Innehållsförteckning för June 2017 från Practical Boat Owner

Email pbo@timeinc.com or write to us at the address on page 5. Photos are appreciated, letters may be edited. In praise of old-style PVC-coated nylon waterproofs I’m writing to support Sam Llewellyn’s observations on waterproof breathables (‘Thank heavens for dry wit’, PBO March). I sail on the west coast of British Columbia: the climate here is similar to the British Isles, namely a bit on the soggy side. I have a Gore-Tex jacket which I wear on land, and it’s brilliant for activities involving strenuous exercise while being rained on with fresh water, like biking (which I do daily) and hiking (which I do rarely). But they’re next to useless around salt water. The salt quickly clogs the micro-pores, rendering the jacket non-breathable, so now you’re bathed in your own…

When we bought our current boat, a Sadler 29, to be kept on a swinging mooring, I was aware that two of our previous three boats had been broken into. Theft is an obvious risk when boats are left unattended in quiet creeks and estuaries, particularly at night. So, with a new and larger boat containing more ‘goodies’, the need to reduce the risk of theft was on my mind from the day we took delivery The boat came with a pair of teak-faced ply boards which slotted into coamings each side of the hatch opening and a lock which engaged into a slot under the front edge of the sliding top. However, as I discovered by accident, it only needed a vigorous push to bend the brass tang holding…

Racing fleets can be intimidating, especially during busy regattas like Cowes Week or the Round the Island Race, where you’ll find more boats racing then nearly any regatta on earth. Coming across a fleet of uber-serious racing boats in a cruiser can make you feel like the proverbial salmon trying to swim up a waterfall. It can often seem that racers, with the loudest shouting, have moral right of way. But what’s the truth? It’s worth quoting a brief rhyme, noted by Eric Hiscock in a 1950s handbook: 'This is a story of John O’Day Who died maintaining his right of way He was right, dead right, as he sailed along But he’s just as dead as if he were wrong.' While coming into contact with a racing fleet is…

Let’s imagine that you sailed away from the UK a few years ago in your 41-footer. You discovered La Gomera in the Canary Islands, and this beguiling little lump of volcanic rock just west of Tenerife has been your sailing base ever since. After a few years you find that your 41 is bigger than you need for the sort of sailing you’re now doing, so you consider a move to something smaller and easier to handle. The challenge is that it blows old boots in the Canaries much of the time: anything less than 20 knots is a calm day, and whatever you sail has to be able to take a lot more than that. The wind comes, changes, blows and goes in the way that wind often does…

Send us your real-life experience – and win a painting of your boat!* Our first sail on our 7.9m (26ft) yacht Littlest Hobo was a relaxed affair: one hand on the tiller, a copy of Sailing for Beginners in the other. A breath of light air lazily filled the limp genoa and pushed us out of Lyttleton Bay from the Banks Peninsula on New Zealand’s South Island. With the bow pointing towards the smooth, shimmering sea, I thought: ‘how hard can it be to sail somewhere tropical?’ My girlfriend Laura and I had been travelling in New Zealand on a two-year working holiday tourist visa, but eventually the realisation that our visas would run out dawned on us. I had the foolish idea that we should spend the money we…

I believe that as a skipper, you are responsible for your sailing companions feeling safe and having a great time. You have to put yourself in the shoes of your least experienced crew and be aware that they may find boats intimidating. It’s down to you to help them enjoy themselves while feeling secure and useful, so here are my top seven easy-tolearn skills to pass on to new crew members. 1. Life on board I have frequently witnessed guests arriving onto an owner’s yacht having had no form of pre-voyage briefing. For novices unused to boats, it’s important to help them feel at home. Being shown where you can stand or sit safely, and pointing out the dangers of booms, winches and hatch covers, helps with orientation. Moving around…

Leech, roach and batten snagging A. Some old cruising skippers prefered a straight leech to do away with the chafe and bother of battens. In fact, the leech was often cut concave to prevent it hooking back on itself. Extra area could be added by having a ‘bumkin’ aft to keep the backstay clear. B. The roach is the bit of curved sail sticking out beyond a straight line drawn from the head to the clew. Battens in pockets stop it flopping about, and the resulting extra sail area was allowed within some racing rules. C. Aerodynamic research created beautifully efficient aircraft wings, which prompted sail designers to experiment with similar curved trailing edges. Multihulls and windsurfers can have massive roaches, because there’s no backstay to constrain them. However, with…

The test team ALEX BELL: Ex-merchant navy officer Alex Bell sails a Beneteau First 305 and lectures in maths and engineering at Southampton Solent University. ALAN WATSON: Ex-merchant navy radio officer Alan Watson is a Yachtmaster with commercial endorsement, and runs a 12.8m Nelson 42 powerboat. ADRIANA MATTEI: Adriana Mattei is a technology consultant, has sailed Lasers since she was 12 years old and now sails a Malö 42. OScar england: Studying Yacht and Power Craft Design at Southampton Solent University. Cruises on a Beneteau 40.5. Has RYA competent Crew and Rib Driver I. JacOB hutchingS: Studying Yacht Design and Production at Southampton Solent University. Races cats and dinghies on the sea and inland lakes. RYA Senior Dinghy Instructor. Megan SMith: Studying Yacht and Power Craft Design at Southampton Solent…

‘Essex is a much maligned county,’ breathed my brother-in-law a few years ago as my former yacht, a Finesse 24, ghosted up the Roach towards Paglesham. It was the quiet end to a hot, bright and breezy summer’s day, its frenetic energy spent. An intermittent chuckle from Kilter’s clinker lands was now all that remained of the huge scrunches as her powerful iroko bow had thrust and beat its way up the outer Crouch only a few hours earlier. Now, in little more than an evening’s sigh, Shuttlewood’s Boatyard appeared around the river bend to starboard. Great Wakering church spire came into view south of us, piercing the flat saltings between us and the wide Thames estuary beyond with all its shifting sands, horrors and wrecks. This is my home…

Home build project Many years ago, I needed a new dinghy. The old one was a 10ft inflatable with a soft floor that was mostly detached from the air chambers. I had found it by the bins in St Tropez, and although it was pretty awful, it would get Flo and I out to our recently acquired Brittany cutter, Cap Horn. The nasty thing could be rolled up and carried on deck and, since we were very short of funds, it would have to do. Sailing Cap Horn to Soller in Mallorca is too long a story for now, so I will give that bit a miss and go on to our arrival. Tea Bag, the inflatable, had to be paddled ashore with Flo and I perched on each air…

Not all Spækhuggers are the same. There are Family and Racing versions, the latter having wider decks, a narrower coachroof, no guardwires and a more basic interior. While Family owners are given a galley, a chart table and a heads – their relative positions depending on the layout – those going the Racing route have a much more basic (yet still neatly-finished) space below decks. The emphasis with both versions is on simplicity and robustness. For example, there’s little in the way of soft trimmings to start drooping, going mouldy or falling off, and no interior mouldings to waste space or restrict access. In similar vein, the absence of a headlining allows you to reach the through-deck fastenings. The mast also passes through the deck, avoiding issues with compression posts…

Last month, we concluded our project boat article by fairing the frames and stringers ready to accept the plywood hull sides. Finally, after six months of slotting panels together, bending stringers and applying countless epoxy fillets, we were just around the corner from starting to make our basket-like structure look like a hull. It was with some trepidation, then, that we cut out the first hull panels (supplied in 6mm ply) and offered them up. The kit allows considerable tolerance on the panels to cope with different builders’ interpretations of the correct sheer, but we were gratified to find that the panels matched our deck stringers to within a couple of millimetres, at least across the forward sections. Below the upper chine stringer the panels overlap by 50mm or more,…

Readers’ cruising destinations, near and far We pay for your published cruising stories and harbour updates. Email pbo@timeinc.com or write to the address at the top of page 5 Castlebay, Barra is a charming stopping-off point when visiting the Outer Hebrides. Coming round the corner into a wide-open bay with beaches on several sides and a castle centre stage, it makes for a pleasant surprise after the dramatic rocky coastline you may have passed en route north or south. If you have arrived after crossing the Minch from one of the Small Isles, Skye or Mull, it is a great place to start your Outer Hebrides cruise. Navigating into Castlebay should be fairly straightforward as long as you clearly identify the marker buoy for Sgeir a Scape and avoid the…

Send us your local news stories. Email PBO news editor Laura Hodgetts at newspbo@timeinc.com, tel: 01202 440825, or write to the address on page 5 SOUTH FESTIVAL RETURN The Gosport Marine Festival 2017 returns on Saturday, May 27, two years on from the inaugural 2015 event. This free community event, which will run from 10am-5pm, is offering more than 800 places for people of all ages and abilities to go afloat. Activities will include dinghy and yacht sailing, windsurfing, paddleboarding, kayaking and rowing, short voyages for disabled people aboard the Wet Wheels accessible catamaran, a marine art and craft exhibition, food and drink stalls, and live entertainment. The day will centre on Haslar Marina, in Trinity Church and on its surrounding Green, in the Timespace and at the Cockle Pond…

Great ideas and tips from PBO readers Email your projects and tips to pbo@timeinc.com or write to us at the address at the top of page 5. We pay at least £30 for each one published A mud horse is a cross between a barrow and a sledge with a flat wooden base and a plank sticking out. The base is a wooden cage made up of four poles. The fisherman loads it with buckets and nets and pushes it out into the mud at low tide. Nets are set at strategic points. When the tide goes out again, there should be a bounty of catch in the nets. Britain’s last remaining mud-horse fisherman is one Adrian Sellick, still using the centuries-old technique for his catch. I wanted to make…

Here’s just a selection of the latest questions from PBO readers. Email or write to the address on page 5 and our experts will answer your queries BOATBUILDING A frank talk on faux-teak Q I own a dutch Pedro aspre 36 steel boat called Happy Jack, and intend to cover the aft steel bathing deck (about 10ft x 3ft) with plastic faux-teak planks. can you recommend a supplier or manufacturing firm that can supply good-quality decking, and what’s the best way to adhere/glue this to steel which has a base resin coat painted with non-slip deck paint? John Brooks, by email TONY DAVIES REPLIES: I am a great fan of faux-teak decking: I had it on my last boat, also steel, and it raised the appearance of the boat to…

When it comes to painting, there’s such an enormous range of brushes out there – costing from under a pound to over £10 per brush, and with a startling complexity of features – that it’s hard to know what to buy. We decided to put a selection of the most common DIY brushes to the test, and a shopping trip to popular DIY outlets B&Q, Toolstation, Force 4 and Screwfix offered up a good selection, ranging from cheap ‘value’ brushes to expensive, handmade, beautifully soft and flexible ones. We painted up some hardboard test panels, applying white one-pack International Pre-Kote to one set, and white two-pack Perfection undercoat to the other. We used white so that brush marks and streaks would show up through our dark blue topcoats. This done,…

In my dim and distant past I spent a number of years in manufacturing highend sports cars, and I remember that there was only cursory notice taken of how easy it was going to be to maintain aspects of the car in the future. The object was to get the car out of the door and start on the next As we in the yard discover almost on a daily basis, it’s not so different with production-built yachts. Some of the design and build decisions hidden away under spray-lacquered veneers and flashy trim really smack of the same ‘get it out of the door quick so we can build another’ mentality. Among my current grumbles is the poor design of through-deck chainplates on modern-ish GRP yachts. We’ve had a rash…

Zoonie swung to her mooring buoy off Neiafu in Tonga amidst 38 other cruising yachts, most of which were waiting to leave for New Zealand to avoid the cyclone season. My husband Rob and I were in a meeting organised by the third annual Blue Water Rally, sponsored by Port Opua and Whangarei Marine Group and hosted by the Vava’u Tourist Association. Our speaker was John Martin, the director of the Island Cruising Association, who had made the journey to and from New Zealand 38 times. He told us that the only scary trip was his first one. Thereafter, he sought to work out ways of making the route safer and timing his starts to fit with weather systems as the highs and lows skipped west to east through the…

The Burnt Isles are a group of small, uninhabited, rocktrimmed islands in the middle of the Kyles of Bute. The islands have many little ‘Swallows and Amazons’ harbours, perfect for exploring. The islands provide good shelter for anchoring both to the east and west, and there are also mooring buoys available on the north shore. In my view, the best place to anchor is to the east of Eilean Mòr, the largest of the islands. The anchorage is sheltered from all wind directions except easterlies. If the wind is easterly, go to Caladh Harbour, less than a mile away. The Colintraive Hotel has six mooring buoys with pickups. You’ll have to pay £15 per night for a buoy unless you eat at the hotel (recommended). The Burnt Isles can be…