Single handed encouragement needed

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by Suijin

Related to docking, one important rule is NEVER step off the boat until it is secured unless you are ABSOLUTELY certain that doing so will allow you to complete that task with no complications, such as no wind and/or current and the boat is not moving. Ray’s tactic of using a midships cleat and winch is one way of tackling that. While it might seem simpler and far easier to jump on the dock with line in hand if it goes pear shaped you may find yourself unable to get back ON the boat and your one line inadequate to control it.

While I’m at I’ll add: beware of well meaning strangers offering to catch a line. While accepting can lead to problems when you have others on board it can lead to bigger problems when you’re alone, realize your strangers have no clue what they’re are doing or won’t listen, and the wind or current or both leave you tied to the dock and unable to bail but unsecured or in a very difficult situation.

Yep, learn't all this from sad experiences.

Almost as bad as the well-meaning but unreliable line handlers are the "pushers". You've done a great job planning the tie-up, executed the plan perfectly, everything is going smoothly your way with the boat steadily drifting into the position you need and a "pusher" grabs the bowsprit and gives it a mighty heave in the wrong direction.

[Snore]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

Yep, learn't all this from sad experiences.



Almost as bad as the well-meaning but unreliable line handlers are the "pushers". You've done a great job planning the tie-up, executed the plan perfectly, everything is going smoothly your way with the boat steadily drifting into the position you need and a "pusher" grabs the bowsprit and gives it a mighty heave in the wrong direction.

My favorite is when I throw a midship spring to the PAID dockhand, point to a piling and ask him to take a turn on it. You can tell the skilled ones as they know what you are going to do, take two turns on the piling and tie it off. The unskilled try to pull me in.

I confess —-when there is room — I have taken the foolish ones for a walk down the dock to the next piling.

This may make me bad—- but I can live with that!!!

[macman4190]

Originally Posted by sailorchic34

My little Islander 34, is two feet less beamier and three feet shorted, but only 2000 pounds less then the 37. I've single handed it pretty much 99% of the time for the last 11 years.

Just have your dock lines located for easy reach when you hop off the boat.

BTW I don't have lines led to the cockpit. Many times there is too much resistance in the lines to make it easy reefing or lowering the main., and really you have to go forward to flake the main anyway. Unless you have a furling main then your good to go.

I handle my Islander 36 this way. I anchor without a windlass. In the beginning, I picked up moorings from the bow. Later it seemed easier to grab them from the cockpit.

[jalmberg]

Originally Posted by akprb

I kind of grimised at “we even feel comfortable leaving and returning to the slip.”

Your age? Your mobility? A 37 is easy to handle under power without a bowthruster, especially the Sun Odyssey. As far as docking and maneuvering go practice, practice, practice.

So few people do this. The only time they practice is when “leaving or returning.”

A good start is resolving to cast off the lines EVERY TIME you go to the boat for any reason, motor over to the fuel dock in forward then motor back to your slip in reverse. Enter and exit your berth twice then find a different berth and hit that one twice (not literally) :-)

Set up for single handed docking is a mindset.

Methodical.

Organize, decide not to rush, remember you can abort, have an exit plan.

As to sailing, same. Get to know your systems and practice. If you have an autopilot you need little else. That will afford you all the time you need to set sails and tidy up. Leave a reef or even two in all the time for starters. I’ll assume you have roller furling. Half a genoa is fine or if off the wind leave the damn main in the bag.

Do this often as a workout. Over the course of a few weeks your fitness will improve dramatically.

Go to the gym.

Final thought on safety. Wear closed toed shoes and take each step when maneuvering INTENTIONALLY.

Solo sailing is one of the most satisfying pastimes. Enjoy it, own it........ confidence.

Excellent advice. Especially about taking the boat out frequently to practice boat handling. I was VERY uncomfortable handling our very big, long-keel 40' ketch when we first got her. But we commenced practicing with her, and after a year and a half, I can get her to do things I couldn't imagine in those early days.

[georgiah]

FWIW in my 30's I sailing an 80 ketch single handed around FL and the Bahamas. It wasn't easy at times but it was great! now at (Cough Cough) over 40 for the past 20 years... i scaled back to a Jeanneau 39i that I single hand. You can do it. Just follow the recommendations discussed above... plan and execute....

cheers
georgia

[AKA-None]

Originally Posted by macman4190

I handle my Islander 36 this way. I anchor without a windlass. In the beginning, I picked up moorings from the bow. Later it seemed easier to grab them from the cockpit.

This is great advice

[John_Trusty]

I fully agree with the great advice above, but let me make a point about safety. If you are hurt or fall off the boat you are totally screwed. This doesn't mean that you should not single-hand, but you must be extremely careful. Consider the toe rail as the top of a 500-foot cliff - there is no Undo key! A personal locator beacon (PLB) costs a couple hundred bucks and is the size of a pack of cigarettes. Buy one, and secure it to your PFD, which you always, always wear from the moment your foot leaves the dock. Make sure your equipment is maintained well. Even if you're "just daysailing" you have no Plan B to fall back on. Consider it like going to sea for a passage. I don't want to scare you, just remember that single-handing also means self-rescue if something goes wrong. Take prudent precautions, then go enjoy your day.

[Suijin]

Related to safety I’ll add one admonition: slow down and be deliberate and mindful about everything you do with respect to the rig and moving about the boat. Reefing can wait a minute or two or three while you plan and prepare. If the weather is fine and you’re walking the side deck without a odd or tether, focus on what you’re doing and keep a hand for the boat.

While falling off the boat is A Very Bad Thing, so is slipping and banging your head on a winch, or getting your fingers caught in a line, or god forbid not watching the boom. 99% of the ways a boat can kill you can be largely eliminated by just slowing down. And it’s supposed to be relaxing anyway, right?

[Tillsbury]

Originally Posted by Suijin

As someone who lives aboard and single hands a boat with everything led back to the cockpit I disagree that it is among the most important things or even desirable.

Not only does it make for masses of rope in the cockpit, but it introduces a significant amount of friction, particularly to halyards. And unless you have single line reefing, you have to go forward to the mast to secure a cringle to the gooseneck, then return to tension the luff.

If this is the case, then I can see why it’d be a pain. But it doesn’t have to be that bad. With well-maintained ball bearing slides and a dyneema halyard, I can easily raise the main on my 50-footer by hand from the helm, until the last foot or two where I need the winch. The last block at the bottom of the mast and the slight redirection from the organiser are minimal additions to the friction of the system. Usually, of course, I’m raising it with the foot controls while steering to stay into the wind, so friction is no big deal but there’s no need to overload the winches.

Single-line reefing means easy reefing from the cockpit, and as long as you have marks set up on your main halyard you can dump it to the correct position very quickly, haul in on the reefing lines, then tension the halyard back up all in less than a minute.

As I said, it’s all about setting the boat up for single-handing. Similarly, changing the lazyjacks to a system where I can tension and release them from the cockpit makes life that much easier.

I try to make it so that I don’t have to leave the cockpit unless there’s a problem.

[Tillsbury]

Originally Posted by Suijin

While I’m at I’ll add: beware of well meaning strangers offering to catch a line. While accepting can lead to problems when you have others on board it can lead to bigger problems when you’re alone, realize your strangers have no clue what they’re are doing or won’t listen, and the wind or current or both leave you tied to the dock and unable to bail but unsecured or in a very difficult situation.

Definitely! A friend of mine told me of his trick: shout out to the well-meaning stranger your thanks, but that you’re practicing single-handed mooring at the moment. This gets them out of the way without being unnecessarily rude (as they will often be your neighbours).

The biggest snarl-ups I’ve ever had while mooring were when someone was trying to help and I let them.

[hellosailor]

Electric winches, bigger winches, better winch handles, there are many ways you can try to physically overpower the boat, but the real advantage is that you can probably out THINK the boat. Planning well ahead (i.e. hanging the fenders when you are still well clear of the marina and have plenty of searoom, or dropping sail ten minutes away and motoring in) are all very workable.

I'd also suggest getting in touch with Garhauer and Harken. Both will gladly go over how your boat is rigged, and offer suggestions for how to change rigging in order to make it easier to single-hand the boat. Some digital pix showing them what you've got, and telling them what you'd prefer (i.e. everything back to the helm?) should get you some good advice.

[JohnAdams]

Single-handing in close quarters is easiest with a tiller, in my experience. With a wheel, even with auto helm and a cockpit mainsheet/traveller, you can find you're outside the workspace at the very moment you need to be inside it.

Practice helps but never quite compensates for the immediacy of knee-steering a tiller while handling winches. More planning is required with a wheel and reefing early is more important. You need to be on top of hoisting and reefing the main alone, too.

Fatigue is something else that needs to be managed when passage making, especially if conditions are...interesting. You can find an entire day has gone by and you've not eaten anything, forgotten to go to the toilet and had no time to think of anything but the sailing.

A key breakthrough IMO, will be discovering how to quickly, easily and safely stop your boat. With a modern hull-form, this is likely to include reefing the main and dousing the headsail entirely if conditions are too fresh to lie at near right angles to the weather. It's easier to write this out in a sentence than it is to achieve in 20-plus knots, at night.

There's good advice up-thread. Practice is important. You might also take a mate along with express instructions not to intervene in the learning stages.

[leboyd]

Here's a youtube channel where he only (and safely IMHO) solo sails. He has a number of "how to" videos on docking, tacking, etc. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEZ...6flqA0q_EEDDBQ

I really like the calm nature of Patrick. Others may find him not exciting enough.

[Hasbeen]

Early in our partnership I gave my wife to be a demonstration. We were sailing down wind 98n about 8/10 knots of breeze, into an area with lots of moored boats. I was down to just the main, about 400 yards out & she was getting very nervous. This was in the backblocks of Broken Bay, near Sydney, with virtually no current to complicate things.


She had raced dinghies as a girl, & sailed quite a bit with people who would drop all sail a mile out & motor into any even slightly confined area. I on the other hand could go for weeks without starting the engine. To give her some confidence in how easy it is to handle a good yacht, I dropped the main, & asked her to make us a coffee, as I lashed it down.


After the boat stopped, about beam onto the wind we sat in the cockpit drinking our coffee. She became visually more relaxed as the boat drifted very very slowly towards the mooring area. We had finished our coffee with the yacht still 300 yards from the moored boats.


This was the best lesson I ever gave anyone. She realised that there is usually no great hurry. That if you plan ahead, & take your time doing things properly, at a suitable slow speed, boat handling becomes a pretty easy pleasure to be enjoyed, not worried about.


I did over 13,000 nautical miles single handed in that yacht, with only one difficult night. Caught in a particularly violent thunder storm one night just off the Queensland coast, I dropped the gear & drifted for about 3/4 hour, during this the halliards became wrapped around each other & the rigging. Not a big problem if I hadn't dropped & broken the spotlight.


Neither of my torchers were really strong enough to give me a good vision of the halliards to see how to get them untangled. I ultimately got them sorted, & sailed on into Bundaberg, where I bought 2 spot lights & a couple of good torches the next day. Single handing is really not much more difficult, once you have confidence in yourself, plan ahead, & take your time.

[markpierce]

Consider a trawler.