A lifelong pleasure-sailor’s parents were well into their senior years, and like the vast majority of people older than 50, they wanted to age in place. That’s the term for staying in the home you know for as long as possible, instead of feeling forced to sell it as changes to your body make it increasingly difficult to remain independent.
“With my parents, I would go around the house and take all the area rugs that they put on top of carpet,” he recalls. “I said, ‘What’s the biggest threat to your independent lifestyle? It’s a fall. We’re taking out this area rug.’ It’s a minor thing, but we fall-proofed the house, and we moved stuff around so that they could age where they were.”
According to Harken CEO Bill Goggins, accounts just like this inspired the leading manufacturer of sailboat, safety, and rescue hardware and tools to think about how people could also age in place on boats. It occurred to them that with a handful of equipment upgrades, older sailors could keep the boats they’ve always loved too.
“This is proactive. You can do things to ensure that you’re going to be able to keep the freedom that you have now,” he says. “You can keep that 46-footer a little longer.”
For starters, Goggins says, sailors can switch to electric winches. One way to do that is by removing and replacing manual winches, but another option is a refit of the manual winches on board. The company can electrify any Harken manual winch, even if the manufacture date was back in the 1990s.
“They’re designed so that all you really have to do is replace a center shaft and bolt the motor to the bottom of a winch,” Goggins says. “Now you have to have the space to do it, and you have to wire the whole system, but you don’t have to buy a whole new winch if you have a Harken manual.”
That equipment swap alone can make sailing a great deal easier. “It changes your life like nothing else.”
Another idea is to add a batten-car system. Bat cars solve the following problem, as Goggins explains: “If you have a traditional mast with a groove in the back of it and a boat rope on your sail, if you’re out in a breeze and you let the halyard go, somebody has to pull the main down because it gets pinched against the side of the groove. If the two of you are out there, one of you is going up to the mast. In the old ways—which is still probably 80-plus percent of the boats out there—if you’re reefing the main, the leech of the sail could go over the side. The luff of the sail could go over the side. With our bat-car system, when you lower the halyard, the sail stays next to the mast.”
The upshot of a bat-car system, he adds, is that “you can keep two people in the cockpit when you’re reefing.”
And while adding a bat-car system used to be a hassle, Harken’s new systems make it a DIY project while the mast remains up. “I have physically been on the dock while we have done a transition to this with the mast up and gone sailing that afternoon,” Goggins says.
Yet another idea is for sailors to add an integral backstay. This equipment eliminates exterior hoses that can catch on a dock line or a spinnaker sheet.
“This is something that can go wrong. If you’re trying to age in place on your boat, you want stuff that’s going to work,” Goggins says. “All of the hydraulic equipment is inside the anodized-aluminum tube. It’s prettier to look at, and it’s armored against getting bashed up.”
Goggins also says that Harken’s FlatWinder is worth considering. It electrifies the traveler, taking the place of two manual traveler winches.
“Now, this is not a DIY project, but it’s a silent electric traveler control,” he says. “It makes your traveler push-button. As you get older, you have trouble with mobility and strength. In some situations, you need winches, but, depending on your boat, you might not need it for the traveler.”
Last, he says, older boaters can consider a Harken Reflex Furling system, which is a top-down furler for cruising asymmetric spinnakers.
The scenario related to this product that older boaters often encounter goes like this, Goggins says: “Your kids go to college, so you lose your fleet-of-foot foredeck person. When you would love to put a spinnaker up, you have your partner and yourself, or you and a couple of friends are out there sailing, but you don’t put the spinnaker up. You end up motoring home.”
A Reflex Furling system can solve that problem. Conventional furlers are made for sails that have a lot of fabric at the foot but not at the top. Asymmetric sails are the opposite, so when the conventional furlers finish winding, there’s still a lot of leftover sail at the top.
“That’s what people don’t like about furling an asymmetric sail,” Goggins says. “Our top-down furlers start the top very quickly. They’re a really easy-to-use furler for a cruising spinnaker that really works and gives you a full-on furl.”
In other words, he adds, no more going without the spinnaker.
“The joy of it is that it’s really fun to go downwind. People love it,” he says. “Why would you want to go wing-on-wing or motor in 7 knots downwind? Put up the spinnaker and have a cocktail.”
Overall, he says, the idea is to commit to the choice of keeping the boat. Yes, adding equipment is an expense, but it’s a better cost to pay than giving up the boat you love.
“Who are we kidding? This is not an inexpensive sport. If you have a boat that is marginally too large for your physical capability or crew size, then affordability probably isn’t the issue,” he says.
“Ease of use and safety are the issues. You’ve already made the lifestyle decision that you want to age in place. Make it easier to age in place.”
