The Blue View - Captain's License

 

It is always amazing to yachties and officials in other countries that anyone in the U.S. can take a boat out - no experience needed. If you rent or charter a boat in the U.S., the agency usually requires a resume and will often go out with you to make sure you know the basics before they let you sail away. If you buy a boat, however, it doesn't matter if the only previous experience you've had with boats was a rubber tugboat in the bath – you are the “Captain”, and can motor away in your spiffy new boat. You don't need to know why some markers are red and others are green, how to put on a PFD, or who has the right-of-way. That's a lot like learning to drive by buying a new Mercedes and driving it home in rush hour traffic.

Most other countries require the operator of a vessel to have an understanding of basic seamanship, safety at sea and the rules of the road. Many require one to pass a test not unlike a driver's test. When we first moved aboard Nine of Cups, however, there were very few states that had any licensing requirements at all. This is slowly changing – 45 states now have some educational requirements before allowing someone to operate a boat or watercraft, but most of these states have only minimal requirements or requirements that only apply to younger boaters. For example, California only requires boaters that have been convicted of a moving violation to take a boater's safety class; Florida only requires completion of a class if you were born after 1988, and exempts the operator of a vessel if it was purchased within the past 90 days; Massachusetts has no licensing requirement at all.

So now it is time for me to climb up onto my soapbox. I feel very strongly that every cruiser should at least take a general boating safety class. Besides the obvious benefits of knowing enough basic seamanship and the rules of the road to avoid putting your passengers, your boat and the other boaters in your vicinity at needless risk, there are several other advantages to having a boating safety certificate.

Many insurance companies give a discount to operators who have completed a boater's safety class.

Even if the state your boat resides in doesn't require a license, if you sail to a state that does require a license, you may be fined for not having one. A certificate from one state is usually good in another, just as a motor vehicle driver's license is good in any state.

On occasion, officials in other countries may require a “license” of some sort. A Fish and Game official in Queensland, Australia asked to see our boaters license and threatened us with a hefty fine if we didn't have one. I showed him our PASIS certificate (Bareboat Charter certificate) and my boater's safety class completion card from Colorado, which, with a lot of talking and a bit of hand waving, got us by.

And the most important reason for taking a class - it may prevent you from sounding dumb when you are sharing stories with the other cruisers in the marina. I remember a sailor telling me about a really rude power boater who “ blew his horn at me as he approached from behind. When I moved to the right to get out his way, he also went to the right and almost hit me!” If the sailor knew anything about the rules of the road, he would have known a single short blast from an approaching boat means that he intends to overtake you on the starboard side and you should maintain course. (Unless you are outside the U.S. where it's two longs followed by one short blast on the horn. This guy would have thought they were extremely rude in New Zealand with all that horn blowing to tell him to get out of the way.)

Not only do I feel it's important to take a boating safety class, it is very easy to do so. There are several companies that provide online courses for every state. Most charge only a nominal fee, and the Boat U.S. Foundation even offers it free. The process is to review and learn the material, then complete a practice quiz in each of several sections. When you have completed all the sections and feel you are ready, you can take the online exam. If you pass, you can print your lifetime certificate – if you don't pass, you can review the material again and retake the exam as many times as you need until you do pass. It couldn't be easier and it is a great way to learn enough to at least make your stories sound somewhat credible.

The next step is the U.S. Coast Guard Captain's License. Once you have some experience, you can attend the necessary courses, either online or in a classroom, and then take a proctored exam to get your captain's license. The usual license is the “Six Pack License”, which allows you to take up to six paid passengers on a vessel smaller than about 65 feet. Most cruisers don't get this license because they don't intend to take passengers for hire. Instead, it is a good way to learn a lot about seamanship, boat handling, first aid at sea, navigation and advanced rules of the road.

When we first moved aboard Nine of Cups, we didn't have the minimum 360 days experience on inland or coastal waters that is necessary to get our licenses. Once we had the experience, we were out of the country or not in one place long enough to take the course. Now that the courses are offered online, I may bite the bullet and get my captain's license. That way, my sea stories will sound credible to even the saltiest of salts.

If you have any suggestions or experiences to share about online courses for the captain's licenses, please share them.

The Blue View - NOAA TO STOP PRINTING NAUTICAL CHARTS!

 

Recently, there have been a flurry of very similar headlines to this one in the news, and, man, did the first few get my attention. NOAA is no longer going to print charts?? Surely, there are still a few other dinosaurs like me around who feel it is quite important to have paper charts aboard? What's the world coming to?

I quickly recovered from my initial shock and indignant outrage when I read the actual NOAA press release, however. The situation is not nearly as dire as I was led to believe. In fact, I discovered a number of new (at least to me) benefits NOAA is now offering that are quite positive.

After April 2014, NOAA will no longer print paper charts – this is true. For the past 150+ years, the U.S. Government has used a lithographic printing method to print charts, which were then sold to retailers. Lithographic printing is a cost effective method of printing if a lot of copies are to be made. NOAA would print thousands of each chart when the stock got low, and these charts would then sit on a shelf, for years in many cases, until the stock ran low again. As updates and corrections to any of the charts were made, all the charts in stock would have to be periodically corrected by hand. I would guess a significant amount of labor would be involved in keeping all those stocked paper charts up to date. After April 2014, the lithographic printing of charts by NOAA will cease.

This does not mean, however, that paper charts will no longer be available. Rather than printing, stocking, and manually correcting thousands of charts, NOAA will continue updating all their charts, and will provide them to third party retailers who will print them on demand. This means that you can order the latest version of any chart, in full or reduced size, and in color or black and white format, and have it shipped to you anywhere in the world from any of literally dozens of companies that provide this service. Our favorite has been Bellingham Charts. Their 2/3 size charts are relatively inexpensive, especially if you buy a chart set, the quality is good and their service is good.

My next thought was that this probably means that I won't be able to go to my local chandlery and spend a pleasant hour or so looking through the stacks of charts to find the ones I want. But after grumbling about this for a day or two, it occurred to me that most local stores would continue to order and stock the same charts they do now. The only difference would be that they would be ordering from a third party printer rather than the government printing office. It's even possible that the cost of the charts might go down since there is considerable competition (or more likely, the store's profit margin might go up?).

NOAA also provides the U.S. Charts directly to the public in several formats. The first format is a digital raster format. This format is used with several of the navigation programs and apps. I have used two of the free ones on my PC... OpenCPN and SeaClear . Both are reasonable, if basic, navigation tools, and both allow you to use the free raster charts provided by NOAA.

The second format is in pdf form. You can view, pan and zoom the pdf file on your computer or tablet, but unless you have a printer capable of printing large sheets of paper, the printed version will be too small to be usable.

The third format is my favorite. You can now print any chart in a booklet format. NOAA has divided each of their charts into 8.5”x11” sections, and arranged them so that they can be easily printed. If your printer supports printing on both sides of a sheet, it is quite quick and easy to make a chart booklet for any NOAA chart. Their website indicates that this option has just transitioned from an experimental program into official production. Kudos to NOAA - I think this is a great option.

Bear in mind that all this only pertains to U.S. Coastal charts. The U.S. International charts are not provided by NOAA, but rather the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and are only available to the public through third parties.

So now I am just a little depressed because I don't – at the moment – have anything to complain about. But the day is still early and I just discovered Amazon is having a sale on Leatherman Hand Tools which should cheer me up until I can find something else to grouse about.

The Blue View - Stern Anchoring

 

I've talked about different anchoring techniques at length (or is it ad nauseum? ) in my past blog posts. I've pontificated about a single bow anchor, bow anchors in series, double bow anchors, and running lines ashore. One of my blog posts was devoted to anchor snubbers and another to floating an anchor chain. Thankfully, I've almost run out of thoughts on the subject of anchoring techniques, but if you will bear with me, I have one more method to discuss - deploying a stern anchor.

We have deployed a stern anchor on many occasions and for several different reasons. Sometimes, because of the depth of the anchorage or the particular geography, we have found it necessary to anchor close to shore in the lee of an island. Despite what weather is forecast or what the prevailing winds usually do, there is always the possibility of a wind shift, which could quite likely cause us to swing around and go aground. A stern anchor will keep the vessel from harm, and using one has saved our bacon more than once. One time we were anchored in the San Blas Islands off Panama when the forecast called for the usual fresh winds from the east. Just after midnight, however, a storm passed through, causing the wind to back to the west. It was a tight anchorage with several reefs around, and attempting to navigate our way out in the dark would have been extremely risky. It lasted about six hours, and the only thing that kept us off the rocks was our stern anchor. I think it is very likely that we would have lost Nine of Cups had we not had it deployed. The next day, we discovered the winds were so strong that several huts in the nearby village were damaged, and one was completely destroyed by what the locals called a hurricane.

Another reason for using a stern anchor is to limit the amount of swinging Cups can do while at anchor. Sometimes we find a small, well protected cove to anchor in, but with limited swinging room. Instead of running lines ashore, we will often deploy the stern anchor to keep our tail where we want it. We have also explored a number of rivers, and because of the depth of the river, the strength of the current, or the amount of debris floating down the river, it was often not a good idea to try to anchor in the middle. By dropping the stern anchor, we could anchor quite close to the riverbank and out of the current without the risk of swinging into the shallows or getting fouled on a tree limb.

A third reason is to keep the boat pointed in a particular direction. We have been in many anchorages where the wind would blow from one direction while the ocean swell came from another. The boat would lie facing the wind and would roll gunnel to gunnel from the swell on the beam, making for a very unpleasant evening. By deploying a stern anchor, it was possible to point Cups into the swell. We might not be totally comfortable, but at least we weren't getting tossed out of our bunk.

We use a 35 lb (16kg) Danforth anchor as our stern anchor. The Danforth has tremendous holding power for its weight and sets in most bottoms. Its biggest drawback is that it doesn't always reset well if the boat swings around and breaks it free, but this isn't a problem when we are using it as a stern anchor. In most cases, we use 15 feet (4.5m) of chain shackled to the anchor and 200 feet (60m) of line attached to the chain. If we are anchoring in coral, we sometimes increase the chain to 50 feet (15m). The combination of the anchor and chain gets heavy, however, and since the anchor will probably be hauled up by hand, we don't often use the extra chain.

To deploy the anchor, we first set the bow anchor, and then use one of three methods to set the stern anchor. If the purpose of the anchor is to keep us off the rocks if the wind changes, we let out another 30-40 feet (9m-12m) of anchor rode and back away from the bow anchor. When the bow rode is taut, we toss the Danforth anchor over the stern and let out only enough rode to allow the anchor to reach the bottom. Then we motor forward while letting out more stern rode until the desired scope is reached. The stern rode is tied off, we set the Danforth and retrieve the excess bow rode. If there is any chance of tangling or chafing the stern anchor rode on rocks or coral, after Cups settles back downwind, we fake any slack in the stern rode on deck, leaving it free to deploy if the wind shifts.

If the purpose of the stern anchor was to prevent Nine of Cups from swinging too much, the method of deploying the anchor is different. We figure out how much scope we need on the stern anchor, add 30-40 feet to this and if possible, back Cups up this distance while letting out additional rode on the bow anchor. If we can get Cups in the right position, we drop the Danforth, motor forward to set it, then take in the bow anchor rode until both anchors are almost taut. Often, because the bow anchor rode is not long enough, because of an adverse wind or current or because the place we want to drop the stern anchor is too shallow or too close to hazards, it isn't possible to back Cups up into the right position. In this case, we use the dinghy to position and drop the anchor. The anchor will usually drag several feet before setting, which is why we start with an extra 30-40 feet of rode.

If the objective was to point Cups into the swell, the process is the same except we place the anchor well off to the side of the vessel so that the angle of the boat on the wind can be adjusted. Pointing into the swell may put Cups broadside to the wind, putting extra strain on the ground tackle. If the wind picks up, we keep an anchor watch and slack off on the stern anchor if necessary.

To retrieve the stern anchor, we try to position the boat over the anchor if possible. If the rode is vertical, the Danforth usually breaks free and can be hauled in by hand. On occasion, it has been stuck so well that we needed the windlass to break it free, in which case we routed the stern anchor rode to the bow.

If we can't get Cups positioned over the anchor, we have to resort to using the dinghy. We position the dinghy over the anchor and take in all the slack in the rode. If we can't break the Danforth free by hand, the rode is secured to the dinghy and we motor around in circles until it works its way free.

When not in use, the anchor is lashed in its place. We keep our Danforth lashed to the mast pulpit. Then the rode is faked in a figure-eight pattern, secured with small line, and stowed.