The ultimate nautical bookworm list

Now the season is coming to an end and winter is approaching. You have, of course already read all the Hornblowers, Bolithos and Aubreys so what is keeping you alive during the winter? Boaty magazines are not enough for the nautical bookworm. But do not despair, here is the ultimate nautical bookworm-list on the web. Over 2000 titles of Nautical fiction are to be found here, many of them with a short description of what the book is about.
Of course, lots are out of print, so a visit to amazon.com's used book section or even a physical used bookstore is in order.

Here is the link.

Twin Keels Shoal Havens - part III

We all look toward the distant cruising destinations of our dreams. Paradise always seems to lie in the South Pacific, or somewhere beyond Cape Horn. My little shallow-drafter, however, has given me a different point o view. When I slip into the nether world of the creeks and hidden marshes, I find that peace and joy lie as close as a mile or two from my home mooring.
On a cruise in busy Trincomali Channel, among British Columbia's coastal islands, Galadriel passes the floating circus of popular Montague Harbor, to dry out in the serenity of a gravelly basin on tiny Hall Island. There she spends her night in a mini-cove only a boat length in radius. As I watch a quiet sunset and listen to ravens in the branches that overhang my deck, I am grateful to the cruising guidebooks that describe this island as a non-achorage.
In the busy lagoon at Sidney Island, boats cluster in dozens along the moorings int he deepwater channel. Yet the place offers a separate world, far removed from the outboard dinghies and the transistor radios. Many a summer evening has found my little sloop ghosting under sail or paddle over the mile-long expanse of marshy flats, to fetch up eventually on the mud behind a low island at the basin's southern end. At low water, when she sits on her keels upon the broad level plain on the drying salt marsh, Galadriel might as well be alone on the surface of the moon.
These are delightful havens, and yet ut has turned out that my special Bali Ha'i is a place that lies even closer to home. Only about three nautical miles from my berth in Oak Bay on Vancouver Island, the complex little archipelago of the Chatham and Discovery Islands stretch out in an intriguing blue chain along the horizon.
This group encloses a labyrinth of shallow passages and tiny gunkholes, some of which even minimal-draft twin-keelers can enter only at the top of high water. During the intervening hours, she sits in smug solitude behind a portcullis of drying sand across the mouth of the cove, happily trapped for the duration in a private world of her own.
A few years ago a friend of mine, on his return from a global circumnavigation, anchored for a night in one of the deeper inlets among those islands, and the experience overwhelmed him. "I can't believe this place", he said, "It's just what I've sailed around the world searching for!".
His home berth, like mine, lies just a couple of miles from this unpretentious, unchonicled paradise.

By Phil Teece.

Back to part I

Twin Keels Shoal Havens - part II

Part II of this reprint by Phil Teece.

Sometimes I suspect that I am a slow learner. During my earliest years of cruising aboard Galadriel I followed the big, deep keeled boats into what might be described the guidebook anchorages. There my diminutive sloop would lie to her fathoms of chain i a depth of water sufficient at all tides to float a Grand Banks schooner. My experience of cruising in those novice days was that good anchorages were always crowded.
Eventually, however, a revelation materialized. On my way to the big harbours I frequently looked through narrow, rocky portals that led into shallow basins where, as often as not there was a foot or two of water. And I looked at my boat. Galadriel is a British Caprice class sloop, designed for use in the tidal estuaries around the English coast, where it is a common place for a boat to spend part of every day aground. Why was I not using her as she was designed to be used?
When I looked at things in this light, I realized that there is literally no place too tiny or too shallow to be a secret haven for a little twin-keeler like Galadriel. Any hole in the wall that I could look into, I could probably sail, or paddle, into.
Thus unfolded my secret cruising world, the alternative universe where one never encounters anybody else. In our crowded era, such exclusive havens are a gift to sailors willing to cruise aboard very small craft.
Yet not every shallow-draft boat will serve as a magic carpet into these hidden realms. I see a lot of small craft nowadays, many of them twin-keeled or centerboard boats, that I would not want to risk in Galadriel's regular shelters. Not every boat whose draft is a mere few inches is really a practical shoalwater cruiser.
In fact thin-water capability is not really so much a matter of draft as of design and construction. When cruising among the drying creeks and rock crannies, a boat must not only lie aground, but also occasionally endure a bit of pounding at the return of the tide. Few modern production pocket cruisers are designed to knock about aground as a normal habit. Most small bilge-keeled sailboats today haul keels that are a part of the hull molding, with the ballast poured inside. Often I have watched such craft being towed into the boatyard in a sinking condition after contact with a rock. Where a keel is an extrusion of the hull itself, a hole in the keel can fill the entire boat.
So I have learned to appreciate the qualities of the Caprice's old fashioned construction. Around England's coasts, where boats traditionally lie on moorings in estuaries that dry out at every tide, small cruisers are routinely fashioned to disdain groundings. Galadriel's twin keels are not an integral part of her hull. Each is a heavily built wood laminate shod with a 300 pound ballast shoe of bare cast iron, the whole structure bolted together through strong floors within the hull. When she grounds on stones or hard sand, the massive iron castings that make the contact with absorb the shock without harm to the hull.
A boat of this sort, whose design and strength I can trust, has been the key to exploring the infrequented shallows.

Continue to part III.

Back to part I

Reprint: Twin Keels Shoal Havens

I received a letter from former Twin Keeler editor Craig Anderson with some paper copies of articles from the old days when T-K was a paper newsletter. As those issues now are out of print he proposed re-printing them online and I will gladly oblige. The first one is by Phil Teece from Canada who sailed his little twin keeler i British Columbia on the Pacific Coast.

All afternoon I had drifted slowly up Haro Strait in a gentle following breeze. I was not alone on this long, broad waterway, which separates the Canadian Vancouver Island from the American San Juans. The perfect weather of late summer had spawned a fleet of several dozen boats, all ghosting northward in the light airs. By sundown all of us would seek our night anchorage among the nearest of British Columbia's Gulf Islands.
As evening approached, the first of the islands began to cluster around us. I wondered if I might find, somewhere, a haven in which to drop my hook in solitude, for the convivality of a thronging cove has never appealed to me. When in a mere breath of stirring air, I inched past the entrance of Sidney Island's popular lagoon, I saw that most of the fleet of larger craft had already arrived. A crush of vessels all in close ranks along the lines of mooring buoys, lay surrounded by a swarm of outboard-powered dinghies that buzzed like flies about the anchorage. To say the place seemed uninviting would be a profound understatement.
Ahead lay Portland Island, marine park. Approaching it, I saw that its principal anchorage bristled with masts. I passed by, unwilling even in the gathering dusk to end so peaceful a day in a haven so sociable. Up along that island's rocky eastern shore, however, there is a sort of notch - a gap in the wall. Only a bit wider than my boat herself with about two feet of depth at high water over a rough gravel bottom, this was a place at which no yachtsman would even glance in passing. But Galadriel is an 18-foot microcruiser fitted with twin keels that draw only two feet. When the tide withdrew from that little cranny, my tiny twin-keeler would lie happily and safely aground on the firm, stony bottom.
I drifted into that place, anchoring when my little sloop's ironshod heels just touched ground. There, during a warm glowing night at the height of the summer cruising season, I was alone, enjoying a delicious deep silence. While all the larger craft lay pressed closely together in the popluar deepwater anchorages, I had found my way into an alternative world that could easily have been on a separate planet.

Continue to part II

Silhouette blog

Ed Hughes sent us an email promoting his blog about Misty, his Silhouette Mk3. He sails her in the Solent in the UK. The blog tells the story of how he acquired the boat, restored her and now sails her. It also contains a lot of pictures and video clips.
http://www.silhouette-misty.blogspot.com/

The Learning Curve

As a consultant I have become quite familiar with the learning curve. In fact, it’s what keeps me in business.

My clients hire me, not because I know everything about their business or their technology, but because I can pick it up faster than most people. When I start on a project, lots of decisions have already been made. Almost always, the software package has been selected. Often the implementation team has been assembled. Sometimes the project methodology has been selected. Once in a while the project has actually begun.

So I seldom get to run a project from scratch. In addition to learning about the business rationale and the budget, I generally have to learn what’s been done right, what’s been done wrong, what can be fixed, and what has to be thrown out. It’s exciting and challenging.

It helps that I’m both curious and analytic. Where is the data for this application coming from? Where is it going? What kinds of business was this application designed for? What has to be done to adapt it to this business? Who needs to be kept in the loop on the project? The answers to all these questions may be different from what I expect, or even what people on the project tell me, but the answers are essential. Lots to learn!

Well, it turns out that the same learning curve applies to buying a boat; more so a used boat, and even more so a boat bought on Ebay. But that’s just what I did, so I am now climbing up yet another curve.

This one began before I bought the boat, a Ranger 26. Actually, it began many years ago, as I was researching some interesting older brands, and noticed the rave reviews of boats designed by Gary Mull. That bit of data was stored in the back of my memory, ready to pop up when I saw this boat on Ebay in the middle of the summer.

Having looked at hundreds of boats on Ebay, and having bid on a few, I felt pretty confident of what I’d bought, especially at the price I paid. But there’s nothing like the first visit to what is now your boat to get your heart started.

This time, everything worked out. A cursory inspection revealed no obvious problems except a rather chalky gelcoat. There was even a ladder lying under the boat, so I climbed aboard. Here, too, the news was mostly good. The previous owner had obviously taken good care of her.

The Lexan hatchboards, massive compared to my Alacrity’s plywood one, revealed a real saloon, not the tiny cuddy in the Alacrity, although I still couldn’t stand erect in it. And a real head, instead of a Porta-Potty. I wanted to explore everything, but first I needed to launch her so the summer storage charges would stop accumulating.

That meant some exterior work, such as removing the old name (Moon Dance) and replacing it with Greyhound. One thing I learned right away is that lettering looks much bigger on the boat than it does in the catalog.

Another thing I learned was that a fin-keeler is much easier to bottom-paint than a twin keeler – no more crawling between the trailer and the hull, painting upside down over my head. With a quick coat of anti-fouling and some cursory polishing of the topsides, I was ready to get out of the boatyard and back to my marina.

Well, almost. First I had to rig her. The genoa had a luff tape designed for the Furlex furler, but I had never raised it before, so I spent a frustrating hour unjamming the tape when I wasn’t careful enough. But it was finally up and furled, and I brought Brian, an experienced sailor, to help me get her downriver to her new home.

A good thing, too. I planned our sail to coincide with the ebb tide, figuring that we’d need help in the typical Hudson summer zephyrs. Instead we pounded through 20-knot breezes right on the nose, with the bow wave washing over the foot of the jib until I had the good sense to reef it after an hour or so. Sometimes the learning curve is pretty steep. On the other hand, I discovered quite by accident that the Barient primaries were actually two-speeds. Sometimes there is no learning curve at all.

With Greyhound safely in her berth, I really began ascending the learning curve. I discovered a wasps’ nest in the lazarette vent when I was routing the fuel lines for the outboard. Oops! I couldn’t flush the toilet until I opened the valve that lets in the seawater. Hmm! I finally discovered the water tank under one of the settees by tracing the tubing from the sink, and filled it with the hose. Awright!

Gradually, Greyhound is becoming less of a stranger and more of a friend. She sails like a dream – I can stand in the companionway while she steers herself, with only a nudge or two on the tiller with my knee to keep her on course.

There is still a lot to learn, of course. Brian got the depth sounder working, but not the knot meter, while we were sailing down the river, but I haven’t been able to get any of the electricals to work. I still have to trace all the wiring and piping under the berths and settees – who knows what I’ll find there. And I bought a plow anchor, a rode and a roller, but I haven’t figured out how or where to mount them yet.

Right now, though, I really want to learn by sailing. I want to nurse Greyhound through light breezes and push her through stiff winds. I want to singlehand as well as take out a bunch of friends. I want to see how close she will go to the wind and I want to try out my whisker pole on a run. Needless to say, I think I’ll be on this particular learning curve for a long time.