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Old 12-24-2007, 05:53 PM   #1
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At the 32nd Annual Seven Seas Cruising Association Convention in Melbourne, Florida, I presented a short discussion on STORM MANAGEMENT FOR CRUISERS.

I have now uploaded the talk on my website so that fellow sailors can learn more about storm managment from an experienced cruiser's perspective. You can read the talk at the following URL:

http://www.maxingout.com/storm_management.htm

The talk discusses storm managment in terms that will help novice sailors develop a plan for when they encounter their first storm offshore.

Enjoy.
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Old 12-24-2007, 07:57 PM   #2
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As a reletively inexperienced sailor with nothing more than a few sevens going eights under my belt, I cannot tell you how helpful and, dare I say, inspiring, I found this presentation. Worryingly, I'm almost at the point of actually wanting to go thru the experience for myself but I'm sure that'll pass!

See ya
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Old 12-24-2007, 08:56 PM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Owen View Post
As a reletively inexperienced sailor with nothing more than a few sevens going eights under my belt, I cannot tell you how helpful and, dare I say, inspiring, I found this presentation. Worryingly, I'm almost at the point of actually wanting to go thru the experience for myself but I'm sure that'll pass!

See ya
Hi Peter,

You are a high lattitude sailor, and I'm sure you have plenty of opportunities to experience heavy weather. That's good. Now all you need to do practice heaving to, using a drogue, and deploying a parachute.

The lesson that I kept learning on the way around the world was that as long as there are no breaking seas, there's no excuse for getting hurt in a storm. As long as I didn't rocket my sailboat off waves or drive my boat into walls of water at high speed, I always did fine. Whenever I kept my kinetic energy at safe levels, nothing bad happened. Only when the speed went up and I reached dangerous levels of kinetic energy did I start to worry about our safety. Slowing the boat with drogues was easy, and stopping it with a parachute worked extremely well. Whenever I controlled my yacht's energy and decoupled it from the storm's energy, things remained under control.

IF you want to see what it's like to tow warps/drogues in 40 to 45 knots of wind sailing down from Gibraltar, check out our video called "Warp speed" on our maxingout.com website.

http://www.maxingout.com/WarpSpeed.wmv

Cheers
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Old 12-26-2007, 09:26 PM   #4
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THat was helpful. I know from previuos post that chafe is a problem. How are you dealing with it? Is it always off the stern? In the one picture it looked to be rigged off the starboard side.If you had your warp of the stern, could you just add more items to it that would slide to center of the warp. I have heard of tires being used. It seems you could just have something prerigged and snap it on and let it slide back on it own to the center.

Very helpful to visualize what others have posted about.

Thanks.

Duckwheat
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Old 12-27-2007, 12:05 AM   #5
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I used an adjustable drogue one time in a storm on the way from Gibraltar to the Canary Islands. This may answer your question about adding to the drogue for more power.

In this incident, we had winds between forty and fifty knots, but since we were running downwind, it was not problem for our catamaran. The wind had a long fetch and the seas got up to about twenty feet, but they were still not a problem as long as we controlled our speed. In this particular storm, we trailed warps behind the yacht and slowed the speed down to four and a half knots. You can see a video of this on our maxingout.com home page in a VIDEO entitled "WARP SPEED" at the bottom of our home page.

In that storm, we trailed a drogue for three days to control our speed and to prevent broaching which would be a major disaster in a catamaran. The drogue that I used in this instance was a homemade drogue that I call the "Abbott" drogue, because I made it up on the spot using readily available components on my boat. (My name is Dave Abbott)

This drogue consisted of an 180 foot long warp of one inch three strand nylon that I looped behind the catamaran, with one end of the loop going to a starboard winch and the other end of the loop going to a port winch on the stern. But the loop is more than simply a loop of rope. On this loop I install carriers that I slid down the rope to increase the pull of the warp and thereby create the drogue effect. What are these carriers? I use four foot sections of plastic water hose as the carriers, and on these carriers I wrap anchor chain, dingy chain, dingy anchors, or whatever, and I lash these heavy weights securely to the hose carriers. Electrical ties can also attach the weights to the carriers. I then slip the plastic water hose carriers onto the loop of rope, and then slide the carrier down the rope and into the water. The carrier with attached weight immediately slides aft to the middle of the rope loop that I am trailing in the water.

If I want more drogue effect, I put more carriers and more weight on my warp and then let them slide down the rope loop and slow the boat down even more. The "Abbott" drogue is an infinitely adjustable loop of rope in which you can send as many carriers and as much weight down the warp as you need to use in order to control your speed when running downwind.

I like the "Abbott" drogue because it does a couple of things.

1. You can adjust the power of the drogue. If you need more drogue power, you simply send another carrier with attached weights down the rope loop to increase the drag in the water.

2. You can adjust the distance of the drogue from the boat by simply letting out more warp or taking in more of the warp loop using winches. The drogue should be consistently on the back side of any charging seas so that you are pulling the drogue through the wave rather than out of the front of the wave and losing drogue effect.

3. You can easily retrieve the drogue when you don't need it any more by winching it in with your cockpit winches. And when you winch it in, the carriers and the attached weight stay centered in the warp loop as you haul it in. That means you don't lose drogue effect and at the same time it's easy to retrieve once it's right behind the yacht.

4. You can construct an "Abbott" drogue using materials that are already on the yacht, and it's not expensive. You need at least 200 feet of line, and three or four pieces of flexible plastic water hose to use as carriers, and anchor chain and dingy anchors to attach to the carriers with shackles and ties.

5. The drogue is essentially chafe free out in the ocean because the heavy weights are riding on the plastic hose carriers rather than chafing directly on the warps.

If you want to see how it really works, go to my web site and view Surviving The Savage Seas on the home page or captains log archive 27. SURVIVING THE SAVAGE SEAS. There you will see a picture of two warps behind the catamaran in 40 knots of wind and eighteen foot seas out in the Atlantic. The "WARP SPEED VIDEO" shows how the catamaran behaves with the drogue in position and doing it's thing. For the three days that we were using the drogue, the autopilot did all the steering and we survived without any problem.

You will notice in the pictures that we actually had two warps behind the boat. One warp was eighty feet long with about 35 pounds of anchor chain shackled in a ball in the middle of the warp. The second warp is 180 feet long, and it had dingy anchor and chain attached to a water hose carrier. I liked having both short and long warps behind the yacht because I felt that if one drogue pulled out of a wave or failed for some reason, the other would be there to take over. Together, they held my boat speed to a consistent four and a half knots downwind. The two monohull yachts that we were sailing with arrived twelve hours sooner in the Canaries than we did, but we took less of a beating because we were sailing at a slower speed. One of the monohulls accompanying us filled their cockpit with water and had two inches of water in the galley - at least that is what they told us over the radio after it happened.
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Old 12-27-2007, 12:13 AM   #6
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Our answer to the chafe problem for a parachute was to use sea anchor chainplates on the bow. They create a chafe free way to attach a bridle to Exit Only.

These chainplates are twenty-five inches long on deck and consist of six millimeter thick stainless steel. On the underside of the deck is the same size of stainless plate, but it is only twenty inches long. Large bolts go through the deck and through both chainplates, and there is nearly zero chance that these chainplates will ever move. If they move, it's because both bows will have been pulled off the boat.

Welded down both sides of the chainplate and sticking out in front of it is a stainless steel bail that is about as thick as my finger. The part of the bail that sticks out in front of the bow is where I attach my parachute bridle using d-shackles that I wire closed after the bridle is in place. The bridle has large stainless steel thimbles on it so there is no chafe on the arms of the bridle where they are shackled to the bails.

When we left New Zealand expecting to get hit by a low pressure area or caught in a squash zone, I attached my parachute bridles to the bail of the parachute anchor chainplate on each bow before I left port. Everything was ready to go if we needed to deploy the chute. When we got caught in the squash zone, we shackled the parachute sea anchor rode to the already attached bridle and we quickly and easily deployed our parachute. It wasn't that big of a deal because everything was prepared in advance and we had tons of confidence in our gear and boat.
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Old 01-03-2008, 01:41 AM   #7
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I am a little confused. The drogue, sea anchor attaches to the bow. In the video it looked like the ends were attached to the rear winches.

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Old 01-03-2008, 04:10 AM   #8
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Originally Posted by duckwheat View Post
I am a little confused. The drogue, sea anchor attaches to the bow. In the video it looked like the ends were attached to the rear winches.

Duckwheat
I believe a drogue is attached from the stern and a sea anchor is attached from the bow. Maxingout was employing a drogue in the video, this it was streamed from the stern.
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Old 11-02-2011, 08:00 AM   #9
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Excellent pharese!! find it on the link: ALL YOU CAN DO IS ALL YOU CAN DO, BUT ALL YOU CAN DO IS ENOUGH!!
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