The Hard Truth About My Stiff Pole
The sad truth—I’ve been traumatized by my spinnaker poles. Part of the problem is, of course, that I’m too cheap. I sail around the world on the pocket change that Scotsmen throw away. That’s right, I squeeze my pennies so hard, Abe Lincoln cries. My wife Carolyn puts it another way: “I’ve learned to count my blessings because I sure can’t count our cash!” That’s true. I’d call myself a miser—if it didn’t sound so extravagant. Let’s put it in simple terms a frugal cruising sailor can understand: once I walked into a public bathroom, noticed the pay toilets, and threw up in the sink. Now that’s cheap!
I mean, I could BUY the correct size spinnaker pole for Wild Card—but what fun would that be?
I started out on my first circumnavigation with two HUGE poles. They were free but I had to (almost) hire a crane to life them aboard—which should have told me something. They were 17.5 feet long and four inches in diameter with a wall thickness, say, oh—about the same as Fort Knox. (On a 13,000 pound boat with a J measurement of 14 feet!)
They came off a 60+ South African racing boat. And you know what they say about those Africans… always swinging around oversized members.
Anyway, we dubbed the poles the Big Bamboo. I could pick up an end and fondle it—but only for a few seconds and if it was flat calm. So we had to keep the twin downwind poles attached to the mast—actually, you could barely see the rest of the rig hiding behind ‘em.
Needless to say, their combined weight made Wild Card a tad nose-heavy … so heavy, in fact, that we had to move our anchor chain to the transom… or our prop would just spin in the thin air … yeah, she was a “bit off her lines,” as my wife noted dryly.
But they were impressive, I’ll tell ya. Small, nervous Caucasian men were in awe of their girth, rigidity and all-around prowess.
Okay, okay … I’ll admit it: I like being macho. Example: I went into a computer store to buy a new drive for my computer. “Hard or floppy?” asked the salesmen. Now, what would any red-blooded American male say to such a question? I said, “Hard,” and, just so he’d know I was miffed at the question, “What do I look like… a heteroflexible?”
The point I’m attempting to make is that I would have kept my twin downwind Big Bamboos just to honor the much-maligned Caribbean Male—but the poles wanted to kill me.
I know that sounds harsh—but it is the truth.
Every time I’d get-it-up and have one pole flying, I’d have to eventually take my wary eyes off it to set the other one. The moment my back was turned, the former would attempt to bash me senseless. This isn’t difficult—I’m fairly close to senseless anyway—but it isn’t enjoyable either. But I hung in there almost half-way across the Pacific by explaining to my wife, “It’s no problem, dear! I have my safety harness on. So every time the pole knocks me unconscious, I land on deck! See—I’ve thought of everything!”
… but one day while attempting to use my twin downwind jibs in heavy weather off Moorea, I could not take it any more. Both poles somehow got away from me—and started raking the entire foredeck, smashing into the forestay, and twang-twanging my forward lowers.
I didn’t know what to do—the bow rail suddenly turned into a ball of bent, broken tubing. Our forward lifeline stanchions were bent down, up, down, up—and then sheared off completely.
I yelled aft to Carolyn (as captain, that’s a major part of my job description—yelling at my wife) something completely useless like, “Git the gun, honey!”
But suddenly there was a moment where one pole was stationary—and I boldly grabbed it, blew off the outboard clew end & detached it from the mast bell—and threw it overboard like a giant spear while yelling the old traditional Caribbean sailor’s saying of “… mothers-a-runt!”
Oh, that felt sweet, me son!
That still left me with one giant, far-too-heavy pole attempting to kill me—but, hey, I can handle that. And I did—for another five years and 30,000 ocean miles or so.
While in New Zealand I was lucky enough to find a small pole in Opua which was adequate for booming out the staysail—and traded some of my recent dumpster pickings for it. (I practically lived in the dumpster at IBY during my STT dazes.)
But I still needed the correct-sized pole in order to get rid of Mister Death, which is what I’d taken to calling my remaining huge-mongus one.
What to do? Stealing one from an unoccupied vessel seemed unartful. And every time Carolyn and I would leave a late-night boat party and ask someone to hand us down the spin pole after we got into our dinghy… well, some too-sober person would always say, “… I don’t remember you bringing that, Fatty … hey, what’s going on?”
I thought for sure that sabotage would work—but super-gluing the piston-pins in place, putting broken glass inside the tube, and coating ‘em with itchy fiberglass dust just didn’t do it. Sure, it made me a lot of enemies but, alas, it also got me no poles.
Everywhere I went I put notices up at the marinas, “Cap’n Fatty has Pole Envy” read one. Another said, “Flaccid Writer Desires Stout Pole for Adult Watersports.” Yes, they were clever, and no, they didn’t work.
Finally I sailed into Langkawi and anchored next to Solid Gold, a Peterson 44 which had been sitting on its mooring since … well, before the Flood and the tsunami. (We’d previously noticed her “hard aground on her coffee grounds” during our first circumnavigation.) In the cockpit was the same pie-eyed fellow drinking beer. I rowed over and asked if he wanted to trade a cold six-pack for his spin pole. When he asked, “… what kind of beer?” I knew I was in luck.
Now Wild Card has three spin poles—the old huge-mongus one, the New Zealand skinny one—and the new perfectly-sized “Magnificent Malaysian” one. Whew! This process only took … well, twenty years in total. And I barely spent a penny.
Even Carolyn sees the wisdom of my step-by-stupid-step frugal approach now. “I didn’t worry so much after I realized that the big poles kept hitting you in the head, Fatty,” she mused. (I’m never quite sure if she’s complimenting me or ...?)
In any event, that’s the story. We’re bristling with erect poles aboard Wild Card!
Editor’s note: right now the $3,000 Wild Card has cost Fatty about four cents an ocean mile. He reckons if he circumnavigates just twice more, he can get that down to a more reasonable two cents per mile. “I’m goal-oriented,” he says, “because, well, goals don’t cost money!”
Cap’n Fatty Goodlander lives aboard Wild Card with his wife Carolyn and cruises throughout the world. He is the author of “Chasing the Horizon” by American Paradise Publishing, “Seadogs, Clowns and Gypsies” and “The Collected Fat.” For more Fat-flashes, see fattygoodlander.com.
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