- Some Questions Answered

In Bulletin, No 164 I put forward some ideas on this subject and asked several questions. Apart from the very useful recommendation of the ratchet block as a means of taking the strain out of holding the mainsheet in a blow, I have had no response to my enquiries. As it turns out, however, I have been able to answer some of my own questions, and my conclusions were to some extent confirmed by the experiences of Peter Small at his Righting Practice last year.

It may cause some wry humour when I explain that I got my answers by capsizing my undecked 12 ft Tideway, but I hasten to add that it was while I was racing on a lake in Devon. The wind was a force 3 and we were having a sharp tussle at the windward mark, everything was lovely until I fell over to leeward just as the wind filled the sails on a new tack. The boat filled with water and rolled gently on her side tipping my wife Ruth and me into the water, but showed no inclination to go any further. At which point I went into a sort of automatic overdrive, and have only a partial recollection of the details of what I did. I swam round to the centreplate which was just above the water, and had no difficulty getting on to it, from where, kneeling on it, I could look over the gunwale to see the mast, spars and sails lying on the water. I told Ruth to hang on while the boat righted scooping her up as it did so, and so quickly did it right that I had no time to climb over the gunwale. I dropped back into the water and swam to the stern where I managed to haul myself effortlessly in over the gunwale which was awash.

The boat has 4 buoyancy bags of nominally 100 lbs each, but thinking it out afterwards, I realized that our combined weights and that of the mast and sails all of which were out of the water just about took up all that, leaving the wooden boat to float on its natural buoyancy. Which explained why the waterlogged boat, although reasonably stable, was so deep in the water that the gunwales dipped on alternate sides as she rolled. However the plastic bowl that I keep aboard for just that purpose very quickly swept out enough water that she floated properly and, incidentally, removed the water much more quickly than it could come in through the centreplate case. The only obvious and entirely expected problem was that the small amount of gear that I had aboard floated out of the boat and soon became scattered over a fair expanse of water. This was where the safety boat came in useful together with one of the other competitors in gathering up these escapees, otherwise the rescue boat just stood by while I sailed back to the beach to get the last of the water out and change into dry clothes.

It was undoubtedly fortunate that the incident occurred at the windward mark allowing plenty of room to get sailing again; had it been at the other end of the course with a rocky bank under the lee the matter would have been much more problematic. I was pleased to find that the theory of the mast lying at or very near the water surface when the boat is on its side does indeed resist inversion, which Peter Small reported as a significant feature of his well loaded boat, a feature helped by buoyancy up the mast in both cases. The down side of this is that the boat has much more water in it when it is righted, but even this, although inconvenient, did not prevent me or Peter getting the boat sailing again, albeit in sheltered waters. Peter did not say how he cleared the boat of water. Self bailers do not work in a Tideway which goes too slowly. Do they work in a swamped Wayfarer?

Peter Small says that the wind strength at his Righting Practice was force 4 which could be expected to induce a significant wind drift on the hull when lying on its side, but he does not give any indication that it did so. It seems probable that this wind drift may have been partly the cause of the difficulty of righting the inverted boat, as the sails were presumably the main cause of the resistance. Would it be worth trying to right the boat with the mast pointing to windward? This would cause the wind to catch the inside of the hull and the drift thus induced to help bring the boat back on its side. The righting could perhaps then be continued in the same attitude rather like an advanced windsurfer in strong conditions, but it would perhaps need somewhat sharper handling than the more usual up wind method.