Ep 156 High Wind Docking, Oyster Regatta, Sail to Guadeloupe
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- čas přidán 26. 08. 2024
- This is a bit of a mashup of footage we took while at our home base of Antigua, W.I. Starting with a rather pedestrian 2 mile motor-sail from Falmouth Harbour over to Nelson’s Dockyard, we find ourselves entering the land of clustered superyachts that almost defines the location. Falmouth and Nelson’s are so close to one another that you can (and must, pretty much) walk over from one to the other.
But Nelson’s Dockyard has its challenges. The big boats on the superyacht dock splay their chains out at about thirty degrees to either side and usually choose to go as far out as they can. This necessarily means that they overlap with the recreational private yacht area abutting the Nelson’s seaward quay. We ended up counting ourselves lucky that we had also gone very far out, near the limit of our chain, in order to overlay the other chains. It should be noted that when leaving, we motored out to the as close to our anchor as we could get before lifting it. One of the mistakes cruisers make, and I see it frequently, is to retrieve 2/3rds of their anchor chain before driving either over the anchor, or backing against it. These actions will drag the anchor along the bottom, picking up whatever other chains happen to be nearby.
As we arrived we found ourselves preparing to Med moor with anchor in 10-15 knots of crosswind. This is a scenario that scares novice skippers, and cannot be taken lightly by experienced ones. We start by backing up from our anchor location, deploying chain as we go. But midway through we suffer a BMS (battery management system) shutdown. This was the situation documented in our previous episode to this one, and left us unable to continue deploying chain until the system reset. It wasn’t a long time, but was enough to require us to realign and try a second time.
We also suffered from poor planning when it turned out that our volunteer crew wasn’t properly briefed by us on the overall plan for docking. In short, we never explained the concept of throwing the windward stern line first, how to properly throw the line so it makes it to shore, how to take up extra line and cleat it, etc. These are big elements of a successful docking, and in the end I’d give us a 60% rating. Not out best attempt.
From there, we did the Oyster cocktail circuit, before heading out on a 42nm passage to Guadeloupe.
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Thank you Wendy and Kevin. Wendy is looking fantastic and so does the sailing!
Thanks so much Greg. She loves hearing that, and I'll tell her she got another like.
Thank you! Awesome content as always!
You bet Duncan!
Oh, great! A new episode and once that music into started it just made me smile! Just strapped in to watch... :)
Thanks Coleen. Hope all is well in the great northwest!
great color and focus'd video.
We're doing everything in 4K, 30 or 60 framerate depending on the camera. The file sizes are enormous, and sometimes it takes 36 hours to upload a video on our slow-speed DSL, but I think it's worth it. Thanks for noticing.
Wendy looking fantastic as always ✌️
She'll be glad to hear. Thanks so much for the kind words.
Always love when the crowd magically appears during docking stress - brilllllliant sail ⛵️
Yep. We all watch. As they say, everyone wants to be captain until it's time to do captain s***.
I've seen worse docking situations with this sort of wind and wind direction. We, in NW Europe, call this 'Hafenkino' (harbor cinema). And the unpreparedness of the crew will not happen a second time. Personally, I hate anchoring and reversing. We did this fro ages around Greece, but untangling anchors was almost a morning's work every time we wanted to leave the harbor. Croatia's coast has 'lazy lines'. I prefer those 100%.
I love how things go in Greece. The Greeks seriously have considered and know that basic maintenance on lazy lines, or laid moorings, won't be done, and therefore they just stick with Med mooring w anchor. As for us, this wasn't out best showing, but I thought it kind of covered the stuff that sometimes happens. I tell novice skippers that there are 1 min., 10 min., 1 hour, 10 hour, etc. problems, and if you can keep your problems small, people forget about them quickly. It doesn't take long in a marina for someone to outdo your stupidity. Conversation at the bar is usually about someone who really rang the bell.
@@SailingTalisman I guess you could be right one the maintenance of lazy lines in Greece. A future pitfall for the Croatians? I hope not! And I fully agree with the educational value of this vid about a mooring situation like this!
@@mennovanrij9334 Nelson's Dockyard is a special situation. The berth we were in is near the neck of Sammy's Slipway across from where we were and not shown in the video, but you could look at Google Earth and see there. So the deal generally is that superyacht captains are 100% held responsible if their boat drags or gets turned sideways in higher winds, doing damage to themselves or others. This being the case, they always want to deploy their own anchors. They'll take up laid moorings if available, but wherever I go I always see the chains out too. And they're happy to pay the divers as it comes out of the ship's budget. Nelson's sees such a mix of smaller recreational yachts and larger vessels that it's always a mess as chains get tangled up. I've been there perhaps 12 times, and although we've been spared major issues, I've come to prefer Falmouth Harbour next door. Besides being free if you anchor, it's a much more convenient place to be. Restaurants, swimming beaches, well protected form weather, a formal town dinghy dock. It has everything.
I don't think it was a bad med mooring in those windy conditions, also the dock hand went above and beyond fishing the lines out of the water.
He did. Those guys were running all over the place that day. And some of the other boats, even the bigger ones, were having a time of it.
Just curious do you tip the guys catching the lines or is that part of the marina price?
I'm sure they wouldn't turn it down, but the custom is no. They're paid a going wage to do the task. Part of this is that by the time the boat is securely tied up, the dockhands will usually have wandered off. Tipping is viewed differently in different regions of the world. The French will rarely tip at all, while the rest of the EU treats it as a spare change thing. In the Caribbean they're starting to tack a 15% "service charge" onto tabs that the servers say never makes it to them and is kept by the owners. In the US of course, it's totally out of hand, working to reduce the number of people willing to go out to eat. I should add that I tip according to local custom. In the US, that's 20% as the base, and someone has to really piss me off to get less.
What was the name of that boat at 7 minutes and 21 seconds into the video? Looks like it could have been DEVA which used to be called TeVega.
Indeed!
@@SailingTalisman Nice boat. I spent a year aboard TeVega. Found out that it was sold and completely remodeled with a name change to DEVA. Indeed looks like it could have been DEVA.
I think that was Chronos, but as I was saying there are two of these boats with the big wishbones between the masts. Hard to say for sure as the lettering is too small.
Three questions, this assumes your pockets have a depth not associated with mere mortals: Length, Mono/Cat, Aluminum/Fiberglass?
Talisman is an Oyster 485, built in 1994, and is hull number 8 out of 33 or so, 1992 to 2003 run if I'm not mistaken. She is built to be what's called a "bluewater" boat (monohull), with offshore cruising in mind. As such, a trade is made to sacrifice speed in exchange for stout and durable construction. She is heavily built with thicker fiberglass and upgraded systems to take a beating. And after 30 years she still kicks ass. These types of boats are necessarily expensive (a new Oyster 495 will set you back nearly $2M), but also opens the opportunity for people like us to bring older models into the modern world, kind of like others do with classic cars. In terms of selling price, Talisman is theoretically still in the green after year in and year out of investments (not including labor, which is almost all by us). I will add that our channel is over a decade old, and in that time I've seen numerous cruising couples come and go. A lot of this has to do with costs, and no matter how expensive you think it is, you'll be guessing low. If you watch our channel you'll see that we try to do every project we can ourselves. But we still lose ground every year, since the base parts cannot be had for cheaper than whatever they sell for on Amazon or eBay. There's just no getting around needing new OEM stuff. We do go for long periods in places where we can anchor for free and cook our own food, although that doesn't rate highly with viewers. It's a life that favors those who don't carry debt of any sort. Anyway, hope that helps.