As the skipper of a boat it’s up to you to decide on safety matters for yourself and your crew. Thus many skippers insist on everyone on deck wearing harnesses, but some eschew them, saying the human hand is the Mk1 harness. Obviously the conditions and the size of the boat will affect this practice. [...]
Getting the mast ready to drop Shooting – dropping the mast without stopping – is the smart way to go through a bridge. By William Loram The bridges at Acle and Potter Heigham are the big obstacle parts of the Three Rivers Race. To shoot the bridges or tie up, drop the rig [...]
In our experience of teaching folks to sail, both on our own Traditional Boat Skills courses aboard Amelie Rose and through the RYA YachtmasterTM scheme we’ve come across many “methods” for doing everything from making a cup of tea to picking up a man overboard. Some of these are excellent but none of them is [...]
Dyneema in the luff Stitched into the luff; dyneema makes the sail easier to handle as well The angel, just enough weight to keep the line on the drum The Wykeham Martin furling gear is often viewed as a tricky piece of kit, but there are ways to [...]
Dan Houston shows how to use a heaving line – and relays how to make a Monkey’s Fist or a quick knot to go on the end of it A typical heaving line is a line 50 to 100 feet long made of light rope – of 6 or 8mm diameter – that is used [...]
You know what point to aim for, the wind is free so you can go straight there. Except that you need to take into account the speed and direction of the tide to determine your course to steer, and then add a final adjustment to account for magnetic variation By John Clarke of Team Sailing [...]
Rule of twelths? It's a bit tricky with metric charts... so use the Rule of Tenths: As your on deck ready reckoner for the state of tide Working out tidal heights using the traditional rule of twelfths is easier if you convert it to percentages that can be used with metric tide tables. The rule [...]
As soon as a vessel came near land her crew would begin "sounding" the depth of water using a line marked with depths and a length of lead. The word sounding is dervived from the old English sund (for water) and the depths found could be related to depths marked on the chart to give [...]
A line, to which markers or ‘knots’ were attached at eight fathom (47ft 3inches to be precise) intervals, was wound on the reel which one man holds over his head. To the end of this 500ft line was bent a canvas bucket or triangular chip-log drag, a wood panel weighted on one side so that [...]
