Both my 25 and my 38 get backed into their respective slips. I'm usually alone. The slip for the 38 sits down the prevailing wind and across the current in the creek. Here are a couple of tricks that have helped me over the years.
1) As Henny Youngman said about getting to Carnegie Hall, "Practice! Practice!" Pilots do touch and goes, and it's not a bad idea for us to do them in differing conditions and when there is not a lot of traffic (and witnesses) to worry about. 2) Both my slips are rigged with "walk lines". They are tightly stretched lines running from the outer piling to the end of the finger piers at waist or chest level to someone standing on the boat. Pieces of old sheets or halyards work better than nylon or poly line because they will not stretch when you pull on them. In nice conditions, you drive the boat into the slip and stop it. Then just reach out for the walk line and pull the boat over to the point where you can grab the dock lines and drop them onto a cleat. This works really well on my 38, which is in a slip originally set up for a catamaran that is 20 feet wide. In conditions where there is adverse wind or current, I need only stick any part of the boat into the mouth of the slip, grab a walk line, and walk the boat the rest of the way into the slip. When faced with really crappy winds, I've even come up with the boat laying across the two outermost pilings, grabbed a walk line, and pivoted the boat into the slip so I could walk it up to a proper position on the dock. 3) All 6 of the dock lines in each slip remain in the slip when the boat is away. They are set up with the eye on the boat end, and cleated on the dock so they are the right length to position the boat when coming into the slip and so they can be adjusted from the dock in the event of storms and high or low water. All my "permanent" dock lines are one or two sizes larger than the lines I have on the boat for use when traveling. My logic for this is that when traveling I am there and will be tending the lines. But when the boat is untended in the marina I want the strongest dock lines I can get. 4) I have 4 big fenders in a cockpit locker on each boat, but only use them when rafting up with another boat or tying to a face dock somewhere. There is a single fender tied horizontally in each slip at the point where contact is made when the boat is pulled over for loading/unloading. I don't want fenders hanging from the lifelines when I come into the slip because 1) the fender will likely just spin between the hull and the side of the dock, and out of the way, when you are close but not exactly where you should be coming into the slip, 2) if you get the hull too close to a piling you will likely tear the fender off the boat or bend a stanchion whne the fender gets trapped, and 3) it just looks ugly. Rick Brass Washington, NC
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