After losing my stern thruster, I rethink my locking procedure and come up with two good solutions.
If you think mechanical issues on the Great Loop are rare, think again. In the past month, I’ve had one buddy boat friend delayed by an issue that required the boat to be pulled out of the water and both of its engines moved to address a transmission issue. (They’ve been delayed more than two weeks and actually left the Loop for a while.) Another Looper friend with a similar issue had to have his boat pulled out of the water and the drive shafts moved for his repair. A big, luxurious 65′ yacht cruising with us had an electrical issue that prevented his heads (toilets) from flushing. Another boater I met in Sylvan Beach had a fresh water pump failure while another I’ve been in touch with here in Canada had an unspecified pump fail. Even the folks parked in front of me at this very moment had to make a repair to their hot water system while parked here. The diver who repaired my stern thruster last night had a story to tell about a Looper hitting a rock with his prop, bringing his trip to a standstill while he had the prop pulled and replaced.
Wear and tear is a real thing and there’s not much more wear than what you can put on a boat by driving it thousands of miles in a year. More than one Great Loop cruiser has found their trip cut short by a mechanical they just couldn’t get fixed. I consider myself lucky (so far; knock wood) that my three repairs this year — trim tab, propane line, and stern thruster — were relatively minor. But then again, mine is also one of the newest boats out there; I paid up front to have fewer mechanical issues.
If you read my previous post about the “hiccup” in my travels, you’ll know that my stern thruster quit working on Thursday, June 27, right in the middle of securing my boat in Lock 3 of the Trent-Severn Waterway. Because I couldn’t just stop where I was, snap my fingers, and make the repair happen, I kept moving, arranging for the parts and repair work to be done farther along in my travels. That meant going through 18 more locks without a stern thruster.
Now if you’ve watched my recent video about single-handing through locks, you might have picked up on the way I use my thrusters to keep my boat against the wall in the lock while securing the boat to a single point midship beside my helm window. I mostly used the stern thruster in short bursts to keep the rear end of the boat against the wall. That was no longer possible when I lost the stern thruster. I needed to come up with a better solution.
The better solution was to do what most Loopers — who are usually couples — do: secure the boat at two points to the wall. I had to come up with a way to do this by myself. While getting the boat close enough to the wall at my window was easy enough to fasten the front midship, the stern had a tendency to swing away from the wall, especially in windy conditions. This made for some ugly locking on more than one occasion. I had to come up with a technique that enabled me to quickly and efficiently get the stern in so I could secure it.
A week and 18 locks after my stern thruster failure, I can happily report that I’ve come up with two techniques to do this. I thought I’d share them with other single-engine boat Loopers who don’t have stern thrusters or any thrusters at all.
One note here: these techniques assume you’re fastening to cables or pipes that are secured top and bottom to the lock wall. You’ll find cables or pipes in some — but not all — of the Erie/Champlain/Oswego Canal system locks and all of the Trent-Severn Waterway Locks. If you have to secure to hanging lines, these techniques won’t really work for solo boaters. Since I haven’t had to secure to hanging lines without a stern thruster, I haven’t given any thought of how I’d do it. (Sorry.)
Step 1: Get the midship to the wall and tie off
The first task — getting the forward midship to the wall so I could fasten a line from my helm window — hasn’t changed. Whether you have thrusters or not, the goal is to move in close to the wall and stop beside the cable or pipe you want to secure to.
Here’s a MastCam view of my approach into Lock 18 on July 2. The Trent-Severn Waterway locks are narrow but the cables secured at the top and bottom of each lock are perfectly spaced for my boat.
With a bow thruster, getting close is easy enough; short burst on the thruster will bring you in. Just keep in mind that every time you hit that bow thruster button, the stern of the boat will go in the opposite direction. This is extremely important because “overuse” of the bow thruster could quickly bring your stern too far from the wall to reach the back cable.
Some folks I know who don’t have thrusters at all make more aggressive approaches to the wall with their bow and then steer hard away from it before hitting, thus swinging the boat alongside. With practice, this is an excellent solution and one I’ve been working on to reduce my dependence on thrusters.
Getting the boat to a stop is also tricky. As we all know, boats don’t have brakes. The only way to slow and stop a boat is to apply reverse thrust. If you have an inboard engine, you have no steering in reverse. And you also have something called prop walk which, depending on the direction your prop spins, could take the stern to port or starboard. On my boat, prop walk takes the stern to port, which is not good at all when I’m doing a starboard tie to a lock wall or dock.
Have your boathook handy if you can’t reach the cable from the helm. I’ve only had to use my boathook from my helm window once so far — remember, my bow thruster still works — but it’s a handy tool to help bring your boat closer to the wall if you need it. The trick there is getting the hook around the cable. If the connection point is a wide pipe instead of a cable, well, good luck. You might try positioning near a ladder, which is a lot easier to grab with a boat hook but cannot be used to tie off to.
Once you can reach the cable and get a cleated line around it, bring the line back to the boat and secure it to the same cleat. I find that this is easiest with a short line and have actually installed 6-foot fender lines on the cleats I use for locking. Be sure to leave at least one foot of slack between the boat and the cable — that’s two feet total. You need slack so the boat doesn’t get hung up on the cable as the boat rises with the water, especially at the top of the lock.
Step 2: Bring the stern in, if necessary, and secure it
Securing your boat in a lock is especially important when you’re one of several boats in a tightly packed lock chamber. Here’s Looper boat Happy Giraffe crammed into the Peterborough Lift Lock yesterday morning with two much smaller local boats.
Now you need to secure a line from the stern of the boat to another cable. I’ve found that the cables in the Trent-Severn Waterway are spaced almost perfectly for my 32 foot LOA Ranger Tug.
If the stern, by some miracle, is already against the wall, you should be able to reach out and put a cleated line around the cable and bring it back to the cleat. If you can’t quite reach it, use your boathook. This is also where that slack in the midship line will help, because if the cable is too far back or forward, the boat will shift when you pull it to the cable.
When I do port side ties — which I prefer not to do but which is sometimes required — this is actually pretty easy. Why? Well, when I used reverse thrust to slow down to a stop, prop walk may have brought the stern right into the wall. Perfect!
But in most cases, I have to bring the stern back to the wall. I’ve worked out two ways to do this without my stern thruster — if the boathook won’t reach of course:
- Use the bow thruster, in short bursts, to bring the bow away from the wall. This seems counter-intuitive because the goal is to stay against the wall. But as the bow thruster brings the bow away from the wall, it brings the stern to the wall. This works remarkably well. And because the bow is constricted by being tied at midship to the wall, the bow won’t go far.
- If you don’t have a bow thruster, the other option is to steer away from the wall with the steering wheel and apply a small amount of forward thrust. Now you’re driving the boat forward, away from the wall but the boat is tied at midship to the wall. The result is that the stern comes back to the wall.
When the cable at the stern is within reach of your boathook, grab it! Secure the line as you did for the midship line, leaving slack.
Step 3: Monitor the lines as the boat rises or falls
Just about everything you read or are told will advise you not to cleat the lines back to your boat. That’s fine if you have two people for locking. But it’s pretty much impossible if you have just one.
What I do is make sure that the lines are not firmly cleated back to the boat with a cleat hitch. Instead, they’re just wound crisscross over the cleat tightly enough that they won’t move under normal light tugging with boat movement. They won’t come loose, but they’ll also be really easy for me to uncleat in a hurry if I have to.
I then move back and forth in the boat to check the lines as the boat moves up or down. Are they getting hung up on something like damage to the cable? Fix it! Are they too loose or too tight? Adjust them! Do not leave them unattended. This becomes extremely important when rising up in the lock when the boat might rise quite a bit above where the cable connects to the top or the wall. This is one reason for that slack, but you might need more. Be prepared and act when necessary.
Step 4: Releasing the boat and heading out
When I’m ready to go, I release the stern tie first and then the midship tie. I use my boathook to push the stern away from the wall. Because my boat’s pivot point is quite a bit forward of my swim platform and dinghy davit, I can’t simply make a sharp turn away from the wall and leave. I must push the stern away from the wall to get it closer to the middle of the lock. I usually use my bow thruster to move the bow away from the wall, but I could also use the boat hook through the window if I needed to.
Practice Makes Perfect
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When I first found myself without a stern thruster, I was terrible at securing the boat in a lock. But the more I did it, the better I got. After the first five or so locks, I began fine-tuning the techniques I’ve written about here. I’m now pretty good — but not perfect — at locking without a stern thruster.
But at this point, maybe it doesn’t matter. My stern thruster was repaired yesterday at Lock 21, the famous Peterborough Lift Lock. I’ll be able to use it again from here on out.
Comments? Questions? Use the comment link or form for this post to share them with me and other readers. If you’ve been single handing your boat for a while, I bet you have all kinds of tricks to share. Don’t keep them a secret!
Very educational. Thank you.
You’re welcome!