LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE
Rival 32 owner John Passmore learned the value of 3mm line when it saved his steering for 16 days of transatlantic sailing
There is nothing, absolutely nothing more useful on a boat than 3mm line. I stretch it across my chest with one arm out to the side, the other bent at the elbow –and that’s a metre. Then add a bit for luck. Put a bowline in one end and you can do anything.
You can stop the halyards slapping. You can hold up lee cloths–dangle rechargeable lanterns over the cockpit for Happy Hour, stop the bottle opener from getting lost (you need a bottle opener once you get past Barbados).
The 3mm line is to the modern yachtie what Stockholm tar was to Joshua Slocum.
And it has held my rudder together for 1,500 miles. More, actually, because eventually I was so confident I put into Carriacou for customs and a bottle of cold Carib rather than heading straight for Prickly Bay in Grenada.
I decided I deserved a little celebration. I had just crossed the Atlantic in 20 days –and for 16 of them, nothing had been holding the steering together but 10 pieces of 3mm line.
I blame the old boy in Falmouth (always a good start). This particular old boy–he had a beard that covered his top three buttons and a gaffer covered in baggywrinkle–told me that if I didn’t want to roll all the way down the trades with my twin headsails, then I should carry a double-reefed main as well: sheet it in so it’s just off the shrouds and steer a course with the wind just on the quarter.
You’ll travel further but you’ll go faster… and you won’t roll, was what he said. I tried it.
Benefit of hindsight
Setting off from Mindelo in the Cape Verdes (after skilfully avoiding arrest and incarceration in a Cape Verdean prison cell... another story), I hoisted my double reefed main, my twin headsails –and set off for the Windies at a rate of knots. I mean it.
For three days, I was keeping pace with a 50-footer called Wikidoo –but he only carried two sails (wimp).
On day four–after the daily runs peaked at 141 miles-I woke to find us going not nearly as fast and heading for Antarctica. It took an absurdly long time to work out what had gone wrong.
What had gone wrong was that the strain from the sh
