Anything you can do to reduce windage pays off.

Cruising Tips: Reducing Windage and Crowd Sourcing

Author:
Tom Cunliffe
Publish date:
Dec 11, 2024

Photo Courtesy of Tom Cunliffe

No Dragging in the Gale

When the weatherman says it’s going to blow old boots, most of us tend to look for a marina berth. Sometimes this isn’t possible; in any case we may be anchored, perhaps hundreds of miles from alongside shelter. Much has been written by me and others about making anchors stick, but a great deal can be accomplished by cutting down on windage to give the hook an easier ride. A modern yacht’s deck hamper can literally blow you away when the chips go down at midnight.

Lowering the spray hood can save you a big 10 square feet. Next, drop your roller genoa and bag it below. Not a popular order, but you’ll typically be 7 square feet to the good. If you can lower your boom end and lash it to the quarter that’ll help. Drop all your bunting and save your flags in the bargain. Have you ever felt the pull of a loaded flag halyard in a gale?

The obvious drawback to this otherwise sound policy is that should the anchors fail, you’ll be left with engine only, but this is rather a theoretical issue. Could you really sail out of danger with a dragging anchor in storm force winds? Better to make sure the batteries are charged and the fuel’s clean.

DIY Cartography

Many heads can be better than one when crowd sourcing information.
Image Courtesy of Tom Cunliffe

This is about the so-called “community edits” on Navionics electronic charts, whereby users can submit chart corrections to the server and have them incorporated into everybody’s software. Until now, I have given this feature a wide berth for reasons most readers will understand. What I didn’t know was that these updates can be activated or left out at will, so I’m not obliged to feature them on my charts. Navionics points out that most of their users are switched-on, responsible people, and that if some guy has entered an update they don’t like, they will report it and have it summarily removed. I tried turning the feature on and off (it’s in “Menu—Settings”) using a chart for a local creek. The crowd updates flagged up a new tide gauge that isn’t on the main Navionics chart, or on any other so far as I know. In future, I intend to make use of these updates in an intelligent way. I may even add a few myself, which you can choose to use or switch off if you don’t like the cut of my jib!