Page 190 - The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice

devote even more attention to the far, far likelier Cleat Details
state of being upright. And it also follows that the
skipper of the thin-decked boat will be edgy not just In a storm, cleats for mooring lines cannot be
about the deck, but about the mast, the stability of too large or too smooth. Use files and sandpaper
the vessel, and the stamina of the crew. to remove anything like a rough edge from your
cleats. While you’re at it, smooth out your chocks
and hawses. Think wide radius. In a blow, lead
Effects of Ignorance mooring lines around winches first, then to cleats,
But there’s more to seaworthiness than attitude; very or belay each line to two cleats if they’re available.
And in a storm, no matter how you belay your
careful, well-intentioned people can go very wrong lines or to what, double them up. Cheap insurance.
from simple technical ignorance. Take, for example
the couple whose interior decorator thought their
keel-stepped mast took up too much room below.
Here’s what resulted: There was nothing wrong with wanting a com-
The couple paid a yard to convert to a deck- fortable, workable interior. And nothing wrong with
stepped rig. No one involved in the project realized properly engineered deck-stepped masts or chain-
that deck-stepped masts have to be stiffer than keel- plate tie-rods, or proper-sized cotter pins. What was
stepped ones of the same length. So they just put in wrong was the assumption that any of these items
a skinny little compression post, cut the bottom off could be considered separately, that all of the details
of their keel-stepped mast, and didn’t realize their of construction would be naturally and inevitably
mistake until the first time they took the new con- comprehensible. One of the most profound and
figuration sailing. Then this mast, which had taken challenging joys of sailing lies in mastering the intri-
them around the world with no problem, revealed cacies of a little floating world. It’s just dangerous to
that it was now about 40 percent less stiff, jumping presume mastery.
and bouncing around, frighteningly close to folding.
Back to the yard to have a “sleeve” inserted Effects of Culture
in the mast to stiffen it. Now the mast is okay (if It is difficult to see through the assumptions and
much heavier, but the decorator has wreaked other norms of one’s own society—they’re so reflexively
havoc). In changing around the accommodations, there—and yet they shape our craft at least as much
he’s eliminated a bulkhead on the port side, amid- as the ocean does.
ships, a structural bulkhead where the inboard Consider, for example, the great racing yachts
chainplates used to attach. The starboard shroud of the turn of the last century. Here was the last
chainplates still attach to a corresponding bulkhead, gasp of a feudal society, complete with a hierarchy
but the port ones now go to a big tie-rod that pierces of indolent aristocrats, knight-helmspeople, and
the cabin sole, attaching to a lug on the hull. Tie-rod forelock-tugging menials. The boats were the size of
and lug are both massively strong, as is the clevis castles, and the entire ocean was a moat.
pin that connects them. But the worker who does the Or consider the recently vanished sailing junk of
installation doesn’t bring along the right size cotter China. Here was a trading vessel which contained a
pin. The ones he has are a little too big, but he jams complete merchant community/family. These easily
one in about halfway, and decides that it is good handled boats were designed around a vastly differ-
enough. The sole covers up this arrangement, and ent social and economic order than that of the Euro-
it is never noticed by even the very maintenance- pean yachts, and the result was a correspondingly
conscious owners. Over several years the cotter different design, construction, and handling.
works its way out; then the clevis gradually wiggles Now look at a typical IOR racer of the past
free; then one day in a fine breeze the port shroud decades. What are we to make of this incredibly
chainplate comes up through the deck, and the top expensive, fragile, ill-handling craft? What are we to
of the mast goes over the side. make of the human ballast that lines its rail, of the
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