CHAPTER 14
Setting up a burgee with a modern masthead • Secure a light cheek block to one side of the mast immediately below the top and pass a light halyard through this. The halyard can be belayed at any convenient point around the deck, the lower shrouds or on the mast itself.
• Prepare the burgee stick. This should be as long as necessary to carry the pennant well clear of the masthead paraphernalia. Burgee sticks, or ‘pig sticks’, are available via the Internet. They can also readily be constructed from a length of dowelling, some stiff stainless wire, a few washers and a round-headed screw.
• Tie the two ends of the halyard together to make it endless. Now attach the halyard to the stick with a pair of clove hitches as shown. To make each hitch, simply flip two half-turns of the bight over the end of the stick and snug them down together.
• Hoist the stick, bringing it upright to clear the instruments once mastheaded.
Wash
Wash in harbours and where moored or anchored boats may be found is antisocial and unacceptable. Almost any powered boat, including most modern sailing craft, is capable of creating enough wash to be a nuisance, and every skipper is responsible for making sure it doesn’t happen in the wrong places. A boat travelling well within her
The burgee stick
hull speed (see page 12) is unlikely to disturb the water much but, as this critical velocity is approached, wave making increases dramatically. Typically, if speed through the water is kept below LWL (around 5 knots for an average 32ft sailing boat), all will be well. Some planing hulls have serious wake problems at sub-planing speeds. RIBs are a classic example. The only answer here is to be sensitive to others. If you’re motoring up a waterway at well within a posted speed limit but dragging half the river behind you, slow down if you see people on moored boats or fishermen on the bank. Whatever you’re driving, always look astern and assess your level of wash. Harbour speed limits Note that a speed limit is based on water speed not ground speed. In other words, your GPS might be reading 6 knots if you’re logging 8 through the water against a 2-knot stream. You’ll be piling up 8 knots worth of wash though, and will richly deserve the black looks. Posted speed limits in America are often backed up by the further constraint, ‘No Wash’. What a good idea!
Wash at sea Sailboat wash is not an issue at sea. Occasionally, a heavy powerboat can cause major upsets if she is steered too close to others. This is especially true in calm weather where a sailing boat may be trying to coax some progress out of an unpromising breeze. A big wash will shake her canvas into lifelessness and the resulting loss of way can take several minutes to make good. Children and outboards A child let loose in the right circumstances with a rowing dinghy is a happy person who is learning. The input is not only about how a boat really manoeuvres, it’s also about the limits of human strength when confronted with tide and wind. A grand package, to be contrasted with a small boy (it always seems to be boys) given free reign with the family’s outboard tender. He will inevitably drone around an anchorage creating noise and wash as he rapidly becomes bored, and doing neither himself nor anyone else any good at all.
MANUAL OF SEAMANSHIP | 135
Manners and customs of the sea
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