A handful of years ago, a few of us were heading out on the Bay. Sailing is a lot of work, for those that are thinking about getting into it. Stretching, contorting, nonstop moving around and grinding are all part of this sport. I’ve always been taught to do things such as to minimize the amount of work later. I’m not necessarily talking about unsafe shortcuts, what I’m talking about is little things like: Instead of taking the lock off my boat and putting it downstairs in some random place in the galley, drop it in one of the holders inside of the cockpit. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve locked up only to find I needed to open her back up to go find the lock.
Anyways, we don’t remove our dock lines generally (unless racing) and generally just coil them up, put them around a lifeline, and then place one end of the coil inside the other. It works great. Of course, I haven’t invented this, I’ve seen so many do the same.
However, if you done make the diameter of the coil of the rope long enough, there can be only a small portion of the coil end inside the other and, as we found out, it’s not safe!
It was a windy day and we were heading out past the Golden Gate. It must have been a flood and the wind waves were decent. It was a rough go. Unbeknownst to us, either a wave or the excessive bobbing of the boat cause the coil of rope to come off the lifeline and fall into the water. As we tacked out the Gate, everything was great until just about 100 yards to the other side Sherine noticed we only had steerage to Starboard and steerage to Port was very limited.
I don’t know what caused me to notice, but we eventually found the dock line in the water with no end visible!
Honestly, I can’t recall how we managed to tack (or gybe) and eventually turn back under the gate. Oh yeah, I forgot one more point. The dock line has fouled the prop we found so we’d be unable to drop the sails and motor somewhere safely to fix the steerage.
The winds through the Golden Gate in the summer can easily exceed 25 kts. I decided to sail into Treasure Island’s Clipper Cove. For the most part this was relatively uneventful once you figured out how to plan for significantly limited steerage.
Clipper Cove is generally not protected from the winds unless you get up close to the south-west portion of the cove. The entrance is also shallow at low-tide and groundings are possible depending on your draft. The southern portion of the cove is very shallow, stay north.
We eventually were able to drop the the main and the jib and drop anchor.
For the next hour, I spend cutting the dock lines off the rudder and from around the prop in sub 60º water. This is the second time I’ve had to do this in my sailing career on the Bay and yes, there’s a story and a lesson’s learned in that one too! I’ll write about it later.