Those who have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance will be aware that there is more to maintenance than just keeping your chosen means of transport on the road, or on the water.

I like sailing more than anything else apart from two or three obvious exceptions. It certainly beats working, but when the need to earn a living means that I can’t sail as often as I like, then playing about with my boat and improving it is the next best thing. For some people, working on their boats or building new ones is even more exciting than using them. This is perfectly valid as boating is predominantly a form of leisure, so it’s a case of ‘whatever turns you on’. I don’t belong to that camp though; I prefer to use the boat and so I avoid large projects that might interfere with my sailing it unless they’re absolutely necessary to keeping her good and seaworthy.

The nearest I got to breaking this rule was when I fitted a 12 volt battery to power navigation lights and the echo sounder. Black Jack David has built-in plywood buoyancy chambers, some of which occupy what would otherwise be the bilges, and the heavy battery would serve as useful additional ballast, so positioning it was important, as was keeping the integrity of the watertight compartments. I had to build a ply and epoxy battery box which then had to be integrated with the hull and bulkheads. This, together with wiring, making the demountable navigation lights and one or two other things took up a good deal of time, and though it didn’t actually prevent my next planned trip, it certainly made me late for it and caused a lot of other stress into the bargain. In this case it was worth it though, because it meant that on several occasions later in the year, I was able to return to my mooring late at night and with a boat-load of tired children without too much fear of being run down by a passing fishing boat and so I was able to do more and go further as a result.

Fitting the battery was on the whole a good decision, but it made me even more wary of big projects which might interfere with using the boat until they’re finished. No boat is perfect, but mine at least works, so I decided that anything non-essential that I did to her from now on should not stop me from getting on the water if it had to be left unfinished for any length of time.

I recently decided to fit a device to hold the tiller, the sort of thing that many people use to make single-handed sailing easier. On an initial consideration, some sort of tiller restraint ought to be very simple. Falling into the ‘don’t mess around, just do it’ way of thinking, I selected a suitable bungee cord with hooks which I fastened to the two after mooring cleats, taking a turn of the shock-cord around the tiller. This worked fine for heaving to and for when I was using the outboard, but when it came to leaving the tiller whilst under sail, it wasn’t much good. It was incapable of fine adjustment, and the excessive slack in a solely shock-cord system made the whole thing too unpredictable as it balanced against the forces acting on the boat in varying wind strengths and on different points of sail. Something more rigid seemed to be the answer, but it had to be capable of being over-ridden in an emergency without the delay involved in unhooking or untying it. I remembered having seen something that might work, on a particularly famous Tideway which I’d encountered at DCA rallies over the course of the year. On the way back from a Falmouth holiday at the end of the summer, I called in on its equally famous (to the DCA) owner and had a look. What I saw convinced me, and I was able to obtain a copy of the reprinted DCA article by John Huntingford which explained how to do it.

For some reason though, I hesitated about implementing it, mainly because I suspected that if I adopted the ‘just do it’ approach to this, I’d be embarking on an exercise in trial and error which would leave me with vacant screw-holes all over the after-end of the boat. Instead, I just thought about it, and realised that excellent though the design was, it was not complete. The basic outline is fine, but there are at least a dozen different variables to do with positioning different components, lengths, properties and dimensions of materials etc. for which there could be no definitive answer. Because they depend so much on other things specific to the particular boat and the preferences of its owner. Several entirely different combinations of these variables could well result in equally acceptable solutions each having different characteristics. Equally, the wrong combination has the potential to be disastrous in that it might jam and could break your rudder.

I was delighted. I had found the perfect project that I could dream about during the winter, or when work kept me away from sailing, but which would not in any way stop me from using the boat when I had the chance. Though it wasn’t essential, it would be extremely useful, and much of the job could be done on my trusty Apple Macintosh, until with a perfected design, I could go out and fix it all up in half an hour’s actual work. I started to accumulate a bag of components which I would take out and play with to relieve work-related stress in the same way that some people use executive toys. I would dream about it on the train or in traffic jams. And gradually, a theory began to emerge, and with it, the beginnings of a design that would be tailored to my particular boat. I now have a diagram on my Mac, full of arcs and ellipses, all put together using odd moments of spare time and energy that would otherwise have gone to waste. It really hasn’t taken that long, and I will soon be in a position to ‘just go and do it’ without all the messing about that would have been involved in doing design ‘on the hoof’ using trial-and-error.

Unfortunately, this means that my project has not been as fruitful as I would have liked in terms of providing me with excuses for not doing things I ought to be doing, such as work. I have decided to rectify this by writing an article about it, two even. This, the first, is to explain the concept and invite readers to write to me with their experience of similar devices. The second will be full of diagrams and will explain my theory of how best to tailor John’s design to suit your particular boat. So if you too have a theory, or if you have had ‘interesting’ experiences with tiller restraints, please write to me at 14 Marlborough Avenue, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire B60 2PF.