Thread: Backing
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Old 06-18-2016, 12:53 PM   #24
Blissboat
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City: Jacksonville Beach, FL
Join Date: May 2015
Posts: 1,252
Most power and sailing vessels that I have handled tend to fall-off at the bow when there's any wind. The bow being higher than the rest of the hull, it is exposed to greater force, with correspondingly less underwater mass to dig in. When there's more wind, the bow falls away faster. The most extreme example was a 65' aluminum two-decked sightseeing boat with V-drives, meaning every bit of machinery weight was all the way aft. The bow blew around like a kite if anyone so much as sneezed nearby. In any wind at all, the thing demanded constant vigilance.

As the others here have suggested, the wind and the current are your friends. If you let them, they'll often help you make your boat go where you want it to. Backing the stern close to your intended stopping place, you can attenuate the direction of movement, even with a single with no thruster, by slipping the shifter into forward, putting the rudder hard over in opposite direction that you want the stern to go, and goosing the throttle a few times - not enough to gather headway, just enough to kick the stern sideways. Then center the rudder while shifting back to reverse, and give it enough power to resume sternway for another short distance. Repeat as necessary.

I once had an engine failure on a twin-engined sportfisherman. Due to the dock configuration, it had to be backed into its slip. Naturally, this happened after dark at the end of a long day, and with a fresh breeze on the forward quarter. I did as above, beginning the maneuver slightly upwind of the slip, and treating it as if it was a single-engined boat with feeble running gear. It worked.

As others note, some single-engined power or sail boats can be steered in reverse. That requires gathering enough sternway to get water flowing across the rudder surface. When maneuvering in close quarters, that is rarely an option.
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