Docking - Terror on the High Seas, Part 1

Docking a boat is exactly like parking a car, if….

1. Your car was 30 feet long
2. Your car didn’t have any brakes, and the only way to stop it was to give it gas in the opposite direction
3. When you spun the wheel, the back of the car moved in the opposite direction and the front followed
4. The turning point of the car was somewhere in the back seat

See they are exactly the same.

Oh to make it even more fun, when you stand at the wheel of the Guillemot, you cannot see the stern of the boat out the back of the wheelhouse, unless you walk out on the deck.
And you have to back the boat (blindly) into a slip that has at least 8 inches on each side.

We have been practicing docking for the last 2 weeks. I went out a couple of times with Cpt. Mark, the former owner of the Guillemot. I think, perhaps, he was a little concerned about handing his baby over to a novice like me, or perhaps he was having separation anxiety (he clearly loves the boat, probably more than the Nordic Tug he bought, but that’s another story). Anyway, after several sessions with Mark, I reached a point where, after numerous corrections and direction changes, I could get the boat close enough to the dock so that Nancy could jump off the boat and haul us into the slip. Well, most of the time; sometimes we had to abort and start over, since she seems unwilling to swim from the boat to the dock.

But it certainly is not a comfortable situation. Nancy has more experience than I with a single screw boat (she owned one in a former life); but all I can get out of her is that at some point she hit a dock, hard, in her boat. So she tends to visibly panic and hands me the wheel. I, on the other hand (and this probably has to do with that Y chromosome) will blunder on, safe in the belief that it will all work out in the end, and that I won’t crash the boat and all will be well.

I’m not sure if one approach is better than the other, but I do know that docking has been tense, and that we often go out and spend 2 hours doing docking approaches and nothing else, and by the end of it, both of us are soaked in sweat and have adrenals the size of grapefruits.

A long time ago in Maryland, Nancy hired a skipper who spent a day with her on her boat teaching her to dock. She felt much more confident after that. She found a trainer here in Seattle. After some grumbling on my part (“I don’t see why we need him. We can figure this out on our own, blah, blah, blah), I realized she was not going to be comfortable on the boat without help, and that training was a fantastic idea. Enter Capt. Bob.