Winding a winch
To achieve the maximum from what your body has to offer, place yourself over the top of a winch as you wind it, ideally, so that you are literally looking straight down the middle of the barrel. This may involve for a sheet winch the inconvenience of standing with one foot outside the cockpit coaming, but the alternative of trying to crank it at arm’s length is a feeble substitute.
Easing rope around a loaded winch
If loading is light, you can safely take turns off a winch progressively until the rope can be eased by slackening up the tail and letting it slide round the barrel. Loads can build up surprisingly however, and trying to do this on a windy day with a genoa sheet is the road to trouble. The sheet will stay put as you start to slack up, then suddenly grab a foot or two, in the process of creating a riding turn or catching someone’s fingers. The safe technique, known as ‘cracking the sheet’ because of the noise it makes; is to place the flat of one hand firmly on the turns while slacking away the tail with the other, perhaps helping them round the barrel with a cupped palm. Once the worst of the strain is off, turns can be removed sensibly as required.
Winches can also be powered hydraulically, although these are rarer.
Riding turns
These come about when the neat turns on a winch barrel are forced over the top of one another so that neither end can be eased. Two solutions are common. The first is to take the bitter end to another winch and literally wind the riding turns out. The second is to hitch a stopper knot onto the bight of the loaded line using a rolling hitch (see page 41), take the strain on this, either by a winch or a tackle, and unwrap the mess once the load is off the winch.
Tackles Powered winches
On larger yachts, many winches are driven by electric motors. The better ones have manual backup in case of battery failure. These winches are extremely powerful and the utmost care must be taken when using them. The global advice to watch the load not the winch lest you do damage is emphatically applicable here. If confronted by an electric winch, look for the activating switch which generally has a flip-up cover of some sort. If the winch is a self-tailer, even greater vigilance is needed.
Unlike ‘ground tackle’ (anchors and chain) which is articulated as it is spelt, the pulley systems on ships were traditionally pronounced as ‘tayckles’. In the days before the universal adoption of winches, they were the seaman’s primary tool for upping the power. One end is fixed, the other is attached to the load and moves with the pull. Power is defined by the velocity ratio, just as it is with the teeth on a pair of gear wheels. In the case of the tackle, the ratio divides the distance moved by the load into the length of rope being pulled through the tackle. The ratio is equal to the number of parts of rope involved at the moving block. All tackles can be rove to advantage, in which case the block with the most parts is at the moving end, or to disadvantage with this block stationary.
In theory, it is hard to imagine why anyone would reeve up a tackle to disadvantage, but in practice it often renders the pull more convenient or the end more readily made fast. A mainsheet on a cockpit traveller is a case in point. These are invariably rove to disadvantage because the bottom
Fixed block
3 : 1
Rove to advantage
Load
Load
2 : 1 Rove to disadvantage
Fixed block
54 | MANUAL OF SEAMANSHIP
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