffected.

As soon as we exited the bridge, we were greeted by a very large pod of dolphins who appeared to be feeding on little fish that had been sucked out of the bay with the powerful current. They saw us sailing along and soon followed us, jumping out of the water ever closer as they came by to investigate what we were doing and where we were going.

The sun began to set and we were still in the mouth of the bay. The winds were blowing us into the bay and we had spent the entire afternoon tacking against the winds in the narrow areas that are not channels.

As the sun became low, the temperature also began to drop and we decided that it would be best if we just anchored again, in the ocean!

We found a shoal between the channels that was not a restricted area and dropped the hook on a shallow portion of it. 13 feet of water at low tide, so I let out 200 feet of chain to make certain that we would not drag in the night.

We set the proximity alarm on our AIS to 0.5nm, trying to keep false alarms from waking us as we tried to sleep, but to no avail. It seemed that every ship entering or exiting the bay was on course for us before they turned to go through the channel. The alarm would sound multiple times an hour, and each time I would check  it, just in case it was actually a collision in the making.

To add to the misery, the swell and wakes from the traffic made the anchorage unbearable as the boat was constantly rolling around. If you find yourself in a situation where it is not safe to continue at your current rate, anchoring is an option, but it really should be your last option.