Boom Brakes
The boom brake could be used in an intentional gybe. One end is dead ended to whatever (Hopefully whatever strongly attached to the boat), the other end goes through a block to a wench. You can tighten or loosen the brake depending on what you want it to do. It works like a belaying device in climbing, you can stop with it, or you can slowly repel (abseil to those living upside down
).
We had one aboard Pneuma, came with the boat... Having done a lot of sailing without one I thought it was a ridiculous piece of gear..........Until I put some inexperienced crew at the wheel in a gusty day, and watched what happened when they were steering. Inexperienced crew and exhausted crew act a lot the same I noticed.
As for Trysails,,,,, I find that they are only usable on boats that have boom gallows. NO gallows, then what are you going to do with the boom???? It swings around a bunch when not in use let me tell you (Yeah you can tighten up that sheet till you pull the traveler off the deck and it makes no difference!
) Lash it to the deck? Right, then you have successfully made it at least twice as hard to get to the foredeck to deal with the inspection and any problems that occur up there, and you have reduced your visibility even more. (You can hardly see anyway why make it worse???).
Back to the boom brake... In really bad errr... stuff, they will bring the boom across slowly, (Plenty of time to duck, and slow enough that it won't strike your head only push it out of the way.) What I found cool was the amount of noise that they make while doing this. Kind of a OHSHITGYBE alarm, I can't describe noises on the net, but they do make a good deal of it if they are trimmed correctly and you gybe.
Worst weather we were in was off the coast of New Zealand, somewhere that I would not sail to again no matter what you were paying (Ok maybe, but I doubt that anyone would pay that much... ;-) ) The wind was sustained at over 85 knots, gust to something that my anemometer could not measure, and the seas were 45 feet and at their worst very organized .)
We got knocked down twice by breaking waves (not pushed over by the wind!). The boom brake did a wonderful job in these conditions, so did the triple reefed main, the Ericson Hull construction when the next wave broke ON US, the wind vane steering (Right up till the knock downs), and mere minutes later the parachute sea anchor did amazing things I would not have believed possible from a piece of fabric with some strange darts in it!!! ( It is a really long story about really strange weather and sea state changes happening faster than I would have ever thought possible....)
We sat that out under sea anchor for two days. Four boats were lost, three others abandoned and all of us had scars to show when we reached Tonga. (Boat, human, and psyche). Now whenever anyone says that Ericsons are not really good sea boats, and that they would rather have heavy crabcrusher X, I just smile… Occasionally I’ll ask how many sea miles they have on crab crusher X, then go HMMMM….. and let them continue…
Back to the boom brake.... I did not like constantly having to get over the lines to get to the foredeck, I hated it most days, however it did work better than advertised. I plan on doing some experimenting on the 46 and seeing how well the end of the boom preventer works. I suspect that I am going to go back to swearing at a boom brake and the lines across the deck though.
For short handed crew using auto steering devices, I would say that either permanently rigged preventer or a boom brake is a very important safety device. Those auto steering devices do fail, and can send the boat into a gybe just when you are walking up to see how well that modeling clay in the hawse pipe is holding up..... I am more concerned after the 40,000 miles that we did in the big blue with the boom hitting a crewmember than I am about getting pasted to the life lines in a Vende Globe boat
. (But that could just be that I have never been invited to sail on a Vende Globe boat ???
)
Guy
