Cruising as a Way of Life - part II

This engineless approach to cruising also reintroduces another pleasure, largely forgotten by many sailing people nowadays. It is the enjoyment of that richly thrilling moment when, after a prolonged calm, the sails first lift and swell to a hint of a breeze. The joy of laying aside one's oar to ghost effortlessly forward under drawing canvas was one of the great delights of sailors from Homeric times to the late nineteenth century. We have forgotten it. If we are motoring through a calm, the very special music of that first subtle wind-induced trickle around the bow is invaribly drowned out by the engine's roar.
It appears that we live in a strange age. Not only do some people laugh at the unfamiliar sight of a cruising yacht being rowed, but a few even consider it cause for a rescue attempt. Last summer, while happily sweeping Galadriel out to sea in search of a breeze, I was overtaken by a wouldbe rescue boat that roared up alongside. When I said good morning and politely declined their offer of help, the couple in the poweboat asked med what, precisely, I was doing. I answered that I was rowing.
"Gosh", the young fellow said, "I've never seen that before!"
I love oil lamps and hate the glaring excess of electrics. Even the riding light that my little sloop carries while anchored overnight is a small oil lamp. It can be seen from a distance of half a mile, yet it doesn't so grossly flood the anchorage with glare that one cannot enjoy the delicate glitter of starlight overhead. I'm afraid that my love of fellow yachtsmen fails altogether when their 500-watt masthead lights turn a dark, lonely cove into something like a floodlit supermarket.
My fetish for primitive lamps, however, seems to amaze many sailing people who come aboard. They ask if oil lighting isn't dangerous to one's health. When a friend complained of the smell of kerosene, I replied that, to me, it is the smell of freedom.
The essence of small-boat cruising is freedom from fuss and bother, of which there is plenty in our everyday lives ashore. A tiny, featherweight cruiser is the most trouble-free craft afloat. Many of my sailing friends have a mortal dread of going aground. If their 5-ton fin keelers get hung up on the rocks, disaster is a virtual certainty. By contrast, when Galadriel goes aground (as she does frequently), she sits comfortably on her shallow twin keels in two feet of water. To get her off, I simply jump over the stern and lift her clear.
Everything aboard my boat is crude and simple. If a boom fitting breaks, I just make another. The originals, after all, were merely handwrought bits of steel, rather than fancy items purchased in a yacht chandlery. If I drop a heavy anchor onto a bunk cushion and split it open at the seams, it doesn't matter. It's easy to redo my own rough handstitching. When her bottom needs a coat of antifouling paint, it is a simple matter to paddle her over to the beach and go gently aground. The cost of upkeep is almost nothing - an essential prerequisite to carefree sailing.
The shallow draft has introduced me to a special cruising pleasure denied to larger, deeper craft. I have discovered that British Columbia's rocky coast abounds in tiny cracks and crannies into which I can paddle my little boat. Inside, in water that may only be a couple of feet deep (and totally dried out at low water), I luxuriate in a private anchorage, while more conventional yachts cluster together in droves in the more usual anchoring spots.
Occasionally, I have watched a larger yacht, at the end of a cruise or a daysail, tacking back and forth in the harbour for an hour while someone tries without success to start the engine. Without power, of course, the owner of a big heavy-displacement vessel dares not to attempt the entry into his berth among the ranks in a crowded marina. My little pocket cruiser, on the other hand, works her way handily under sail into the thightest corner. If she does happen to drift out of control in a cramped spot, a gentle shove with the foot is enough to redirect her miniscule inertia and avoid collision.
Yet a little boat ot good design can be a fine offshore sailor, too, as is evidenced by Shane Acton's circumnavigation of the world in a Caprice class sloop like my own. While he was in Australia, Acton was offered the chance of an unbelievable trade - a new 30-foot ocean cruising yacht in exchange for his intriguing little 18-footer. He turned down the offer.
Like Shane Acton, I own a simple little boat that I know intimately and love dearly. It would be sheer folly ever to exchange her for the illusory attractions of something grander.

Philip Teece

Reprint: Cruising as a way of Life

Another of Phil Teece's articles in reprint. This one was first published in Small Boat Journal #68, 1989.

It is a calm summer evening just at sunset. In the stillness characteristic of this hour, among the wooded islands of the British Columbia coast, my little sloop Galadriel lies motionless on an inverted mirror-image of herself.
Her intended anchorage for the night, a sand-fringed lagoon on the lee side of a small densely treed isle, lies less than half a mile distant. If she had an engine, I might perhaps be tempted to ruin the magical quietude of this place with its jarring din.
Instead I step forward along her narrow side deck and unship the 10-foot sweep from its upright stowage position on one of the lower shrouds. Without hurry, I drop its long leather collar into place in the oarlock beside the cockpit. Then, standing with the tiller between my knees for control, I begin a slow, quiet oarstroke that moves the boat forward, gradually gathering a sedate knot-and-a-quarter speed in the direction of the cove. At this pace, it will take me perhaps half an hour to reach the spot on which I shall drop anchor. But why should I want to get there any faster?
Later, as my little ship lies peacefully in the gathering darkness of the lagoon, I go below for supper. While a can of stew warms up on the single-burner gimballed primus stove, I light the lamp. The tiny cabin glows warmly (and, in fact, actually warms up) in the mellow light of my bulkhead lamp. This small kerosene lamp is all that is needed to flood the compact space with a glory of light. Although supper is a primitive meal eaten from the billycan in which it was heated, it provides one luxury: Cleanup afterwards takes only about 20 seconds.
After the evening meal, I recline on my bunk with a good book. The ceiling is a scant few inches above my head, but I feel as comfortable as pampered royalty. The flickering orange glow that illuminates my page reflects dimly from painted wooden surfaces and casts deep shadows in the angles behind hull-frames and deckbeams. As I lie on the handsewn cushion of my bunk, my feet project forward almost into the open chainlocker in the forepeak. In fact, my living space is small enough so that, without moving from where I lie so comfortably, I can reach across to the galley counter to grasp my cup of coffee.
The style of cruising described above is unfamiliar to many yachtsmen of the 1980s. In recent years, I have encountered increasing numbers of people to whom a "small" boat is something of 27 to 30 feet in overall length, with a powerful engine, electrical wiring for lights and other elecronic gadgetry, and a built-in dinette and bar. To a surprising majority of the cruising fraternity whom I meet in various West Coast anchorages, my spartan 18-foot sloop is an object of dismay and even disapoval.
Yet, nearly two decades after her launching, Galadriel still represents my dream of the perfect boat for adventure. Her smallness and simplicity have become my way of life afloat. A shoa-draft design ny British naval architect Robert Tucker, she is a twin-keeled Caprice class sloop, a little over 18 feet in length and 1,600 pounds displacement. She sails well (a fact I learned fully when I finally gave up using and outboard motor), and she can be moved surprisingly easily by oarpower.
I enjoy depending on sail and oar. In more than one emergency situation, I have found that an outboard engine has failed to start; my long spruce sweep has never given that problem. The technique of rowing a vessel with a single long oar is onethat takes considerable practice. When the oarsman develops skill in balancing the turning-moment of the oarstroke against exactly the right counterpressure of the helm, he enjoys a great sense of physical satisfaction. There is a sort of pleasurable Zen of rowing with a sweep.
To be continued.

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