14. Self-Steering
After the fog and the fulmars, after my first gales and flat calms, after the twenty-foot-long great white shark gnawed at my main boom, after the indifferent sea turtle, I was now more than halfway to England at about the longitude of the Azores and Iceland with less than one thousand miles to go. The wind was perfect, unexpectedly from the south, so I had my full mainsail and my largest jib set and was making excellent time in the right direction. Down below in the cabin that afternoon, I pinned up a Union Jack. Also on that bulkhead, beside the barometer, I had tacked a photograph of Lisa (my girlfriend, now spouse) and our dog in the snow. I also had a curious old postcard of four young men sitting and looking at the camera. It is an image from where I don’t know, maybe the 1930s, but I have always found it oddly moving: the young men from another generation, each of whom seemed to look at the camera yearning with aspirations that I found motivating somehow. I still have the postcard.
By that point in the trip the only reason I was able to sit below in the cabin of Fox and fart around with the bulkhead décor or page through books and manuals to try to fix my overheating engine was because the self-steering gear was working so well. I had learned by that point how to adjust it properly. It had worked for short periods before I left when I sailed with friends along the coast of New England for the shakedown trip, but I still felt like I did not have a clear feel for it when I sailed out of Portland. I’d been unreasonably fortunate that a man named Sandy Van Zandt, a retired sailmaker and a former world cruiser who with his wife became nationally recognized environmental advocates for public lands, had one day walked by my boat when it was still hauled out on the stands at the boatyard in Noank, Connecticut, at the mouth of the Mystic River. Sandy and I struck up a conversation. I can’t remember how we got started on my hope to sail across the North Atlantic by myself, because I told very few people about this. I must have trusted him immediately—or he just asked me outright. I can’t remember exactly how it got started. Sandy took some interest in my endeavor. He helped me set up the steering gear before I left, cutting me some chain and fabricating a hard plastic piece to clamp around the tiller. Without him I would have been lost in terms of this gear. I bought the self-steering device by mail from a company in California. I took the stainless-steel bars to an auto company to drill the holes I needed, and then I drilled the holes through the fiberglass transom of Fox myself and bolted the thing to the stern of the boat. But even as I corresponded with the company and other owners with my same boat design and also regularly checked in with Sandy, I still felt like I was making too much of this up as I was going along.
Sir Francis Chichester, who in 1960 was about to sail alone across his first ocean, designed his own self-steering gear, which he named “Miranda” after the character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest who delivers the famous line, “O brave new world.”
Self-steering mechanisms and strategies have likely done more to enable single-handed voyaging than any other factor, more than the use of fiberglass production hulls or the small-boat engine or even GPS. Self-steering has allowed more sailors to get out there and given them more time and mental space to look over the side for sea turtles, coral reefs, or icebergs. Thus a brief technical digression here is useful for the larger story, as well as my small one.
Part of the reason boat designs like Slocum’s Spray and Pidgeon’s Islander could sail thousands of miles without a helmsperson was because they were larger, heavier hulls with full keels under the water (helping to keep the boat on a straight line track), wide initial stability (less tippy and rolly), and these boats supported a range of different sails from one all the way in the back (a mizzen) to a sail all the way out front on a bowsprit (a jib). These boat characteristics allowed these experienced sailors several options to balance their hull with the amount and orientation of canvas set on a given day. In most conditions Slocum and Pidgeon were able to adjust their sails and tie their wheel or tiller in place before going below to nap, read, or make some coffee.
Self-steering mechanisms for crossing oceans in modern boats, ones not blessed with the magic dust and design of Spray and Islander, began as early as 1936, credited to French sailor and artist Marin-Marie, who crafted and tested his wind-powered self-steering system on a motorboat going trans-Atlantic. At least three different British and French sailors then further designed and advanced the use of vane systems in the 1950s.
The devices were not well known or cheap enough for boaters like Davison to install on Felicity Ann in the early 1950s. Horie’s Mermaid in 1962 was meant to have a system, but he wasn’t able to finish it before he left Japan. Soon, however, homemade and production self-steering gear became accessible and tested enough that by the time Sharon Sites Adams crossed the North Pacific in the 1960s and Nicolette Milnes Walker crossed the North Atlantic in 1971, they each had multiple brands from which to choose and were able to use their self-steering with little previous experience.
In general, these wind-powered self-steering systems start with a wood, fabric, or fiberglass wind vane on a vertical post that is at the very back of the boat, the stern. As an oversimplified explanation, imagine, like at the top of a house, a weather vane shaped like a sperm whale. The top of the vertical post is attached to the whale’s forehead. When you’ve got your boat sailing well in the direction you want, you adjust the whale to face into the direction from which the wind comes (not in the direction the boat itself is heading) and connect the system to the tiller or wheel. If the boat starts to turn in one direction or the other, the wind puts pressure on the whale’s tail on one side or the other, forcing the rotation of the whale’s head and hence the post. The bottom of the post is attached to a little auxiliary rudder in the water or to the back edge of the main rudder or through pulleys and lines that lead directly to the tiller or wheel. Regardless of the exact system, the wind moving the tail turns the post, which eventually steers the boat until it is back on track, until the boat is sailing in the direction in which the vane, the whale’s forehead, is again pointed directly into the wind with no pressure on its tail. In small increments this carries on constantly in the same way you can stick your hand out of the car window and angle it to keep it straight with as little resistance to the wind as possible.
That’s oversimplified, but hopefully you get the idea. I’ve included in the chapter notes a link to a video that demonstrates this well.
Most budget ocean cruisers today use, as I did, a self-steering design called a servo-pendulum vane system. This employs both the wind and its own small rudder in the water, utilizing both forces to adjust the tiller or wheel via pulleys and ropes. This wind vane works vertically in that the “whale” is diving down toward the water, so its tail tilts from left to right, which then, in my case, turned a small rudder in the water which rotated a rod that swung like a pendulum as it was connected to the lines leading into the cockpit and to the tiller, moving it to the right or left, to starboard or port (see this page). The early systems in the 1960s, like on Chichester’s “Miranda,” had blanket-sized wind vanes, little sails really (see this page, for example), whereas by the twenty-first century, thanks in part to the new systems, the vanes were now down to the size of skinny skateboards. My self-steering system was a beautiful contraption. It had a transparent plastic vane that acted on a mechanism of thick shiny stainless-steel bars and bolts, smooth bearings and gears, and a counterbalance weight. It was also nonsensical-looking. The lines made a spider’s web in the cockpit. Even as I watched it tilting from one side to the other, moving lines that moved through the pulleys that I’d installed and led to a bit of chain and Sandy Van Zandt’s custom collar around the end of the tiller, I remained only on the edge of understanding how it all worked.
With friends on the coastal shakedown trip north we experimented a bit more with the vane, which I’ll call Sandy. Once alone during the first days of the trans-Atlantic crossing, I learned how to adjust the direction and the tension of the lines and when to use either the larger or the smaller of the paddle-shaped vanes, depending on the force of the wind. These vanes were switched out with little wing nuts that I prayed I would not drop into the water when I leaned over the rail at the stern. I had two back-up vanes of each size and several spare nuts, but it was a finite supply for such crucial equipment.
Once Sandy was set for a time, I could sit in the cockpit as Fox rolled and sloshed across the blue waves. I would usually sit with my back to the cabin on the windward, higher side of the boat, looking aft and watching the wake, marveling how the steering gear did his thing, converting the wind and my boat’s direction to rotating pulleys and ropes that moved the tiller as if by the hands of a ghost. Sandy was gimballed in his way, too, staying vertical to the horizon from where he was fastened off the stern, so even as the boat heeled in one direction or the other the rotating part of the mechanism stayed vertical. The whole silent system was miraculous and mesmerizing, a modern-art mobile. Once in motion Sandy ran entirely on his own, like one of those metal sculptures where you push a counterweight to get it started and then the bicyclist rides and rocks back and forth on a wire endlessly.
Wind-vane self-steering systems work best in steady wind and when the wind is coming from angles forward or from the side of the boat. Wind-vane self-steering gear does not work as well with light, fluky winds or when you’re sailing directly downwind, meaning when the wind is behind the boat. Each boat is unique, though, and the sea and wind conditions vary from day to day. Besides the fact that they generally do not work as well in light breezes or in winds from directly astern, there are two other facts about these self-steering systems that are perhaps obvious but important to clarify, including to inform later events in this story.
First: if you fall off the boat, the self-steering gear does not care about you and will just keep sailing ahead. In 1979, Yukio Hasebe fell overboard while sailing alone off the Great Barrier Reef with his wind-vane gear engaged. He was still connected by his harness, which dragged him astern, but the boat was sailing too fast for him to be able to climb back aboard. Beaten and bloody, he held on until his boat grounded into a reef. (Hasebe later bought another boat and made it nearly all the way around the world, but then died somewhere in the middle of the North Pacific; neither he nor his boat were ever found.) Some single-handers stream a line astern from their self-steering to which they might desperately grab if they fall overboard in order to disengage the gear and allow the boat to round up into the wind, luff the sails, and stop itself. I chose not to send a rope astern, because I didn’t want a random line getting tangled with fishing gear or getting wrapped up in the propeller or around the self-steering rudder.
Second: since wind-powered self-steering systems are beholden to the direction of the wind, when the wind shifts from, say, northerly to easterly, and you’re down below sleeping, cooking, or engrossed in reading your Ann Davison, the boat will quietly just turn along with the wind without telling you about the course change. Self-steering based on the wind maintains the boat’s relative position to the wind. This is how Pidgeon’s Islander, with the sails adjusted and the tiller lashed, ended up on the beach while he slept. For another example, one night when Horie had been at sea for nearly a month, he went below with the tiller tied in place so he could sleep. The wind slowly shifted clockwise without him sensing any change in speed or heel. When he woke up he had sailed about twenty miles in entirely the wrong direction. Angry at the loss of perhaps half a day, Horie wrote: “From here on I set myself two rules: ‘Keep an eye on the compass as often as possible’ and ‘Do not let “feeling” be your guide under any circumstances.’ ” And so it seemed indeed an “angel at the helm” that steered Adams’ boat past that oil-rig buoy, seemingly changing the course on its own, while she slept during the last couple of days of her North Pacific crossing.
Electrically powered compass alarms do exist; they were in place in the 1960s, but many of the early single-handers found them too loud or too sensitive or too cumbersome. To be honest, I’m not sure why I didn’t think to get one in 2007 or why I anticipated it wasn’t necessary. Today’s off-course alarms are now easily integrated into GPS and radar units if you want to enable them.
In addition to the wind-driven self-steering systems, there are also now electronic self-steering mechanisms, known as autopilots. The earlier of these devices were set to a compass course rather than a relative wind position. Autopilots adjust the tiller or wheel via electronic signals to gears, pistons, or belts. This technology was just being developed in the 1960s for smaller boats, and Chichester, Horie, or Adams did not want to waste the money for new technology like that, nor did they have the power supply to support it. Today these electronic self-steering devices still require a lot of electricity, but there are some smaller types for on-deck use that are affordable enough that even low-budget sailors can have one of these electronic “tiller pilots.” Once a marine technician (or you, if you have the skill) has cued it up to your compass, you just connect the little robotic piston and key in a course into the box as easily as setting the temperature on your home thermostat. The advantage of the autopilot is that you can use it in any weather, in really light wind, coming from any wind direction, and just as well when motoring. More recently, modern sophisticated autopilots try to manage the best of both worlds, wiring an apparent wind indicator on the mast to this electronic self-steering, meaning the device can steer a course with the relative wind at, say, the boat’s beam, 90 degrees to your hull. Some budget single-handed sailors who can’t afford a reliable autopilot set-up below will embark on a long voyage with a few tiller pilots available for using on deck, knowing they’ll likely fail after a long time in the sun and saltwater. Tiller pilots and autopilots can be difficult to repair on your own.
Thus, wind-vane self-steering systems have the advantage over autopilots in that they require no electricity and are visibly mechanical. They can be used for the majority of the sailing miles out on open water. But there were times when I was changing a sail up forward, for example, and I wanted to keep the boat on a compass course. In those situations I would stand down Sandy and set up the tiller pilot for a short time. Almost all of the time, though, the tiller pilot lived in a waterproof bag down below. It worked great the couple of times I used it. It never had a name.
Many believe the greatest sailing movie ever made was With Jean-du-Sud Around the World (1984), created by Yves Gélinas, a French-Canadian single-hander. Gélinas filmed himself, produced the movie, and innovated several cinematic methods, decades before waterproof smart phones and GoPro cameras and selfie-sticks and drones. He was likely the first person from a boat to use a kite to hold up a camera and film down on his vessel under sail (and himself in his birthday suit), and he was also likely the first on a boat to use a camera mounted on a helmet. Gélinas, with an earnest respect for the sailing and writing of Bernard Moitessier, left a career in acting and theatre to become a sailor, funding his early trip learning about aluminum and steel while working in shipyards in France.
After the circumnavigation, his film and book did not make enough money to support his daughters at home in Quebec. Gélinas said that his book was never translated into English because the anglophone Canadian publishers did not like his outspoken stance on independence for Quebec. So to make a living he turned to fabricating a wind-vane self-steering gear similar to the one that he had made for his own boat. He made each unit by hand at first, learning how to use a lathe and how to weld. He named his company CapeHorn. His device was quickly successful, even as electronic autopilots were arriving on the scene, so he was able to scale up and make it a family business. CapeHorn wind vanes are still available. His design is widely known as one of the most aesthetically pleasing, along with its simplicity and durability. Gélinas once explained: “I am an artist basically . . . When I made the film I attempted to make it a work of art. And I had the same attitude with the self-steering gear. I was very conscious [that] to claim the title of ‘work of art’ it did not only have to look good, it also had to work perfectly.”
Gélinas added that he felt you couldn’t be an artist in one part of your life and not in others: “A [sea] passage well made, without any mishap, without any problems, can also be considered a work of art.”
After I pinned up the Union Jack on the bulkhead and marked less than one thousand miles to go in my logbook, with multiple exclamation points, I wrote down the barometric pressure. I poked my head out of the companionway to look at the altocumulus clouds, piled and balled on top of each other in colossal castles stretching impossibly high, clouds crafted as if by children, accented a creamy yellow by the sun behind me. I noted the wind direction and scanned 360 degrees for ships. All looked good. Sandy faithfully held the course. I updated these weather details, too, in the logbook.
The barometer was dropping slowly, but I was making 4.5 knots at 100 degrees by the compass. All of this was just fine. I spread out my books on the leeward settee to calculate my noon sextant fix and found that it was within five miles of my GPS position, which was plenty good enough for me. I checked my wristwatch again, ate my daily power bar, and got ready to tune in my multi-band radio receiver to see if I could hear a weather forecast. I thought of the first beer I’d order at the pub in Falmouth.