I put my oar in the sculling notch in the dinghy’s transom and held it like a rudder, with the blade vertical. From that starting position, it was easy to see which way to twist the blade so that it scooped water backwards like a propeller – but it meant that my wrists were doing the work, and I had to twist them a lot to obtain a shallow enough angle to get the dinghy moving from a standing start.

It was afternoon when I invented my sculling technique, so it was only a few hours before a friendly adult arrived after leaving his office, and showed me the proper way. Here it is.

While you’re learning, it’s easier to sit on a thwart, face aft, and use both hands – partly because you can see which way you’re twisting the oar.

• Lay the oar in the sculling notch with its blade horizontal.
• Hold it with both hands, elbows down and a little further apart than the width of your body.
• Set the backs of your hands outwards, in line with your forearms, so that you can easily bend your wrists both ways.
• Leave your wrists floppy. Since they are below the oar, each time you drive the oar from side to side the pushing arm will twist the blade the right way.

Try a few gentle strokes. It’s easier to start with the oar on one side or the other than in the middle.

• Oar handle to the right (port, since you’re facing aft), now push it to starboard with your right hand.
• Your right wrist swings under the oar, twisting the left-hand (starboard) side of the blade upwards. For now, just relax your left wrist and let it be led.
• Swing the oar handle right across to starboard, then reverse the movement by pushing to port with your left hand, keeping both wrists floppy.
• Your left wrist swings under the oar, twisting the right-hand (port) side of the blade upwards. For now, just relax your right wrist and let it be led.
• Repeat.

You’ll almost certainly go round in circles. Keep practising, adjusting the side force on each stroke to even out the swings. Every now and then, you’ll probably need to lift the oar out of the water to take an extra bite on one side or the other to straighten up.

Once you’ve developed a feel for making the boat go straight, you can increase the power by using the pulling hand as well – but let the pushing hand, hanging below the oar, control the angle.

With a bit more practice, you’ll be able to sit on one side of the boat and scull with one hand while you work your way around the trots or the marina pontoons or up narrow creeks. No smelly, buzzing outboard – and no frantic shipping of oars and rowlocks when you come alongside. Bliss.

Maybe. But first he had to be sure that his vessel was tough and seaworthy. He has done the Open 70 class a great favour. Because they are normally driven very hard in what would have been considered survival conditions not that many years ago, breakages of all kinds are common, and plenty of traditionalists have been unhappy with the way sailing was developing.

What Bekking did was decide that, for once, this was truly a problem of surviving, and changed the mode in which he sailed his boat. He cleared the decks of everything not related to the heavily-reefed rig he was flying. He centralised the stacking of sails inside the boat and put the keel vertical – the boat was equally stable on either tack. Then he directed his crew to sail carefully – something he was better able to judge, he says, after he hurt his back helping move sails and ended up confined to his bunk.

Congratulations, all the Leg 4 crews – there was a lot of damage done, some by wind and water and some by fairly solid underwter objects, but no-one had to be rescued.

The classic ‘foolproof’ way of getting off is to lay a kedge upwind and pull the boat off before motoring up to the kedge and recovering it – but try that in Cowes or the Hamble River. There is a solid line of boats moored to the trots about three boats’ lengths to windward, and a steady stream of boating traffic. You can’t get far enough off to lay a kedge, it would almost certainly foul something if you could, and there wouldn’t be a fifteen minute gap in the traffic to allow you to obstruct it with your kedge warp.

We need a different solution, and there is a clue in the Boat Handling & Seamanship section of the Jan 2009 issue of the UK cruising magazine Sailing Today, which deals with docking rather than getting off the dock.

Our goal is to get the boat aligned at an angle to the dock, so that applying power will move it out into the stream. First, let’s see what else can affect our options:

• A strong tidal stream with or against the direction the boat is facing.
• Other boats moored to the same pontoon close ahead or astern.

A strong tidal stream makes it easy. Just cast off the upstream line and let the tide pivot the boat about the downstream line, then cast off the other line and motor out into the stream (ahead or astern, depending on which end of the boat the stream pushes away from the pontoon).

If there is no tidal stream, or one which is too weak to push the boat out against the wind, we can try using the motor to pivot the boat about a mooring point. Ahead or astern? Think about it.

• Astern can only push along the centreline of the boat – you can only steer astern if you’re moving through the water.
• Ahead, you can use the rudder to deflect the prop stream even when the boat is stationary.

In theory, you could cast off the bow and motor hard astern against the stern line, but you would need a stern line attached to the transom, and the crushing force against the dock wouldn’t bear thinking about. In any case, there’s a much easier and safer way.

• Cast off the stern line and tighten the bow line until it is trying to swing the stern out
• Motor hard ahead with the helm over so that you push the stern away from the pontoon
• When the stern is a far is it will go from the pontoon (which will depend on the wind strength), go hard astern and cast off the bow line. You’ll need a good bow fender, because the bow will get pushed against the pontoon by the wind.

What if there’s a great fat motor cruiser ahead or behind you on the pontoon, with its heavily-flared bow pointing your way. Quite common on the outside berth.

If you can’t get your stern really well out before casting off your bow line, don’t risk it – ask the marina to get a workboat to tow you off. Otherwise you could get blown under the flared bow, scratching the gin-palace and damaging your rigging. Embarassing and expensive – and puts paid to your weekend cruise.

This is the first in a new category of posts on this blog, and I’ve deliberately kicked off with a hairy manoeuvre the basic sailing courses usually avoid. This post is based on real live experience.

First, let’s make it clear that the boat we are talking about was a racing sailing boat 34 feet long, whose auxiliary motor drove a folding propeller. Now let’s look at the potential causes of problems.

* * * *

• All single screw boats suffer ‘prop walk’ – going ahead, they turn tighter one way than the other, and going astern the stern is kicked to one side. Normally, you do your best to take advantage of this when planning an approach to a berth.
• When you switch from ‘ahead’ to ‘astern’, the boat takes some time to stop. The rudder has no effect unless the boat is actually going backwards through the water, and even then it has far less effect than when going ahead because it isn’t in the fast-moving slipstream of the prop.
• When switching from ahead to astern, folding props sometimes fold flat. When you go ahead, the natural screw action assists centrifugal force in opening both blades again smoothly, but occasionally only one blade will open when you go astern, causing severe vibration and possible damage to the bearing seal. The only option is to return to neutral and try again. Not a joke if you are heading for the end of the dock at the time, with a two knot tide helping you.
• Our berth was a small pontoon with a gangway from the mid-point to the shore. On the shore side, there were two berths upstream and two downstream of the gangway. We had an upstream one, next to the gangway.
• Shallow water began less than half a boat length in from the pontoon, so there was no room to approach the berth from the shore side and turn back out towards it.
• We were all racing, so sometimes the berth further from the gangway was already occupied by the time we arrived.

The classic approach to this problem is to face up-tide, get into line and slow right down until the tide walks you very slowly backwards into your berth – with or without the other boat in place, a crew member hops on to the pontoon and warps you in.

Because the shore was so close, this was risky. Also, on several days there was an erratic, gusty wind.

The technique we ended up using wasn’t very kind to the pontoon’s moorings, but it worked – just. We went in head first down tide and used a spring to help stop the boat (and once, when the prop didn’t open, as the only means of stopping).

A trusted and nimble crew member (sometimes me, but we took turns because it was so scary) took the stern line and a spring, tied to the mast and led through the jib fairlead block (slid up to its foremost position for the occasion). He stood outside the lifelines ahead of the shrouds, and jumped onto the pontoon as early as he could, slipped the spring round the most uptide mooring cleat he could reach and surged the line out, braking the boat’s movement as quickly as possible, then tied off the spring and pulled in the stern line.

We never quite hit the gangway, but the pontoon’s moorings probably needed re-laying that winter.

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