At an earlier stage in my life I did quite a lot of sailing, some over it over appreciably large distances.
There is a fine line in sailing between a boat big enough to live aboard, and small enough to handle single handed, depending on who you are, how much money you have and where you sail this is probably going to be between 30 and 40 feet LOA.
If you are going to be living aboard it is going to be a heavy old barge, not a 3/4 tonner that skips along in a light breeze canted over, sailing on your ear.
Any displacement boat has a top speed that is a function of its waterline, for a 30 foot LOA hull you could have an LWL of 27 feet, for a 40 foot LOA hull you could have a LWL of 37 feet. This is called hull speed. The longer the LWL the faster the displacement hull can go.
For a 40 footer you’re looking at 9 knots.
For a 30 footer you’re looking at 6 to 7 knots.
This is maximum, ideal conditions, millpond calm.
This isn’t just a question of power, you can put a 1600 BHP MTU into that hull, it will still only do 9 knots, and all the excess power will go into making a monster bow wave and a huge stern wake.
If you are trying to round Ushant in spring tides the tidal race there can make 9 knots easy, more in places, if you get wind over tide (wind running opposite to tide) it gets real rough.
If you’re boat is powered by wind, unless you have a following wind (which will give you wind over tide) you can’t point closer than 30 degrees to the wind, so if the wind is 30 degrees either side of being a headwind you’re gonna be tacking, a lot, which again vastly reduces your mean forward speed.
More than once I have sat at anchor in the north of Brittany near Lanillis for two weeks, waiting for conditions to be right to make passage around the head to Concarneau, I’ve waited because I could, waiting for the right combination of tide and wind and weather… the alternative is go 100 miles out into the Atlantic and go around, which is what all the jammers did, following the old saying that your troubles only really started when you got near land and had no sea room.
The sea, wind, weather, always a “she”… because it didn’t really matter what YOU wanted, she could not be controlled, or predicted, or influenced, all you could do was what I did, wait until conditions suited YOU, then use her for as long as she suited you, and the moment she changed just sit back again.
I’m sure you can see the parallels to hooking up with some skank ho for some rumpy pumpy, the only time you can up anchor is when her ACTIONS are compatible with your own goals, and even then you could be mistaken and all change within an hour.
If you listen to what wimminz SAY, or try in any way to influence what they eventually DO, or worse still to become deeply involved in trying to influence this, then you are not only the fucking idiot trying to magic up the weather, you are the fucking idiot who then sets sail upon those seas, despite the conditions not favouring you.
If you depend in any way for a wimminz to DO a certain thing so you can get what you want, you’re better be like me in harbour, chilling, eating, drinking, smoking, waiting and watching, neither knowing nor expecting, but patient.
Or you can go out in this…
Related articles
- Sailing Hydrofoils and the Fold Catastrophe (penzba.co.uk)
