How to Anchor by Sail

The commonly accepted practice to anchor requires a motor. The typical plan is to drop the anchor and then back down on the anchor with your motor. As the thrust from the propeller pulls your yacht backwards, the anchor will be buried into the seabed and hold you from drifting back. When you come to a stop, you know the anchor is well set and secure for the night.

If you are sailing, there is no motor involved in reversing to backdown on the anchor, so you can't really backdown on the anchor to know that it has set! This means that you would drop the anchor and wait for the wind to blow you back. As you are pushed back, the anchor will set (or drag). If your anchor will set, then all is fine, but if your anchor will drag, then you will slowly (or quickly) drift back.

To avoid this dilemma of not knowing if the anchor will set or drag when the wind picks up, there is a trick that still doesn't require the motor!

When sailing into your anchorage, simply drop the sails and continue to drift along with speed. While you are still moving at around 2 to 3 knots, drop the anchor and at least 5:1 scope based on the water depth. The boat will continue to drift forward as the anchor rests on the seabed.

When the yacht covers the distance of the anchor rode, the chain will become tight and start to pull on the anchor with a considerable force. This will jerk the anchor horizontally along the seabed and bury it into the substrate.

If the anchor drags, the yacht will continue to move forward until the anchor sets (hopefully). When the anchor sets, it will be very apparent because the bow will stop in its tracks and the entire yacht will spin around with some speed. This is why it is important to not do this at speeds greater than 3 knots because the force on the chain could be a bit too dramatic.

When the boat spins around, the anchor is set, and you can then let out additional chain should you desire; all while knowing that your anchor is firmly set into the seabed!

How Tight is too Tight?

When setting up your rigging, it might be very tempting to tighten each stay until something breaks! The problem with this protocol is you would then have something break.

The truth is, your standing rigging only needs to be tight enough to hold the mast straight and upright. The looser your standing rigging can be, the less stress you will put on all the fittings that are associated with the rigging. The removal of unnecessary static loads will greatly prolong the life of your rigging and your yacht.

It is important to remember what each stay does, and therefore, how tight it needs to be. The cap shrouds need to be the tightest of the shrouds, as they keep the tip of the mast in place. Due to leverage, this stay needs to withstand a lot of load. If the stay is slack at rest, the top the mast will move to leeward as the weather builds. Eventually, the stay will become tight and the mast will stop moving. The less you want the masthead to move, the tighter this stay needs to be.

The further down you go, the less stress each stay will experience, and the looser it can be.

On cutters, check stays will be present to counteract the inner forestay. These stays do not need to be tight at all, as all these stays do is stop the inner forestay from pumping the mast. As the inner forestay pulls forward, the mast will bend forward slightly, and the check stays will become tighter.

At rest, however, these stays may appear to be "too loose."

The headstay and backstay are another stay of constant debate. If they are tighter, you can point upwind better. Looser and you can reach better. The correct answer for the tension in these stays is "enough to point what you need." If you are a gaff rigged cutter, you will not point very well due to the sailplan, so there is no reason to overstress your fittings by having a bar-tight headstay. On the other hand, if you have a fin keeled racing sloop, the headstay should be akin to a banjo string!

Standing rigging is only there to hold the mast up. The goal is to accomplish this task with the loosest stays possible.

Cooking While Underway

It is often touted that a gimbal stove is an absolute must onboard a cruising yacht. The gimbal allows the entire stove to swing with the heeled vessel, keeping the contents on the cooktop level. This means that you can cook while sailing with a rail in the water.

The alternative to a gimbal stove is a fixed unit, that simply leans over with the yacht as you sail. These are touted as "only useful in port" when the yacht is anchored and sitting vertically.

The truth is, fixed stoves have been around and used on sailing vessels for far longer than gimbal stoves have. There is no denying the convenience of a gimbaled unit, but this doesn't mean that a fixed stove is inoperable while sailing.

While working on a tall ship, I had an interesting conversation with the ships cook. The tall ship has a very large fixed stove, and no pot holders! She said that cooking on the fixed stove was simple, all you need to do is use a very tall pot and never fill it more than half. As the ship heels over, the food will lean over in the pot, but the contents will not spill over. The lack of pot holders was also alarming, but apparently the friction of the pot on the iron grate was enough to keep the pots in place. Since they don't slide, they don't bother with pot holders.

I took this information back to our own boat and applied it to great lengths. Our stove is fixed, and we use it frequently while under sail. We simply only cook while sailing on port tack, as this would put the stove on the leeward rail. If the contents of the stove were to spill out, they would spill away from any crew standing by it, cooking the delicious meal.

If we are heeling excessively, we simply heave to, which reduces heel and makes life inside the cabin much more enjoyable!

Cooking on a fixed stove is nothing out of the ordinary on a sailing yacht, it simply takes a few precautions to make sure that the meal is safely created without any injury to the crew. This will allow you to cruise on a smaller budget as fixed stoves are cheaper to purchase and much easier to install.

Finding Time for What You Enjoy Most

Cruising might seem like an endless string of vacation. Each day as carefree as the last, which means that everyday allows for you to relax and enjoy what you love most.

The problem is that it is easy to get wrapped up into the same meaningless routine that you had on shore, just that you take this routine up in a new and exciting location.

While cruising, things will break, and tasks will present themselves. You can either engulf yourself in these tasks and spend your entire cruise working on them or you can take some time and stop all the madness to enjoy what you set off for.

I am a workaholic and will easily bury myself into all the projects I can invent for myself to carry out. Maddie is very good at enjoying the moment and is especially good at finding the perfect time to include me in the moment.

One day, I was busy toiling away at some meaningless job I had created for myself when Maddie called my name. I heard her voice but could not see her anywhere. It turns out she was sitting in the hammock watching the sunset.

She called for me as it was almost to the best part. The sky was still blue but it was about to turn a myriad of reds and oranges. She called me to join her in the hammock to enjoy the color changing sky, and that was the whole point of being there.

Looking back on that day, I honestly can't even remember what I was trying to accomplish, but I do remember the magnificent sunset! Be sure that wherever you end up, that you enjoy the reason you are there for! These will be the memories that you will retain for the rest of your life, not the work you had to do.

Stress and Schedules

Cruising is often thought of as carefree and relaxed. There is no stress because there is no schedule! This holds true as long as you live a life with no schedule.  

Sadly, a scheduleless life is usually a solitary one. How will you meet up with friends and family while cruising without a schedule? How will they know when to come somewhere to meet up?  Landlubbers love their schedules, but cruisers also have them too. 

Imagine that you meet another boat and you guys plan to meet again at another island in a month. You now have a schedule! 

If you have a powerful diesel motor,, schedules are rather easy to follow, as you will be able to arrived at a predetermined place at a prescribed time. I met a couple once who had to leave the anchorage at 10am, arrive at another harbor by noon, and have those people in a different anchorage by 2pm to meet other friends. This schedule seemed ridiculous to us as they were planning their voyage at an average speed of 7 knots!  

With their motor, they were able to stick to this schedule, but they never did get to sail on that day! 

In our situation, where we don't have the luxury of a diesel motor, we are completely reliant on the wind to power us. This proves a hazard with schedules. If the wind is from the wrong direction, we will be a long time getting there. If the winds are light, we will be going slow. Basically, it is nearly impossible for us to plan to arrive anywhere at a set time because our travel time is always in limbo!

Our solution to this dilemma is to arrive somewhere, and then invite people to join us there. This allows us to get places at our own speed, and lets us rest at the destination before guests arrive. While this system works well for destinations close to us, it still poses a problem with longer term plans.  

In our current situation, we are planning to cross the Atlantic after the hurricane season cools off. We hope to fly back for Christmas to spend the holidays with the family, but this would require us to be at a major port city that has an airport attached to it! While we have many months to complete this journey, it is a nagging feeling in the backs of our minds that we might miss Christmas!  

This is exactly how schedules cause stress while cruising. If we could completely rid our lives of schedules, then we would also be able to reduce the stress of life considerably. Sadly, we came from land and the concept of some form of future plan keeps lingering in our minds as we seem incapable of actually freeing ourselves from the clutches of time and dates.