Practice these ideas for safer sailing
Issue 64 : Jan/Feb 2009
Having options may prevent a minor mishap from becoming a serious accident. Based on his 20-plus years of experience, Lieutenant Commander John A. MacDonald, U.S. Coast Guard (Ret.), notes that, “Most accidents occur because the boater has no backup position. They run out of fuel, but they can’t sail the boat in the current conditions. Someone tries to reef and ends up overboard, but they have no crew-overboard equipment or training. Most serious accidents result from a cascade of causes that could be arrested with one good backup.”
That backup can come in many forms, from a decision to seek shelter based on a forecast for bad weather, to a way to stop the boat quickly to fix a broken block. Over the course of a 10-year circumnavigation aboard our 47-foot aluminum sloop, Hawk, we have spent almost all of our time sailing in unfamiliar waters in unpredictable weather, with large tides and strong currents, beyond the reach of rescue services. Almost everything we do to keep ourselves and our boat safe is defensive, designed to prevent that “cascade of causes” from starting.
Defensive sailing consists of three things: building skills, acting preventively, and thinking ahead. Integrating these three elements into your sailing will increase your safety and your crew’s competence and confidence. It will also empower and involve the whole family, making time spent on the boat more fun and rewarding.
Building skills
In most emergency situations, you need to be able to stop the boat or sail it somewhere without the aid of an engine. If your engine dies or a line fouls the prop, you need to stop the boat and fix the problem, fix it while sailing, or moor the boat under sail. If someone goes overboard, particularly if they are injured or unconscious, you need to maneuver close to them and stop the boat to get them back aboard. If the weather deteriorates, you need to be able to sail the boat to a safe harbor. If you go aground, you need to be able to kedge off. In each of these situations, one or more of the following techniques offer solutions for controlling the boat and helping yourself. Practicing them will involve every member of the family and can add some spice to an otherwise lazy summer day.
Deploying an anchor. If you are in or near shallow water and your engine fails, the prop gets fouled, someone goes overboard, the keel touches the bottom, or something else goes wrong, everyone’s first instinct should be to stop the boat and deal with the situation. As soon as they realize there is a problem, the crew should prepare to deploy an anchor and wait for the skipper’s command to do so. If the anchor is not stowed on the bow, it must be accessible, the connections between anchor and rode must be easy to work, and a marlinspike must be readily available. It will take practice, but the crew should be able to deploy the anchor in less than five minutes. Involve the whole family by designating duties for each crewmember and naming a timekeeper to track the crew’s progress.
Heaving to. In water too deep for an anchor, the boat can still be brought almost to a stop by heaving to. The technique can be used for everything from bringing the dinghy aboard when the waves start to build during a daysail to enjoying a picnic and a swim on a calm day. Start by trying the technique in moderate conditions (10 to 15 knots of wind). If you have a large headsail, furl it to about 100 percent and then tack the boat without releasing the sheet. Lock the rudder in a position that holds the boat from 30 to 60 degrees off the wind. Depending upon the boat’s hull configuration, it may continue to move forward at 1 or 2 knots, or it may drift to leeward at about a knot. For a more complete explanation, refer to the article on heaving to at <http://www.bethandevans.com/articles.htm>. Practice will help you determine how much sail to use for different wind and wave conditions. To get going again, release the sheet and trim the headsail in on the leeward side of the boat. Let every crewmember take the helm and heave the boat to, and make a habit of using the technique. Heave to outside the marina to put out fenders and lines, or near a racecourse to watch a regatta.
Crew-overboard retrieval. Much debate surrounds the various crew-overboard techniques: crash stop, reach-tack-reach, the LifeSling, and so on. For a comprehensive review of techniques and equipment, download the U.S. Sailing report. We thought we had mastered all of these until an instructor attached a large bucket to the crew-overboard pole we were to retrieve. We discovered that no matter how we got back to the “body,” the real challenge was positioning the boat so we could haul the full bucket of water aboard, which weighed a fraction of what a body would weigh.
Too many people practice crew-overboard retrieval as a 6-knot fly-by grab, which will not help at all when confronting the real thing. So whatever method you use, practice actually stopping the boat next to the “victim.” Remember that the LifeSling can be used only if the victim is conscious, uninjured, and not hypothermic — and work on other techniques for more serious situations. Practice enough that each person immediately takes on one of the crew-overboard tasks — pointing at the victim and keeping him in sight continuously, throwing objects that float, maneuvering the boat, and handling sheets and lines. Make it a habit to pick up anything that falls overboard and floats, such as hats or boathooks. Once a month or so, designate a crewmember to drop a horseshoe buoy or life jacket over the side and to time how long it takes before the crew retrieves the “person” in the water.
Maneuvering without an engine. Most coastal boats can easily be sailed on and off an anchor or mooring buoy, and many can be sailed into a slip in a not-too-crowded marina. While you’re learning, leave the engine running but don’t use it unless you have to. Start by sailing on and off the anchor and mooring buoy. Once your crew has mastered that, try sailing out of your harbor as soon as the boat is clear of the slip. If your marina truly precludes sailing, designate a secondary harbor nearby as your “emergency port” and practice sailing in and out as well as anchoring under sail.
Along with mastering the techniques above, make explicit plans for each situation you might encounter and make sure that each crewmember knows what role he or she should play. Develop emergency plans for fire, taking on water, going aground, losing the engine, or fouling a prop. Make sure everyone aboard knows where critical safety equipment can be found and how to operate it.
Acting preventively
Like most offshore sailors, we are actually quite conservative. We know our boat, respect her limits, and avoid bad weather whenever possible. We don’t make passages in the tropics during hurricane season, nor in the temperate and high latitudes when winter gales rage. We maintain the boat to forestall serious emergencies like fire or taking on water. We do these things because we often have no safety net — no rescue service that will get us out of trouble if we get into it. Most of these things take little time and effort, but they would prevent the majority of the incidents coastal sailors call the Coast Guard about each year.
Maintain your boat for safety. Most of the life-threatening situations that can occur aboard an offshore or coastal boat can be prevented by good maintenance. Faulty wiring, dirty alcohol stoves, or fuel leaks can lead to fires; rusted hose clamps or clogged breathers may cause a vessel to sink; worn fittings or frayed standing rigging can result in dismasting. Older boats that have had multiple owners are more likely to have hidden faults that can become safety hazards. Good maintenance of all systems offers the best insurance against major mishaps.
Know the limits of your vessel, your crew, and yourself. Every boat has its limits, and these must be understood and respected. Equally, every crew has its skills and areas of competence, and these improve with experience. Your definition of heavy weather will change over time, but your boat’s ability to handle storm conditions will not. You need to find your boat’s limits while building your crew’s skills. Take an experienced sailor out with you on a day with more wind than you have sailed in previously and experiment with various sail combinations in high winds or steep waves. Select controlled circumstances in sheltered waters close to home to build skills with your crew. When cruising unfamiliar waters, sail conservatively and stay within your boat’s and crew’s limits.
Track your position, as well as the weather forecast and the tide. Used properly, charts and tide tables keep skippers from grounding their boats and forecasts of deteriorating weather tell them when to find safe harbor. Before heading out on the water, always check the forecast and the state of the tide. If you plan to be out for more than a few hours, carry a weather radio or VHF, the appropriate charts, and tide tables. If you carry a GPS, learn to use the features that will help keep you safe — putting in waypoints, creating a route and using cross-track error to keep you on the route. But never forget that while a GPS is a marvelous aid to navigation, it is just that — an aid. It cannot substitute for good paper charts and basic coastal navigation skills. Too many crews have come to depend upon it as their sole means of pinpointing where they are. Each member of the crew should learn to plot the boat’s position on a paper chart using compass bearings taken on identifiable landmarks, to plot a course line and convert between true and magnetic courses, and to use the depth sounder to position the boat using contour lines or to navigate along contour lines. When your crew has mastered these skills, turn off the GPS and go for a sail. Plot your position every 20 minutes or so and navigate using only these techniques. You’ll end up with multiple ways to find your position and with a crew that participates in navigation by checking the chart and helping to locate landmarks and buoys.
Thinking ahead
When we are sailing, our position is dynamic, not static. We are navigating through space, as captured on the chart, but also through weather systems and tidal movements. We are constantly evaluating not just where the boat is now with respect to the land masses around us, the weather conditions and the tidal flows, but where it will be in 10 minutes or an hour. And we are factoring in ways to deal with the situation if something should go wrong. There are four main ways to ensure that you have a backup option if the unexpected happens.
Make sea room. As offshore sailors know, it’s not the sea that’s the problem — it’s the land. The more distance you have from it, the more options you have. When coastal sailing in unfamiliar waters, it has become second nature to do everything we can to make sure we have more space, rather than less. When approaching a headland upwind on one tack, we sail high off the course. If, as often happens, the wind comes forward as we approach the headland, we will usually be able to weather the point without tacking. If the wind doesn’t shift, we’ll be able to fall off to a nice reach while rounding the point. Similarly, in an area with strong currents, we always give headlands a wide berth (between a half mile and a mile) because currents often accelerate around them and can produce dangerous waves. Making sure you have some room to maneuver gives you options if the engine quits or the wind dies and allows you time to choose from your grab bag of boat handling skills to deal with the situation.
Prepare for the worst. When sea room simply is not an option — entering a marina or a narrow river entrance — we always make sure we have a backup plan. If entering upwind under power, we keep a sail up so we can turn downwind and run back out to sea. If we can’t sail our way out of trouble, we make sure an anchor is ready to deploy in seconds before we reach the restricted area. When entering a strange marina, we always have fenders and lines deployed on both sides of the boat so we have options if we have to change our plans and go to a different slip or enter stern first instead of bow first.
Get as much information as possible. Knowing what lies around a point or through a narrow harbor entrance allows you to plan ahead. When entering a strange marina, we always call ahead and find out where. we will be docking and which side will be against the dock. When entering an anchorage, we get that information from a reputable cruising guide, from another sailor we trust, or from someone already in the harbor via VHF radio. When these options are not available, as in a remote anchorage where there are few other boaters, we will often heave to outside the harbor in a position where we can use binoculars to see the layout before we enter. If the entrance is too narrow for that, we will deploy the dinghy, and one of us will go in with a hand-held depth sounder to explore.
Turn on the engine. We’re not purists. We lug that hunk of metal around, service it, and feed it expensive fuel. If we’re in a situation where it might increase our safety, we don’t hesitate to turn it on. But we consider it as one additional option and always have a backup plan if it decides to go on strike. We will use the engine to help us tack instead of jibe in big seas to limit the stress on the rig, to get out of the way of an oncoming freighter if we’ve misjudged our relative positions, or to maneuver to a crewmember in the water if that is the most efficient way to get back to him. Many times, we turn the engine on as part of creating a backup option and turn it off again without putting it in gear. But before we turn the key, we always make absolutely sure that there are no lines in the water.
Finally, whenever things start to go wrong, ask yourself, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” This serves two purposes. It allows you to prepare for the next thing that could go wrong and forestall the cascade of causes that lead to serious accidents. If your engine has failed and you’re drifting toward a shoal, the worst thing that can happen is that you will go aground. You can get an anchor out or raise a sail to forestall that.
Just as importantly, this exercise can quickly calm a crew. “The worst thing that will happen is that we will go aground, get out the dinghy, kedge out an anchor, and winch ourselves off. We may lose a little bottom paint, but that’s it.” The crew will be much less likely to succumb to panic if a likely scenario can replace their worst fantasies.
By learning to sail defensively, you will forestall problems and involve the whole crew in learning new skills. And they will experience the satisfaction of sailing onto the anchor or flawlessly picking up a mooring buoy, impressing everyone in the anchorage.
Beth Leonard and her husband, Evans Starzinger, have sailed more than 100,000 nautical miles, most of those in the high latitudes, on their current boat, Hawk. After heading from the Falklands, South Georgia, and the South Sandwich Islands north up the Atlantic toward Antigua, late last fall, their plan was to reach the Caribbean around January 2009, spend the season there, and head north this spring. For more on their travels, visit their website.
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