How to take a tow It has been said with justification that we learn more from our own mistakes than from any manual, and when it comes to towing, I’d agree. I’d pottered about boatyards towing odd vessels astern and alongside for years before I came face to face with the ugly truth about towing offshore. My rig was disabled, the boat had no serviceable engine and I was 60 miles from help down the coast in Rio de Janeiro, so I accepted a tow from an old pal. My saviour, a sometime Greek ship-owner, had a 60ft motor-sailer of huge power. On the day in question he wasn’t quite himself on account of a broken toe incurred during a misunderstanding with his somewhat feisty cook the previous night. The cook had subsequently gone ashore and left him singlehanded. He hooked me up with a long length of whatever we could muster, swallowed a handful of painkillers, and away we went. With the autopilot set for the Sugarloaf Mountain, he selected 9 knots and promptly passed out. As we surged through the big seas left behind by a cold front, the Samson posts on my classic wooden boat, standing in for the mooring cleats of a modern yacht, began taking their leave of the foredeck. The seams were gaping to letter-box proportions before I hit on the answer. I dropped a bowline over each one, led the line aft to the cockpit and winched it back until it groaned. It worked. The boat wasn’t ripped in half despite being pulled at 2 knots above her hull speed, my friend woke up just in time to steer us into the magnificent harbour, and I’d learned a critical lesson about towing. Sooner or later, from one end or the other, we all become involved in a tow. There’s more to it than just passing a line and securing it at each end. In open water, the job demands good seamanship. In harbour, what may seem daunting can be made safe and easy by adhering to one or two basic principles. There can be few organisations with more experience of towing yachtsmen than the RNLI, so we asked Yarmouth Lifeboat coxswain Howard Lester and his crew to show us how the professionals go about it. One big message that came across from the lifeboat was that every tow is different, from the way the line is attached, to whether a drogue is advisable or if a lifeboat crew member should be on board. Much like a man-overboard recovery, we can offer general recommendations but, in the end, we all must think like seamen and make decisions based on what is happening at the time. It might be a fisherman helping you off the mud, a clubmate towing you in on a calm evening when you’ve run out of fuel, or maybe you’ve got things badly wrong and the first craft on the scene to help you off a deadly lee shore is a … Continue reading How to take a tow