I’m a slacker. I’ve reached a point in my life when I’ll happily do nothing for hours on end. My favorite type of nothing is to settle into a corner of the couch and read a book from cover to cover. An interest that allows me to travel through space and time without moving.
I was hoping boating would be a sideline activity for me. I could be present and supportive without participating. That dream did not come true. Much to my surprise, operating our 34-foot Nordic Tug, Blue Wander, is a two-person job.
Blue motors along at eight to ten miles per hour, it’s a slow but steady cruising rate. A 50-mile journey is an all-day activity for us. The distance a car can travel in about an hour takes us from sunrise to midafternoon. It’s too long for one person to monitor the helm station screens while scanning the waterway for obstructions, boat traffic, and crab pot buoys. Inputs that prompt the captain to make minor adjustments to the vessel’s course and speed.
This spring, I decided to accept the helm duty challenge and now volunteer to run the boat about half the time we’re underway. We operate Blue in one to two-hour shifts, giving us time to relax and rest our eyes.
We run the boat from the pilot house, located in the center of our vessel. It’s an elevated space with a panoramic view of the waterway. An aisleway separates two cushioned bench seats. I once envisioned placing a coordinating set of nautical-themed pillows on each bench to give the space a living room feel, but it’s a workplace, so my husband declared it a pillow-free zone. The benches are home to our self-inflating life jackets and binoculars. I use my life jacket to build a nest for my cruising day essentials, including my cell phone, earbuds, journal, pen case, bird book, and water tumbler. I’m not known for my ability to travel light.
The helm station is on the starboard side of the pilot house. At first glance, the helm’s instrument panel looks like a dizzying array of dials, digital readouts, and moving maps. There are so many colors and numbers that my brain screeches, “Noooo!” when I’m standing there. With my husband’s help, I’ve learned to quiet my internal chatterbox and scan the instruments. Allowing me to quickly take in and evaluate one piece of data at a time, then look up and out the windows.
The upper half of the helm instrument panel is dedicated to navigation and contains: two Garmin displays, the electric steering display, the autopilot, and the compass. It’s also home to our most valuable and dependable navigation aid, gifted to us by the harbor host in Southport, North Carolina. It’s a wooden popsicle stick colored green on one end and red on the other. The harbor host’s wife and grandchildren make them, and he hands them out to every cruiser that stops at the marina down the street from his house. The boat captain flips the stick when a vessel enters or leaves a port. It’s a low-tech aid designed to remind recreational captains to navigate with the red channel markers on the right when returning from sea and, conversely, to keep green buoys on the right when leaving port. Other rules apply, so please don’t flip the stick without consulting the captain.
The helm panel also houses the fuel gauge, engine instrumentation screen, throttle and thruster controls, and a panel with eleven toggle switches. Each toggle switch turns a different system on or off. The last three switches are variable speed controls the three front-facing window wipers. At first, I thought the wiper blades were an unnecessary device, as I wondered, Who wants to boat in rainy weather? However, clearing raindrops is not the primary function of the wipers. It’s a lesson that’s reiterated each time we cross a sound, aka a large body of water connected to the ocean. The wipers are needed in rough weather when waves crash over the front of the bow and obscure our view.
There is an upper helm station, also known as the canoe. But it’s not too crowded up there. The eight-foot-long panel houses two VHF radios, a satellite radio for our listening pleasure, solar panel controls, the bilge alarm, and the engine compartment’s fire suppression system. I stand on my tiptoes to operate the radios. At five feet four inches, I fall into the vertically challenged demographic. Luckily, the VHF radios are equipped with programmable presets. We keep the port side radio tuned to Channel 16 to listen to United States Coast Guard (USCG) broadcasts and initiate communication with other vessels. In busy port areas, the starboard side VHF radio is tuned to Channel 13 to monitor commercial vessel traffic or Channel 9 if we need to request an opening from a bridge tender. Switching either radio between channels 9, 13, and 16 can be done with the push of a button. If I’m at the helm, I need to take extra care when using the radios. More than once, I’ve reached up to change the channel and inadvertently bumped the throttle forward while balanced on my toes. It’s an accidental maneuver that can knock the first mate off balance.
With all these dials and instruments, it was surprising to learn that once the boat’s course was set with the autopilot, running the vessel down a waterway was hands-free for the most part. When we took up boating, I pictured myself standing at the helm station with hands locked at 10 and 2 on the ship’s wooden wheel steering wheel, (aka the helm). But that’s not necessary.
The helm controls the rudder. You can hand steer with the helm wheel, which controls Blue’s turn rate. For example, turning the wooden wheel one complete rotation to the right quickly spins Blue in a circle. I prefer to use the electronic steering control buttons. One push of a steering control button changes Blue’s course by one degree. I’m prone to using a series of single degree clicks, one degree at a time, if I want to change the course by a few degrees. If I pilot Blue around a bend in a river, I’ll hand steer or hold the appropriate port or starboard steering button down for a half-second to activate the 10-degree turn option.
If there’s traffic on the waterway, and I’m the designated boat pilot (aka acting captain), I prefer to stand barefoot in front of the helm station. With my shoes off, I can feel the water moving under the boat. If we’re fighting the current, my soles can detect the feel of the boat pushing against the water. If the wind shifts, my feet will react to maintain my balance. So, my toes are my early warning system.
As the acting captain, I spend most of my time at the helm seated, scanning the instrument panel, looking out the forward windows, and then grabbing the back of the bench seat to hold myself in place as I look out the rear window. My instrument scan starts with the Garmin displays. Half of the left Garmin’s screen is usually set to the radar function. Landforms show up as bright red while moving vessels are green. The top corner of the left Garmin is the waterway’s depth profile. At a glance, I can tell if the water is trending deeper or shallower. Below the depth profile is the waterway course. Blueappears as a boat icon following or deviating from the set course. The far right of the first Garmin is a series of data readouts, including the water depth below the keel in feet and boat speed in miles per hour. The right Garmin screen is dedicated to our course, although the far right of that screen also includes a series of data readouts leading with the water depth and the boat speed. I also take a quick peek at the engine control panel to confirm both the engine’s oil pressure and temperature are in the operating range.
Running the boat is hours filled with instrument scans, where I check and adjust Blue’s course and speed, monitor the water depth as if my life depended on it because it does, and scan the horizon in all directions for traffic and hazards. When it’s my turn to stand down, my eyes hurt, and my vision is a little blurry, but my working shift isn’t over. As first mate, I pick up my binoculars and start sweeping the horizon, looking for crab trap buoys. I call them out to my husband as if the bow was a clock pointed at noon. For example, “There’s a line of four white buoys starting at 2 o’clock. Four hundred yards and closing.”
I’m now comfortable running the Blue when the weather is calm. Joe is our designated captain. Next season, I hope to work on my docking, route planning, and marina selection skills. We’re cruising through retirement here along the Eastern seaboard and loving it, but I must admit, it’s a working type of fun.
