The forecasts for Sunday had promised a much-needed break in the weather, but after a fine start to the morning, the clouds rolled in again.
I wasn't too bothered. I needed to clean up the mess left behind after our abortive attempt at the Round The Island Race two weeks earlier, and there were a host of other little jobs that needed to be seen to. I emptied Arabella's contents out onto the marina pontoon - it never fails to amaze me just how much stuff gets shoehorned into such a small boat - and got stuck in with a vengeance.
Note to self: ban potato crisps for next year's race. You wouldn't believe the places I found them in.
The forecasts said it shouldn't rain, so of course it did, in the mid-afternoon. By that time, I had managed to remove from Arabella's interior all of the powdery silt that had been left behind by the Solent mud-waters that found their way below decks during the race. And removed the dried salt spots. From the headlining. And managed to reload all of her kit back on board, but not before undertaking some drastic dejunking and consigning certain items to the marina skip.
Sheltering in the dry, below decks, I considered my options. Last night, I'd kind of, sort of, convinced myself that if the weather was kind, I might have a go at singlehanding today. But in the cold light of morning I'd had an attack of cold feet - or was that realism? I'd never yet managed to get through a lesson with Roger without cocking something up - usually something pretty basic - and now I thought I was capable of going out alone? There had been times when merely reversing Arabella out of her berth had been difficult - and she is a very small boat.
The uninspiring weather conveniently added another reason not to go. I probably ought to have called it a day then and gone home, but the rain relented, though the dark clouds remained overhead. Reminding myself that life doesn't often give me the chance to come down to the boat, and I should make the most of it, I stuck around and attacked the next item on the to-do list - how to get the lead right on the genoa furling line. That took a while, fiddling around with various lead angles, but finally I had it cracked, I thought, and suddenly it was 6.00pm and the sun came out.
Peering up, surprised, I saw that there was actually quite a lot of sunshine. A big patch of blue sky was sweeping in from the west, punctuated only by light cloud.
Damn. I was all out of excuses. Now I would have to go. I couldn't face jumping on the train back to London in fair weather, having not having at least tried. I'd never be able to live with myself. The tide was flooding, and there were maybe two hours to go until "first" high water, perhaps another hour or so of the stand - which was less pronounced on neaps - by which time it would be dark anyway. The wind was falling off as evening came on. I could get maybe three hours out on the water, in near-perfect beginner's conditions.
If I dithered any longer, time would run out and I wouldn't go. Forcing myself to act, I started the outboard, got togged up in lifejacket and harness. Removed the sail cover, unhooked the bungees from the halyards. Dug out one of the two tillerpilots. Switched on the instuments, hooked up the laptop, fired up the chartplotting software and activated the attached GPS. Went back out onto the pontoon, slipped the bow line from the dock, threw it on board. Holding Arabella to the pontoon, walked aft and did the same with the stern line.
Arabella was free. The tidal current running through the pontoons was pulling her gently but inexorably out of her berth. All I was doing now was keeping her close to the finger berth as she backed out, nothing more. If I didn't go with her, she would still be leaving. I stayed put on the end of the pontoon, keeping Arabella lined up. Too late it occurred to me that, with the current taking her like this, I could have - should have - used a slip line as a spring off the starboard quarter to help her swing around.
I stepped aboard, shifted the outboard into reverse. We had to get some sternway through the water if I wanted the rudder to bite so that we could swing round between the rows of berths. But I had already left it too late. Arabella politely but firmly declined to turn the way I wanted her to and continued heading for the boats berthed across the way.
Not good. With tiller still hard over, I clunked the outboard into forward gear. Arabella obediently began to swing, but of course, in forward gear, she swung the wrong way, pointing into - not out of - the lane to the river between the two lines of berths.
Further note to self: in future, try not to forget to put the tiller across when switching gear. Another beginner's mistake. Still, I'd settle for what I'd been given. Clunking the engine back into reverse, and increasing the revs, I got some stern way on and just kept on reversing Arabella all the way out into the river.
And that was really the worst moment of it all. After that, everything went fine, as the utterly boring movie below shows. Mind, it's boring for you, because nothing exciting happens. It wasn't boring for me - my heart was in my mouth for much of the time.
About a half-an-hour in, I finally unclenched my but-hocks and starting enjoying myself. In the process, I found out a few useful things through trial and error.
Once out in the river, it turned out not to be feasible to do what Roger had taught me on my last lesson, which was to sort out the fenders, lines and mainsail just bobbing around outside the marina. The reason for that was that the wind and the flood tide were aligned, and Arabella wanted to drift upriver at a rate that was too fast for comfort. Clearly, Roger's technique needed less wind, less tide or - ideally - for the two to be in opposition.
Instead, I headed off down river to see what I could do with the Tiller-Tamer. Using it to lock off the tiller was a solution of sorts, but as on previous occasions, Arabella wandered off track pretty rapidly once her balance was upset, for example as soon as I left the cockpit to collect in the fenders. The direction in which she headed correlated inversely to which side I stepped up on to - every time I went up on to the starboard deck, for example, she'd head off to port. This tendency was manageable, but annoying, and I wasn't sure how I could risk enough time to go up to the foredeck and recover the forward mooring line, even if I could attack the fenders one at a time before heading back to the tiller to restore Arabella's course.
It may be that the balance of a small boat like Arabella is simply too easily upset for the Tiller-Tamer to be of much help, and it may work better on a larger boat. As far as Arabella is concerned, however, it really requires that you stay in the cockpit so that you can tend to it - good for locking off the tiller while you tidy up lines or grab the flask of coffee, say, but not much else.
Frustrated by that, I turned my attention to the tillerpilot. I'd rigged it before leaving, assuming that at some point I would use it, but uncertain just how much. The tillerpilot was a revelation. At the cost of some battery drain, it was utterly unflappable. Provided I kept an eye out for traffic and watched where Arabella was heading, the tillerpilot kept Arabella to the required course no matter how much I wandered around the deck. It was easy to gather in the fenders and lines, and then to raise the mainsail, as we motored gently down river. By the time we reached Southampton Water, we were ready to sail.
It was as good as deserted. Yet again. It always is when I go out. For all I knew, it might have been the maritime equivalent of the M25 out here earlier on, but at 7.15pm on an acceptably pleasant Sunday evening, with the sun already low in the sky, everyone had gone home and left the whole place to me. I had a private practice area of more square miles than I could possibly need.
I put Arabella onto a reach and unfurled the genoa. With the breeze only reaching F3 at most, I unfurled it all, even if that was not strictly sensible on my first singlehanded sail. Arabella accelerated smoothly to 4 knots or so, and I cut the engine before reconnecting the tillerpilot so that I could start trimming the sails. At this angle of attack, the sheets could be eased for speed. That suited me just fine. I had absolutely zero desire to go sailing Arabella around on her ear on my first time out alone. My stomach was just about returning to its normal place, and I forced myself to put out of my mind all the iterations I would have to deal with later on and to relax, concentrate on what I was doing right now. I'd done my thinking ahead, just as the books say you must, and prepared everything I could for singlehanding. There was nothing further I could do right now, except enjoy the moment.
Above and below: Look - no hands! The orange lines, by the way, are just to stop the outboard from vibrating itself to port or starboard.
If the tillerpilot was now my new best friend, the laptop/chartplotter came a very close second. Admittedly I was sailing in familiar waters, but our course took us over some shallow patches. With the laptop I could see at a glance where I was, what the charted depth was, and add the expected height of tide to that with a quick mental calculation, and do all that from the helm. I had the charts out on the nav table below decks, as a backup, but I doubt that I would have been able to handle much paper chartwork, as well as singlehanding, at least not at my stage of development. It would have been easier to head out into deeper water beside the main shipping channel instead, and simply buoy-hop. With the aid of the chartplotter, however, I could keep well inshore and stay out of trouble and anyone else's way. The only traffic that came anywhere near me was a solitary dinghy heading in to shore at Netley.
Above: My other best friend - the laptop chartplotter saves frantic dashes to the nav station and makes pilotage easy. Note how we just shaved the side of the drying patch.
Above: where I went today. Screenshot taken from PassagePlus software (click the image for larger view).I disconnected the tillerpilot, and executed my first-ever singlehanded tack. In such light airs, the manoeuvre went smoothly, and I was able to trim in the genoa sheet by hand, without resorting to the winch. Staying put in the cockpit, I found the Tiller-Tamer more useful than it had been earlier, as I could lock off the tiller, trim the genoa, then release the tiller and steer by hand to get the best performance out of Arabella. I didn't want to be hanging around now.
Above: Where I went today - the Google Earth tour version (to find out how to do this on a budget, see the note at the end of this post)
As Arabella putt-putted back up river, the sun finally set. Even the industrialised lower reaches of the Itchen can look nice in conditions like this, and I let the tillerpilot take the strain while I grabbed a coffee from the flask and admired the display. Then, after sorting out the fenders and lines, I rigged a midships spring leading aft outside everything to the cockpit, with a large loop tied in the end with a bowline. Fingers crossed, that would stop Arabella when we came alongside her finger berth.
The three hours spent out on the water had been worth every minute of the train ride home. I'd barely covered seven miles singlehanded, in the most benign conditions imaginable. At best it was the first step on a very long road, something that other boatowners might think nothing of doing. But the point was that I had taken that step. It was a taste of total freedom and independence; it was like a drug. I was already craving the next fix.
Conditions: WSW F2-3 Sunny intervals. Sea state smooth.
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 6.9 NM
Total distance covered to date (2008): 77 NM
Engine hours: 1.5 (total for 2008: 7.7 hours)
Techie Postscript - Google Earth Movie: If you want to create a Google Earth movie like the one shown in this post , there are a number of options.
First, Google Earth Pro has a movie capture facility - if, that is, you don't mind forking out US$400 for the licence to upgrade to Google Earth Pro. No, that's not a typo.
Back in the real world, the quick and cheap way to do it (on a Mac, at any rate) is as follows:
- download the basic level version of Google Earth for free from HERE
- invest US$20 (about £10 at today's exchange rate) in IShowU, which can be downloaded from HERE
- open both programs and, in Google Earth, create a "tour" that corresponds to the route that you sailed - check out Google Earth's help file for details on how to do this. It's a bit fiddly the first time, but very easy once you've figured it out. The tour can then be played automatically onscreen and, using IShowU, you can capture it in variety of formats, such as Quicktime or MPEG4.
The image quality of the streaming version that Blogger displays here is a bit squint-inducing, but that's Blogger's fault. I'm neither a YouTube user nor well-acquainted with video codecs, but Dylan Winter seems to be doing something similar to the Google Earth tour in his Keep Turning Left movies, and the quality of the streaming video there is somewhat better than here on Blogger.
The original version created by IShowU is large, sharp and high quality, with no pixellation. It looks professional and can be saved to your desktop, or imported and played in Quicktime. You can use Quicktime Pro to edit it. Alternatively you can import it as a clip directly into iMovie (it works with both iMovieHD and iMovie 08), where you can edit it and add a voice commentary - a nice finishing touch if you like to produce quality movies of your sailing.
If posting a copy to Blogger, good results can obtained by using iMovie 08 and exporting (via the Share menu) as a Small (480 x 360) or Medium (640 x 480) movie in MPEG 4 format. The Google Earth tour shown in the above post was exported in Small; that shown in the next post (Lesson 3) was exported in Medium. I think Medium works lightly better. In addition, iMovie 08 tends to 'wash out' colour slightly, so it's not a bad idea to increase the color saturation by a small amount before exporting.
