After I bought my 50ft schooner Britannia in 2010 I decided to fit as many systems as I could afford to make handling the big 20-ton boat easier. I also converted all five sails to roller-furling and routed 12 control lines back to the centre cockpit to minimise the deck work.
I then fitted self-tailing winches and rope jammers on either side of the companionway to handle all the lines, which we call the rope decks. This, of course, meant an awful lot of manual winch winding, so after dismissing electric winches due to their horrendous cost, I began to think about how to make an electric winch-winder myself.
The early winch winders went under names like Winch-Master, Winch-buddy, and Modea. These were hard-wired devices that needed to be connected to a battery with a cable – a 4m cable in the case of the Modea – which restricted their use outside of a boat’s cockpit.
Drill power
I ‘invented’ my first electric winch-winder in 1977, using a simple right-angleand had to be changed several times. It was also not very powerful and I usually had to finish off the sheets by hand, by taking the drill out of the winch and winding a regular handle. This meant first cleating off the sheet because my winches were not self-tailing – many shortcomings indeed, but better than nothing.
