Hauling out

Winter haul-out is a melancholy time; the final admission that, this year, there will be no more sailing... no more anchoring in quiet and beautiful places, no random encounters with big beasties from the deep. This winter, Briongloid will get new pintles & gudgeons, and maybe a few electrical tweaks to satisfy her owner's fantasies of hot drinks in cold places.

In compensation for having to leave the water, I did get to participate in the small adventure that is the haul-out. I'm aware that city-folk hire full-time experts who simply crane the vessel straight out of the water and deposit it neatly on a trailer or a stand. Where I grew up, the ritual is practiced in an older and more character-building and ingenuity-testing form, and this last weekend, my Briongloid experienced this form for the first time.

This haul-out went relatively smoothly, but not too smoothly (that would be boring). The local haul-out wizard and myself used van power, muscle power and ultimately an interesting grapnel+outboard engine technique to get the trailer into about 6 feet of water. Briongloid was towed on with an anchor laid out astern to check her way (boats don't have brakes!). Unfortunately, she landed just slightly off-centre on the trailer, missing the trough that normally holds her keel. I did try to fix this (setting a personal speed record for time taken to change into a wet-suit), swimming down to hold the trailer and kick the keel (it has worked before), but she was already too well settled (we had used the van/rope combination to haul the trailer higher on the slip, not a reversible procedure), but ultimately, it was not serious balance problem, and had the advantage of allowing us to clean beneath the keel.

The keel: ah yes. The one part of the boat I couldn't reach to anti-foul before launch. I knew the result would not be pretty, but... wow! After 4 months afloat, the bottom of the keel was encrusted with sea-life. Most prominent were several kilos of mussels - which I seriously considered saving for the pot, until I remembered how close to lots of very toxic paint they had grown. There were also several mysterious animals that were quite transparent - oblong, featureless, with a small yellow structure inside. When squeezed, they squirted. I asked the haul-out wizard their name; he said a local boat man had called them "pissers" - but this wasn't the actual Linnean name. I was amazed to find a relatively large and completely static animal I've never seen before in water I've spent quite a bit of time snorkeling in.

Funny thing about that haul-out: technically, it is mere drudgery, part of the price of owning a sailing boat. This one ate up some hours on a sunny flat-calm Sunday, and involved some moderately heavy manual work, a few good chances to get a nasty crush injury, and at certain points I was cold and wet. Oddly enough, I really enjoyed the whole thing. Water Rat has a point about messing about in boats.

The Wrecking of Briongloid

The call came late in the evening from an unfamiliar number; a voice I had never heard before told me that Briongloid (Irish for "dream") was hard aground the rocks outside her home cove. Several hurried phone calls later, I was on the road to the coast, racing through the darkness in convoy with a hastily press-ganged brother-in-law, trying beat the water to our precious boat, and take the salvage opportunity presented by the approaching high tide.

A few miles down the road, the dash was ended by another call; a crew from a local boatyard had got her off. Too late to do any good now, we turned for home.

~

The next day, I saw her. Back on the trailer she had left so recently, her bottom paint still brush-fresh, but her hull now sadly battered, the smooth swell of her hull now sadly gouged and scraped, with cracks that penetrated the hull below the waterline. The rudder, refurbished mere weeks ago, smashed to matchwood, only fragments remaining attached to the gudgeons and the tiller. Inside, the flexing of her hull had cracked the interior. Below, a sinister crack ran right around the keel.

Not good.

Re-Launch

In which the saga of the near-sinking is concluded

In brazen defiance of ancient nautical tradition, the owner of the boatyard called with the news no boat-owner expects: repairs complete on time and under budget! Briongloid would be returning to the water on exactly the promised day.

~

On a calm and sunny Saturday, I found Briongloid floating calmly on the river by the boatyard, rafted to a fishing launch which itself was moored at a pontoon, her bilges drier than I could remember them. The tide was just right for escaping down-river - dead low, with the mud banks high, dry, and - crucially - visible. I ached to get Briongloid and her deep fin keel safely away from this alien place; you can't beat a fin keel for sailing into the wind on the open sea, but the same keel is a fatal vulnerability when aground on a mud bank (because if the water level should drop further, the boat will simply fall over, then flood when the water returns).

Before I attempted to get Briongloid down river, I had first to board with her dinghy and crew. The initial obstacle was the ramp to the pontoon - on this unusually low tide, it was as steep as a domestic staircase but with low-profile battens in place of steps. To my crew (my parents, combined age 144) it had something of the aspect of the north face of the Eiger. I made the first trip with a deflated dinghy (45 kg) on my back, descending backwards with hands on rails, as if using a ladder, then repeated the trip twice more, guiding my crew individually. They were too polite to say it, but I'm morally certain that they were reconsidering their decision to start a family.

~

We putted off down river, dead centre in a narrow and unmarked channel; nobody comes this far up river except locals, so why mark it? Clutched in one hand, I held my guide: a composite aerial photograph covering the first few miles of meanders. Taken at low water, the mud banks show clearly, as do landmarks on the river banks. I was betting that the outside of each bend would be deep, and the inside shallow...

~

This strategy worked beautifully for the first few bends, and soon we were alone on a stretch where the banks were silent and wooded, occupied only by watchful herons. Then, so gently that I almost thought I had imagined it, the bulb at the base of Briongloid's fin slid softly into the glutinous grey muck of the river bed. The best route away from a grounding is backwards; but full throttle in reverse gear did nothing but stir up some interesting vortices. For now at least, we were a fixture, essentially a small blue fibreglass island. Not a skipper's proudest moment.
Whatever my parents (never previously shipwrecked in their combined 144 years) thought of my seamanship, they were merciful enough to remain silent.

On a falling tide, this grounding would have been a serious mistake, liable to lead to a pretty severe wetting, at least for Briongloid. However, secure in the knowledge that the combined gravitational efforts of (a) a rock the size of Austrailia and (b) a spectral type-G star were, at that very moment, reversing the flow of the river, we did exactly what the likes of Charles Stock would do - made mugs of tea, and buttered the home-made scones supplied by a far-seeing wife.

Just when the scones were beginning to run low, eddies swirling out from under the hull on the up-river side revealed that the incoming tide was rising fast, reversing the flow of the river, and stealthily slipping over the mud. Reassured that Newton's laws still stood (more or less), I took soundings to port and starboard from bow and stern, revealing a definite gradient towards the stern. Adjusting my theory of the location of the main channel to this data, I was able immediately to motor free. After that, the keel touched once, but stuck no more; and off we putted down the Bandon River, breasting the current as we crossed from bank to bank chasing the main channel, watching rural Ireland slip past; apart from pastures and trees, the main features of that stretch were a ruined tower house, a demolished bridge (giving the submerged piers a very wide berth).

Near Kinsale, houses began to appear on the banks; passing under the road bridge (having checked for anglers and their dangling hooks) we entered the harbour proper, and at last met other boats, the usual miscellany: a gorgeous wooden yacht of classic lines and vintage, ultra-modern racing machines, a herd of gin palaces, a fleet of trawlers, a solitary coastal cargo ship - but all moored up tight - on a gorgeous March Saturday, we were the only boat on the move. As I tied Briongloid into a visitor berth at the KYC, I felt the sway of the pontoon, and smiled; we had reached the sea.

Repairs

Spring is coming fast now, daffodils and crocuses in full bloom, sunsets and dawns pushing back the night. "Any day now", the men at the yard where Briongloid lies sleeping beneath her tarp will make her hull watertight again; after that, I want her back in the sea at the earliest opportunity.

So, it's time to get ready. The flowers of rust blooming on her iron keel have been ground away, exploding into powder beneath the stainless steel bristles of a rotary brush on a cordless drill, and the bright metal exposed beneath locked away under two barrier coats topped off with a clean new coat of the most toxic anti-fouling I could find.

Outfit for sutiable for either WWIII or minor boat repairs

However... most detachable bits of Briongloid still seem to be living in our shed, waiting for repairs, improvements, or outright replacement. The biggest and toughest project has been the repair of a damaged cockpit seat. The cracks (inflicted before I bought her) had grown too big to ignore, so it was time to tackle a new task: repairing GRP (a composite of epoxy and glass fibre cloth).

A little preliminary research taught me that fibreglass is a fantastically useful and tough material (can be molded into any shape, drilled, filed; does not rot or rust) . It also taught me that exposure to epoxy resin and the catalyst required to harden it is bad news (industry websites talk airly about fumes and hospitalisations). Also, the reaction that hardens the epoxy is exothermic - get the mixing wrong badly enough, and say goodbye to your shed.

And so, I set to work in my back garden on a frosty night, wearing disposable coveralls over full foul-weather gear, plus rubber boots, nitrile gloves, a respirator, eye protection, ear protection and an LED headlamp - full "WW III Apocalypse mode". The respirator in particular is very impressive - putting it on, air becomes weirdly (and reassuringly) scentless. No word yet on what the neighbours think I'm up to in that shed.

The first attempts at patching were very messy indeed; fibreglass fragments seemed to get everywhere, and the epoxy seemed to have a life of its own, apparently keen to go everywhere but onto the fibreglass cloth - a bit like working with honey that hates you, wants to poison you, and will explode into flame if the bread to which you apply it has too much butter. However, after several iterations of the patching procedure, I began to think that perhaps there was a chance I could survive the procedure; even better, the seat I was repairing actually started to look, feel, sound strong again (no more creaks from where the crack used to be). After a little tidying-up work (file, angle grindge, rotary brush, peeling off masking tabe), it looks as though this might actually have worked.

One week to launch day...

Sinking, Part 3

Being the third installment of a tale of a watery tale begun here and continued here.

At last, Briongloid was safely on her trailer. On a snowy afternoon, I left The City early to go the boatyard and get a look the problem from the outside. I love the approach to the boatyard: it lies near the navigable limit of a tree-lined river - very scenic. This time, the tide was low, and some very interesting boats were sitting high and dry in the mud. The channels deep enough to carry Briongloid are narrow, sinuous, and unmarked.

Once at the yard, diagnosing the problem didn't take very long at all; on her starboard side, well below the waterline, an ancient mechanical log (its display long since lost) protrudes from her hull. For non-boating folk, a log is a device for measuring a boat's speed through the water; the earliest logs actually were logs, or at least splinters. Since I carry a hand-held GPS, and always (so far!) sail in sight of land (so can take bearings with a hand compass), a log is not really an essential item - especially since, like most skippers, I can usually estimate my boat's speed quite accurately. When I had last seen the log, its protruding arm carried a small propeller which turned as the water flowed past, the rotation being carried into the hull by a wire rotating within an outer protective sheath.

The Leak

Since then, as the photo shows, something had ripped that little propeller clear of its mount, exposing the core, and pulling the base of the instrument loose. Looking at the damage, I was amazed poor Briongloid had survived - the damage looked absolutely frightening, exactly the sort of thing that persuaded me to leave damage control plugs next to all through-hull fittings. Looks like the through-hulls which feed and empty her sea toilet are innocent after all - but what did I hit? A guilty memory of the time I snagged my own mooring bouy sidles into my mind's eye...

After a quick chat with the owner of the boatyard, we had a repair plan: I would get the boat as dry as I could, and put on a tarp (low-skilled work, suitable for a bungling boat owner). A de-humidifier will be left inside to dry her further, sucking every possible drop from her bilges, fittings, even the hull itself. Then, a nice man from the yard who knows what he is doing will drill out all remains of the log, and glass over the resulting gaping hole, fairing the repair with epoxy. Finally (we hope), we'll drop Briongloid back in the river, and see if she still floats...

As the sun went down, I began a long, long list of boat-related jobs, loading my long-suffering car with things to fix and things to dry ( soaking sails, soaking cushions, hatch covers, wash boards, a rudder, etc.) . I also spent quite a lot of time down in the bilges with pumps and a sponge. Ah, the glamorous life of the yachtie!

The afternoon sun had melted what little snow lay on Briongloid's deck; later, as the sun set, and I scrambled about the decks with pointy tools, measuring tape, and tarpaulin, the water turned quickly to ice. I found skating up and down her decks to be a highly disconcerting experience; on her trailer, she is a tall boat, and I didn't fancy the drop. Extra respect to all you high-latitude sailors - how on earth do you manage to stay on board when your boats are not only ice-covered, but moving?

Venus was brilliant between the snow-clouds by the time the last knots on tarp were secure. This far up-river, most yard inhabitants are low-draught motor launches, fat and squat, with a sprinkle of lifting-keel pocket cruisers, and our boat stood out; in the cool light of the half-moon, the silhouette of an enshrouded Briongloid looked tall, sleek, fast, and a little bit mysterious.

Squeezing myself into the driver's seat, tucking my head below a wandering tiller (still attached to a rudder that my boot would barely close on), I left her to the night.

Sinking, Part 2

Having established that our beloved Briongloid was letting in something on the order of 40 litres of sea water every 24 hours (see Part 1), it was time to get her hauled out and fixed by the yard that fitted the loo (and the leak). So, last Saturday, I got up before the sun did to drive to the cove and sail her to the yard.

I pulled up on the slipway just in time to see the sun touch the western face of the cove, painting the steep slopes and cliffs in warm gold. The air was crisp and clear, and the sky perfectly, completely blue, and only the gentlest of sail-able breezes ghosted in from the sea - the perfect January morning. This sailor had the cove entirely to himself: the convenient (but exposed) moorings by the slip were empty - too many storms these last months - and even half a mile across the water, where the inconvenient (but gale-proof) moorings lie, Briongloid was one of the last three boats, surrounded by a sea of empty buoys.

Aboard, things were good: the automatic pump wired in the previous week had kept up with the inflow; even better, the solar panel seemed to have kept up with the pump's power consumption, even now, at the least favorable time of year (short days, sun always low in the sky, plenty of cloud). I ran up the main and the working jib, and Briongloid and I rode the ebb tide out of the cove.

~

In open water, conditions were just as beautiful; Briongloid moved smoothly over an achingly blue sea, framed by a crystal-clear horizon to the south and the cliff-girt Old Head to the west. The dawn picked out gold highlights on the land, and the low angle of the light threw every detail of the sea caves and precipices into sharp relief.

I looked longingly south and sea-ward... but Briongloid and I had a flood tide to catch, the boat yard being far up-river, and so I turned my eyes from temptation and hugged the land, passing inshore of the reef that guards the mouth of my first stop, a harbour downstream of both the destination boat yard and a crucial low bridge. My chart showed plenty of depth on my chosen route, but my faith in the Admiralty was sorely tested when a long low swell to seaward rose up and steepened to become a perfectly peeling breaker, on course to catch us beam-on. As a surfer, I can say that it was a beautiful wave; as a sailor, it inspired an intense desire to find some very deep water, and stay there. A few seconds later, that gorgeous, murderous wave subsided into the depths (as promised by the Admiralty chart); and I resumed breathing, switched to worrying about the sandbars in the outer harbour.

~

For me, growing up as a free-diver and sailor in an unusually wide and deep bay, open water has always been a refuge; in the waters of my boyhood, "narrow" meant "less than a mile wide", and "shallow" might mean "50M". Now, entering the very alien environment of a long, bending harbour that also happened to be a river mouth, I concentrated very hard indeed on lining up features from the chart with the land-marks and buoyage.

Motoring in a silky-smooth calm, all went smoothly - except that every now and then, my outboard would be seized by gremlins, and Briongloid would pivot sharply to port, and make a run for the nearest sandbank. I planned to devote some serious attention to that treacherous locking nut, and also to do some proper swearing, just as soon as I had less than four simultaneous tasks to worry about.

Briongloid and I passed on serenely (but with occasional abrupt swerves and even more abrupt corrections) up the harbour mouth, slipping unnoticed below the great battlements of the fortress; I winced at the thought of what those interlocking fields of fire would do to a boat catching them on its length. Soon, we gained the inner harbour, and I prepared to dock solo at a marina for the first time in my life (we have always been swing mooring kind of people). As always, the secret to solo sailing lies in preparation; I had already cleated on two long ropes - one at the bow, one at the stern - and hung every fender out to port (having checked the chart, and established the orientation of the visitor pontoon relative to the wind), and carefully read and re-read the art of pontoon docking (grasping for the first time the role of springs). I gritted my teeth, throttled back till I barely had steerage way, and prepared to dock...

In the event, Briongloid made it very easy for me; she came gliding in very slowly smoothly to an empty visitor poontoon, turning to meet it nearly at a tangent; I didn't even need flip the engine into reverse, but simply stepped ashore and checked her movement first with my own weight, then with the stern rope, finally with the head rope. Seconds later, my little craft was secure, and I was wondering what I had worried about.

~

A little later, C and Junior turned up; with the help of passing strangers, we rigged the mainsheet as a block-and-tackle in the bows, and dropped the mast. By now the was rising, and so was the tide; time to go, but the boatyard phoned and postponed my river pilot. We'ld not make the boatyard today.

Now, as forecast, the wind rose and rose, until it sang in the stays of every mast in the marina. The once-glassy waters of the harbour now rose up in a vicious chop, and tried to bash Briongloid to pieces on her shelter-less visitor pontoon. On the other side of the pontoon, massive 45 and 50 footers sat near-motionless in perfect safety, while I almost cried to see our poor little Pandora enduring such a battering. Could her fenders really hold against such impacts? Had the mast still been up, I would have been seriously tempted to brave the gale and simply sail back to the safety of our cosy cove. I tied and re-tied her lines; then added heavier ones; then checked and re-checked her fenders; and finally, feeling like a rotten traitor, I slunk off, and left her to the gale.

P.S. Although I spent most of a Saturday either in or immediately outside a town with hundreds of yachts, Briongloid was the only one that I saw move so much as an inch. Bit sad, really.

Whale Patrol

Day-dreams of craggy headlands, taut canvas, wide blue horizons - clearly, I was in the grip of a bad case of sea-fever. The fever was not reduced by a steady stream of reports that huge beasts were on the move just off-shore. This far north, the sun sinks early, and gales are frequent; I would have to wait my chance.

I found a Saturday with a weather window just wide enough to slip through (framed by gales); found a willing crew (Mr. H); and so, arrived at a deserted slipway at dawn to launch my dinghy into the teeth of a nor'wester whose brisk chop delivered a bucket or two of seawater into the dinghy before by the time we reached Briongloid.

With only a modest set of sail, Briongloid fairly leapt along under a mostly-blue sky, across an empty sea - not another mast to be seen; we steered south west to bring us close by the Old Head. We could have dodged south to escape the tide race generated by the flood coming east around the Old Head of Kinsale, but the gold of the early sun on the craggy cliffs and the lighthouse tempted us within convenient photographic range. We knew the tide race when we met it: Briongloid's bows buried to the deck, and a certain skipper dogged the forehatch down tight in a hurry...

The Old Head about an hour after dawn (Picture: D. Hoberg)

The pounding of the tide race was short-lived, and soon we were around the headland, beating across the white-capped chop of Courtmacsherry Bay; a good wind, force 5 to 6. Three hours out, investigations of circling sea birds - gannets, mostly - lead us to our first sighting, a brief glimpse of a common dolphin no more than 10 or 15 metres dead ahead. Mr. H missed it; not long after, I saw a patch of mist hang in the air 50-70 metres or so ahead - gone again a moment later. Did I imagine it? Within a few tens of seconds, I had my answer: another whale-breath misted into the air, and a huge black back showed for a moment before vanishing once more into the depths - straight towards us - almost certainly a Minke whale.

There is something uniquely heart-pounding about encounters with the mega-fauna of this planet, something beyound the sheer physical bulk, a thing that is absent in mere scenery; perhaps it is the sense of an encounter between human and non-human minds... that we look at a beast, and the beast looks back. Now, in the cold blue vastness beneath us, something huge and wild moved unseen; but though we turned and searched, and turned again, our whale escaped us.

Not long after, a small pod of common dolphins moved across the bow; too close for co-incidence, I think. Mr. H saw them this time, but they moved off to windward, and dived; perhaps they just surfaced to take a look at us? We searched on, sailing into the easternmost extent of Clonakilty Bay, with the white gleam of the hotel showing above the strand. Then the clock told us it was time to turn, and we tacked for home, taking our lunch a few km south of Seven Heads - hot tomato soup, very welcome on a cold winter day.

The final incident of the day came when a bottle neck screw vanished from a stay on the leeward side - I really have to get hold of some seizing wire. Luckily, I had a replacement, and got it fitted while Mr. H paid especially close attention to keeping a steady course. Not so luckily, we heeled well over, a sea stole on deck and crept inside my waterproofs, soaking me to the knees. That gave me a real problem: I was wearing jeans, and the cotton wicked the water steadily up my legs; by the time I was finished fixing and checking rigging screws, I began to shiver, and my speech to slur, and my mind to get a little foggy. Hypothermia is an isidious enemy. I dried off my feet, keeping them bare, then layered up, and wedged myself into the (comparitively) cosy corner of the fore-peak while Mr. H stood watch alone.

Right on schedule, we slipped into the cove against an ebbing tide as the sun dipped below the horizon, saluting a feeding seal as we came, and tacked onto the mooring as a huge flock of crows swept in a black gyre low over the woods and the river mouth; from the east, more dark wings swept by in squadrons, until thousands swirled above us, and the twilight echoed with their cries. Well might they huddle in their roosts: their worst enemies fly by night.

Day's run: about 65km, in 8 hours, almost entirely under sail (GPS track on Google Maps).

Important Lesson: wear hydropobic synthetics only - and bring a change of clothes, no matter how good your outer layer is.

Bird of Passage

Working on Briongloid's foredeck on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I was in the perfect position to watch the arrival of a sleek low double-ended boat I didn't recognise, coming in the from the open sea with only a singly scrap of sail still flying. At her tiller sat a man in full foul-weather gear who waved a salute as he sailed by up-river. As I worked, I saw the red hull work a few hundred metres up-stream, well clear of the moorings, and drop anchor.

The Ness Yawl "Rat" anchored in the Belgooly river

A little later, I saw a white shape appear above the hull: through binoculars, I saw that an awning had been rigged, using the main mast as a ridgepole. A cruiser then... I hopped in the dinghy, and put-putted over to say hello.

The sleek red shape I'ld been admiring turned out to be a Ness Yawl, a two-masted open boat of about 22ft LOA designed in the double-ended style of a Norwegian Faering by Iain Oughtred, a boat architect from the Isle of Skye. This beautifully-finished example of its type had been built by its owner, Robin, an allegedly amateur boat builder. A slightly stretched version of the original plans, the good boat "Rat" had just been sailed from the vicinity of Fishguard across the Irish Sea to Tramore, and hence, propelled by an easterly gale, to Oysterhaven, in the course of a few hours of particularly intense sailing - lively going, in an open boat. At least, with such a wind, her lack of an engine was no hindrance...

Robin turned out to be a returning visitor to these waters, having cruised these bays several times before, both for pleasure in his own 27ft wooden yacht, and as skipper of a 90ft super yacht - also of traditional design. Robin is well-supplied with good sailing stories, having previously cruised his own engine-less yacht to New Zealand and back (out across the Atlantic, through the Panama canal, across the South Pacific to New Zealand, and home around Cape Horn). This summer, he is taking the diminutive Rat on a cruise of indefinite duration, to waters undecided.

Talking to Robin gave me an even worse case of Sea Fever than I already had. Lucky, then, that I'm due to catch the ebb-tide this coming Friday for a voyage to points westward...