Seamanship

I have got to the age where I’m comfortable with my bad habits and so the standard New Year’s resolutions hold little interest for me—I’m simply not giving up whisky* or chocolate.

But as a voyaging sailor, I know that forgetting the basic rules of seamanship can be the slippery road to disaster. And even after all the years and miles I have cruised, or maybe even because of that (hubris is a dangerous thing), I often take a moment to remind myself of those rules. It’s New Year’s, a good time to turn those rules into resolutions:

It was 4:00 am on a black early morning anchored at Cape Lookout Harbour when Phyllis and I were awoken by a crash from up forward followed by a sickening scraping sound. A quick look out the companionway showed the outline of another sailboat reversing away from our bow.

The outline looked a lot like a boat that had been anchored a good 400-feet away (measured by radar) the evening before. The GPS confirmed that we had not dragged and the other boat had been anchored abeam and slightly behind us, so nor had they.

Phyllis and I just finished laying-up Morgan’s Cloud for the winter at Billings Diesel and Marine in Maine, where we will be replacing the engine. As always, we are sad to move off the boat, which, over the last 18 years, has become more our home than any place else.