Don't Do This on YOUR Sailboat

all right I'm here aboard the 1995 oyster 485 it's a 48 1/2t oyster sailboat and we're getting ready to go on about 1,000 mile Journey Through the tanek winds so right now we're scheduled to get about 35 knots which could be anywhere between 30 and 60 knots judging by the historic data from a lot of the delivery Skippers I've talked to we've got new sales we've got new rigging we've got the rigging all tuned really well uh we've already been out to sea for about 1,000 Mi with it and it looks really nicely so I'm I'm very confident in this boat's abilities so before we leave there's a couple of mistakes that these guys have made don't do this when you have to prepare for an offshore passage with with high [Music] [Music] winds okay number one and the most Greedious of crimes never put solar panels on the deck of the working area of the boat that's the front of the boat where we're working up here we need to get up here we need to mess with these we need to mess with this we need to come up here and uncp these if we need them these are so slippery when they're wet so slippery that's why they put teak on boats it's very non-slippery when it's wet very slippery very nons slippery please don't ever ever ever put solar panels in the working areas of your boat it's not a good idea so this is actually my favorite spot to put solar and wind because you have all this unused airspace up here a lot of oyer owners don't want to put an arch on the boat because they think it detracts from the lines I personally think it's the 21st century and we have all this renewable energy why not take advantage of it but I understand there are some Puritans that don't want to do that so in this case where the O the owner doesn't want to put an arch on it he's still not using this real estate so you can actually put little standoffs here they make clamps that go right on here standoff and then you can put two or three solar panels right here and that's up to I bet you could fit 1,000 wats of solar back there another real common one is right here they mount solar panels on this tube and on that tube and they fold up it's a little bit tricky to do with uh with netting on your boat but you can absolutely do that too so let's just ask Mario cuz I I've been a little hard on him this video why did you choose to put the solar panels on the front so we chose to put the solar panels uh on the front um knowing that we would have to take them up when we were underway but when we're at anchor that's when we use the most power now that was real estate that me and John never really used cuz we don't like to sit in the Sun so we're typically in the cockpit so we said why don't we just put some solar panels out back now we did have the full intention and we have already ordered the new Simpson davits that are going to raise those um uh probably to about here and the Simpson davits they're a lot bigger and they're wider and it allows for them to tack weld on brackets to put solar panels without having the arch and you can still get through to get to the to the boat the other thing that we're doing is we're putting up a 1500 WT windmill which is in my generator wind generator um to supplement it but those were never meant to be on the boat while we were underway cool sweet I'm I'm good with that they were on the boat while we were underway though and I S on and almost died okay second thing that's a big error on this boat is these Fender holders they're real nice they make these little uh Fender holders that that hold your fenders pretty and these might even be custom are these are these custom made Fender holders I think the owner bought them I don't know um but they're in a horrible position this is right up at the front of the boat we're about I don't know 12 ft back and man when we start taking water over theat boat it's going to come right here it's going to come over the boat and it's going to wash down this side it's going to wash these out of this bag and then they're going to sit like that and then they're going to get washed over and then they're going to start going backwards and then and then they're going to end up ripping this off and breaking this plastic or something and there's nothing we can do about it there's no way we can go up on the front of the boat to try to save a fender so you're probably going to lose whatever your Leeward fenders are if you put them in bags on the front of your boat so a better solution would be the stern Pulpit all this metal back here is called the stern Pulpit from here to here I had mine extended up to here cuz I like having the extra real estate but having the stern Pulpit you can put those bags on here and then put all your fenders back and an even better solution would be in this lazarette right here this a lazaret is where most people store their fenders but in that case you probably have to deflate them these are they're all real big offenders the way that I do it on my boat is I tie them to the stern pulpit and then I flip them inside the boat when we're under way and what whatever I can't fit in the Lockers in there and in the sail Locker in front uh that's where they live and they that been fine for long time I've got probably 40,000 M on this boat so what are you planning on doing with those fenders we're going to put them in your bedroom in my bed yep stop you from hitting the sides of the boat when we're rocking he heard me he heard to be talking smack about his fenders number three and in my opinion tied with number one for the most Greedious erors this anger doesn't have a pin in it so this is how a lot of people lose their boat the anchor doesn't have a pin a big wave comes up and pulls the anchor on the windless and and either breaks the windless or breaks the lock on it or breaks breaks the brake on it breaks the brake and it pulls out and it starts to go out and um there was a YouTuber that got that chain stuck in his prop as he was going over a bar and it it started a fire in his engine room and flooding and I mean he almost lost the boat that's just one example I've had that happen to me and luckily I was in 200 ft of water so we had this huge anchor dangling down and we were doing 10 knots I mean had that thing caught the bottom it would have either flipped the boat or definitely broken the bow Beam on the cat so let's repair that right now hey I've got a story about an anchor pan oh yeah yeah I was on a boat James knows the boat and uh we had the anchor pin through we came into a Anchorage at night that was pretty tight had reefs around it and boats with no lights on them and I went forward to pull the anchor pen and couldn't somewhere during the sail a uh the windless had kicked on momentarily and pulled the anchor in and bent the pin so James wound up having to go up there with a uh with a sledgehammer small hammer and pound it out before we could anchor um what do you do now James obviously that's my boat he's talking about so yeah my anchor pin is bent so do as I say not as I do but just in case you don't have a hole in your anchor a lot of anchors don't have holes for a pin uh what I would do in that situation is drill one but if you don't you can always just tie a bowan in the actual anchor itself or in through one of the links uh what I do is I just put a line right through here or right through here somewhere that it's not going to chafe so on this anchor I wouldn't use that one I'd use this one and then tie a bowl in here and then just take it back to the CLE thanks for for bringing that up Billy appreciate that really cool I just wanted to point out that sometimes things go go wrong even for good [Music] Sailors okay number four is right here and this is a really common one for newbie Sailors they use these Cal straps to tie everything down these are a no no on a boat because they are made of very mild steel and they rust like hell and they'll leave rust stains all over your boat and you'll have to cut these off and furthermore when you do tie things down like this if there's any big lengths like this or even longer they will buzz they'll buzz like this really really hard in the uh strong winds so it's just annoying I mean imagine listening to that all night when you're on watch better way to tie down is with line uh thin strong line is the best the thicker the line the less this will work you can either tie that off on the boat better yet tie that off on the tow Rail and then we just went around one of the stanson bases and then this is the knot that you use to make a purchase so you go around around around and then you pick up the middle and go through the center and that makes the Alaskan Alpine hitch I'm going to show you that one more time okay you you come up over your hand you go around one 2 3 you reach up underneath and you grab the middle line and then that middle line goes under the other two lines and that makes a knot with two btes in it so this is one bite on this side this is one bite on this side okay and then we can use The Bitter End of this line put it up in here and we can get this very very tight once we get it tight now to finish this knot we just grab right here so it doesn't go anywhere and we put a slip knot in it so we we come up and put one hitch in it but don't pull it all the way through leave the leave the little Loop here and then you you finish it off by one more hitch one more half hitch okay now it's very very secure it's very tight tighter than you can make it with like 2 and 1/2 hitches or just one knot and then when you need it out you just take this one out and this one's this one's taken all the load now you can get it out and you can do like seven or eight of these all over the place and that way if one breaks then the the others will still hold it this is really really good for the dingy on the front of the boat taking waves where you need it to be really secured down and you can do multiples of these too you can do one on this side and then you can do another one on this side and then you can you can have like a for purchase system if you want to okay Fifth and final thing for this video series is the housekeeping of the mass now we we call it housekeeping it's really linee keeping but it's just called housekeeping so there's a bunch of things wrong with this Mast and I'm going to go through every one of them and show you what's what's the matter can you see okay first of all this is not supposed to be wrapped around the winch you want to leave your winches clear uh if you don't have a place for these you need to add some cleats to your boat so this boat conveniently has cleats down here and we're just going to pull that down pull it down tight and lock it around this cleat and then depending on how much we have left we can either just keep going around a couple times boom boom boom boom boom until it's off the deck that's okay that's one way to do it it or we can hang it and I'll show you how to hang it okay so this line doesn't have a clutch so this line will get real tight with the with the cleat and then we'll go over lock it in and then we' we've got a lot left here so this time I'm going to wrap it up so in order to wrap it up we're just going to wrap little lines little tiny Loops so they they stay off the deck and then on the last Loop we reach in we grab this line and we Loop it up over itself there's only on side there we go that's how to wrap that I'll show you guys that again in just a minute first this line is the major fault so this is a working line if you look this blue one is the jib Hower so in the case of emergency our jib gets stuck our furer gets stuck we need to let the jib down this is going to be a pain in the ass at night you got to always think about nighttime cuz everything seems to happen at night this is going to need somebody to work on it for 5 minutes to try to figure it out and they're probably going to get it in knots and have to work on it for 10 minutes and by that 10 minutes your your s's now shredded all the sail Howards are working lines if the sail's up it's a working line we're going to grab it this is not right either we're going to leave a little bit of a loop so we can hang it and then we're going to do arm siiz Loops big Loops cuz this is a lot of line This is a Howard we're just going to go the whole length of this line with these Loops there's two ways to coil it you can either coil it like this and it comes out in figure8 or you you can coil it like this you take it overhand once go overhand so it's nice and circular and then when you go to do the next one you go underhand and you flip it up underneath so it ends up being one big circle and it's twisted this way then this way then this way then this way this is how we used to do it in the in the electronics house that I used to work at for big long cables and it works really well uh a lot of sailors like the Figure 8 design it doesn't really matter I mean honestly what whatever works for you works for you okay now that that's going to coil up and be all pretty so what we do now is we drop one and then we grab it we go around the front of it and then grab it with this hand the hand that's holding and we make a little Loop there and then we we put this through the loop okay so you got two Loops here now to keep this from coming out we either have to splice up a loop in the end of this line or we have to tie an overhand knot and this one will tie an overhand knot cuz we don't have it spliced yet eventually what you do with this dyema line is you just take the dyema core out and splice the um the the sheath over itself and then now we hang it up point being to this whole thing is it's only got one wrap around it and it's very very easy to get out and drop on the floor and be ready to go I'm going to show you that right now okay in the invent of emergency we all we have to do is take this off push this out and hold this and it comes out and now you can just take it up take it up take it up take it up take it up take it up take it up it's not going to bind on itself or anything it doesn't you see it's not nodding on itself get it nice and pretty that's pretty right there the red one's not too pretty but that one's damn pretty the red one is the stas how you're we're going to need that line when we get into some very strong winds this one's a little bit short cuz it's now tied to the stacil so same thing little bit of a loop so we can hang it smaller Loops cuz we don't have very much and then now that we're done around the backside up with your finger up through and then tie a knot in it this is brand new line it's kind of hard to get an overhand knot in oh I need a little more slack on this thing there we go this this line as it as it ages it'll be easier to tie this will it soften with age uh-huh okay yeah and then it'll get harder yeah it'll soften at first and then it'll get harder I'm used to Old lines being really hard but yeah not new lines y maybe I should Sail on better boats yeah probably or at least people that you know take care of their boats feel okay so we're going to put this one over the other one because we're going to use that more often okay so in an emergency that's how you need to hang your lines now let me show you how to hang any lines that you're not using right now for instance this is our stacil we've already got it set up the bag is tied off the Howard's already tied on it's tied in a knot here and we've got the clue lines set up these are the clue lines those aren't going to be used until we get to like 30 35 knots so I'm going to show you how to route and and hang those those clue lines on the secondary winches for easy use come with me okay so then it's coming up through this sheave and then it's sitting on these secondary winches now what do you do with all this it's easy you take you give it like about a foot foot and a half tail and then you make small loops loops that are are small enough so when this is hanging this isn't hanging down in the water because there'll be water coming down the bat so you want small Loops about that big okay and then you take this and you put your hand through it you grab the line and you flip the line over itself and hang it on the hang it on the winch the point of doing it this way is it's very easy to get it off you grab the little Loop and you grab the line and you pull it off and you drop it and then it's ready to go okay you can throw it in your cockpit and then now we're ready to use this winch it's just very easy way rather than trying to wrap it or wrap it around the winch a million times a lot of people do this this is a crappy way to do it because you're just asking for problems you're asking for a knot in there or an override or you know when you really need it you need it you don't you don't need to sit there and unwrap this thing a million times plus it looks like crap so I'm going to show you one more time and then that'll be the end one foot and a half little circles you can you can do that that technique I taught you where you go back and forth if you want to make real pretty circles and then hand through up and over and you got to you got to kind of mess with it a little bit just to make it pretty okay that's it thanks see you next week [Music] a

Channel: Sailing Zingaro

Views: 90,007

Keywords: sailing, top five rookie, top five mistakes, top ten, boat repair, boat maintenance, svzingaro, zingaro, sailing zingaro, adventure vlog, sailing around the world, adventure, travel the world by sailboat, boat lifestyle, boat life, sailing away, yacht life, travel vlog, Adventures with purpose, travel blogs, Travel vlog 2020

Id: IHBe4_JT3wE

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 16 2023