Equipping a cruising boat is an intensely personal matter. The choices are many and varied and in the end they say a lot about what kind of cruiser you are. Rarely do two cruising boats match up when it comes to performance, budgets, available space, energy consumption, and the host of other factors that go into making each boat unique. Some crews have a higher tolerance for discomfort and don’t think twice about clambering forward to wrestle sails in the middle of the night. Others seek to make life bounding over the waves as much like the life on land that they have left and need a little more help from sail handling gear.
During our travels we’ve seen all makes and model of cruising boats, some crewed by sailors that didn’t have two nickels to rub together, owning boats that reflected it. On the other end of the spectrum were those who couldn’t spend their money fast enough for their allotted time on this earth and seemed to have one of everything hanging off the stern rail. With these small caveats out of the way our time at sea has fostered some strong emotional attachments to some of the gear aboard our 35-foot Sparkman and Stephens-designed
Althea based on their performance over several thousands of miles through the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. In some semblance of order, here is what we wouldn’t be cruising without.
1. Dodger and Enclosure Our route from Charleston, SC, to the Bahamas, BVIs and down to Venezula often bore the full brunt of sailing close-hauled against the trade winds. More often than not spray flying over the bow was a fixed feature of this stretch of ocean. Twenty to 25 knots is pretty much an average day of sailing between islands in much of the Eastern Caribbean, and the accompanying currents found snaking their way between the gaps can make for some boisterous going in choppy water. The more time you can be out of the sun, wind, and spray the drier and more comfortable you’ll be. The power of the sun in the tropics is something that can’t be overestimated. Week-long charters who soak up the sun are viewed as a bit batty to those who spend entire seasons in the sun-drenched area. Getting out of the sun is a priority, and sailing while staying in the shade helps stave off that sun-struck feeling.
And in foul weather, the more rested crew is the more alert crew and hopefully better decisions will follow. We must have thanked the makers of our dodger and full enclosure hundreds of times out loud to each other and I still have ambitious plans to call them up and let them know what a great job they did. One thing about our dodger is that it is entirely waterproof, having been made from a type of Sunbrella known as SeaMark. This is a vinyl backed Sunbrella that is impervious to spray. It’s more expensive, but I have to say that it’s worth it—the dodger and enclosure are eight years old and still looking great and keeping the crew dry. That’s not to say that we didn’t replace zippers, a bunch of common sense fasteners, and snaps that had finally corroded into oblivion after one too many dousings in salt water.
A basic knowledge of how to do these tasks will serve the new cruiser well, and a capable sewing machine is likewise a good investment. Sailing at night in an enclosure does affect visibility, and from time to time we had to unzip the side panels and scan the horizon for ships. But the benefits of keeping warm and dry far outweigh this handicap.
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2. Windvane/ Autopilot It’s one of the great ironies of going cruising. Before you couldn’t spend enough time at the helm steering. But structure your life around sailing around parts of the world and the last thing you want to do is steer a boat for several days at a time.
I’d say over the two years it took to get from California to the East Coast and the year and a half it took coming back to the Pacific that 90 percent of the time if there was enough wind to sail, the wind vane was steering. If there was no wind, our below deck hydraulic autopilot took over.
The only thing worse than having no wind is having to steer the boat by hand under power, so having both is not just a redundant backup, but more of a necessity if you want to preserve sanity when the wind stops for two days or so and the sun bakes down on your tender skull like it did on our passage from Isla Mujeres on the Caribbean side of Mexico back to the Dry Tortugas off Florida.
Our current windvane is an external rudder with a trim tab and a horizontally flopping vane made by Autohelm. Since our boat is a center cockpit, this arrangement works nicely because there are no lines to run to the steering wheel the way there would be in a servo pendulum type. With the sails trimmed and the boat balanced, we lock off the ship’s main rudder and let the wind vane work its magic.
If you’ve never had the chance to harness the wind’s power to steer the boat, it’s a fairly amazing process to watch the first time. There’s enough energy in the wind to move the boat thousands of miles, so it makes intuitive sense to harness this to steer the boat as well. It’s not uncommon for those sailing under the windvane for the first time to gaze off the stern for hours in mesmerized wonder. There is suddenly a lot more time to do other things like read, cook, navigate.
The biggest disadvantage is having to leave the cockpit to adjust the vane, especially when the wind and seas are building, but experience has proven that it’s good to get up and look around anyway, size up sail trim and rigging, and in general just make the rounds everynow and then to ensure no critical piece is about to go chattering over the side.
On the plus side of having an external rudder is the ability to have a spare rudder to steer the boat should something go wrong. There is some minor tweaking that has to be done occasionally with the arrangement. The autopilot and the wind vane don’t get a long together. One must be on, the other must be off. And if you think backing up a sailboat is interesting with one rudder, two rudders can make life even more so. Luckily for us, most of the time cruising is spent going forward.
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| "There comes a wind velocity where no amount of pulling on the chain will help." |
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3. Windlass On our first boat, we didn’t have a
windlass, and anchoring was a hands-on affair. The boat was small, so, when the wind was cooperating, the loads were relatively manageable. On our second, larger boat we had a manual windlass
—and felt like we had been inducted into the civilized world. There comes a wind velocity where no amount of pulling on the chain will help. The engine can be used to drive the boat against the wind while some worker bee on the bow heaves mightily on the
anchor rode, but a windlass makes life a lot easier and safer. Our Simpson Lawrence manual windlass has done superbly, despite the fact that it has been overdue on a good greasing for sometime now. The only complaint we had was the handle that came with it. Cruise long enough and undoubtedly you’ll see this style of manual windlass being used by people down on their hands and knees, wielding a two-foot bronze bar to lift the
anchor.
One day while in St. Maarten we went into a chandlery and a light bulb came on. There was a five-foot long stainless steel handle. We happened to have a one-inch diameter piece of stainless tubing on the boat, promptly flattened one end with a sledgehammer, put a grip on the other end and voila!--a new and improved windlass handle that we can use while standing which makes raising and lowering the anchor easier and probably safer as well. We don’t really have an opinion on electric windlasses, since we’ve never cruised with them, but stepping on a switch and having your anchor magically appear has its appeals as well.
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4. Laptop Computer Well, here’s one that I never thought I would put on the must-go-cruising-with-list, but the ubiquitous and efficient quality of computers has changed the nature of cruising in a number of ways that go beyond just DVD swapping and CD burning at anchor.
We’re solid in our belief of paper charts being irreplaceable, but using computer navigational software—we used both Nobletec and the Cap’n—in tandem with our GPS results in instant plotting information that can tell you if you’re going to make that point or going to have to tack one more time to get around it. Computer charts are also useful for planning the next leg of your voyage. And then there is the ability to hook the computer up to the SSB to receive weather faxes. While we listened to the SSB nets in the Caribbean and Mexico daily for weather and safety information, having a visual weather map in front of you aids in whether you decide to make it out of the harbor you‘ve been pinned down at for the last week, or whether you stay hunkered down. Finally, composing e-mails on the boat and sending them through SSB or taking them ashore to send through the many Internet cafes that now dot the globe is another time and money saver.
The downside is the dependence such a magical device fosters. While we kept ours in a watertight Pelican case, our laptop went the way of many laptops that live on actively cruising boats and crashed irreparably somewhere off Costa Rica. Luckily 90 percent of the digital photos we took had been burned on discs and sent home with friends, but that said we’re still missing photos of our most recent Panama Canal transit. Digital cameras are also another plus. In some of the more remote islands being able to take a picture and print it out for the locals is a big icebreaker and something that they don’t have access to everyday. At times we thought we’d become a floating photo studio and managed to make a lot of smiles along the way.
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5. Binoculars with Compass When you’re tired and the seas are bouncy and visibility could be better the sight of a ship on the horizon isn’t necessarily a welcome thing. Cruise ships, tankers, fishing boats, and other craft with dubious running lights were frequent on our trip, and the ability to identify their course early on is critical. Rather than just eye-ball it, since we didn’t have a radar, a pair of binoculars with a bearing compass inside went a long way to discerning whether our course would pass safely to whatever ship that may be heading your way.
Our Nikon 7x50s worked superbly and gave us an early heads-up on whether the bearing to the traffic in question was changing and how fast it was doing so, meaning we would clear, or whether the bearing to the ship was remaining a constant, meaning we were on a collision course. We don’t have a radar and ironically never felt that we needed one until now. Our new home port in Ventura, CA, has fog frequently in the summer, and the big shipping lane between here and one of the main attractions—the Channel Islands national marine park some 15 miles offshore—makes acquiring one at the top of the wish list.
There’s a lot that we didn’t cruise with including a watermaker, radar, hot water, pressurized water, an anchor wash down, onboard email, wind generator, solar panel array, dinghy davits, a hard bottom inflatable dinghy with a huge outboard, and roller furling, just to name a few. Some of these will be on the next voyage, some will likely remain perpetually on the wish list. Next month, I’ll add the rest to our top 10 list.
