TELL-TALES

KISS

These pages have a motley collection of practical stuff for boats. It all comes from hands-on stuff on our boats that gets tested in the real cruising world and on those wet salty passages where you find out what works and what doesn't.

KISS   keep it simple stupid

If you wander around the boatshow as I did this year, you could be forgiven for thinking that somewhere between the good old days and the glittering arrays on the stands at the boat show that we seem to be missing the point about going sailing and cruising. The basics have got mixed up with the toys that have a by-line like ‘essential for every cruising boat’ or ‘don’t leave port without one’. Its all for your convenience and you would be a fool not to have one on board.

In fact most of the equipment we need is low-tech and it needs to be reliable. We run all sorts of complicated gizmos in Skylax: a couple of chart-plotters, integrated instruments and autopilot, radar, lap-top navigation and routing software, all sorts of stuff. The nub of it all is whether you need to continually be repairing all this stuff or whether you keep cruising and repair or replace a piece of equipment when you can. I see all sorts of boats stuck in a harbours around the world waiting for a spare part or replacement gear. In fact most of what we need to keep these sailing dinosaurs going is simple basic stuff and a lot of what enhances cruising is low-tech or at best intermediate technology.

KISS. Below are some simple things that make your cruising more enjoyable and also some caveats on things we use.

From the Skylax blog 08-05-08

Before we left Colon a week ago a couple of outboards were stolen off yachts in the flats anchorage. Both of them were lifted up on davits and the outboards chained on with 8mm stainless chain. The outboard thieves have taken to carrying bolt croppers to cut chain and cable. Here in Portobello I’ve just been talking to the unfortunate Mario off Valuda who had his outboard stolen a few days ago. It to was chained with 8mm stainless chain to the dinghy which was tied on to the back of the boat. He found the dinghy ashore minus outboard so the thieves were obviously not interested in the dinghy.

It’s standard practice here in Panama and in quite a few other places I can think of to lift your dinghy up out of the water alongside the boat and use cable or chain to lock it on. This seems to work better than davits though it’s not the complete answer. In risky areas we quite often lift the dinghy with outboard right up onto the foredeck and then lock it on. Alternatively we hoist the outboard up onto it’s mount on the pushpit and then just put the dinghy sans motor on the side or on the foredeck. Since we sleep aft we should hear someone trying to break the padlock and cut the cable to get the dinghy off the pushpit. To my knowledge none of these guys have boarded boats to steal the outboard off a dinghy.

We do have a slight advantage in that the thieves seem to be after outboards over 10hp so a smaller 5hp like ours is less at risk. I know several cruisers here that have sanded the ‘1’ off a 15hp to make it look like a 5hp.

While the locals get all the blame it’s sometimes your fellow cruisers you need to keep an eye on, sad as that may be. In Isla Grande we waved cheerily to a young couple returning to their boat in the anchorage. We got a surly look as a reply and a half-hearted wave. Soon after they departed to a green steel boat anchored inside the reef-bound harbour. I didn’t think too much of it until we went ashore and wandered around to the harbour. The young couple were energetically loading bits of boat equipment from the steel boat, which looked neglected but seaworthy, into their dinghy. They returned to their own boat after dark and loaded all sorts of gear onto their boat. Now their may be a perfectly innocent explanation for all this, but their behaviour did seem furtive and they left early in the morning the next day. Still I didn’t notice any spare outboards lying around the deck.

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From the Skylax blog 14-05-09

From  the Skylax blog 29-05-09

From the Skylax blog

11-10-08

The ‘Eric’ siphon method

Long ago when I was in Cochin en route to Malaysia and sucking on a tube to get a siphon going, I met Eric Lambert heading the other way. He expressed amazement I used this awful method. Just put a tube down the pourer to the bottom of the can and the other end into the fuel filler, get a shorter bit of tube and a bit of rag to make the pourer airtight and then blow. The pressure forces the diesel into the long pipe and starts the siphon.

In the picture below Lu is blowing into the breather on the fuel cans we have on Skylax with the pourer pipe kept airtight with the bit of rag, but the principle is the same. So easy and no yucky taste of diesel.

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From the Skylax blog Jan 08

Loo matters

I'm sure most of you new men out there sit on the loo to have a pee at sea. For the unreconstructed put a bit of elastic shockcord/stretchy/bungee cord across the top to hold the loo seat up. For anyone sitting the shockcord also keeps the loo seat top from banging on your back when the sailing is a bit bouncy.

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