Terry Stafford: The most important thing, you know for them to bring your sunglasses, I mean that might not perhaps doesn’t seem obvious, and not only sunglasses, but real good sunglasses because the glare out on the water even when its cloudy is considerable and your eyes take a tremendous beating. I personally use really what the kind of sunglasses that you use out on the snow and I find them to be very adequate.
Another thing is, sun screen. Enough said about that -- this environment is all, is basically all white, the reflection of the water, the reflection of the sky, the reflection of your sails, and perhaps often forgot most boats are white and so you get enormous reflection of the deck. So, you want to put sun screen on regularly. Always bring a lot of water, in the marine environment, you know where the wind is constantly blowing at to you, you know you lose just that much of more water than you do when sitting an Om and so you want to bring along plenty of water, I normally bring a quick cooler.
Before you go any where, check the weather that’s very easy to do, if you have access to the internet, any number of ways, find out what the temperature range is going to be, you know subtract five or eight degrees from that, you know for lake water and most ocean water, and dress accordingly, it’s a good idea, you know to bring a jacket or something of that sort, you know just in case, you know you have a storm. Most people live on boats have fall weather gear of some sort, you know on the boats, if the boat is sufficiently big, so that’s not necessarily something that you want to take it every time. But make sure, you check the weather.
Now as for as boat equipment is concerned, it totally depends on the size of the boat and what type of sailing you’re going to do. Most cabin boats that are 21 feet or more have enough room to carry a reasonable amount of equipment, and so I’ll address that, that situation first. PFD, Personal Flotation Device for every person who is aboard is mandatory, it’s a good idea to have coast guard approve once if you can afford it, the Walmart orange type or perhaps or probably not the best in the world. They’re adequate put you much better of to have a coast guard approve one, the type three is in the most comfortable that you use for water skiing and they’re adequate for the lake environment, perhaps not for the ocean environment.
It’s a good idea to always bring a flash light, if you’re out in any boat of any size if it turns off that your running lights fail or you don’t have any running lights, the flash light might be the only way that any body can see you, make sure you change the batteries every year whether they needed or not. Another thing that you should have some types of emergency alerting device, you know be it a horn, or be it a whistle or bell whatever. Obviously, the larger the boat, the most sophisticated the device can be, but at the very minimum you carry a whistle with you, a whistle and a small flash lights you can carry in your pocket.
As far as boat equipment is concerned, again it depends on the size of the boat. I think regardless it’s a good idea to always carry an anchor, and the reason for that is that if you’re big enough to have motor and your motor fails, you’re go a back to a place where you can’t sail into your where you slip or you cant sail under boat dock or whatever you may just have anchor and wait until the situation improves. So you can do that or you can get your motor fixed, so always carry an anchor, it doesn’t has to really have to be a good one, but you need something along those lines.
First aid kit, good idea to always have one of those and make sure everybody on the boat knows where they are. There is a lot of other equipment that, you know that can be added to that, there are a lot of good list that are published by most of the marine chance, and that’s the good thing to investigate, you know whenever you buy a boat. The brake normally comes at about 25 feet, most 25 footers that are built by most manufactures at that length come in both axillary or an in board and or an out board there are some smaller boat that a deep heel that have axillary engines, you know on smaller boats.
There are some real advantages to having an out board, the biggest thing is there is no near as much maintenance required. You can take the boat, take the engine off the boat, take it to a dealer and have it serviced. The second thing is that it gives you another tiller at the back of the boat because you can steer the motor as well as steering the boat. When you’re going in and out of the swipe, assuming that you can reach the throttle shaft on the motor to move it, that’s an advantage for going out or returning for that matter.
The first disadvantage of an out board motor is that it generally means that you going to have to store gas somewhere. Well, that’s either a big problem or a non-problem depending on, you know on how you go about it. If you stores gas safely and you make sure that you keep it above the deck, and you follow proper precautions, gas is not a problem. The second disadvantage that it has is that you may not be able to get enough pull or push behind the boat, but because you can’t get the motor shaft in far enough into the water, as you transom get higher and higher that gets to be more of a problem, you have to use a special motor mount and you may or may not have easy access to it when you’re going in and out of the marine and you can correct that problem to some degree by using in board controls on your out board motor. So that’s not necessarily disadvantage.
The advantage on auxiliary is that they generally use diesels in this to make gas engines really reliable, most of diesels. The second thing is that your center of action is right under your wheel. The third thing is which you can get a lot more torque with smaller engine, this is the 27 footer and it weights 7000 pounds in its run very adequately at 5 knots when in the strong breeze by an 8 horse power diesel, one cylinder diesel. You would need considerably more out board than that to achieve the same results.
The big disadvantage of an in board is you’re leaving the dock because when you first start up on in board the prop underneath the boat your wash is to the left when you’re in reverse, the boat is always going to want to go to the left and that’s the direction why that you want to go to get out when you slip, you know then it’s is not particular problem. You also have to be very careful with an in board when you have a lot of wind and you don’t keep your forward motion, you lose your forward motion then you become vulnerable to the wind.
So there are little trickier to use, but once you get the hang of it aside for the increased maintenance cost and you know and the difficultly of getting used to it, they probably are more efficient in the long run than out board wise. First of all, there are a lot of different kinds of sail boats, they go all the way from open cockpit dingings, they’re only eight or nine feet long, two inflatables that you can actually put a sail rig on you know right up to moldy masted schooners with helicopter platforms. Obviously, the price range reflects that, boats go all the way from you know from about a $1000 maybe $1500 new up to millions.
When you start thinking about buying a boat or getting into a boating, what you really need to decide is how much you’re going to use the boat, what you’re going to use the boat for, how many people are going to be using it regularly, are you’re going to stay over night on it, they’re on off a lot of and of different situations to consider and particularly what water are you using. Are you want a lake environment are you off shore, are you going to tropics, are you going northerly climates all these things are important to decide and what type of boat to buy. You can spend any amount of money on a boat that you want, but you can get decent sized small cabin boat in the 21, 22, 23 range, you know that maybe 15 or 20 years old with a trailer for few thousand dollars, and that is probably a good way to start sailing.
One you don’t get too much money into your initial investment, if you decide that you don’t like sailing you don’t have so much in it that you can get most of your money back out and if you really like it ride they’re always enough boats around where you can upgrade to your level and satisfaction. Regardless of what you’re sailing, sail boats basically all sail the same way, it just depends to large degree on how you want to relate to it.
There are a couple of different ways to attack the problem of sailing on a regular basis. There are really three ways you can do it, one is that you can actually put a boat in slip in a marine, and then all you have to do is just go ahead and rig it, start up the motor and go up with sails up in your business. The second way is to store the boat in the marine on a trailer with the mast up, then all you have to do is to take the boat over to a boat ramp and launch it, and then here in the same situation as person has a slip. The third way to do it across is to keep the trailer at home then you go ahead and you -- trailer out the -- the sailboat out to a ramp area go ahead and put the mast up, which on a smaller boat 23 footer less, its not a difficult thing to do for one or two people and rig it right while you’re there and launch the boat and it just takes longer.
So, it really depends on what you want to do, and it depends on a how much you want the sail. In reality, if you’re going to sail regularly every weekend and a number of people do that, then it’s probably worth some money to go ahead and pay for a slip, and that way why you have easy access to the boat and easy access to swim.
The question is asked, why do people sail? Well, you’re probably getting a little idea of that right now by the fact that boat sailing a good deal and we got a pretty strong wind blowing and there are a lot of things to do. Sailing is very different from power boating in the sense that the experience is not as climatic in the sense that you get up to relatively high speed in the power boating or you ski behind a power boat or drag or power sail or whatever it is that you’re doing with the power boat, which you want to be doing that under relatively calm conditions as calm is possible. That’s just the opposite of what the sailor wants. A sailor wants it windy and rough, the absolute worse conditions for a power boat. So in reality, power boating and sailing is complimentary, they’re just done under different conditions.
Sailing, even when the wind is blowing very hard, our sailing is a very relaxing sport and it is quite except for a course sound of the wind. The only exception is that when you have motor on, but you presumably you’re going to just use the motor for coming and going to a point where you can in fact sail. For people that have sailed for long time will generally tell you that, that it’s one of the most relaxing things that they do in their life and I can speak from experience that after a hard day in the office you come out here, just kind of let everything hang out and just sit back and relax and you go home with a much better attitude after the experience.
Well, we’re lined and hanged out pretty good, we’re heeling about main, heeling about 25 degrees, wind has really come up blowing about up close to 25, 26 nauts at times and we’re going along pretty close to haul speed. This may look very difficult, its not -- the only thing that I’ve to be careful of is that my boat has a small rudder and with a fair amount of sail up, I have to let the main luff up a little bit in order to maintain control of the rudder when the wind blows very strong as it is right in this particular moment. However, this is not difficult, and after you’ve done this a few times, all you have to do you is get your feet raised and hang on, on to the wheel whether it’s a wheel that you have or whether you have tiller steering doesn’t matter. Tiller steering is actually much easier when the wind is blowing hard because you don’t have to move the tiller anywhere as much as I have to move the wheeling in order to keep the boat moving in more or less a straight line.
It’s accelerating that’s the best word for it. Otherwise, right in this situation (Voice break) you know I’ve Mother Nature to content, what Mother Nature is driving the strain. Right now, it’s causing this boat to, you know to do things are causing me to take actions to either go over comment or change it or cooperate with it or whatever we’ll get the job done. When the boat gets up on its top side and gets you’re rolling along, its wonderful experience.
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