Terry Safford: I am taking off the jib halyard off of the lifeline, putting it on top of the jib. I will now – we still have the motor on. The reason for doing that and so that because as long as the motor is on, we’d experience problem with the sails, we are not going to believe ourselves in dangerous situation. Okay, all the winds have been checked and everything is fine. At this point, we can take the motor, just put the engine idle for a minute or two and let it cool off.
Now it isn’t difficult. In the case of this boat, which has a wheel it’s a little bit like driving a car. A well-trimmed sailboat and this one can be made to be well-trimmed, in even aghast wind is actually going to sail itself reasonably well, like for instance, I can go ahead and I can take my hands off the wheel. The boat has a tendency to move around a little bit but it keeps on going in the same journey direction, something which you certainly can’t do with a car. You do have to make adjustments. The once you have learned the language and really it’s like a foreign language, you learn the language, you go ahead and go through the safety aspects of sailing and every part of sailing has really specific safety things that so you need to pay some attention to.
Then learn the basics of coming about, going through the wind, jiving going through the wind, you know, sailing courses of various kinds and that’s really all you have to master and that’s the essence of teaching. At this juncture, I think it’d be wise some things about single-handing. This boat is 27 feet long but it’s not more of a boat to single-hand. Once a boat gets bigger than that it gets to be just that much more difficult, especially taking away from the dock. A couple of points here, and that is when you are single-handing, you need to be very, very careful at the minimum that you use at least a mental checklist. Then do at the same way each time because when you are all by yourself, when you are sails up, you got to make sure the boat stays into the wind, you got to make sure that your lines are all free.
One of the tricks that I use when I am sailing by myself especially when the wind is blowing hard is to be very careful to flick the halyards into the cabin so that in the case that you have to take a sail down quickly in the event of a storm or for whatever other reason, sail rips something like that sort, then you can go ahead and then you can pull the sail down very quickly, that especially if you don’t have roller fueling on your foresail.
Some other things that you want to be aware of is you want to keep the motor on until you have both sails up, you have all your lines secured, and everything is to your satisfaction. As long as the motor is on, you will continue to have reef even if you have taken the sails down, and you don’t have to worry about it stalling on you, if you try to restart it when you have an emergency. Those are just a couple of items that are perhaps different with a single-handing situation.
On flaking lines, what most people do when they are hanging halyards up is to cleave them up. Cleave them up and hang them on a clay or hang them somewhere. The problem with doing that is that when you have to pull the seal down in a big hurry, it’s almost inevitable that clay was going to tangled up either on the cleaver, it’s going to get tangled up going back through the ship or the halyard leader. You basically take the end of the halyard and then just drop it down into the cabin and then it piles up in a nice neat pile. And then when you have to pull one of the sails down in a hurry, it’ll go right through the brake without getting tangled.
By the way, if you in fact are using brakes on your halyards as I have here, the problem with tangling is even more severe than the other way should be, so this is a good tip for both single-handing and also for strong winds. Little bit to go before we put the jib because the wind is blowing very strongly. And again this is another jib single-handed tip, and that is to go ahead and stuff the jib in some sort of a bag, go ahead and connect the sheets and the halyard, stuff it in the bag, tie the bag shut, and tie the bag to the poll pit or to a lifeline. What that allows you to do is to let it set up when you are ready to put it up now when the wind is getting ready to dump it in the water. We pull the jib, pull it out of the bag, put up the jib and then you can go ahead and retreat the bag.
Single-handing with a 27-footer is not particularly a problem but you should be aware of the fact that a 27-footer with a tall rig as this particular boat has is definitely a problem when you are single-handing. And the reason why this is the fact that you have so much of the upper part of the sail exposed to the wind and the wind is stronger, you know, ten meters above the surface. So what I’ve done in this particular case is because the wind is blowing over 50 knots, and I presumably would have been by myself, I want to head and I put a refund sail. In the case of the tall rig that drags down almost a third of the main sail, when I puts it out of the connection.
This boat has a really small rudder and as a result sail is much better in the strong wind. What we’ve done is that the sale has along latitudinally parallel out of the bottom of the foot of the sail has weak points. There are three weak points in this particular sail. There is an extra crinkle in the sail forward at the front of the groan and there’s a extra crinkle back here. Basically what we do is you drop the main sail down so that the front crinkle can be dropped over a hook and a jiffy rating line, which is attached the crinkle back here, this one goes back through the boom.
I can pull the tad from here but you’ll know -- if you look at the crinkle on the back of the boom here, you’ll know that this is tied down very securely. That’s the most important thing about rethink. This has to be tied securely to the boom because this is where all the tension in the main sail is at this point here. The weak lines themselves are tied very loosely on the mast or on the boom rather, excuse me, so that -- and there’s a very much tension on that part of sail. If you don’t do it that way, you’ll tear the sail. And again the single handing aspect of this is that you should always reef when the wind is that strong because it’ll probably much easier to handle and it’ll be a lot easier on your nerves.
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