What with advances in technology, modern weather forecasts are at least 100 per cent accurate, if not more. And although dog walkers, keen gardeners, leisure sailors and anyone who goes outside may contest this, it is backed up irrefutably by the science, as I can prove. For example, when they say it’s going to rain it does, and to the very minute, as if commanded by some higher being; and when they say the wind will be northeast force three it will most certainly be, beyond any possible doubt. It is not the fault of meteorologists if dog walkers, gardeners and sailors happen to be in a different place from where the weather’s actually happening, or on a different day. In other words, it’s the weather that’s right and us who are wrong. 

The other problem with the weather is that there’s just too much of it, but thankfully now that the BBC has ditched its longwave transmission of the shipping forecast, there’s a little bit less. The resulting reduction of anxiety is worth the licence fee alone, and if only they’d also can the shipping forecast, particularly the one at 05:20, the whole nation would sleep more peacefully and be more on-side with the recent licence fee hike.

When I first started sailing there were only two weather sources I relied on. One was the three-hourly Channel 16 VHF announcements, which told you to go to another channel that was either silent, buzzing with interference or occupied by motor boaters asking each other where France is and what time the duty-free wine warehouse in Calais closed. 

Of course, these days there are myriad phone weather apps that allow you to choose weather suited to your liking and temperament. Though they’re all unerringly accurate, there is a spectrum of opinion among Maldon’s waterfront sages in the Queen’s Head as to which is the best; this is not dissimilar from the range of views on which greyhound-cross is the ideal lurcher for hunting, legal or otherwise. Those with a sunnier disposition tend to favour Wind Optimist, while those who spend more time in the pub swear by Wind Pessimist.  

It is, however, wooden boat sailors who are most keenly attuned to the weather. This is because before you go sailing you have to varnish your boat every spring, on a day without rain or sun in a temperature range between 11.7 and 12.3 degrees Centigrade and relative humidity of 40.3 to 41.2 per cent. This year that occurred between 2 and 3.15pm on the third Tuesday in April amid a frenzy of activity, as that’s a relatively narrow window to varnish and sand seven coats. Unfortunately, as some people were sanding while others were varnishing, a fight broke out. 

I avoided the fracas by varnishing the mahogany surround of the barometer attached to the bulkhead of my own wooden boat. Barometers, it should be explained, are operated first by tapping, followed by tutting, because whatever the needle does it’s bad news. If the needle falls that means rain and/or wind; a quick rise after low is a sure sign of stronger blow; and if the needle doesn’t move, it’s broken. Thus, a barometer not only measures pressure but creates it. Indeed, one of my heroes, Blondie Hasler, who came second in the 1960 solo trans-Atlantic race, eventually threw his barometer overboard because he realised there was nothing he could do to outrun the oncoming weather. 

When it comes to weather forecasts, and whether or not to go sailing, I rely on local oracle Adi, our boatyard manager, who not only tolerates berth holders, but is less keen on the ones who actually try to move their boats. Adi is in effect a one-man nautical care-in-the-community programme, whose range of advice services encompass everything from anti-fouling and anodes to unusual rashes of an intimate nature, or, as he terms it: “saving you lot from yourselves.” 

In my case he’s done it countless times, which I think may be something he regrets. Typically I’d ask him something like: “I’m thinking of going to Brightlingsea, what do you think?” He’d study the sky for a minute – possibly to avoid eye contact – and then say: “Go for it, Dave, you’ll be fine.” And to be fair, he’s never yet been wrong, as I haven’t died once, even though I’ve never encountered anything less than a Force 7 north-easterly. When I asked him if this was always the case, he replied: “No, Dave, it’s normally a 9 or 10 – I told you I was saving you from yourself.” That just made me appreciate all the more how lucky we are to have Adi’s kindly forecast guidance, knowledge and infinite wisdom. I did go out in a Force 3 once, but Adi was on holiday that week. 

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The post How to Read the Weather: Dave Selby’s Secret Sailing Forecast appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

No Need for a Running Aground Masterclass

Like everything else to do with sailing, running aground is a lot easier than the experts make out. Of course, the experts are the true experts at it, and do it frequently and on purpose, purely to demonstrate the myriad techniques for getting off again for magazine articles that illustrate both their depth of knowledge and our lack of it in what is a relatively shallow field of endeavour.

Most of these ‘expert’ and ‘masterclass’ type techniques involve throwing everything that’s in the boat into the water – or what’s left of the water – including anchors, life rafts, cushions, outboards, ceramic loos and loo doors, flat-screen TVs, mobile phones, people and wot not. As a rule of thumb, if you manage to create a scene reminiscent of the aftermath of a particularly muddy Glastonbury Festival, you’re on the right track.

In truth, jettisoning the mobile phones doesn’t help much, but I’ve never once come across an expert masterclass that actually tells you to take them out of your pocket before jumping. On the other hand most sea-survival experts strongly caution against jettisoning hair dryers, particularly if the hair dryer’s owner is on board. This is for the safety of any married man on board who hopes to remain married and single ones who hope to reach retirement, and perhaps even form a meaningful relationship along the way. However, under no circumstances should you kedge a hair dryer overboard while it’s still plugged in. The consequences would be truly shocking.

After outlining any given scenario, experts cheerily conclude “if you’re lucky that’ll do the trick,” then proceed to describe 23 other techniques that might also do the trick.

Then, once all hope is lost, experts advise crew to pass the time by swinging off the end of the boom or other bits of rigging to provide amusement for passing boats and put maximum distance between yourself and the skipper. And here there’s an important distinction often overlooked by experts. Whose boat is it? If the boat isn’t yours, and if the ground is firm, simply walk ashore and leave them to it. Prior to that, if your mobile phone still works, it’s good practice to first ask the skipper the lat and long, and then call a cab before walking ashore. If, however, the boat is yours, you’ll have different priorities, mainly to explain to the authorities that you are not aground, but have “careened” the vessel for: a) a mid-season scrub and anti-foul; b) to replace the impeller; c) inspect the anode, prop, stern-drive, lower rudder pintle, gaping hole in the bottom of the boat etc; or d) to save face. In the last case we’d advise bringing along sporting equipment such as cricket bats, stumps and balls, or croquet hoops, polo mallets and ponies to lend credence and plausibility.

Become an Expert at Running Aground

And so you see, it’s not as complex as the experts make out. And in fact I’m something of an expert myself, as boats with lifting keels, like mine, are even better at running aground than bilge keelers. I’ve been so far aground I once nearly made it to IKEA; on another occasion I got a parking ticket.

In fact it’s reassuring to know that any novice can acquire a secure grounding in this field of sailing completely free of charge and without buying costly charts or going to the expense of night classes. Indeed, there’s nothing like learning from experience as demonstrated by those Learning From Experience articles, the enduring popularity of which ably demonstrates that we do indeed never learn from experience. And I can prove it.

My chums Mark and Dave, who keep a 24ft bilge-keeler at Orwell Yacht Club, invited me sailing – just once, as it happens – and within an hour we noticed that we’d stopped going forward. That’s not unusual in a bilge keeler, but some time after that we noticed we weren’t even going sideways, which is quite unusual in a bilge keeler. I was at the helm, but that’s not strictly relevant because I assumed they’d let me know where to point. They assumed, unfairly I thought, that I’d been looking at the echo sounder, but I’d assumed, fairly, they’d tell me where to point, then Mark said they’d assumed, just as fairly, that I’d been looking at the echo sounder, and I said I’d assumed even more fairly they would have told me where to point.

Then abruptly, our learned discourse was stopped in its tracks by a dazzling display of nature. All around us an impressive plateau was emerging, the receding waters uncovering oysters the size of base-ball mitts which, as they snapped shut, squirted jets of water skyward. It was like the fountains of Versailles or the Taj Mahal. Then more nature, like sunset and stuff, happened and we returned to bickering and Mark said: “Anyway, I thought you’re supposed to be an expert cos you write for yotting mags.”

“I am,” I countered. “I’m doing research for an expert masterclass article.”

“You should leave that sort of thing to Tom Cunliffe,” Mark replied, adding “I think you’re out of your depth, mate.”

“No I’m not,” I retorted.

“Too right,” said Mark. “That’s the problem.”

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The post Masterclass for Running Aground: Dave Selby’s Expert Warning appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Tom Cunliffe’s Column on Bad Luck at Sea

It seems to me that two sorts of Jonah are still abroad in the watery world. The first lot are traditional, bringing ill fortune to whatever ship counts one on the crew list. The others don’t do much damage to the ship, but they don’t have a lot of luck themselves. In my time, I’ve shipped out with both.

Readers of a certain age will recall the Jonah character who first appeared in the hallowed pages of The Beano in 1958. So infamous around the seven seas was this hapless, buck-toothed mariner, that whenever he was first noticed on board, he was greeted with the catch-phrase, ‘Aggggh! It’s ‘im!’ by the mate or the bosun. Everyone understood that Jonah meant the Deep Six for them. And so, week after hilarious week, it proved to be.

Only one Jonah of this first category has ever crossed my rail. I’d known the lady – for such she was – fairly loosely for a while and was aware that things had inexplicably never gone well for her partner’s boats. A series of apparently unconnected incidents of bad luck at sea had decided him that his yacht was unlucky, so he sold her and bought a bigger one. Good man, you’ll be thinking, and so did I, but his fortunes didn’t change. He hadn’t had the new boat a month before he was anchored one sunny, breezy day in an open roadstead. He was sitting with the lady in the cockpit enjoying a nice cup of tea from his fine new galley when out of nowhere a large steel wave-cruncher arrived closehauled and teeboned him comprehensively at 6 knots. His yacht didn’t sink. Not quite, but the damage was so heavy that she was never the same again.

This, then, was the lady who pitched up by chance on a 35-ton gaff cutter in my charge while I was dried out on the tide. The boat was stable, lying in at just the desired angle, plenty of chain cable along the inboard side deck and the throat halyard led ashore to a big-ship mooring ring. So stable was she that, with work on the rig pending, I decided it would be safe to bring in the halyard and make a start on de-rigging the boat. As before, the lady was taking tea – this time with my wife – when the impossible happened. I’d stowed the halyard and was walking round to the shrouds away from the wall when the boat fell over. From below came crashing, screaming and the sound of breaking crockery. As for me, I hung onto the mast in total confusion. This could not have happened. But it had.

Still clinging on, I took stock. Unbelievably, things could have been worse. The women were clambering from the companionway, white as a pair of ghosts but unharmed and the boat had not gone right down and stove in her bilge. She was rigged with four seriously stout shorelines secured to some grand old cavils in the bulwarks. She’d fallen to, perhaps, 50 degrees before these had miraculously saved her from going any further. There, for a few minutes, the matter rested.

The next event was the inevitable arrival of rent-a-crowd who always seem to show up when events are not proceeding as you’d have liked. For once, I was glad of them. I made up a heaving line and tossed it across. One was sailor enough to grab it. I attached the lower throat halyard block and overhauled what felt like half a mile of slack. The man ashore got the message. He pulled the block across and hooked it back onto its ring. When I tossed him the fall, he knew what to do with it. This excellent fellow marshalled the dockside loafers into a team and took up the slack. At the cry of ‘Two-six, heave!’ they lay to with a will. The creaking was awful and for a few grunts I feared something would carry away or that morale ashore would collapse. But not a bit of it. Slowly, at the standard throat halyard velocity ratio of 5 : 1 rove to disadvantage, the boat came back up again.

We cleared away, made sure all was stable, then spliced the main brace. The loafers thought it was Christmas. They hadn’t had so much fun in years. As my wife poured the second round I looked for the other lady. She’d gone and taken her luck with her.

I’ve dried out a lot of boats and I stand here to tell you there was no reason for what happened on that day, but pondering on her man and his misfortunes, you have to start wondering, don’t you…

Bad Luck at Sea with a Spectacular Jonah

Once, I shipped out with a spectacular Jonah of the other less dangerous variety. His name was Hughie. He turned up from a crewing agency with his mate, Ron, to help me deliver a classic 50ft motor fishing vessel to the French Riviera. The first night out, one of the two engines blew up during his watch after he mistook the warning whistle for the kettle boiling. Hard luck, you might say, and at the time I did. We limped into Guernsey, had the diesel rebuilt, then pressed on.

Hughie’s next bad luck at sea came in Lisbon. In a moment of drink-induced enthusiasm, he fell off the sea defence wall at midnight. Away he went down-tide along the stonework and since neither of us fancied jumping in to save him, Ron legged it back to the ship for a line while he clung to a strand of seaweed. We hauled him out, rubbed him down and he swore to lay off the booze in future. But they all say that, don’t they?

On the final leg of the trip, we ran into a full-blown Mistral. We were taking big seas on the beam and an awkward breaker arrived half-way through Hughie’s afternoon watch. It threw us flat down into the trough, leaving Ron and me buried under a heap of debris down below. When the boat shook herself back up again, we went out to look for Hughie but the wheelhouse was empty. Hoping he’d wandered on deck for a smoke, we pushed open the door, but there was no sign of him out in the storm. Ron throttled back while I peered frantically across the grey wastes of the Gulf of Lyons. Suddenly, I heard a feeble voice calling my name. It seemed to come from the clouds and for a second I feared he was already an angel, until I glanced up and saw his round face silhouetted against the sky above the wheelhouse.

‘I’m up here, boys…’

Hughie had been washed clean overboard, fag and all, as the boat was knocked down. He’d spent a few seconds in the sea considering his mortality until, like his biblical forebear, the ocean spat him out. With the boat still on her side, a second sea had tossed him against the lid of the house. He’d grabbed the radar scanner for a free ride while she righted, and hung on, dazed, while we imagined he’d opted for early pay-off.

Ron set the autopilot to head slowly into the waves while we sorted Hughie out yet again. The change in motion was downright impressive. Gone were the violent lurches of a small craft in a dangerous beam sea. Instead, the MFV stayed on her feet, nodding as she soared up the steep faces of the breaking waves, breasted the peaks and nudged down their windward sides. We hoisted a reefed mizzen, sheeted it board flat to steady her and steered just far enough off the wind to fill it most of the time. The boat made virtually no headway but maintained enough steerage to keep her bow up to the crests, steering manually to dodge any breakers until conditions eased off.

Avoiding Jonahs & Bad Luck at Sea

A week later I was safe in St Jean with the hands paid off. I’ve often wondered what became of Hughie, but there was no doubt that, once he stepped ashore, the disasters backed right off.

The technique Ron and I stumbled across is well known by fishermen as ‘dodging’. In these days of reliable auxiliary power, it can work for smaller craft as well. Just make sure you’ve no Jonah aboard before you try it.

Tom’s Columns:

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Or listen to Tom’s Podcast here!

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The post Bad Luck at Sea: Tom Cunliffe Warns of Sailors with Misfortune appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Old-fashioned Sailing in a Sparkman & Stephens Yawl

My first long ocean voyage, a circumnavigation of the globe, had more in common with voyaging in the post-war years than it did with contemporary ocean sailing. My husband Seth and I made that voyage in the first years of the 21st century; therefore, if we had been much wealthier, we could have sailed in a style not greatly different from that which is common today. As it was, our experience would have felt familiar to such iconic voyagers as the Smeetons or the Pyes.

Our sloop was built in 1968, to a 1954 design. Specifically, she was an imitation of the famous Sparkman & Stephens yawl Finisterre (winner of three consecutive Bermuda Races), although she was a sloop rather than a yawl. Despite being 38 feet overall, and 27 feet on the waterline, she displaced 24,000 pounds. She had a relatively shallow-draught keel, with a centerboard that could be lowered for upwind performance. She was low to the water, had sweeping overhangs and a narrow stern, and a small cabin with a traditional layout. Her chart table was expansive and her bunks were narrow. Although her hull was constructed of solid fiberglass, she had a solid mahogany cabin, coamings, and toerail; her ports, stanchions, and most of her other fittings were bronze. Even her propeller shaft was bronze. Her engine was a Perkins 4.107 that leaked an embarrassing quantity of oil. The boat herself leaked, through the chainplates, coamings, winch bases, toerail, and many other places. We slowly but surely resolved all these leaks over the course of our circumnavigation, but they were there for a time, just as they had been for many sailors over the centuries.

Bit by bit, small upgrade by small upgrade, Seth and I did bring ourselves into the current century, or at least into the late 20th century. By the time we dropped the hook back in Maine, after four years of sailing around the world, we had solar panels, electric light, a Pactor modem for email over the single sideband radio, and even a minuscule refrigerator. But at the beginning, our only concession to modernity – or rather, the only piece of it we could afford – was a small black-and-white GPS. This showed us merely our latitude and longitude; the rest of our navigation we did on those large paper charts that today are pretty much relegated to wall decoration.

Our electrical capacity was limited to the very small battery bank we had, only 270 amp hours. We used this to power the little GPS, our VHF radio, and our navigation lights while underway. Those three little bulbs, however, drew enough amperes that we were concerned about the electrical draw on a long passage, especially on our Pacific crossing, a month at sea from Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands to the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia. So we went to the tremendous effort and expense of installing a small wind generator while we were in Panama. With this extra power, we were later able to install an electronic depth sounder (what luxury!) and then much later on, the tiny fridge, just big enough to keep any fish we caught from going bad before we could eat it.

A couple of years later, in Australia, we replaced the wind generator with solar panels, realizing that we disliked the necessity of anchoring in windy places, and also the fact that the blades had maimed at least one poor seabird. The increased reliability of our electricity, especially in sunny places like Queensland, led us to install electric cabin lights. Up until that point, however, we had lived as sailors for centuries had done, with an oil lamp to light the cabin after dark.

We had two fresh water tanks under the settee berths; for the first year we pumped our water at the galley sink with a hand pump; when we reached New Zealand, we upgraded to a foot pump. In ports where we could easily obtain fresh water, we would fill a “solar camping shower” bag with it, letting the black bag sit in the sun to heat the water and then washing ourselves with it up on deck. This was rather pleasant in deserted tropical anchorages, but was less enjoyable in colder locations, or in crowded harbors where we felt a bit exposed, even wearing our bathing suits. On passages we used our fresh water only for drinking and cooking; a shower at sea was a bucket of saltwater.

We rowed to and from the shore, aboard our eight-foot faux lapstrake solid fiberglass dinghy. We cooled our boat in warm places simply by opening the hatches; we warmed ourselves in cold places simply by layering on clothing or blankets. We always sailed. We used our oil-leaking engine only to maneuver into tight marinas or harbors; often we sailed right on and off our anchor, and we never motored at sea. We used less than 40 gallons of diesel fuel per year. If there was no wind – as there wasn’t for six days off Australia’s Northern Territory – we just drifted.

For the first year and a half of old-fashioned sailing, we obtained weather forecasts simply by looking at the sky and the barometer. Then, upon leaving New Zealand, we joined a single sideband radio net, on which a man back in New Zealand reported weather forecasts. Another year and a half after that, upon leaving for South Africa from the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, we finally upgraded to receiving GRIB files over SailMail, via a Pactor modem hooked up to our SSB. With the advent of our Pactor modem, we also finally had primitive, text-only email communication with the outside world. Before that, voice communication with other radio stations – other boats with SSB or VHF – had been our sole contact with the world beyond our little sloop. Indeed, on our Pacific crossing, we only had the VHF on which to communicate, meaning we could speak only to those vessels that came within 25 miles of our position. Over the course of that month-long passage, a month that just the two of us spent out of sight of land, we spoke with only one ship.

There is a certain element of difficulty in living in this way. There are times when you are very tired, or the wind is blowing strong, and you wish you had an outboard motor for the dinghy. Sometimes the dishes you washed in the light of the oil lamp turn out not to be all that clean in the light of day. Your hair itches after weeks of seawater bucket “showers.” Drifting out of sight of land, in a dead calm, in tropical heat, for a full week, taxes your mental stamina in way not familiar to most modern Westerners. Reading the sky and the barometer to estimate your own weather forecasts requires an attentiveness and observation power beyond what most of us are used to. Living without refrigeration restricts your diet in unpleasant ways. Sailing without modern aids like radar, AIS, chartplotters, and electronic autopilots makes for quite a bit more work and more vigilance. This is especially true in thick fog, even more so when that fog is hiding a busy roadstead like Cape Town, South Africa. Hauling a 60-pound anchor up by hand, especially in deep anchorages, when you have many feet of chain to haul up as well, requires serious strength. And making ocean passages aboard a low-freeboard, heavy displacement boat, especially in high winds and steep waves, makes for a very wet ride.

But it also provides a unique satisfaction. Like a lengthy mountain trek or climb, it shows you that you are capable of discomfort and effort beyond what you may have expected. Just as the author and pioneering aviator Beryl Markham found when she left home as a very young woman, it’s liberating and satisfying to discover that, “I never had less and I never needed more.” Combined with the marvelous experiences of offshore voyaging – the seabirds wheeling in the pink sky as the sun rises after a dark night of rain squalls; the flying fish shimmering over the waves; the delicious taste of a tuna you caught yourself; the feathery tops of palm trees at the end of a long passage; spinning yarns with fellow sailors; Sunday brunch with a local family on a remote island; the quiet stillness of a protected cove – sailing like this, in a style many people today would find primitive, provided Seth and myself with a unique joy.

Old-fashioned sailing: Connecting with the Natural World

I think that the true reason for this was that the simplicity of it necessarily connected us more fully with what we were doing, with the natural world through which we were moving. Creature comforts, as lovely as they are, in some ways form a barrier between us and our world. Finding a balance between the two is important: after all, Seth and I did not cross the Pacific on a raft, Kon-Tiki style. We had bunks with bedsheets, a gas burner on which to cook hot meals, and enough tins and dried food to last us for months. But we lived much closer to the elements than we would have done aboard a more modern, kitted-out yacht. It’s hard to feel removed from the ocean, and from the act of sailing across its vast expanse, when green water is coursing down the decks and drenching you on your watches in a gale. When we reached an island or a bay or a harbor, we would carefully nose around it before dropping the hook; hauling up the anchor by hand had given us a great appreciation of the depth of the water in which we anchored. Drifting in calms instilled deep gratitude for the gift of wind. The dim light of the oil lamp meant that our daily routines were much more in keeping with the rising and setting of the sun, and we appreciated full moon nights much more than we ever had before. Seawater showers and a poor diet offshore made the simple pleasures of bathing in fresh water and eating fresh fruit in port into supreme joys.

I think that slowing down our lives, reducing them and simplifying them, added enormously to the joy and wonder of our ocean sailing and the beauties of each new landfall. Perhaps the biggest contribution to this was our lack of communication with the outside world. Satellite communications back then – and I am only speaking about less than 20 years ago – were prohibitively expensive. Internet connection on a sailboat was unheard of, not even quite believable, a bizarre extravagance that megayachts were rumored to have. SSB radio with slow modems and text email service was as high-tech as it really got, and Seth and I didn’t even have that for the first three years. We communicated with those at home sporadically: via letters posted from a port with a post office; via emails sent from internet cafes; and sometimes via phone, in conversations curtailed by the expense of a long-distance connection from pay-phone booth. And so we lived much as people had for generations, socializing with the people in our immediate vicinity, making new friends when we went to new places. In short, we lived in each moment in the place in which we found ourselves. At sea, that meant with only each other, and the sea and sky and the wild creatures, for company. The simplicity of that, the slowness of it, the immediacy and intimacy of it, resets your mind in way, enables a degree of focus and calm that’s missing in the fast pace of the digital world.

And so, while Seth and I have upgraded now to slightly larger, cold-molded wooden sloop, with pressure water, an anchor windlass, and even radar, our floating home remains relatively simple. Thus, sailing remains the time and place in which we reconnect with the natural world, with the ocean we are sailing upon, with the wildlife we observe, with the people we meet, and with each other.

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The post Traditional Seamanship: Why Old-fashioned Sailing is Best appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

When Technology Dies

Oh the silence in the cockpit, when the bleeping ceased, as the battery died, and the instrument that once showed where I was, and how far I had to go and in what direction cut to black. I still had a compass, analogue speed, depth, or rather height, and a 150,000 chart. All now was quiet save for the rushing of the wind and a gentle creaking sound. The distracting dials and warning tone gone, a peace came over me. I realised that much of what we call essential was in fact dispensable. Could I not still find where I was, feel the strength of the wind and judge my drift or leeway with reference to land marks? Bring her safely home? Crucially, I was still in touch with the forces that dictated my progress. I could feel the rise and fall in the seat of my pants, and compensate with a slight correction of hand on stick, not tiller, for this was a glider, 9,000ft above the Moray countryside. And yet the same would be true for any yacht deprived of chartplotter and autopilot, her skipper forced to stream the Walker log and keep track of where they were by reference to an Admiralty chart, for altimeter read leadline and compass. 

In my years sailing yachts, and occasionally racing them, it was always a given that on stepping up to any strange wheel I would be warned that the wind instruments were not working, or showing apparent  angles that differed port to starboard, or that the autopilot was unreliable, and so on. Adding to the frustration any yacht owner feels when his gadgets go down is that manufacturers bring out new and ever-better bits of kit every year, it seems, with less thought about all the old bits of kit that now need new bits inside to keep them working. Could you get a NavMarine CourseMate 45 remote wind sensor, four years after it was replaced by the “new, totally upgraded CourseMate 60”? Could you heck, perhaps on eBay.

They do say that yachtsmen are fair game.  A stainless shackle for a an engineering project is £x, the same for a yacht is £x+50%. In fairness chandlers have a hard time keeping stock of the, er stock. Fellow comes in wants a 3/8 twist shackle, with captive pin. “Ah, now we’ve got a 3/8 but not twisted, sir.”  In fairness, the inability to replace a shackle on a yacht, to use a cliché, “is a First World problem”.

The Good Old Days

Lucky those who went sailing in the old days when the catalogue from Simpson Lawrence, the venerable, much missed purveyors of bronze and galvanised stuff in Glasgow, remained much the same year in year out. There was certainly a huge selection from complete fold down vanity units, with copper basin and spigot, to an assortment of anchor windlasses, porcelain and gunmetal loos, bronze hatch cover hinges, shackles etc, but all were common to pretty much every yacht in any harbour you might care to drop anchor in (no marinas then). Today you’ve a choice of hatches from twenty companies, all with their own hinges, seals and fittings.

Torn Towards Technology

Today the average yachtsman with an eye on the racing scene is torn between emulating the outrageous, French foiling mob, who flash around the world in weeks, monitoring screens, with powered winches to trim sails,  and without ever touching the tiller, as against the other lot, attempting to turn back the clock and circumnavigate with only the instruments Sir Robin would have used on his solo circumnavigation in 1968. Which way do you turn? Embrace technology for all its expensive, sometimes temperamental worth, fill your cockpit with screens and readouts, and let the autopilot do the steering, or KISS? Instinctively the owner of a classic yacht will tend towards the latter, (whilst not chucking the chartplotter out with the bathwater.)

As to seats of the pants sailing, which is essentially what happens when the screens go blank, blank or not, the best advice once given to the skipper of an America’s Cup helmsman was to keep his head out of the boat, and make only passing reference to the instruments. And it is the same advice given to pilots: keep your eyes outside the cockpit. Watch the instruments but stay in touch with the elements. Isn’t this what sailing is all about? An autopilot may be able to steer better than you, but is it having any fun?

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Call yourself Ishmael, if you really must go down to the sea again… it’s a common theme in literature; a romantic appeal that strikes us all from time to time, but is it realistic? Should we feel guilty if the last thing we crave is a long, wet, windy sea voyage rather than a flotilla holiday in Greece to restore the balance of life? Or better still, a deckchair under a parasol on a beach in Thailand, for that matter.

Of course not. A crash diet of Eric Newby, Shackleton or Alan Villiers and a dozen Mariner’s Library books and literature should be enough to cure many of those with salt in their veins of a misplaced longing for the North Atlantic or Southern Ocean, and yet the appetite for cold latitude adventure increases exponentially by the year. Arctic, North West Passage, Antarctic… icebergs, polar bears and penguins.

This I know, having returned in mid November from a delivery trip from Ullapool in the wintery far north to Tenerife in the balmy south, via the North Atlantic and Biscay at its grumpiest. I should have known better but the old Ishmael in me was whispering in my ear, a wild call that I could not deny, but perhaps should have (peer pressure and the promise of warm seas and sunny skies also had a lot to do with my decision at the last minute to ship aboard a 1915 Dutch ketch for an 1,800nm trip on the cusp of winter).

The motivation was as old as Ishmael’s, the itchy-footed narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick which, incidentally, I had enough off-watch time to read on the 14-day passage, along with Erskine Childer’s spy thriller Riddle of the Sands, an antidote to the whale oil, blubber and disaster. In both books the main characters were motivated by a desire to get away to sea; Ahab’s obsession with finding the white whale, however, contrasts with Ishmael’s simple desire to escape the surly bonds of land, while for civil servant Carruthers, the Riddle’s reluctant at first addition to Davies’ crew on the Dulcibella, it was a chance to flee the ennui of a stiflingly hot London during the height of the Edwardian “Season”.

Both must have wondered, as I did at times, whether trading boredom for adventure, in my case at the wheel of a magnificent old steel trawler, plugging very slowly into a series of gales, in leaky oilskins, had been a wise decision. Carruthers learned to cope, and Ishmael survived, thanks to Queequeg’s coffin, as did I, without recourse to coffin – albeit nursing a hernia from an abrupt change of diet and much straining on strange ropes. Alas poor Ahab whose obsession had no happy ending. And he didn’t even get the satisfaction of killing his bête blanc!

This is as much to say that anyone with a love of the sea can find adventure, without shame, suited to their taste closer to home. There is no need to spend two weeks in the North Atlantic to scratch an itch. Anyone can be cold, wet and miserable on a boat; it takes only an ability to endure the tedium of long watches, and the promise of good hot food and a warm bunk when the long trick is over. Does it build character? Possibly in the admirable youngsters who crew aboard these Tall Ships, and who know no better; not for those whose characters are formed, and who may well have faced greater hardships, but of a different calibre: bereavement, close encounters with death or debilitating illness, and already possess the stoicism needed to plug on regardless.

By all means tap into your inner Ishmael, when life becomes a chore, if your chums are all having fun and you’re stuck in the office, just take a moment to reflect. To adapt the old saying: be careful what you hanker for. Is it really a life on the ocean wave you crave? Or the end of a trapeze on a fast dinghy off a beach in the Caribbean, washed down by a rum punch, to the sound of a steel band and sparkling table talk? Have the sirens of the deep stuffed your head with fantasy, or is it all about the promise of penguins?

Illustration by Charlotte Watters

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There was a time when, possibly as a legacy of dinghy sailing and some youthful offshore racing, I would strap Sally’s long, heavy wooden boom down and attempt to get it as close to parallel with her waterline as I could, without ripping the toerail from its fastenings. It was a legacy of “Vang on!”, a call we used to hear all too often on those interminable triangles to nowhere which comprised RORC racing in the 1980s. On a flighty racing boat the vang is used, among other things, to control twist and keep the forces acting on the fin keel in balance.

Long-keeled Sally, or Sally II, is an altogether different creature, the second
of what later became the Vertue class, Jack Laurent Giles’s best known design. She is 25ft and a bit long, 78 years old, and last summer managed to clock 8.7 knots on the chartplotter she had for a 75th birthday present three years before.

Let no one tell you that old long-keeled yachts are slow, or don’t point worth a damn. Sally knows her limits, for sure; try and push her upwind closer than she wants, or her sails permit, and she sulks. Sally’s  sails – Simon Richardson on the Hamble knew his stuff after cutting his teeth, and sails, on 12-Ms in Newport Rhode Island in the old America’s Cup days – are cut to suit her hull’s ability upwind. That is, not too flat. Crucially, they’re powerful enough to drive her hull (just shy of 5 tons) at the angle it prefers to assume to the wind.

Simon once told me that it is largely the hull that defines how close to the wind a boat can sail, so there’s no point in cutting sails that do not match that angle. Get Sally in the groove – an easy matter, as she’s better at steering herself than the helmsman; just peg her tiller and put the kettle on – and she will set her perky nose to the horizon and go. But try and make her do what she was not designed to do, viz knife-edge to windward at 30 degrees off, and forget it.

Like most old boats of her era, she has this longish, heavy boom, prevented from taking out the backstay (or preventer as Giles called it) in a Chinese gybe by the addition of a boomkin, a jaunty little appendage that can be forgotten when paying harbour dues, but which adds character (and carries the backstay well out of reach of any sky-ing boom).

Thank goodness then for a boomkin, for Sally does not have a kicking strap. But I soon realised that for a quite separate reason its lack was a positive advantage, although occasionally I would bowse the boom down on a broad reach to the rail with a handy billy, if it wasn’t too windy.

And that is the key. The heavy boom alone is enough to keep the mainsail drawing, but if the breeze pipes up the absence of a kicker allows the boom to rise and fall naturally, spilling wind from the top of the sail, while still allowing it to fill the lower portion. It serves as a natural depowering process, while reducing the strain on the rig.

And that is exactly the scenario that we faced as we charged past Rhubh Reidh lighthouse on a broad reach, after a weekend jaunt to Gairloch last September. Vicious bursts of heavy air fell from the clifftop. With far too much sail up (that is, a full main and staysail), and little inclination to reef, we simply let the natural rise and fall of the boom regulate our sail area. The top of the sail was aligned almost dead into the wind, pressed flat against the top spreaders, but the lower half meanwhile was pulling like a train.

Truth be told, when we did get around to rolling up a good portion of the mainsail, the speed remained in the high 7s, and occasionally low 8s, apart from that tremendous burst which had the GPS peaking at 8.7 knots, unheard of in all the time I have owned Sally.

When I ran all this past a vastly experienced old friend, John Simpson, former skipper of Jolie Brise, he told me that his old Dutch boat Blauwe behaved in exactly the same way with her mainsail. However he pointed out that sails on older boats don’t want to be sheeted in too flat, particularly in light to moderate winds. “If they are cut full; let em’ work full to develop the power necessary to drive older heavier boats.”

Being a cautious kind of sailor, he was glad that we reefed and just let the mainsail spill for only a shortish amount of time. A mainsail flat against the spreaders might have caused chafe on a long passage.

If the gust that drove us to that heady speed had encountered a full mainsail, kickered down to the rail, I suspect something would have given. Instead, the boom rose, the sail flattened against the spreaders, the gust spilled and the power in the lower half was quite enough to have Sally break a record that will probably stand until we next storm down to Gairloch. As my friend Craig Nutter once told me (he owns the Harrison Butler, Sabrina, a Round the Island Race winner): “Adrian, you must let twist be your friend.”

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Dorade rocked the world last year. We are currently waiting to see if she can do the same in this year’s Newport/Bermuda race that started three days ago…

She is not exactly an easy boat to sail. 
Certain wave angles will push her around dramatically, regardless of wind speed or direction. With up to five sails up, there’s a 
lot going on. Apparent wind speeds increase linearly with true wind speed, and so on.  Doing things right and proper is not so much “important”, but vital for her and her crew’s very survival. The ocean is unforgiving and there are damn good reasons for those traditions,” says Eric Chowanski, crewmember aboard Dorade, in a letter to the crew after winning the 2013 Transpac race.

Bowman and rigger Eric “Chewy” Chowanski is somewhat of a legend on the West Coast sailing scene. He’s seen everything the Pacific can throw at a boat and crew. He is known to climb out onto the “spear”, or bowsprit, of the most modern of carbon-fibre ocean racers, in the middle of the night, while thrashing along at 20 knots, 
to rig up the spinnaker gear. In that light, his observations of Olin Stephens’ near-masterpiece yawl, which made history winning all the great ocean races of her day, are all the more shocking.

What Chowanski and the rest of the Dorade crew discovered after nearly 10,000 miles of sailing in 2013 was that her worst quality – death rolling from rail to rail when sailing deep off the wind – allowed her to once again slay the giants of the ocean-racing world, 77 years after her first Transpac victory.

With a visionary owner and a driven batch of professional sailors, Dorade closed the door on her competition while exiting the Molokai Channel last July and won the overall title and the King Kalakaua Trophy in the biannual Transpac. Why owner Matt Brooks of the San Francisco Yacht Club decided to start racing Dorade in the ocean again after all these decades has already been explained in the pages of this magazine (CB304). How Brooks and his team were able to unleash one of the world’s most significant racing yachts, and win again, is described here.

Matt Wachowicz, a former America’s Cup navigator and Dorade’s navigator for the 2013 and 2014 seasons, led the team’s performance analysis programme with the specific aim to prepare for, and attempt to win, the 2013 Transpac. He is a top specialist in analysing a boat’s strengths and weaknesses, and combining technical boat preparation and weather routing to drive a boat to success on the ocean. When he was asked in late 2012 to join the boat, he was cynical, as many have been, to the idea of racing an ancient artifact across oceans.

“But it’s such a unique opportunity, it makes you pause,” says Wachowicz, who selected a fully professional crew that included global short-handed sailor Hannah Jenner, sailmaker Kevin Miller and top trimmer John Hayes. Even the captain, Welshman Ben Galloway, had led a team around the world in the BT Global Challenge.

Many people thought Wachowicz’s decision to sail 
a classic in the ocean was not only “stupid and impossible”, but that it would taint his professional career. “We had to be professional and we were. But more than anything else, wouldn’t you want to be a part of this special thing if it actually happens?”

Wachowicz says he selected his team because, though they were all well respected, they were just crazy enough to “believe” in Dorade. What followed last winter was a meticulous, no-stone-left-unturned approach from rating analysis, sail design and materials testing, and offshore training that included two West Coast ocean races.

To optimise the boat, a new way of thinking was needed. “The performance direction of Dorade is the opposite of what we do today,” says Wachowicz. 
“We were going down roads we would never go down.”

Three-quarters of the Transpac is downwind, not reaching, but mainly dead downwind. The downwind performance curves for the modern 70-footers (21.3m) Dorade was competing against for overall victory call for higher angles and flatter, asymmetrical spinnakers. These “sleds”, including Roy Disney’s second-placed 70-footer Pyewacket, reach closer to the wind, heel over almost to their rails to optimise their waterline length, and generate tremendous speeds tapping into the 30-knot range.

Dorade’s best performance, according to Wachowicz, is “super deep”. The crew decided to sail Dorade as low, or close to dead downwind, as they dare. “We would just attempt to control the helm, though most of the time it was out of control,” says Wachowicz. “But we had incredible results. Our learning curve was learning how to steer. It was unorthodox to us but not 70 years ago.”

The “low mode” that Dorade had in her DNA let the team cut the corners of this traditional race course. Wachowicz says that race veterans can dictate exactly how anyone should sail this course, which is dominated by consistent weather features between Los Angeles and Hawaii. This opened up a few interesting tactical plans. “The boat is so slow,” says Wachowicz, “but sailing 25 degrees lower than the fleet allowed us to reconsider a course to the finish that no one else could.”

Wachowicz’s data was put into Kevin Miller’s North Sails’ computers. The result was a selection of asymmetric and symmetric spinnakers, and staysails all of modern, laminate materials. Though Dorade’s downwind profile looked amazingly similar to images of her sailing past Oahu’s Diamond Head in 1936, the striking difference was her new mizzen sail. The handkerchief-sized sail that went only two-thirds up the mizzen, allowed the boat to keep her yawl rating and ability to fly staysails, but the reduced area allowed clean wind to reach the staysails.

The boat was in constant development just as she was under the Stephens’ stewardship. “We’re looking at every piece of equipment,” says Brooks. “Can we make a wooden block that looks classic, but is as strong and safe as a composite block? It turns out, through much trial and error, that the answer is yes.” This process led to the fabrication of a more robust bronze gooseneck after the original one cracked on a delivery trip down the coast.
“You have to win your day and hope your day wins the race,” says Stan Honey, Jules Verne Trophy-winning navigator, offering advice to Dorade.

The format of the 2013 Transpac had the slower boats starting almost a week before the larger boats. 
The positioning of a high-pressure system that week allowed Dorade and her fleet their first opening for the overall trophy, starting in more wind compared with 
the lighter wind the larger boats faced.

More than halfway through the race, Brooks’ dream of winning the 2013 Transpac started to materialise. “We realised the winner of the race could come from our group,” said Wachowicz. “We had to be clever tactically. We had to maintain our position in our class but had to race the 70-footers to the south. There’s always hope that something really special is going to happen, and that came three days from Hawaii.”

Dorade raced across the Pacific in a professional manner, the crew adjusting sails constantly and pushing her hard. Only the occasional glass of wine and the daily commitment to taking celestial navigation sights drew thoughts of her past.

The thought of an overall win was left to the gods for the first nine days of the race but when winning came into focus, sleep was not an option. In the last 36 hours, Dorade went for a shift, separating from her class. The team clung to a 15-minute lead in class and if the shift didn’t come, they would lose the top group.

“We saw a hint of the shift and decided to gybe,” says Wachowicz. As the sun rose that final morning and the position reports came up on the computer, Dorade had added seven miles to their lead and not only locked in their class win, but a miraculous overall victory.

“I can’t describe to you that moment, at 9am,” says Wachowicz. “We pulled off that gybe in perfect fashion. I still get emotional thinking about it.”

What now is labelled as “Matt’s Crazy Idea”, Brooks’ ambition to race Dorade in all the great ocean races of her day is much more than an idea – it’s a movement. After one Bermuda Race and a Transpac, the boat is now on the US East Coast preparing for the 2014 Bermuda Race. The Rolex Middle Sea Race in Europe is next and, hopefully, the 2015 Fastnet and a transatlantic race.

Wachowicz says the team is not resting on their laurels and continues to develop sails and sailing techniques. “Historically the Bermuda Race is reaching, not our strength,” says Wachowicz. “One grand caveat is the Gulf Stream and that can compensate.”

The clear decision-making in the Transpac highlights the team’s strengths in navigation. Brooks has high hopes for his second race down to Bermuda’s Onion Patch. “Rod and Olin did the Bermuda Race twice, in part because they weren’t satisfied with their performance the first time,” says Brooks, “and the same is true for us.  The last Bermuda Race was our first ocean race on Dorade after the refit, and while the boat and crew did extremely well, all of the modern electronics failed. We want a chance to show what the boat can do with everything in proper working order.”

Dorade’s legendary Transpac win last year not only led the New York Times sports page, but was the most viewed sports story on its website for two days. The same headline was inked 77 years before in papers across the country. Though the future for Dorade is bright, the passion for ocean racing aboard a boat with so much history is possibly the greatest take away from “Matt’s Crazy Idea”.

In Chewonski’s heartfelt letter of gratitude to Matt Brooks and Dorade’s crew, he sums up the value of such an experience: “Without crazy visionary projects, nothing in this world would amount to much. At some level, this is the most fundamental aspect or facet of Dorade and what she can teach us, which is that a crazy, visionary project combined with the hard work to see it through, and a little luck, can change history.”

Dorade’s future race dates include the 49th Bermuda Race (20 June), 36th Voiles de Saint-Tropez (27 September) and 45th Rolex Fastnet (16 August, 2015).

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Its famous bar is probably the thing that does the most to determine the Deben’s character. These notorious shifting sands at the river’s entrance are not actually that fearsome – they change position each winter, and sometimes more often, but they are well buoyed – it’s just that its reputation tends to frighten off more timorous and less experienced boaters. This, as well as the complications of timing your departure from, and arrival at, Woodbridge, has ensured that, of all the Suffolk rivers, the Deben is less well-visited than its charms merit, and, somehow, has become the haven of choice for traditional wooden boats.

Moreover, the aforementioned bar discourages large commercial traffic, ensuring a restful cruise up the nine-mile navigable length to Woodbridge. Standard advice on crossing the bar is to do so on a rising tide, from half-flood up to High Water, and to leave on the flood, or, even if you’ve experience of these waters, very soon after. The ebb, which can rush out at up to 6 knots needs to be taken into consideration. The bar, at least this year, forces you over to the west bank, but once inside, and having made sure to keep clear of a wicked little mid-river spit, just before you reach the second Martello tower, you’ll need to edge over to the eastern, Bawdsey, side to avoid the Horse Sand Shoals in the middle of the river. Best to pre-arm yourself with an up-to-date chartlet from harbourmaster John White.

Once safely inside, it’s worth picking up a mooring and going ashore. Felixstowe Ferry on the west side is a pleasantly clapboard-shack and fishing boat sort of place, where you can buy fresh fish off a stall, and walk out to the two Martello towers. There’s a pub, The Ferry Boat Inn (the other pub, the Victoria, has closed down), and the Ferry Café, a classy greasy spoon with homemade cakes, whose breakfasts are so superlative that Nancy Blackett’s crews have been known to drive out from Woodbridge in order to partake of them, on the pretext of inspecting the bar.

The other side has the Boathouse Café, overlooking the river and more of a tea and scones sort of place. It also has the resplendent Bawdsey Manor, a Victorian gingerbread Gothic pile with oriental turrets and other embellishments, just waiting to be chosen as a location for an Agatha Christie adaptation. It was built in 1886 by Sir Cuthbert Quilter, MP and telephony entrepreneur, who also established a steam-powered chain ferry across to Felixstowe Ferry. Opened in 1894, it ran until 1931. The Manor was taken over by the RAF in 1936 for the secret development of radar. Its array of prominent transmitter and receiver towers became a local landmark and the Transmitter Block is now a museum.

Immediately above Felixstowe Ferry there is a short stretch of unrestricted speed, for the benefit of water-skiers. Then an 8-knot speed limit kicks in to ensure the relative tranquillity up to the head of navigation. The land on either side of the river here is generally rather flat – marshes in some parts – and mainly undeveloped, thanks to 19th-century landowners who kept the area clear for wildfowling – even to the extent of pulling down Ramsholt village. As a result, it’s great bird-spotting terrain, particularly for overwintering avocets.

Nowadays, Ramsholt is known as a mooring, with a length of quay providing landing and shelter for row-ashore dinghies, an attractive grassy strand and an isolated riverside pub, the Ramsholt Arms. This has one of the best locations of any pub in Britain – sunsets a speciality – but has struggled to maintain viability in recent years, and in fact closed down briefly earlier this year. Good news is that it’s open again, under new management but, shock horror, has lost its Suffolk pink-wash exterior in favour of a genteel cream render. Tasteful enough, but indicative of its gastro-ised ambience. Approach via low-tide mud in seaboots is unlikely to be welcomed, so visiting yachtsmen may need to come ashore armed with spare shoes and plastic bags, or resign themselves to eating in their socks.

Above Ramsholt, the character of the riverbanks changes, with the addition of low, wooded cliffs. The Rocks – aptly named, for those not removed to build Orford Castle litter the river’s bed – provides a pleasant landing spot with a sandy beach.

Then, on the west side, is Waldringfield. There used to be a thriving cement industry here, with barges coming and going, but perhaps mercifully there’s little evidence of it now. Instead, there’s a popular inn, the Maybush, and a small boatyard, which also offers river trips and, as of this season, incorporates a gallery and shop run by local artist (and CB contributor) Claudia Myatt.

Still on the west side, and shortly before the river reaches Woodbridge, lies Martlesham Creek, accessible about an hour either side of High Water, and with its own secluded boatyard, which has pontoons and swinging moorings. Five minutes’ walk through the woods and up the lane brings you to the Red Lion pub. The fierce figurehead of a red lion on the wall comes from the Dutch ship Stavoren, captured – so I’ve been told – in the Anglo-Dutch battle of Sole Bay, 1672.

And so to Woodbridge, a rewarding finale to this upriver passage, despite its tendency to be fringed by mud rather than water for a large half of each tide. Several of Classic Boat’s friends and contributors live there, including Richard Hare, Andrew Craig-Bennett, and Moray MacPhail of Classic Marine.

But you will need to time your arrival with some care. The river pretty well dries here at Low Water, and entry into the Tidemill Yacht Harbour is feasible for less than a couple of hours either side of High Water. The marina is protected by a sill at its entrance and the depth over the sill is shown there on a tide gauge.

You’ll notice at once that this is not your normal marina, being a horseshoe of water and pontoons, surrounded by grassy banks. In fact, it was converted from the old tide mill pool by Whisstocks, then the town’s chief boatbuilder, in the 1960s. The tide mill itself, an iconic Woodbridge sight, still stands at the head of the marina. Built in 1796 (though previous mills date back to 1170) it was still working commercially in the 1950s. Now a living museum, it provides daily demonstrations according to tide times.

A walk from the tide mill along the river wall will take you past the now-abandoned Whisstocks sheds (they come to life every other year for the Woodbridge Maritime Festival), the Ferry Dock and Bass’s Dock, both full of intriguing liveaboard boats, including a number of Dutch barges. Then there’s the black-timbered home of the Woodbridge Cruising Club, a particularly lively organisation and as much a social centre for the community as it is a sailing club. And no visit to Woodbridge would be complete without a diversion to see the array of boats for sale at Andy Seedhouse’s yard.

Walk the other way, upstream – fi nd a footpath between the tide mill and the railway line – and you’ll reach Robertsons boatyard, with its lagoon full of more liveaboard barges, and then on, past the odd mooring as the river becomes more rural and tranquil until, within a mile, you’ll happen on the Granary Yacht Haven, known to all as Mel Skeet’s, a rambling collection of pontoons and temporary tarpaulin boatsheds where restoration and rebuilds are under way. Here, for example, John Krejsa is slowly restoring the Albert Strange yawl Mist – just one of the several Albert Strange boats in the area. Further upriver, Larkman’s Boatyard has a large winter lay-up area, and is a useful source of chandlery supplies.

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Each year, I join up with a group of guys from the Portsmouth-based training school Team Sailing, and attend an instructors’ event where we look at what we do, criticise each other and try out new ideas.

This time, we were going to look at a specific set of actions related to a scenario we all hope and pray will never happen – a man overboard recovery.

Everyone agreed that in order for the crew to consider an effective recovery, they should split the procedure into two distinct phases: ‘Return to the Casualty’ and ‘Recovery Aboard’.

So, to put this to the test, two boats, Emma and Maggie, headed out from Portsmouth Harbour on a cold March day to see if we could write a script for a simple, easy-to-teach manoeuvre that could be achieved by the widest range of crews and skills levels.

First we did a little exercise just for fun and to confirm we could all still do it ourselves. A stopwatch started as the dummy hit the water and, from a sailing start with compulsory tack-gybe-tack manoeuvres, the boat had to be sailed back alongside the casualty close enough for the helmsman to leave the wheel and recover the dummy. Thankfully, almost everyone did it in less than three minutes.

Of course, the first rule for any sailor on any boat is: don’t fall in! The next one is stick to the RYA policy of wearing your lifejacket unless the skipper says it is safe to take it off, then if you do fall in you’ll be afloat for long enough to stand a chance of being rescued.

Returning to the casualty 

If it happens, stop the boat and shout “man overboard!” The quickest way to stop a sailing boat is to point her at the wind. Some argued for ‘Quickstop’ where the boat is tacked, the foresail left aback and the helm put down to adopt a ‘hove-to’ position. Both methods achieve the aim of stopping, at least for a short while, close to the casualty. With the boat somewhere near head-to-wind and more or less stopped, sheet the mainsail in, hard. Then go back and pick up the casualty.

In its Offshore Special Regulations, the International Sailing Federation (ISAF) suggests that the quickest way to get back is to tack, leave the foresail backed, sail past the casualty, get rid of the foresail, gybe and sail back to him under mainsail, using the engine for fine-tuning the approach if required. We tried it and it does work, but it takes a well-organised and experienced crew to judge the courses involved, stow the foresail, gybe and steer back on a good wind angle. It’s not easy for a short-handed crew and, with relatively inexperienced crew members in mind, none of our instructors wanted to recommend a practice that involved a gybe.

Then we have something called ‘Reach-Tack-Reach’. Many dinghy sailors and some offshore skippers practice this; on a dinghy it all happens very quickly and the boat stays close to the casualty. On an offshore yacht it takes a little longer: when someone falls in, the boat is immediately turned onto the nearest beam reach; the compass course is noted and a count started. The cry of “man overboard” should have alerted the crew and once things have ‘settled’ the boat is tacked onto a reciprocal course and the count restarted. When the recount reaches the same number the casualty should be pretty close. It works if everything goes to plan. I tried it once on a 56ft (17.1m) yacht making six knots to windward: over went the bucket and fender and up went the “man overboard” cry; I asked one of the crew to start counting, guided the helmsman onto the beam reach and told him to note the course.

“Ready about!” I shouted and the helmsman followed through. We settled on the new tack and I glanced down at the compass and then at the helmsman: “What course were you steering?” “Er… I can’t remember,” he said. “What number did you get to?” I asked the counter. “I’m really sorry, I’ve forgotten,” came an apologetic response. We lost the fender and bucket but it was a good lesson – for me too.

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