Excellent taste in boats

CAMPION MARINE is a Canadian boat manufacturer that seems to be doing just fine in a difficult market. Campion has been making recreational boats for more than 40 years in Kelowna, British Columbia, and now sells its products practically all over the world, even in China.

But what interests me most about Campion (which, incidentally is Canada’s biggest fiberglass boatbuilder) is the fact that its boats are edible. At least I think they are. In a press release the company proclaimed:

Campion Marine Inc., Canadas largest fiberglass boat builder, is proud to announce that it will become the first boat builder in the world to manufacture all of its boats with Envirez®, a renewably sourced bio-derived resin from Ashland Performance Materials.
Envirez® resin is the first resin that uses a substantial amount of soybean oil and corn derived ethanol in its formulation.
So now, if you run out of food in mid-ocean, you can eat your boat. You’ll have to spit out the fiberglass strands, of course, otherwise they’ll get stuck in your teeth; and the diet of soybean and ethanol may start to pale after a week or two; but at least you won’t starve.
The only decision left to make is: Where do you start eating? Somewhere above the waterline, obviously. Not the cockpit floor, but maybe the coamings. Or perhaps the toerails if your crew wash their feet regularly.
The edible boat ushers in a new era of yachting and I look forward to the first book of recipes. Transom stew. Corn à la Cockpit. Poopdeck Purée. Pintle and Gudgeon Potage. It all sounds so delicious I can hardly wait to buy an old wreck of a Campion and invite my friends to a boat tasting.
Today’s Thought
This has got to be the most expensive food ever laminated.
— Bryan Miller, NY Times, (on Manhattan’s Casual Quilted Giraffe restaurant)
Tailpiece
“Don’t you think he looks like me, nurse?”

“Yes, sir, but don’t let it worry you.  All new-born babies look strange for a while.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

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Many thanks to many boats

 

BOATS I HAVE OWNED have taught me a lot in my lifetime. I guess I ought to be giving thanks to them right now. So, OK, thanks to:

My International sliding seat canoewhose name I have happily forgotten. She taught me how ancient Roman army catapults worked. Every time a gust came along I was catapulted off the sliding seat and over the boom into the drink.

Shane, a 14-foot Sprog one-design. My thanks to her for teaching me that having a fast boat doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll win races. It needs cunning and deviousness as well.

M’aidez, an 11-foot International Mirror Class dinghy, for alerting me to the fact that you should never name your boat M’aidez if you ever want to call anybody on VHF radio.

Mother’s Ruin, another Mirror, taught me how to wage  psychological warfare against racing competitors. Old Band-Aids stuck on a brand new mainsail seemed to distract them greatly as I sailed past.

Messy, another Mirror, taught me the valuable lesson that there are various forms of polyester resin, at least one of which will not cure if you don’t exclude air from its surface.  Her taped seams never got hard, never accepted paint, so I deliberately gave her a splodgy paint job and painted her name on her sides with a whitewash brush.

Trapper, a C&C 27, deserves my thanks for raising my social status at the yacht club.  Everybody admired her looks, if not my racing results.  A sweet boat.

Freelance, a Performance 31, by Lavranos, carried me and my family to a new life in America and taught me how to lie ahull in 50-knot winds off the Cape of Storms.

Square One, yet another Mirror, was a wreck I found in Los Angeles. She taught me how to restore a wooden boat in a garage in an apartment block without alerting the tenants directly above.  I learned their habits, and did my banging and sawing while they were showering or listening to loud TV. Nobody reported me to the fierce landlady.

Square One II. Yep, a Mirror again. Another wreck, this time in Seattle. I learned that I could

use an epoxy paste to replace a whole ply of marine plywood that fell off the starboard topsides. I was very proud of that repair job.

Tagati was a Santana 22 that showed us the glories of Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands and the Canadian Gulf Islands. Fast, simple and easily handled. I spent 13 months restoring her and should never have sold her.

Jabula, a Cape Dory 25D, took us around Vancouver Island on a six-week trip and allowed us to to meet an Oregonian cruising couple who gave us their recipe for gravlox salmon, which became our most-requested dish ever.

Sangoma, a Cape Dory 27,  took us around Vancouver Island again and taught me that you can  tow a heavy-displacement full-keel sailboat for two miles behind a small dinghy in a calm if you know how to scull with one oar over the transom. Yes, our engine broke down, but I got her into a small port from which a friendly Canadian boat towed us 10 miles to the area’s only mechanic.

Eclipse, a Cal 20, one of Gary Mull’s finest, taught me that I don’t like outboard engines that work in small wells let into the cockpit. She was a champion sailor, but I couldn’t stand the idea of her propeller protruding beneath the hull and causing drag all the time.

And finally, I have to mention Tokoloshe, a 10-foot, narrow-gutted, fiberglass fishing skiff that served as tender for the last four boats I owned. She was an unfinished mongrel of a boat, but without peer for seaworthiness. We towed her for thousands of miles, including hundreds in the open Pacific, and she never gave us a moment’s worry. Perhaps it was because I warned her that if she ever gave us trouble in a heavy following sea, I wouldn’t hesitate to cast her loose. I give thanks that It was a threat I never had to carry out.

Today’s Thought

So once in every year we throng

Upon a day apart,

To praise the Lord with feast and song

In thankfulness of heart.

— Arthur Guiterman, The First Thanksgiving

 Tailpiece

"Why did that sailor buy drinks for all those girls?"

"He likes to have a port in every sweetheart."

 

 

                                            

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Design flaw in small boats

I HAVE TO ADMIT that in this column we don’t often talk about sex in small boats. Regrettably, the subject is also much neglected by the yachting media in general. It was obviously also neglected by yacht designers in the past. Aboard those narrow-gutted, full-keeled little cruisers there was never room to swing even half a cat, never mind roger a woman. The priority in those days was to make boats efficient at sailing, rather than reproducing the human race. Go figure.

Nevertheless, to get back to the original point, if we intend to live in a democracy that defends our constitutional right to free speech and plentiful sex, then sex on small boats needs to be discussed with openness, frankness, dignity, and as few blushes as I can manage. If the kids are offended (as they should be if you brought them up properly) just send them off in the dinghy to play on the beach somewhere until we’re through.

It is perhaps not irrelevant to this discussion to note that Lin and Larry Pardey’s long-running book, The Capable Cruiser, shows Lin topless on the dust-jacket cover. She is perched on the main boom at the mast, pointing to something on the horizon, dressed only in a long wrap-around skirt, the kind known as a Polynesian pareu.

It was all very well for the Pardeys, of course. They don’t have any kids. How do couples with kids manage on a small boat, I wonder, the kind that doesn’t have a double stateroom aft. You can’t send them off in the dinghy everytime you feel the urge. 

Traditionally, and in the absence of passion-killing ankle-biters, the V-berth was the passion pit. But most V-berths on small yachts are difficult to get into. You have to back in and fold yourself in half like a pocket knife. By the time you’ve got your limbs sorted out you’ve sprained two sacroiliac tendons, you’re exhausted, and the last thing on your mind is a bit of nookies. When people who live on small boats talk about safe sex, it’s not disease they’re thinking of, it’s broken bones, pulled muscles, and strained backs.

I suppose that if you’ve ever made love in the back of a car, you’ll probably find a V-berth roomy enough. Maybe. I’m not sure. To tell you the truth, I grew up in a country where the back seat of a car had room only for a large grocery bag, so I have never had the pleasure, if it is a pleasure. I now do have a car with a large back seat, but I’m not as flexible as I used to be and my bones are more brittle. I can’t do the athletic contortions that I’m told are necessary. So I guess I’ll never know.

When I was much younger and more flexible I fantasized about those lascivious blonde Swedish girls who (rumor had it) were always cunningly letting themselves be chased through the woods by young men waving birch branches. Coincidentally, a male friend with similar dreams bought a 17-foot dinghy in England. It had a small cabin on it. So I met him over there, and we set sail for the woods of Sweden via the English Channel and the continental canals.

But, alas, because of too much non-sexual dallying on the way, it took us three months to get from France to Holland, and the onset of winter drove us back to England, broke and very frustrated. We never did pause to wonder where we would make love if we actually did catch a couple of those lovely Swedish nymphs. There wasn’t room on our boat for the birch branches, never mind the nymphs.

On really small boats you may have to do it standing up with your head out of the hatch. In a crowded anchorage, that means you have to assume a look of calm nonchalance while you ostensibly scan the horizon for signs of storm clouds or something. In the interests of maintaining this little deception, you should not scream or roll your eyeballs too far back in your head. Other nearby sailors, the crafty devils, are very quick to notice things like that and make their own deductions.

In these modern times, while the hoi polloi are concentrating on safer sex, small-boat sailors are still searching for better sex. It’s a sad reflection on the state of yacht design. The naval architects have failed us. Maybe WE should go ashore in the dinghy, find some friendly bushes, and strand the kids on the boat while we think about the solution.

Today’s Thought

Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages.

— William J. Brennan, Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court, 24 Jun 57

Tailpiece

“Sorry lady, bad news. I just ran over one of your roosters in the road out there. I feel real bad about it and I’d like to replace him.”

“Well sure, just as you wish, mister. You’ll find the henhouse next to the barn.”

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Dealing with heavy weather

THE WAY OF A SHIP in the sea is not as great a mystery as the Bible makes it out to be. Most of us can understand that a boat left to its own resources in heavy seas will tend to adopt a position that’s roughly broadside on to the wind.

Most keelboats will settle that way, and be quite happy, when all sail is taken down. Often, there’s a tendency, especially with sloops, for the bow to drift downwind a bit, which causes the hull to gather way and forereach. You can counteract that by lashing the helm to leeward, so that every time she tries to go forward the rudder will point her up into the wind and stop her in her tracks.  This is known as lying ahull, and works fine until conditions get so bad that your boat is being lifted by large breaking waves and hurled bodily down to leeward.

Most of us can also understand that things would be better if the boat could be made to lie with the pointy end facing the oncoming waves. Then she’d be presenting a much smaller area to the force of breaking waves, and she’d be much more difficult to overturn.

The question is how do you keep her facing that way in heavy weather without the help of an engine?  If you can keep the bow still in the water, then of course she will lie downwind as if she were made fast to a post. The sea anchor, made fast at the bow, is designed to do that, to act as a post, although it’s a post that actually moves very slowly through the water. But while it works well for boats with even, shallow draft, the sea anchor won’t keep a normal keel boat pointed into the waves, no matter whether it’s a fin keeler or a full keeler.

The Pardeys, a well known and very experienced cruising couple, claim to have kept their 29-footer pointing more or less into the waves by setting a sea anchor from a bridle, with one end of the bridle attached to the bow and the other to the stern. By taking up slack on one end of the bridle or the other, you can  of course alter the way the boat lies.

I’ve never tried this, but I have serious doubts whether normal people could manage this trick. For a start, I can’t imagine how I would be able to drag a sea anchor with its mass of small lines and its 25- to 30-foot spread of parachute material across the deck and over the side to windward in a heavy gale.

So I have never tried to lie bow-on to the waves in heavy weather. My method, in a full-keeler, is simply to lie ahull with the tiller lashed to leeward, until things get too dicey, and then to run off downwind under a storm job or bare poles. You need lots of sea room to do that, of course. A fin keeler is best kept moving at all times, but this needs a fit crew.

Some boats will lie about 45 to 60 degrees off the wind with the help of a special storm mainsail. It’s cut so that a lot of its area is aft of the boat’s underwater pivot point, the center of lateral resistance, so that it tries to point her up into the waves all the time.  But most boats these days don’t come equipped with a storm main, and few of us realize that using a third reef in the working mainsail instead doesn’t cut it, because that actually moves the sail’s center of effort farther forward, instead of aft where you want it.

 Anyway, the only real way to sort out this problem is to go out in bad weather and experiment with your own boat. The best way would be to persuade some experienced sailor with a sister ship to take you offshore, hunting for a storm, and watch what he or she does to cope with heavy weather. But I’d say your chances of pulling that off are rather slim.

Today’s Thought
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

— Charles Dudley Warner, Editorial, the Hartford Courant, c. 1890

Tailpiece

Overhead at a Boy Scout meeting:

“Did you ever have one of those days when you felt just a little untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, discourteous, cowardly, and antagonistic toward those wretched old women who always wait for suckers to help them across the goddam road?”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

 

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