Fire hose looks the part and takes the wear
Issue 95 : Mar/Apr 2014
It would be about three hours before the morning tide would turn and take me on a fast-moving flood through Rich Passage on the way to Bremerton, Washington. I could leave now and buck the 3- or 4-knot current, read another few chapters of The Visible Man, or make the boat a little better. I opted for the latter.
A fire-fighting sailor friend had given me some surplus fire hose and recommended its use as anti-chafing gear. For years, I’d been using leftover plastic tubing, and it worked pretty well keeping lines from fraying as they ran through chocks and over the rail. But the tubing was stiff, bulky, and clumsy to use, especially with coiled lines. It also looked like leftover plastic. I wanted something a little more “yare.”
Every night when at anchor, I moor my wooden dinghy fore-and-aft and about amidships to the mother ship. The lines that hold the fenders between the dinghy and sailboat pass over the edge of the genoa track, where they chafe. So on this warm sunny morning, after pouring another cup of coffee, I got out the ditty bag, found the bottle of needles, waxed twine, and sailmaker’s palm, and set about making a pair of fire-hose anti-chafing sleeves.
I doubled the twine, threaded the needle and, with the help of the leather palm, pushed it through the Dacron line before sending it through the fire hose in a series of stitches that ringed the fabric. To make certain the hose stayed in place, I stitched both ends of each sleeve. That went quickly and worked so well I repeated the process on the mooring lines. By the time I’d finished, I could still get in a chapter or two before weighing anchor and heading for the pass.
Richard Smith, a contributing editor with Good Old Boat, is an architect. He specializes in designing and building very small houses and has built, restored, and maintained a wide variety of boats. He and his wife, Beth, sail their Ericson Cruising 31, Kuma, on the reaches of Puget Sound.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
