All about Dinghy Cruising

What is dinghy cruising?

By 'dinghy cruising' we mean the use of a sailing dinghy for recreational travel over relatively long distances, generally with overnight stops. Most dinghy sailors use their boats for racing, or just for pottering, which usually means sailing for an hour or two in one patch of water. Few dinghy sailors seem to be aware that their boats are potentially capable of covering greater distances and carrying all the equipment that will be needed for overnight stops.

I suppose that if you want a definition of dinghy cruising then you need to supplement it with a definition of a dinghy. In this context we take a dinghy to be a small (say less than about 20 foot (6.1m) length), open (i.e. no permanent cabin) sailing boat which does not have heavy stabilising ballast. However, we don't need to apply these conditions too rigorously, there are some boats which most people would think of as dinghies but which do have some ballast and there are some which have a tiny cabin but which are otherwise dinghy like in style. The HSC Wayfarers are certainly dinghies in all respects. There are also people cruising with what are basically rowing boats, perhaps with a small sail to provide relaxation on downwind legs only, this can reasonably be included as a form of dinghy cruising.

Here are some real benefits in using a dinghy rather than a yacht for cruising, apart from the obvious one that the purchase cost and maintenance costs are lower by one or more orders of magnitude:

• A dinghy can be transported on a road trailer behind a car which is not possible with any reasonably sized yacht. This means that a dinghy has greater flexibility to explore a variety of cruising areas. Getting a yacht to a new cruising area can mean long sea passages which take up most of a short holiday before you get a chance to relax and explore at leasure.
  
• It is easier to find overnight stopping places for a dinghy than for a yacht. The small dimensions and particularly the shallow draft of a dinghy mean that it can use mooring sites which yachts cannot reach. Furthermore, dinghies are rarely asked to pay harbour dues. Either they are off the bottom end of the scale of charges, or they are tolerated because the water they occupy is too shallow to be sold to a yacht or perhaps they are just not very visible.
  
• The upper reaches of estuaries, and indeed inland rivers and even canals, are interesting places to explore but are inaccessible to yachts both because of shallow water and because of fixed bridges. (on most dinghies it is fairly easy to lower the mast, the Wayfarer is particularly good in this respect)
  
• Dinghies don't make you seasick. It is true, most people are liable to seasickness on a yacht but on a dinghy it is comparatively rare. I don't think this is only because dinghies stay at sea for shorter periods than yachts. We have made trips of 12 hours duration in our Wayfarers and rarely has anyone been seasick. This may have something to do with the super abundance of fresh air and the horizon being visible all round. Some have said that if it is rough enough to be sick on a dinghy it won't happen because you will be too scared to remember to be sick.
  
• A dinghy can be rowed so an engine is not essential, although a dinghy can carry a small outboard. A yacht cannot really manage without an engine these days since, apart from anything else, manoeuvring under sail is prohibited in many harbours and marinas. This is a big advantage for a dinghy if you are a green purist and feel that your boat should only be propelled by non-polluting renewable energy sources.

Of course yachts have their own advantages too. If you want your boat to be a retirement home you are probably better off with a yacht. No one would pretend that a dinghy is as comfortable (or should we say less uncomfortable) as a yacht for long sea passages, although the trailability of a dinghy may allow a sea passage to be avoided in the first place. However, various people have shown that sea passages in a dinghy are possible if you are really determined. Frank Dye with various crew members sailed a Wayfarer from Scotland to Iceland and Norway and survived force 9 gales on route. There are a handful of others who have made very long sea passages in sailing dinghies. For example, earlier in this century Frank Rebel made a 9,000 mile voyage across the Pacific ocean in an 18 foot racing dinghy which he acquired cheaply since it was in poor condition. This was not even intended to be a pleasure trip, he just wanted to get to America but could not afford the fare for a steamer. When he arrived he was thrown in jail because he did not have a visa. He stopped at many islands on route but the trip still included some long passages and some bad weather.

How do you make an overnight stop when cruising in an open boat?

There are two methods:

1. You can moor the dinghy or pull it up on the beach then find somewhere to camp onshore - or even find a hotel for the night.

2. You can put up a purpose made tent on board the dinghy itself and spend the night on board, either afloat or with the dinghy dried out or pulled up on the foreshore.

The author generally prefers the second method. In our part of the world it is usually much easier to find some quiet water for camping on board than it is to find somewhere you can conveniently get ashore and camp without upsetting a land owner. Camping on board also saves carrying carrying gear to and from the boat, everything is just where you need it. However, occasionally one does find a good place to camp onshore, perhaps there may even be a proper campsite with full facilities. To cover both situations I usually take both a shore tent and a boat tent.

When cruising with the HSC Wayfarers, our Wayfarer crews normally do camp on shore, despite the disadvantages stated above. The main reason is that we often have a crew of three aboard a Wayfarer which is fine for sailing during the day but is too many to sleep on board at night (at least we think so, others have done it).

How do you carry all the camping kit and personnel baggage when dinghy cruising?

Most dinghies can potentially carry a lot of baggage, certainly more than one could carry when backpacking, cycling or canoeing. Having a lot of gear aboard a dinghy may marginally hinder the sailing and rowing performance but this is hardly noticeable since you are not racing. The extra weight will slightly improve stability and hence may actually be slightly beneficial from the point of view of seaworthiness.

It is always an advantage for a cruising dinghy to have some built in dry stowage space, the more the better, almost without limit. However, for boats without provision for dry stowage there are now excellent waterproof bags which can be used to keep kit dry. These are available from outdoors shops and are sold mainly for canoeists. Typically these are made form a plasticised fabric and are a long cylindrical shape which can be sealed at the top by rolling the fabric several times over. Such bags should be secured to the boat when at sea. Here is a little tip for packing a large sleeping bag into one of these waterproof bags. If you just try to stuff it straight in you will probably find it does not squash up evenly, there will be wasted space at the bottom of the bag. To avoid this you start by rolling down the sides of the waterproof bag until you have a much shorter bag with most of the sides rolled up. Then you unroll the sides as you stuff in the contents.

Choice of dinghy for dinghy cruising

Almost any type of dinghy can be used but some dinghies are better than others and some suit particular types of waters. I have even met someone who cruised with a sailboard. He carried his equipment and dry clothing partly in a rucksack and partly in waterproof bags strapped to the sailboard ahead of the mast. He said that the biggest problem is that a sailboard needs different sizes of rigs to suit different conditions and obviously he had no way to carry spare rigs.

One could easily give undue emphasis to the selection or design of a boat for dinghy cruising. If you already own a boat and are thinking of trying a cruise why wait until you can change boats? People have fun cruising in all kinds of boats and if your boat is not particularly seaworthy you can always start on inland waters or sheltered estuaries. So unless your existing boat really is totally unsuitable why not leave the acquisition of your ideal boat until you better know your requirements and get started with your existing boat now - or just join the HSC and sail our excellent Wayfarer dinghies!

Some dinghies do not have enough space for it to be feasible to provide a berth(s) for sleeping on board. In such cases camping ashore is the only option and this does have disadvantages as discussed above. Also some of the smallest and lightest dinghies, espeicially the light weight tall masted racing dinghies, have too little stability to sleep securely on board, even if there were space to do so. A section below covers sleeping on board in more detail.

If you want to make long sea passages you will probably choose one of the larger and/or heavier dinghies. However, as discussed above, long sea passages can usually be avoided by doing some road trailing so lightweight dinghies should not be discounted, they are fun to sail in lighter winds and they have advantages in ease of launching, road trailing and recovery, ease of rowing and the possibility of hauling up clear of the water for a comfortable night on board. Also, if you do suffer a capsize, light dinghies can often be easier to right than heavy ones, although this is not necessarily so. Racing dinghies can be used as lightweight cruising dinghies and the older ones can sometimes be purchased remarkably cheaply. Just as an example, I recently met someone cruising aboard an Albacore dinghy which had been purchased in very good condition for 150-00uk£. Don't ask me where to find such bargains, I only know that they do come up from time to time.

The number of crew anticipated should certainly have an influence on the selection of a dinghy. A 12 foot dinghy will be cramped for two persons sleeping aboard, anything much smaller than that will be only for one. When considering the size of a boat remember that the weight and space generally increases with the cube of the length, if you accept this basis of measurement a 14 foot boat is 60% bigger than a 12 foot one - a significant difference. A nice size of sailing dinghy for two persons is around 14 to 16 foot. This seems to be a nice size from several points of view - it is a feasible size to tow behind a smallish car and it will fit in most domestic garages. I dont think it should be necessary to store a boat in a garage but it can be handy to get it into a garage to do maintenance work. Few dinghies will comfortably sleep more than two persons on board, although some of the larger dinghies might take three, this depends on the internal layout. For over nights on board with a party of four or more the best way is probably to have two or more boats, as we do with our club. If you need to be able to sail the boat singlehanded then there will be an upper size limit as well as a lower one. Specially designed 60 foot yachts are raced round the world single handed but these are ballasted boats. With a dinghy the crew weight is the ballast and one person may not be heavy enough. It is difficult to state a maximum size since this depends on the sail area and the general style of the boat. Many sixteen footers would certainly be a handful for single handed sailing in anything other than light winds.

Staying overnight on board a dinghy

There are only a handful of dinghy designs which were produced with sleeping on board in mind (examples include Wayfarer, Mirror16, Cormorant 12, Dockerel 17) but there are a lot more designs which happen by chance to be suitable or can be made to be suitable with DIY adaptations. The Dinghy Cruising Association Bulletin is full of articles about how to make such adaptations and there are also a couple of books on the subject.

Basically the options are either to sleep down in the bottom of the boat or to sleep on some kind of raised platform. Most dinghies have, or should have, a rowing thwart and in many cases the clear height under this thwart is too little to permit sleeping on the bottom of the boat. If designing a dinghy from scratch, it is easy to make the thwart removable, as on my boat. With an existing boat I would be cautious about making the thwart removable since the thwart may be an essential structural member.

If there is space to sleep down on the floorboards in the bottom of the boat then this is likely to be the simplest arrangement, although not necessarily the most comfortable. If the floorboards are very close to the bottom then there may be a risk of getting bedding damp with bilge water when the boat is heeled. An air bed to sleep on helps a lot!

If it is not practical to sleep in the bottom of the boat then you need a sleeping platform higher up. Does the boat have side benches each side of the cockpit? If it does then it may be feasible to have removable extensions to add extra width to these benches for sleeping. Alternatively it may be better to completely board over the space between the benches to make a wide platform which could be a double bed. The boards used for this purpose could be the boats normal floor boards raised to a higher level. The floor boards in the little 'Cormorant' dinghy are designed so that this is possible. Alternatively you can have a set of boards used only for sleeping and arranged in sections small enough that they can be stowed away for sailing. My first cruising dinghy was an 11 foot Mirror dinghy. I used a single piece of plywood together with the dagger board to cover over the space between the side seats. This large piece of ply turned through 90 degrees and stowed aft under the tiller during the day. The space under the tiller of many dinghies is unused space and can be adapted as stowage space.

However you make your sleeping platform I should cover it with something soft and comfy. There is no need to put up with a hard bed, we are not back packing so we are not all that restricted in the weight of gear we take with us. I like to use a pump up inflatable air bed. Others like the American made 'Thermarest' mattresses which are self-inflating but not quite as thick as most airbeds.

If the wind falls calm during a dinghy race there will be rescue boats and probably a committee boat to tow the fleet home. If you are making a coastal cruising passage in a dinghy you should be self sufficient and able to continue somehow. Many dinghy cruisers carry a small outboard motor for this eventuality, others are sailing purists and prefer the simplicity and 'greeness' of keeping to sails and human power only. I do have an engine for my boat but these days I rarely take it on a cruise and I do get a certain satisfaction from managing without it. After all, if you continue with this engine idea a bit further you don't really need a sailing dinghy, you could have a speedboat, or just go by car. Come to think of it why do that, you could just stay at home and look at a web site about sailing. Generally we seem to get pleasure by achieving things and there usually needs to be some slightly arbitrary set of rules to make that achievement difficult enough to be satisfying. Apart the philosophy, an engine and fuel are clumsy items to stow and with most if not all engines there will be some smelly and messy oil and petrol leakage. Having said that, there have been a few trips for which I found an engine most useful, although not essential. For example, in the summer of '98 we sailed to Kent then up the River Medway into the upper reaches where you really could not do much sailing because there are so many bridges and the trees shield the wind. We could have used oars but we would not have got so far in the limited time available.

If you do decide to have an engine then I would advise against buying an unnecessarily large one. Reading the writings of Wayfarer sailors it would seem that a 2 to 3HP engine is enough for a Wayfarer, anything much more powerful will take up more space and use more fuel but give only a marginal increase in speed since speed under power tends to be limited by hull form. I would be wary of an engine salesman who suggests that you should get a bigger engine in case of bad weather or in case you have to tow someone off a mud bank. An engine on a sailing dinghy is not for bad weather, it is for calms and situations where you cannot sail, e.g. because of low bridges. It is not often that you will need to pull someone off a mud bank but if you do then in most cases the best way is to lay out a heavy anchor, either your anchor or the anchor from the boat that is stuck. You don't even need an engine at all this way.

Standards for new outboard motors in the USA require a 75 percent reduction in hydrocarbon emissions from 1996 levels by the year 2006. These standards are not retrospectively applicable to existing motors. Manufacturers are now marketing four stroke outboard motors to meet these low emission standards. Manufacturers are also working on the development of direct injection two stroke engines to achieve low emissions with lighter weight than typical four strokes, but this approach may be mainly applicable to larger engines than are required for dinghy propulsion. If buying a new outboard I would suggest giving consideration to four stroke engines which appart from low emisions use less petrol than conventional two strokes for the same power and avoid the complication of needing oil as well as petrol to run.

When I do carry an outboard motor on my boat I much prefer it not to be on the transom when not in use. With the motor tucked away in a locker the boat looks much more like a sailing boat! Apart from that the motor is kept dry so that it has a better chance of working when needed, the weight distribution is probably better and the motor wont catch up your mainsheet or other ropes. I know cases of sailing dinghies capsizing because this happened. When arranging a stowage for an outboard motor you do need to take account of any restictions the outboard manufacturer may place on the position of the motor when stored, for example some of them cannot be stored lying on their side. This probably applies more to 4 stroke than 2 stroke motors.

If you don't have an engine then you need oars. Even if you do have an engine you will probably find oars worth having as well. You might break down or run out of fuel and also oars are probably better if you need to manoeuvre your boat in really tight spaces in a harbour or marina. Many racing dinghies carry paddles rather than oars but oars are much better, especially if you are single handed. Using a paddle single handed on a typically beamy sailing dinghy will send you round in circles. With two persons and two paddles it is just about possible but rowing is better for any distance. If as a last resort you have to use a paddle single handed in a sailing dinghy you may do best to sit astride the bows and skull the boat along by working the paddle in a figure of eight motion. This can be useful if you need to move your boat a few yards after you have put up your overnight tent (you can do it with an oar as well as a paddle), but it is not a way to cover any distance.

Rowlocks are quite easy to fit to most dinghies, if not already supplied. There are special (plastic) rowlocks you can use if you need to fit the rowlocks into a buoyancy tank built into the side of a boat. I managed for many years with these but as with most plastic rowlocks they spring apart and release the oar at the most embarrassing moments. Recently I brought some galvanised iron rowlocks and fitted them into turned plastic sleeves which fit plastic sockets in the side decks. These metal rowlocks feel much more solid to row with than plastic ones.

Both metal and plastic rowlocks will sink if they are dropped overboard so it is a good idea to keep them permanently tied to some adjacent part of the boat. If this is not convenient then you should definitely take a spare rowlock or two.

Oars on sailing dinghies are very often shorter than the best length for rowing. The optimum oar length is a function of the width between the rowlocks and the resistance of the boat to motion, a light easily driven boat can utilise slightly longer oars then a heavy one. There are various formulae for calculating oar length on the internet but for most sailing dinghies it is best to get the longest oars which you can stow in the boat, the chances are that they will still be too short. If you should be designing a boat for dinghy cruising then oar stowage is something to think about from the beginning. On my purpose designed boat I have stowage for the oars each side of the cockpit and above the level of the rowing thwart. That way the oars can be used quickly without having to get them out of the bottom of the boat where they are under the thwart and possibly buried under baggage.

If you would like to make your own oars then a simple and effective method is to glue plywood blades onto a shaft rather than building up the whole oar from solid timber as the traditional method. For most sizes of dinghy the shaft should start at about 50mm x 50mm section and is then planed octagonal before rounding off all the corners, a satisfying job and if you use an electric plane it will be done in no time. If you are going to use the plywood blade idea then the outer end of the oar can blend from a circular to elliptical section which then becomes a D section so that the blade can be glued to the straight side of the D. If you make this face curved you can form a blade with a slight spoon shape. 6mm ply is quite thick enough for the blade. Sitka spruce is one of the best woods for making oars, albeit expensive. Sitka spruce is one of the lightest woods and was used for racing oars prior to the advent of carbon fibre. For general purpose oars some people recommend harder woods than sitka spruce, eg ash or pine since these are less easily bruised by being knocked about.

I remember a tip from Eric Coleman for applying fibreglass to the ends of oars to protect them when they are used as punting poles, which tends to happen with oars on cruising dinghies. You wrap a few layers of fibreglass tape or cloth impregnated with resin (epoxy is best) round the end of the blade and positioned so that it overhangs the end of the blade by perhaps 6 to 10 mm or so. This forms a little pocket extending beyond the wood of the blade. After the fibreglass has hardened you can then stand the oar on end so that this pocket can be filled with a mixture of resin and scraps of fibreglass off cuts or a suitable proprietary high density filler. When that has hardened you will probably have a horrible looking mess with spikes of fibreglass sticking out everywhere. However, a few minutes work with an angle grinder and coarse disc will shape this so that you end up with a solid fibreglass blade tip extending beyond the end of the wood and that should last for years of shoving off mud banks.

Does a cruising dinghy need another dinghy to act as a tender?

It is not essential to carry a tender since most dinghies are small and light enough to act as their own tender, being brought up to a landing point whenever the crew need to get ashore. However, there are quite often situations where a small tender can be quite useful, particularly with a heavy cruising dinghy. If a heavy dinghy is allowed to dry out on a beach as the tide ebbs the crew may not easily be able to get it back into the water until the tide returns, which may be many hours. Thus if you want to make a quick trip ashore it may be preferable to anchor or moor the larger boat in deep water and go ashore in a tender. A small tender that you can carry around on shore is also useful when the only landing point is likely to damage a boat, e.g. there may be rocks, submerged obstacles, fishing boats going to and fro etc. In this situation you can anchor off or take a mooring then go ashore in the tender and find somewhere to safely leave the tender well clear of the water.

I have found that one of the tiny inflatable boats sold as a beach toy makes a suitable tender for a cruising dinghy. I have had several of these beach toy tenders over the years. Even if you use them carefully they tend to develop leaks but they only cost a few pounds to replace whereas a proper yacht tender costs hundreds of pounds and would in any case be too bulky to carry on board most dinghies. Toy inflatables are usually poor rowing boats since apart from anything else the rowlocks are too weak and flexible. I do not use oars with mine, I prefer a pair of home-made paddles which look very much like ping pong bats. The picture below shows my tender in use with the small paddles on the Odet River in Southern Brittany. This particular toy inflateble is an 'Octopus 110' which is large enough to take two adults. I think the next size down is the 'Octopus 90' which is adequate for one adult. The Octopus range of toy inflatables is just a bit upmarket from the really cheap ones. In case of a puncture there is a double main air chamber but I am not sure how much of a safety feature that is since you would not have a useable boat left once once the largest chamber is punctured. The largest air chamber features a proper valve with a screw on lid. Unfortunately the second largest chamber has only a small plastic air connection with a moulded plastic flap as a valve, as on the really cheap toy boats, this is much less satisfactory for easy inflation.

Get a good pump to use with your inflatable, otherwise it will take ages to inflate. If a pump is supplied with a cheap toy inflatable this pump may well be poor quality. Get an inflatable large enough to feel secure but no larger than necessary otherwise again you will be all day inflating it. Remember that the inflatable only needs to carry the one crew member who has stayed on board to anchor or moor the larger boat, any other crew can usually be put ashore first. Do not leave loose items aboard your inflatable while it is moored by its painter - a gust of wind can capsize it and all is then lost.

Boat Tents

As discussed above, if you intend to cruise with an open boat there is much to be said for having a purpose made boat tent, even if you are going to take an ordinary land tent on board as well.

If you want a professionally made boat tent then most sail makers or boat cover makers could help. Most boats will need a custom designed tent, as far as I know the Wayfarer dinghy is the only dinghy for which you can buy a standard boat tent 'off the shelf', the firm which sells these being listed on the Wayfarer web site.

Making a boat tent can be quite an interesting project and does not require a great skill in needlework. It helps to have a suitable sewing machine, I found that after making my boat tent I had to replace the plastic gears in the modern domestic sewing machine that I had borrowed, some sewing machines are more robust than others. I also understand that it is important to use the right size of needle for heavy cloth, perhaps this was where I went wrong. I might add that I used a PVC coated fabric and that may be harder on the sewing machine than conventional tent fabric.

In designing a boat tent there are three main points to consider: Speed of setting up, weather resistance and space inside. I felt that it was particularly important to have a tent which can be set up quickly and I was prepared to compromise on spaciousness to achieve this. Sometimes you sail into harbour feeling very tired and then you just want some weather protection as quickly as possible. The last thing you want is to fiddle with a large and complicated tent, even if it is going to be more luxurious when you eventually get it set up. I am always amazed at how suddenly a cold wet dinghy becomes a cosy home once a tent is up and a lantern is lighted inside, just shielding the wind makes a huge difference.

There is a lot of variety seen in boat tents on cruising dinghies. Some people have very crude arrangements, perhaps just a rectangular plastic sheet or land tent fly sheet draped over the boom and perhaps fixed with lines passed right under the hull. If you are going to go cruising at all frequently it is probably worth having something better than this. Remember that a boat tent may have to withstand at least as much wind as a land tent and possibly more, you will try to choose a sheltered location to anchor overnight but this is not always possible. On the other hand there is no point in trying to make a boat tent particularly light weight. It is not a back packing tent and you will probably not need to carry it further than from your boat to the car boot. Hence I think it makes sense to use a fairly heavy grade of canvas. Synthetic canvas of any kind will avoid the risk of mildew. The materials used for big boat awnings, caravan awnings or the lighter weight lorry tarpaulins may well be suitable. Some of these materials are plastic coated, usually with PVC, others are 'breathable'. The plastic coated materials will cause condensation but they should be totally waterproof. One material which is widely used for awnings and spray dodgers on larger yachts is called 'Sunbrella'. I don't think this is plastic coated but it is a heavy tight weave in an acrylic fibre and is reckoned to be 100% waterproof.

Here are three UK companies which supply tent making materials -

Dinghy cookery

You can cook aboard a dinghy using a camping stove. You can of course also visit pubs/restaurants/chip shops wherever you go ashore and the Hostellers Sailing Club often takes this attractive option. However, we would not be without our camping stoves for breakfast and for brewing cups of tea during the day. The Hostellers Sailing Club used to have a club owned collection of paraffin primus stoves but a few years ago we had an unfortunate incident which left all these at the bottom of the sea a couple of miles out from the mouth of the Blackwater estuary! Our members now mostly use camping gas stoves which are less trouble to light and cleaner but they do cost a lot more in fuel. The best type of camping stove to use on a boat is the low lying type which has a tube from the gas cylinder rather than the upright type with the burner on top of a cylinder. The latter type could so easily fall over if someone passes by leaving an unexpected wake. With the squat type of stove I think it is reasonably safe to cook on board with the boat at anchor, keeping an eye on the stove and another eye for passing boats which may leave a wake. We also do make cups of tea on board our Wayfarers while at sea in fair conditions but this needs great care and occasionally a hand to steady the kettle on the stove. Do be careful with camping gas stoves - many years ago a member of the HSC was injured when a camping gas stove was knocked over and this was on shore in our club hut, not afloat.

One point if you sail to France - Make sure that you either have a stove which is compatible with the gas cylinders sold in France or that you have an adapter for the French cylinders or make sure that you have enough gas to last all your holiday. The type of cylinder which used to be called Epigas, now Colman or Primus, is not available in France. Once you get used to having hot drinks available on your open boat you really miss this luxury if you suddenly find you have no gas!

It is pretty well essential for a cruising dinghy to have provision for reefing, that is for reducing sail area as the wind strengthens. For a tryout dinghy cruise on an inland water or sheltered estuary you could manage without but you should have tested your arrangements for reefing before you go coastal sailing. Most dinghies designed for racing or general purpose sailing have a gooseneck which allows the mainsail to be partially rolled up onto the boom for reefing. That is better than nothing but it is not the ideal reefing method. A sail is not a flat sheet of cloth but is shaped three dimensionally. Hence when you roll it up from the lower edge you get creases and usually the outer end of the boom drops well below horizontal. Also the luff rope bunches up at the inboard end and it is awkward to use a kicking strap, although this can be done by attaching the kicking strap to a length of webbing rolled in with the sail. The preferred method for reefing a cruising dinghy is known as points or slab reefing and this has also now largely superceded roller reefing for big boat sailing. With slab reefing there are pairs of cringles (large eyelets) for each reef, one at the luff and the other at a similar level near the leech. Tying one of these pairs of cringles down to the boom takes a section out of the sail and also produces a bag of loose material. This loose material can then be rolled up and tied along the boom, usually by means of reef points which are short cords fixed through a row of eyelets running across the sail between each pair of main reefing cringles.

The reefing cringles at luff and leech are heavily loaded and the sail needs to be suitably reinforced at these points. Fitting reefing cringles to an existing sail is probably best left to a sail maker, it is less likely to be a DIY job than, for example, making a boat tent. Luff and leech cringles suitable for reefing are usually fitted with a small hydraulic press and special tools. Also, sailcloth is harder to sew than most tent materials. If you really want to fit your own reefing points to the sail I have heard a suggestion that one could use a loop of heavy polyester webbing to secure a stainless steel ring to the sail at the leech and luff. You would still need reinforcement patches on the sail where the webbing is sewn on. This method is sometimes used for attaching sheets to the clew of a foresail so I am sure it is strong enough for reefing lines provided that adequate stitching and reinforcement is used. I don't think many domestic sewing machines would stand a chance of sewing through two layers of webbing and several layers of sailcloth so hand stitching is required. A proper sail makers needle is needed, these are sold in chandlers shops. You may need to pre-make holes for the needle using a spike or even a large masonry nail used with a hammer and a block of scrap wood. I have also resorted to the use of pliers to pull the needle through.

You will use anchors more frequently when cruising in a dinghy than when racing or just pottering around. If you sleep on board your dinghy you may often find it simpler to anchor overnight rather than getting permission to use a mooring or finding a berth alongside. You may also want to anchor to go ashore for sightseeing or shopping and you will want your boat to stay where you left it rather than drift away and possibly cause damage to expensive yachts. However there is no need to get paranoid about this, if you have good anchors and warps and anchor on suitable holding ground you should have no problems.

The Dinghy Cruising Association offers a useful guideline that a traditional fisherman style anchor for a cruising dinghy should weigh about one pound for each foot length of dinghy. It is also stated that if you use one of the more modern anchor styles with broad flukes the anchor weight can be reduced to two thirds of that recommended for a fisherman anchor. It is generally accepted that broad fluked anchors such as the CQR, the Bruce and the Danforth hold better than a fisherman on a soft seabed, eg soft mud, and this is hardly surprising. On the other hand, a fisherman anchor is at least as good, and indeed probably better than, the modern anchors when the seabed is stones or is overlaid with kelp. I certainly would not write off the fisherman anchor as an obsolete design, it is a reliable anchor under a wide variety of conditions, even if it does not quite have the best holding ability on soft seabeds, which are in any case not the kind of seabed which usually causes trouble with anchoring.

I have seen published test results for the holding ability of different anchors but the results seem rather inconclusive. Holding ability probably depends more on the type of sea bed than the type of anchor and this makes comparison difficult. Certain sea beds such as shingle provide very poor holding for any type of anchor and if you need to anchor securely you simply have to avoid anchoring on this type of seabed altogether. We have used various anchors with the HSC club boats and I think that only the Danforth type has let us down, having on one occasion allowed both our boats to go adrift. The local sailing school retrieved them for us. I cannot be sure that this was the fault of the anchor itself but it does look to me as though the Danforth anchor could be prone to getting jammed up with debris from the sea bed. Suppose that the anchor drags a bit before it bites home then something like an old boot or a clump of sea weed lying on the seabed gets stuck between the shank and the flukes. Then if the tide turns and the anchor topples over the other way up the flukes will be locked pointing upwards and unable to dig in. This is only a theory but it makes me a bit wary of Danforth anchors even although they are a convenient flat shape to stow and have large flukes for maximum grip in soft mud. I have a CQR anchor and have found this to be reliable to date. The Bruce anchor is another type which has good reports from users. Both the Bruce and the CQR anchors are rather awkward shapes to stow. The traditional fisherman anchor folds up and is then a good shape for stowage but it does take a few seconds to unfold it if you need it in a big hurry. Incidentally Roger Barnes of the DCA has provided a tip to speed up the deployment of a fisherman anchor. This is to lock the stock in place not with a metal wedge and lashing as usually provided with the anchor but with a hairpin shaped stainless steel spring clip which you can buy from a good chandlers.

It is often suggested that a dinghy should be anchored with a short length of chain attached between the anchor and a warp (rope). The idea is that the weight of the chain improves the direction of pull on the anchor and improves holding. I am sure that this is true but I would question whether it would not be at least as good simply to use a correspondingly heavier anchor without the chain. I have tried using chain on a dinghy anchor and have found it awkward to handle. It can do a lot of damage to varnish work or pristine fibreglass and it will not run properly through the small fairleads or other bow fittings on most dinghy sized boats. I prefer just to have a plain rope and with the DCA recommended anchor weight and adequate length of rope (scope) this seems fine. I don't think I have ever dragged the anchor on my own boat other than when anchoring on unsuitable ground (famous last words!).

The recommended material for an anchor rope is nylon since it is has high strength for a given diameter and is slightly stretchy so it can absorb shock loads. Anchor ropes for dinghies tend to be oversized in terms of ultimate strength and so for practical purposes polyester is probably almost as good as nylon and is available in a wider range of colours and plaiting styles. The floating ropes such as polypropylene are to be avoided for this purpose since an anchor rope floating on the surface could catch motor boat propellers. Plaited rope seems to tangle a bit less than the traditional laid (3 strand) rope and is usually more comfortable to handle. I use 10mm diameter rope to anchor my boat and if anything this is perhaps slightly larger than necessary (the breaking strength of 10mm nylon is around 2.2tonnes). You could probably get away with 8mm but I would not go any smaller since although a smaller rope may be quite strong enough in new condition it will not allow much margin to allow for wear by chafing.

I find the easiest way to keep a long rope such as an anchor rope free of tangles is to dump it into an open topped container as the anchor is hauled in then just let it run out from the container when the anchor is next lowered. A suitable container is a plastic bucket, washing up bowl or small basket. A small hole at the bottom of the container will provide drainage and another hole will allow the free end of the rope to be lead out so that it can tied to some part of the boat. No attempt should be made to coil the rope in the container, the more untidy it looks the better it will run out when needed. Contrary to what most people would think, coiling ropes neatly is a sure way to get them in really bad tangles! 100 feet length of rope on each of two anchors is sufficient for cruising in most areas. It is usually stated that the length of anchor rope should be five times the water depth. Hence in most areas 100 foot length will allow you to anchor at high tide and be sure of not grounding at low tide, as may be necessary if you are not sure that the bottom is safe for the boat to ground on. If you sail in areas such as the west coast of Scotland where the water is often deep even close to the shore it would do no harm to have even longer anchor ropes.

At this point I would mention a strange and rather annoying property of certain modern synthetic ropes. I purchased a 10mm diameter plaited nylon anchor warp and found that after a couple of years use it had increased in diameter to something like 15mm. I asked about this at a chandlers shop and was told that it is due to the fibres bunching up with use. I am sure that the extra diameter does not increase the strength of the rope one iota since there are still the same number of fibres in the cross section but it may reduce the length and it certainly increases the storage space required for the rope. I have another plaited nylon warp which has not grown in diameter at all with use, I wonder what is the difference.

I think there is much to be said for having two anchors and warps when dinghy cruising. One of the main reasons is that the use of two anchors allows you to restrict the space your boat can swing through when at anchor. This can be essential if you need to anchor in proximity to other boats or obstructions. Two anchors also allows more secure anchoring since the two anchors can be placed so that they are always loaded in roughly the same direction and hence less likely to pull out as the tide turns. It is sometimes useful to anchor with one of two anchors on the beach so that you can pull your anchored boat to the shore. Finally, two anchors provides a backup if you loose one of them. The most likely reason for loosing an anchor (apart from not tying it to the boat) is getting it inextricably tangled in some debris on the sea bed. This is fairly unlikely but it can happen. It has happened to me twice but so far only in water shallow enough that I have been able to get the anchor back by going swimming. Of course, if you are rash enough to anchor in proximity to laid moorings you considerably increase the risk of loosing your anchor.

When anchoring with two anchors a typical technique is as follows. You drop the first anchor while still sailing, rowing or motoring. Then with the boat still moving you run out the warp until you reach the position where you want the second anchor. Often this will require the full length of the rope or perhaps the rope from the second anchor temporarily joined onto that from the first. As soon as the second anchor is down you lower sail or stop rowing or motoring and then adjust the two warps. Probably you will aim to have about the same length of warp on each anchor and an angle of around 120 degrees between the two warps. This angle gives roughly the same holding strength whichever way the wind blows your boat. Furthermore, as noted above, with a fairly large angle between the ropes the pull on each anchor is always in roughly the same direction even when the wind and/or tide turns. Anchored in this fashion your boat should be secure and it will also take up a lot less swinging space than with a single anchor, even if a chain cable were to be used with that single anchor. You may want to anchor for an extended period, perhaps to park the boat between two weekends. In this case if you have ropes to two anchors secured within the boat the two ropes will probably get twisted together as the tide repeatedly turns. I have never yet found this to be a problem, you don't usually get that many twists since if there is any wind a half twist made by the flood is more than likely going to be untwisted by the ebb. If you want to avoid twists in the ropes you can join one rope to the other using a rolling hitch outside the boat but then you loose the slight extra security of having both anchors individually fastened to the boat.

Quite frequently one wants to anchor the boat and go ashore awhile leaving the boat so that it will not ground when the tide ebbs or so that you can still return to it when the tide floods. If the wind is offshore and there is not much current this is usually just a matter of placing an anchor on the beach letting out plenty of rope then giving the boat a push off - see diagram below. The anchor rope must be long enough to keep the boat clear of any small waves breaking on the beach since these will tend to drive the boat back to the beach despite the offshore wind. The length of anchor rope and position of the anchor on the beach must also take account of the rise/fall of tide expected during the period the boat is to be anchored.

If the wind is not truly offshore or if there is any significant current a single anchor will probably fail to hold the boat clear of the beach. The boat will end up lying on the beach and if there are even small waves breaking on the beach this is not good for the boat. Also, on shingle beaches there is a good chance of getting the centreboard jammed up with small stones. A more certain way to hold the boat clear of the beach is to use two anchors, one to anchor the boat suitably clear of the shore and one on the beach to pull the boat back in when you whish to re-board - see sketch below.

If the tide is ebbing the time you can spend ashore before your boat grounds will be limited by the length of rope - another reason for not stinting on the length of anchor rope. If the tide is flooding you also need a long rope to get the anchor far enough up the beach that you can reach it later without swimming.

If the wind is onshore, i.e. it is a lee shore, or if there is almost no wind at all it is possible to anchor using a pulley attached to the anchor. A long rope is lead from the boat, through the pulley, then to a second anchor on the shore then back to the boat. The boat can then be pulled in and out as required. This arrangement is quite complicated to set up and in most situations it is easier just to find a windward shore to anchor on. The length of rope required probably means you will need to join both your anchor ropes together and the knot must be the right side of the pulley. There can be difficulties if seaweed gets jammed in the pulley. The load on the anchor is doubled compared with normal anchoring so you need to be sure of good holding ground. A large free running pulley works best and I keep one on board for this purpose but don't use it very often. I have also heard of a large metal ring attached to the anchor being used rather than a pulley, perhaps this might be a little less prone to jamming up with seaweed.

The above notes on anchoring on the shoreline are really only applicable when there are no significant waves, that is in calm weather or where there is shelter as in a good harbour. If there are waves of any size breaking on the shore then landing will at best result in a soaking and getting away from the shore again will be even harder than landing. Lee shores with breaking waves are particularly unfriendly places for any kind of boat and whilst a dinghy may well survive better than a larger boat it is not wise to take chances with lee shores.

Where to stop for the night

Unless you feel sure that the night will be calm it is best to find a really sheltered spot to anchor for sleeping aboard. If you anchor in an exposed position and the wind gets up you will probably get no sleep because the boat will be rocking about, the tent will probably be flapping and waves may be crashing against the hull. In an extreme situation your boat might even be capsized with the tent up and you inside which would not be very comfortable.

If you need to sleep on board the boat in a fairly large area of water such as a wide estuary or large lake then unless it is calm it is best to anchor near the windward shore, both for shelter from the wind and to reduce the distance (fetch) which is available for the waves to build up. It also helps to be in the lee of any shelter from the wind. Trees are particularly good in providing shelter and a tree lined creek will be comfortable in most weather conditions. It also helps to anchor where the boat will actually dry out for most or all of the night, that way you will not be disturbed by the motion of the boat. This is only possible when the tides are suitable, high tide in the morning and evening is ideal. Drying out overnight also needs a patch of sea bed free of rocks or anything else which might damage your boat. Prodding under the boat with an oar will reveal an obviously unsuitable seabed but could only too easily fail to detect a serious boat sinker such as an isolated boulder, an old anchor or mooring block etc.

For convenience and security it is hard to beat a marina berth. You get a sheltered place to tie up with walk on and off access to the shore and normally a floating pontoon so you don't need to think about the effect of tide on fenders and mooring lines. You also get the shoreside facilities of the marina which normally include showers and sometimes a launderette. For this reason alone you may like to stop at marinas at intervals during an extended cruise. Most marinas have a minimum charge which applies to a dinghy the same as to a small yacht. This is understandable since the same facilities are available to a dinghy as to a yacht. A few marinas have some cheap berths for small boats which don't mind drying out. If you are tied to a pontoon which dries at low tide check that your boat cannot be trapped under the edge of the pontoon when the tide rises again, this can happen to low freeboard dinghies. Marinas are not available in all areas (which is fortunate since much of our coastline is at risk from over development). Also, a marina does not always provide the most attractive views from your boat. It is more pleasant to wake up to a view of the sun rising over an estuary than the back end of a motor yacht in an adjacent berth.

Weatherproof Clothing

Dinghy cruising in anything other than the best of UK weather is potentially a very cold and miserable past time. So if you are actually going to enjoy this pastime rather than merely endure it the choice of clothing is quite important. However, there does not seem to be any one solution to this, different people wear different kinds of weather resistant clothing and many people seem to be in a state of constant experiment trying one option then another.

Dry suits The author's own choice for dinghy cruising in adverse conditions is to wear a dry suit. At least one other of our club members seems to agree with me on this. The main disadvantage of dry suits is that they are expensive - at the time of writing I think most are in the range £200 to £400 and the really posh ones with integral hoods and lifeline attachments etc are even more than this.

A drysuit, in the usual meaning of the term, is a loose fitting garment made from waterproof synthetic cloth, it is not at all like a wet suit which is tight fitting and made from cellular neoprene. A dry suit is like a boiler suit but with a special waterproof zip and with the legs terminating in rubber feet which are bonded to the rest of the suit and rubber seals which seal against your wrists and neck. There is also an alternative design of dry suit which is in two pieces joined by a rubber seal around the waist, this is much less popular than the one piece type with a zip but I do know someone who had one and was happy with it. There is also an alternative drysuit foot design which has ankle seals which fit round your ankles but I think the integral rubber feet are a more popular choice and would give you a better chance of keeping your feet warm.

A dry suit on its own is not a particularly warm garment, the idea of it is that clothing worn underneath it stays dry and keeps you warm even if you go in the water. At first I was sceptical about this but I can confirm that the seals do work provided they are in good condition. Unfortunately these rubber seals perish and disintegrate after a few years but they can be replaced for much less than the cost of a new suit. You could go swimming with a business suit under your drysuit and if the seals are in good condition you would keep it dry, not that this is recommended.

The degree of insulation of a dry suit is adjustable according to what you wear inside it. You can buy special 'woolly' suits, usually made from fleece material, to wear under a dry suit and one of these is a good starting point. Providing the dry suit is an adequately loose fit you can then add additional pullovers etc. to increase warmth in cold weather, or in warmer weather you can wear the drysuit with out the wooly suit and with just light clothing underneath.

If you do buy a dry suit it is important to make sure that you get one the right size, large enough but not ridiculously over size. For dinghy cruising use you need to be able to change into your drysuit while aboard your boat and even while actually under way in worsening weather. In these conditions standing up can be a bit tricky, you really need to be able to put the suit on while in a sitting or at least a crouching position, so I suggest you check that this is possible when trying on the suit in a shop. You also need a fit generous enough to allow for the possibility of wearing thick warm clothing under the drysuit. It is advantageous to be able to open and close the drysuit zip yourself, indeed if you plan to sail single handed this is essential and effectively narrows the choice to those dry suits with front opening zip rather than a zip across the back of the shoulders.

The majority of dry suits are now made from materials which claim to be 'breathable' and this is supposed to stop them becoming clammy with condensation building up inside. I would say that I have had two dry suits, one breathable and one not breathable and I have not noticed any difference in clamminess between them. It may be that some people produce more perspiration than others, or some are more energetic perhaps. For my own use I am not sure that I would choose a drysuit in breathable material again given that the cost of a breathable suit seems to be somewhere between 50% and 100% more than a similar but non-breathable one. Also, I understand that most if not all breathable materials can be damaged by salt water and should be rinsed in fresh water after use in the sea, something which is really not practical when dinghy cruising.

I would mention at this point that a couple of years back the term 'dry suit' or 'semi-dry suit' was sometimes also used for a low leakage neoprene wetsuit fitted with a waterproof zip, and this terminology may still be in occasional use. This is a bit misleading since a wet suit, even one which is so low leakage that it is not actually wet inside, is not at all like the garment most people think of as a dry suit.

'Oilskins' Most people would not find a drysuit to be an ideal garment for sailing in fair weather, being awkward to get on and off (although easier than a wetsuit), sometimes too hot and it does not quite feel right for going ashore to a pub. Consequently you will probably want some less extreme form of waterproof clothing to wear when the weather is somewhere between the shorts and teeshirt situation and the anxious about survival situation. Chandlery stores certainly offer a big variety of specialised sailing clothing, still often referred to as 'oilskins' although they no longer depend on being soaked in oil to stay waterproof. General purpose outdoor wear can also be considered and may well be cheaper although it is usually a lighter weight fabric so less resistant to damage by catching on sharp bits of boat (which really should not exist, but you do find this problem on many boats).

I have sometimes been disappointed when I have brought fairly expensive sailing waterproofs, for example waterproof trousers which had taped seams which fell apart after they had been worn three or four times and a jacket made from a proofed material where the proofing peeled off in sheets after two seasons use. I had better not mention the manufacturers since these purchases were a few years back and perhaps these manufacturers have now improved their technology, but I would say that both these hopeless garments were from very well known UK manufacturers of sailing clothing. As I say, perhaps the technology has now improved, I certainly hope so since a top of the range sailing jacket and trousers now costs £600-00 or more and for that money I would hope you would get something that will keep the rain off for at least the first few times you wear it! However, I don't think you necessarily need to spend anything like that much. I have had a moderately priced jacket and trousers made from pvc with welded rather than stitched seams which has proved to be durable and waterproof over a number of seasons. These particular garments were from a range of no-frills sailing clothing from the French manufacturer Guy Cotton, they are not claimed to be 'breathable' nor do they have fancy features such as reflective tape markers or built in lifeline attachment points. I think the same manufacturer does also make clothing with these fancy features and in materials other than pvc, whether these are as good as the more basic pvc garments I could not say. You do also see some very cheap welded PVC waterproofs made in the far East, I have tried these and they were not bad considering the price (about £5-00 for a complete two piece suit!) but they are not nearly as tough or well made as the French ones.

I now wear my pvc waterproofs for most sailing but keep a drysuit aboard for use in difficult conditions. The trick is to anticipate such conditions in advance, once spray is flying everywhere it is difficult to change clothing without getting soaked in the process.

Wetsuits Racing dinghy sailors and sail boarders usually wear wet suits. A wet suit is a close fitting garment made from an insulating cellular foam rubber. Water can leak into most wet suits but since the cellular rubber material does not soak up any water it keeps its insulating quality even when wet on both sides. Wet suits are good for active sports like sail boarding but our kind of sailing can include long periods of little physical activity. In cooler summer weather most wetsuits will not keep you warm when you are inactive and exposed to the elements for a long period. Also most people do find a wetsuit uncomfortable to wear for a period of hours at a time, even if it is warm enough. Another disadvantage of wetsuits is that if they fit properly they are so difficult to change in and out of, changing into a wetsuit while actually on board a small boat could be really awkward.

Footwear

Turning now to footwear, provided that your boat is free of dangerous sharp metal fittings it is fine to sail in bare feet in warm weather but you must have some kind of footwear to put on when you need to step out of the boat. It is not a good idea to step off a boat onto a beach or into shallow water in bare feet since there is always the possibility of a broken bottle, an old fish hook or some other horror.

In colder weather your feet will be one of the first parts of your body to feel the cold so you will be more comfortable if you can keep them at least a bit insulated. Ideally it would be nice to keep them dry as well, but experience suggests that may be just too much to ask, unless you are prepared to wear a drysuit.

Here are some comments on some of the many possible alternatives for dinghy sailing footwear:

Plastic 'Jelly shoes' These will give your feet reasonable protection from injury but don't do much to keep them warm. They don't take up much space in the boat. They have a strap and buckle so that you can tighten them for wading in mud. I think they are a good option for fine weather as well as to wear over dry suit feet in adverse weather. You may have to search around to find them, you sometimes see them in places like beach kiosks.
Flip flops/slip on beach shoes etc. Comments as for jelly shoes except that most of them are no use for wading in mud (they will get sucked off and you will probably never find them again).
Old Trainers/cheap plimsolls A alternative to jelly shoes is an old pair of trainers or plimsolls which have become so scruffy that you don't mind using them in low tide mud. But jelly shoes are easier to wash clean and won't turn smelly after they have been left in the bilge a week or two.
Knee length sailing boots. Most yacht crews seem to wear these. They are also quite good for dinghy sailing. Disadvantages are that sooner of later you will probably get water over the top and once that happens your feet will not stay much warmer than if you were just wearing jelly shoes. They are bulky to store on board. They often have very fine tread on the soles which collects fine grit which is hard to remove and scratches paint and varnish on your boat. For cold weather it would be best to have them large enough to wear with thick socks or to wear over a drysuit, but in that case they may be too loose a fit for walking in mud when you are not wearing the thick socks.
Wellington boots I would be a bit anxious that these could make it hard to swim should that become necessary. If you want full height rubber boots for sailing then I think you would be better off with the lighter and more flexible 'yachtie boots' even though they cost a little more. The off-road tread and thick soles on agricultural style wellingtons are quite unnecessary for sailing.
Calf length sailing boots. Comments are as for the knee length sailing boots, except that they are not so bulky in the boat but on the other hand you will probably get them full of water that much sooner! A wayfarer sailing dinghy runs aground in about 8 inches of water, this type of boot is only marginally high enough for that depth even in absolutely calm water. This type of boot often has lacing at the side with a thin rubber sealing flap. This makes them easier to get on and off than the knee length boots but my experience is that the sealing flaps can start to leak after a while.
Neoprene boots These are often worn by windsurfers and they are also an option for dinghy sailing. They don't do anything much to keep your feet dry but they do quite a lot to keep them warm since the cellular neoprene material of the boot insulates even when wet. Some are available very cheaply (say £5 to £10) but these may be of rather thin neoprene and may have poor soles, the better ones do cost a bit more than that. They can be found in specialist windsurfing shops or possibly in diving shops. I have also seen cellular neoprene socks which can be worn inside the boots for extra insulation. How well you get on with this kind of footwear probably depends on how much you mind your feet being wet for long periods - after a while you may feel that your feet are starting to dissolve away but perhaps that is better than having them frozen solid, a matter of opinion though.
Waterproof and breathable socks I tried a pair of these recently and from experience to date I am not sure that I can particularly recommend them. The material is Goretex or some comparable 'breathable' material. They are warm and comfy when dry but although the material is waterproof water soon came in over the top and after that had happened they seemed to take a very long time to dry out again. The manufacturer recommends washing them in fresh water after each use and that is not really practical when dinghy cruising.

So altogether there are a lot of options for dinghy cruising footwear none of which is perfect in all situations. For arduous conditions the best answer is probably to wear a drysuit with integral feet (rather than just ankle seals). If you wear warm socks inside the drysuit your feet should stay dry and at least fairly warm and you then just need some kind of outer foot wear to protect the drysuit foot material which is easily damaged. You can use yachting boots for this provided that they are a generous fit, although jelly shoes or even an old pair of trainers also seems to work well.

Lighting

Torch

Most would agree that a reliable water proof torch (flashlight in the USA) should be kept aboard any cruising dinghy, even for what is intended only to be a day trip. Most dinghy cruisers do not intentionally sail at night but you can be delayed for all kinds of reasons and end up sailing in the dark, or at least fumbling to moor your boat or to put up a tent in the dark.

Navigation lights

Extract from the International Regulations for the Prevention of Collisions at sea, Rule 25d.:

A sailing vessel of less than 7 metres in length shall, if practicable, exhibit the lights prescribed in paragraph (a) or (b) of this Rule, but if she does not, she shall have ready at hand an electric torch or lighted lantern showing a white light which shall be exhibited in sufficient time to prevent collision.

A vessel under oars may exhibit the lights prescribed in this Rule for sailing vessels, but if she does not, she shall have ready at hand an electric torch or lighted lantern showing a white light which shall be exhibited in sufficient time to prevent collision.

Cruising dinghies are generally well under 7m length and I think most people would consider fixed navigation lights to be impracticable on this size and type of boat hence it is legal for a cruising dinghy to just carry a torch which can be used to draw attention to the presence of the dinghy if there is a risk of collision in the dark. If this is necessary I imagine that the best way would be to shine the beam straight at the boat which is on a collision course. (I have never had to do this myself) Shining the beam at your sails might be less likely to initially attract attention but could be used to make it clear that you are a small sailing boat once you have gained attention. In practice you can normally avoid getting into this situation since you can see larger vessels more easily than they can see you and hence you should be able to keep out of the way. I suppose the exception would be in fog when a large vessel may see you by radar when you cannot see it. Some dinghies do carry navigation lights although they are not legally required to do so. I imagine that it must be quite a complication and expense to fit lights, wiring and power supply and any such system is likely to be unreliable unless very well engineered.

Tent lights

Using a conventional torch (flashlight in the US) to light your tent for any length of time will be expensive in batteries and not very effective since a torch beam is directional. There are electric camping lanterns which give a wide spread light but will be at least as expensive as a torch in batteries. Recently various torches and lanterns have appeared with LEDs rather than filament bulbs and since these are claimed to use much lower electrical power perhaps they may be a good way to light a tent. However, I don't yet have experience with these so I cannot make a recommendation. I still use an old fashioned non-pressurised oil lamp for tent lighting and find this quite suitable. One filling of lamp oil lasts many hours and costs very little, much less than batteries for an electric lantern with filament bulb or gas cylinders for a gas lamp. You can buy lamp oil in some supermarkets and it is better than parafin since it is almost odourless. You can buy aluminium screw top containers which will hold enough oil to last out an extended cruise. The light is not very bright but is just about adequate and better than a candle lantern which is another low tech. possibility. Oil lamps are pretty reliable but those made from 'tin plate' will fall apart from corrosion after a few years. You can get brass ones which should last much longer and I have one of these in the smallest size made. I hang this oil lamp from a fitting on the boom, sometimes it swings about a bit but the important thing is that it cannot fall over. I did have a pressurised type of lantern which gave a really bright light, comparable to a mains electric light bulb. However I don't use this any more, the risk of a serious flare up just does not seem worth it since you don't really need a bright light in a tent. Another problem was that the mantle of this lantern fell apart while it was not in use, I think it suffered from the rocking motion of a boat at sea.

Radio

I have never had a VHF radio so am not in a position to make recommendations about them. VHF radio is now the number one method for signalling distress in coastal waters and I have been criticised by coast guard officials and others for not having one so perhaps the time is coming when I will have to think about it. I understand that a low cost hand held VHF radio purchased at the time of writing (year 2000) will become obsolete within a few years due to changes in arrangements for distress signalling by VHF radio. Those which will work with the new arrangements are currently pretty expensive gadgets. At least one of our members has taken a cell phone aboard for our club cruises and this has proved useful for rendezvous with crew coming to join us by public transport or for getting a weather forecast when we are out in the wilds of Essex and miles from the nearest working public phone. A cell phone is not recommended for signalling distress but I imagine that in the event it could be a lot better than nothing.

Reefing Pegs

These are quite useful for general purpose tying up of loose objects as well as for reefing. For example they can be used to tie down spars to a trailer mast support or car roof rack or as sail ties. They are safer than the elasticised type of sail ties which have in the past caused serious eye injury. I don't think they are still manufactured so I think it is reasonable to include the diagram below for the benefit of anyone who wants them enough to be prepared to make their own using drill, saw and files. The material used for the original manufactured ones was a strong slightly bendy plastic about four millimetre (3/16") thickness. The bendyness helps when tieing round a small cylindrical object but a stiff material like Tufnol or even aluminium would probably also be suitable. Stockists of engineering grades of plastic may have off cuts.

The dimensions on the above diagram are in mm. All the edges of both the perimeter and the holes are rounded off. When you have made it thread a length of 5mm (or possibly 6mm) plaited polyester cord through the round hole and tie a stopper knot in one end, or carefully melt the end into a lump with a flame. To use the device you pass the cord one or more times round the objects you want to tie together, then tension it through the tapered hole before securing by making a twisted loop round the tapered end in the same way that you would take a locking turn on a mooring cleat. It will not come undone on its own but can be released more easily than a conventional knot.

Tools

I often find a pair of pliers useful on a dinghy. Pliers enormously augment the gripping power of the human hand and can be useful for all kinds of jobs such as freeing shackles or badly jammed up knots in ropes. A screw driver may be useful both for tightening screws and as a general purpose levering device. A sail makers needle and sailmakers thread together with a pair of scissors may be useful for maintenance of sails and tent. The needle can be stored in a small sealed container such as an old film canister, together with a little oil for preservation. I don't normally bother with other tools but some dinghy cruisers do take a much more comprehensive repair kit. I remember a DCA rally where one of the boats was holed in more than one place by drying out on a lumpy bit of foreshore. Spare pieces of plywood, screws, woodworking tools and a tube of mastic appeared and within an hour or so the boat was sailing again - very impressive but this kind of damage is pretty rare, or at least it should be.

Trailers and associated problems

When trailing your boat you probably should have a few trailer spares and tools in the car boot. Boat trailers are notoriously unreliable, amazingly so considering how simple they are compared to a car. The usual tyres used on boat trailers seem to last only a fraction of the mileage of car tyres and are prone to punctures so it is essential to carry a spare wheel for the trailer and a wrench to fit the wheel nuts. Your car jack may not work with the trailer in which case you need a second jack which could probably be a lightweight scissors jack. Trailer wheel bearings often fail, especially if they go in the sea when launching the boat, so you need a spare set of bearings or a complete spare hub unit which may not cost much more than just the bearings. I find some sea water gets into the outer end of the bearing housings each time the boat is launched and I drain this out straight away and add a bit of fresh water resistant grease, otherwise I doubt the bearings would last another journey. There are spring loaded grease reservoirs which fit onto the hubs to preserve the bearings and I have heard that these work well but I don't think they are available to suit the hubs on my trailer. Trailer lights are also prone to failure, on a couple of occasions I have made arrangements to meet up with other dinghy cruisers and when they have not appeared as expected it has turned out to be due to trailer lights failing. The last set of lights I purchased for my trailer was defective as supplied, some of the wires were simply not connected to internal screw terminals! Vibration combined with a bit of corrosion can cause wires to break close to terminations. I have also had trouble with poor connections at the standard plug and socket assembly between car and trailer. The most recent problem at this point was that a slight corrosion increased friction at the contacts such that the action of pushing the connectors together forced some of the brass contact sockets to slide back out of position, they being only weakly retained in a plastic moulding. This caused an intermittent fault which you could do without on a dark wet night. It seems that you need to be prepared to replace the trailer electrical components, the wheels and tyres and the tow hitch mechanism on a regular basis, perhaps every three years. The only good thing is that all these are fairly cheap items to replace, but I would like a bit better quality even if it costs a bit more.

My own equipment for trailing and launching is not ideal, although I have found ways round most of the problems. I don't have a launching trolley or a trailer winch so I immerse the trailer in the sea each time I launch the boat. I don't like getting the car too close to the water, especially on a soft foreshore, so I quite often use a 10mm dia anchor rope to link the trailer to the car for towing the boat out of the water. Even a small car can pull a lot harder than a human provided that the drive wheels are on firm ground. The jockey wheel on the trailer is very useful for this operation and means that with care the boat can be hauled out by one person driving the car, although it does make it easier to have a second person guiding the front end of the trailer. I have made small 'docking arms' to guide the boat onto the trailer and this is a big help especially in a cross current. I have also made aluminium mudguards to replace the manufactured steel ones which fell off due to corrosion. I am sure that a trailer with integral launch trolley would be better and would have saved some of the problems I have had with corrosion. But one feature of my trailer is quite handy and that is that the frame is a 'T' shape rather than an 'A' shape. That means that for parking the car after launching the boat the car and trailer will both fit into one standard car park space, the T shape of the trailer fitting along side the car with one trailer wheel near the middle of the car rear bumper. That can be useful in crowded waterside car parks. Maybe the ideal trailer would be T shaped with integral launch trolley, jockey wheel on the launch trolley and low level cross member between the wheels so that you can get it under the boat in shallow water.

Airbed Pumps

I have tried quite a variety of air bed pumps over the years, using them both for airbeds, for dinghy buoyancy bags and for small inflatable dinghies which can be useful as a tender for a cruising dinghy. Inflating these various articles is always a chore so I am always on the lookout for a faster pump. The pumps which are made as a moulded rubber dome seem to be about the slowest and those which look like a small concertina are not much better. The 'clamshell' type, like a miniature blacksmiths bellows seem to be a bit quicker. I had a large and small one of these and found the smaller one was the quickest since the large one had too weak a return spring hence the return stroke limited the speed. Eventually the clamshell pump fell apart because it had some components made from plated steel which corroded. I now have a double acting pump having a piston in a plastic cylinder and this is the fastest pump I have found so far. It was not particularly expensive (<£10) and takes up less storage space than the larger of the two clamshell pumps. The only slight problem was that although it was supplied with a couple of different nozzles they didn't fit both the air bed and dinghy but if you have a lath or know someone who does then you can make a custom nozzle quite easily. Indeed, years ago before I had a metal turning lath I did some crude turning using files on wood or plastic parts held on a bolt in an electric drill, some of the pulley block sheaves on my boat were made that way and it should work reasonably well for something like an airbed pump nozzle. Try to avoid the pump nozzle being a bottleneck in the system, i.e. a small nozzle should have the largest possible hole through. Here ends my treatise on air bed pumps!

Camera

If you take your camera to sea aboard an open boat I think it extremely likely that sooner or later you will get it wet and this will immediately and totally ruin most cameras. You may well think it is a fine day and it is only a short trip, but that does not mean your camera will not be destroyed! Over the years I have destroyed several cameras this way including one which was sold as 'water resistant'.

The camera I am using at the moment and which was used to take most of the photographs on this website is an underwater type rather than just water resistant (I think its called Minolta Weathermatic Zoom) and this one has survived fine so far. It is an easy to operate automatic camera, good for those who don't make a specialist hobby of photography and it also seems to be robust having a casing which fully encloses and protects the zoom lens. It was fairly expensive and also bulkier compared with a comparable non-waterproof camera. Although I quite like this camera I would not want to recommend this or any particular type since photography is not a special interest of mine.

To protect non-waterproof cameras you can get flexible plastic camera bags with a window for the lens, you can work the camera controls through the bag. I have not tried these but they would seem a good idea but I am not sure who well they suit cameras with projecting zoom lenses. I expect that most of us will soon be using digital cameras anyway. No doubt there will soon be a better choice of waterproof digital cameras than exists at the time of writing.

Anemometer

This is definitely a non-essential, just a toy for the fun of it. However, I would point out that dinghy sailors and yachtsmen often refer to wind strengths using the Beaufort scale and I suspect that they often don't know what these numbers really mean out on the water. They think they know because they heard another yachtsman quote similar numbers in what seemed like similar conditions, and that other yachtsman heard another and so on - without some calibrated instrument somewhere along the line no one can really be sure and also does not the wind seem stronger on a cold day. Hence I purchased an anemometer so now I don't have to guess. It may be that after using the anemometer for a while I will be able to judge the wind well enough not to need it anymore. I looked at several hand held electronic anemometers in a chandlers shop and picked one with a watertight casing and which worked in a low wind speed, this can be checked by holding it while walking slowly and seeing how well the instrument responds.

Navigation

Most dinghy cruisers sail within harbours and estuaries or within half a mile or so from the shore so do not need to plot a course on a chart or fix a position with multiple compass bearings, even if these were practical things to do on a small open boat. Most dinghy navigation is based on observation of ones surroundings and is perhaps better described as pilotage rather than navigation. For example you find that it quite often helps to be on the windward side of a river, then if the river turns towards the wind you may escape having to put in a tack, also if you run aground it will be easier to get free. You learn that when you turn a corner into a tributary creek you may hit a spit of mud that has formed where the water flows merge. A book which includes a lot of hints and amusing anecdotes relevant to this kind of navigation is 'Sailing Just for Fun' by Charles Stock. Over several decades Charles has covered many tens of thousands of miles of sailing mostly on the coastline of Essex, Suffolk and Kent, which is home waters for the HSC. Anyone who has done any amount of sailing in this area is likely to have come accross Charles Stock with his engineless green painted gaff rigged sloop which has a hull about the size of a Wayfarer, although it is a completely different kind of boat being much heavier and having a cabin. I believe that some years Charles has been out sailing in this boat every weekend, winter and summer. It is unlikely that anyone else alive would know these waters as well as he does. I can recall one Charles Stock anecdote myself. A few years ago Josephine and myself were crew members on a hired cruising yacht proceeding under power up the River Thurne in Norfolk under the command of a rather bossy female skipper. We were sitting on the foredeck to keep as far as possible from the yacht's command centre. As we rounded a bend we spotted Charles Stock in his little green boat tacking up the river ahead of us, so we waved to him but he did not seem to recognise us. Our yacht carried on under power then when we were right up to him we slowed down and followed breathing down his neck so to speak. I could see that Charles was getting quite annoyed because we were neither speeding up to pass him nor slowing down to fall back and give him space to tack freely. Our skipper was getting impatient too, and eventually she opened the throttle wide and went for it as Ellen MacArthur would say. We would have got past safely but then Charles tacked and our skipper panicked and put the engine astern again. A collision was imminent but Charles managed to avoid it by immediately tacking again, but now he had lost steerage way and his boat went straight into the reed beds along the river bank. Our engine gunned again and off we went up the river, leaving Charles stuck in the reeds and shouting something not very polite about people who hire sailing boats then drive them around under power. Josephine and myself were no longer waving but rather trying to duck down out of sight.

Although dinghy navigation is something you will mainly learn by doing rather than by reading there are a just a few things that you really should know before you go afloat in any boat, on saltwater at least. These include the rules of the road (ie who has right of way when boats are on a collision course), the basic IALA system of navigation marks and, in case you get caught out after dark, the basic lights shown by different vessels. These topics are well covered by books available from public libraries and of course plenty of sailing schools, adult education colleges and sailing clubs offer navigation courses following the RYA sylabus. The RYA approved courses cover more than is needed for dinghy cruising but I would not want to discourage anyone from taking such a course, apart from anything else I believe that they can be good social occasions for the winter months. But if you do not have time to take a course do not be discouraged, the essentials require only an hour or so reading.

For the kind of navigation we are discussing here, you don't need any expensive instruments but a small magnetic compass of the type used by hill walkers is so compact and inexpensive that it is worth having one aboard, then you will have some idea of the direction to head back to land if you get lost in fog or just heat haze.

Although some sailors may think this is heresy I would say that I find ordnance survey maps more useful than charts for most coastal and estuary dinghy cruising. Maps show all sorts of interesting and even useful information which is not on charts, e.g. location of pubs, phone boxes, footpaths, lanes and places of interest for exploring ashore. Much dinghy navigation is based on observation of the shore and good maps show details of the shoreline and adjacent landmarks more clearly than most charts. A good map will show tiny creeks and inlets where a dinghy may find shelter, these may not be quite so clear on charts which are produced with larger vessels in mind. Unfortunately maps do not give much information about the depth of water but this is less important for a dinghy than for a keel boat. It is also unfortunate that even large scale ordnance survey maps do not show navigation marks such as buoys but that does not mean that you cannot make use of such marks, the IALA buoyage system is standardised so that you can tell where a channel runs or which side to pass a danger point without needing to identify the marks on a chart. I suppose you really should have a full set of both charts and large scale shore maps but they are expensive and rightly or wrongly it is the charts rather than the maps which I tend to do without, not everyone would agree with this.

I started by making the point that most dinghy cruisers do not venture far from the shore but if you do make a passage out to sea, say across the English Channel, then you definitely do need charts. It is useful to include a chart with a small enough scale to show your whole passage without being unfolded to too huge a size. This will help you to see where you are in relation to your preferred destination point and also alternative destinations you may need to suit changing conditions. Plastic charts such as the Stanford series are excellent for use in an open boat. Water resistant ones, such as those from Imray, are better than normal paper but not nearly as good as plastic. If you only have paper charts consider covering them with clear adhesive film, they will then survive better but will not fold up neatly.

The Global Positioning System

The Global Positioning System has had a big impact on navigation by land, sea, and air. For a price starting at about uk £150 at the time of writing, you can buy a hand held waterproof unit which will reliably tell you your position to within something like 15 metres, or possibly better where various signal enhancements are available. In the context of sailboat navigation that means 'spot on'. A GPS unit usually offers functions additional to the basic position display, for example an accurate speed indication and a 'pointer' which can help you get from A to B a little more quickly by telling you the exact course to steer to counteract a cross current. A gps unit is particularly valuable in fog or darkness or if you sail out of sight of land but I would make the point that we used to manage fine without it, so if you don't want to get involved with this technology or can't afford it that does not mean you cannot go to sea.

I first purchased a GPS unit a little over a year ago. The unit I purchased is the Garmin 76 so my comments are based on this and since I have not used any other gps I cannot give advice on which is the best to buy. From what other people say they all provide the basic functions, so it is probably a matter of how much extra you want to pay for features such as a larger and clearer display (the Garmin 76 has a higher resolution display than the cheapest models), a built in magnetic compass, built in barometer etc. Also you can go for a unit which displays maps/charts, I can see that would be nice but it really puts the cost up a lot, not just for the instrument but also for the map data which you have to buy separately. I think I am right in saying that the basic accuracy is about the same for all models of GPS since this is ultimately dependant on the satellite system. One feature which I think is important for open boat use is that the instrument is fully waterproof but this does not narrow the choice much since most of the current hand held models do claim to be waterproof.

The Garmin 76 is totally waterproof and is thus be useable in conditions when a paper chart would probably be useless. The battery compartment is sealed from the inside of the unit but it is not fully sealed from outside. I think it needs to be that way since otherwise you could seal in water when changing the batteries. I often use rechargeable batteries and I have found that because the battery compartment is not sealed these get rusty when used in the Garmin gps, I don't know how rusty they can get before they don't work. If you use throw away batteries they would probably run down before they have time to rust. I have also had the unit stop operating because of poor contact between the batteries and the contact springs. This was a bit disconcerting the first time it happened but I have found that just rolling the batteries around in their compartment restore operation, I do wonder whether Garmin could do something to improve the reliability of these contacts though.

The Garmin 76 GPS is good ergonomically, the screen is high resolution and as large as you could reasonably expect on a hand held unit and you can operate all the buttons holding it in one hand, using the other hand to sail your boat. Garmin do make smaller GPS units than the 76 but for a marine application miniaturisation is probably less important than an easily read screen and easy to operate buttons. Although the 76 is reckoned to have better battery life than earlier units, if you run it continuously from the internal batteries on an extended cruise you would get through quite a few batteries so I normally switch on the GPS only as and when needed. The disadvantage of this is that you cannot then make use of some of the 'fun' functions such as the trip odometer, the calculation of average speed and the recording of a complete map of your route.

You can switch on a GPS at any time without any setting up in advance and after a wait of perhaps a minute or so you will get your position as a latitude and longitude, (or an alternative coordinate system such as the UK Ordnance Survey grid if you prefer). However, to get the most benefit from a GPS it is worthwhile using waypoints which does require a bit more advance thought. Waypoints are simply reference points which you enter into your gps so that the gps can tell you where you are relative to these points. Once you have waypoints set up the gps can tell you your position either numerically as a bearing and distance from any particular waypoint, or graphically as a map display showing your position together with nearby waypoints, or as a compass display telling you which way to steer to go to a particular waypoint. All this is much more immediately comprehensible information than long numbers representing latitude and longitude which are rather meaningless until you have plotted them on a chart, not an instant operation when steering a dinghy with the other hand! The waypoints you enter will often be points along a route you intend to follow but you can also set waypoints for alternative destinations, for hazards you particularly want to avoid or simply as reference points. It may be worth entering waypoints for the location of the compass rose(s) on your chart then you can read the bearing from this point on your GPS and plot your position relative to the chart compass rose.

If you are entering waypoints into a gps while actually afloat in a dinghy you will probably have to do it by estimating the positions from a paper chart and keying them into the GPS. This is the most tedious part of using a GPS and you need to do it a bit carefully since an error in one digit could send you astray. I certainly find it helps to have a chart with a reasonably spaced latitude and longitude grid rather than just scales at the edges of the chart. Working from the scales at the edges of a chart is really awkward in an open boat since you will almost certainly need to work with the chart folded. If your chart only has scales at the edges, as is the case with the Stanfords charts I have, then I would recommend that you consider pencilling a grid onto the chart as part of your preparation for going cruising - it is much easier to do this on a large desk than working on the bottom boards of an open boat, I can say that having now done it in both situations.

Apart from keying in coordinates there are at least a couple of other ways to enter a waypoint into a gps. One is to press the 'Mark' button (it may have different names on different makes of GPS) which will cause your current position to become a new waypoint. It is always worth remembering to do this each time you leave a harbour entrance, then you immediately have that harbour entered as a waypoint should you need to go back to it for some reason. Another method to enter waypoints which is available on at least some units is to set the gps to the map display and use an on-screen cursor to set the waypoint position. This meth