The most important word when jibing is control. The helmsperson, sail trimmers and entire crew need to be diligent. The mainsail boom will swing across the boat with great force if important steps are not taken. There are many cases of serious injuries to unsuspecting crew who were hit in the head by the boom, or who tumbled overboard with the rapid change of course.

By contrast, completing a successful jibe provides great satisfaction when executed with precision.  

The best time to jibe is when a boat is sailing at full speed. The force of the apparent wind on a sail is less when sailing swiftly, which makes steering easy. The reason to jibe is to head on a more direct course toward a desired destination, or to take advantage of a shift in wind.

In advance of a jibe, one person, who is usually steering, should hail the crew about the intention to jibe. This is the proper time to assign specific duties to each crewmember so that everyone is clear about their role during the jibe.  

Once in proper position, the crew should stand by for a countdown to the maneuver. The helmsperson should turn the boat slowly, leaving no one caught off guard. Verbally state the new course, and visually look at any references, such as objects on shore or other boats, to know where the boat will be heading after the jibe.   

The sail trimmer should trim in the sails as the boat makes the turn. This is particularly important with the mainsail. Keep the sail under control so that the boom doesn’t swing wildly across the deck. Trim in the mainsail as the boat turns, and let it out rapidly as the sails fill on the new course. Just before the mainsail swings over, the helmsperson should hail, “Heads!” This will alert the crew to keep their heads low. 

In heavy wind, the ­helmsperson can execute an S-course jibe. Just as the mainsail is swinging across, the helmsperson turns the boat briefly in the direction the mainsail is heading. This action depowers the wind’s force on the mainsail. Once the boat is on the new course, the mainsail can be eased out to its most efficient position. The course that is steered is the shape of the letter S.

In winds less than 10 knots, most boats will jibe through 70 to 90 degrees. In stronger winds, a boat will jibe through 60 degrees or less. In a good blow, I suggest easing off the boom vang and securing the traveler in one place before jibing. This will depower the pressure on the sails and the rig.   

The jibing process is more complicated when a ­spinnaker is being flown. If the ­spinnaker is symmetrical with a ­spinnaker pole, then the helmsperson should be particularly careful when steering. The foredeck crew needs to exert downward and forward pressure on the spinnaker pole to keep it under control as it is being rehooked to the mast.   

Avoid rapid turns. Give your crew adequate time to shift the spinnaker pole. The sail trimmer in the cockpit is positioned to keep the sail full. Good teamwork is the key.

In recent years, the asymmetrical spinnaker has become a popular sail. I find that inside jibes are generally more efficient. This is when the sail passes inside the fore-triangle. The sail trimmer eases out the old sheet so that there is plenty of line to trim on the new jibe. The turn of the boat is usually a little faster than when jibing with a symmetrical sail, but it should not be any faster than the sail trimmer can move the sail from one side of the boat to the other. Continue changing course smoothly and constantly when jibing with an asymmetrical spinnaker. A pause can cause the sail to wrap.   

I find it interesting how many modern yachts resort to roller furling systems to handle forward sails. This applies to headsails and staysails. The sail is simply rolled up before jibing and rolled back out after the jibing maneuver is complete.  

I suppose I could add a technique or two for schooners and other multimast boats.  For example, schooners set a gollywobbler between the masts. On some schooners, it is best to have two of these quadrilateral sails ready to set on either jibe. When it is time to change course and jibe, take down one and hoist up the other on the new jibe. You just need two sails. But that is a story for another day. 

5 keys to safe jibing

1. Give the crew ample warning that a jibe is about to take place.
2. Assign each crewmember a specific job.
3. Keep the mainsail under control; don’t let the boom fly across the boat.
4. Look for a reference point on land to head for on the new course.
5. Do not turn the boat too quickly.

Hall of Fame sailor Gary Jobson is a CW editor-at-large. 

The post How To Jibe Like the Pros appeared first on Cruising World.

It was early afternoon on Day One of a weeklong course to prepare for the US Coast Guard’s captain’s exam, and besides my head feeling like a balloon about to pop, already several pages of my notebook were filled with hastily scribbled notes, including this gem: 1.169 x square root of light height = geographical range. Who knew I’d have to know that?

During the course of the morning, we’d slogged our way through license requirements, calculating days underway inshore and seaward of the boundary line that wraps like a string around the offshore points along America’s coasts. We’d touched on license endorsements, required publications when carrying ­passengers, and a list of additional things we’d need to procure before applying for any license. Things such as a Department of Transportation physical, CPR and first-aid cards, and a Transportation Worker Identification Credential.

We discussed in detail aids to navigation, buoy functions, beacons, light characteristics, Intracoastal Waterway navigation, light ranges, weather patterns and cloud identification.

And in between it all, Capt. Greg Metcalf, owner of the Atlantic Captain’s Academy, and instructor Capt. Chris Davis, an ex-Coastie-turned-towboat-skipper, spun entertaining sea tales and bantered back and forth with the 12 students—nine would-be tuna charter captains, a mate with a family tour boat that runs on the New Jersey coast, and a couple of sailors—who had committed to this immersive experience, held in a hotel conference room on the banks of the Annisquam River in Gloucester, Massachusetts. 

That first day, a Sunday, as Metcalf outlined what we’d cover before taking four individual exams the following Sunday, he assured us of one thing: We’d make it through. ”Anyone know a charter captain?” he quipped. “Do they seem like rocket scientists?”

And then there were Davis’ two fundamental rules of ­navigation that we’d be reminded of again and again: “No. 1: Never hit bottom. No. 2: Never hit anyone else.”

Different Routes, Same Waypoint

There are all sorts of good ­reasons for mariners to ­consider becoming licensed captains. In the class that I took, several of the students were fishermen who had spent years on boats of all sizes, either chasing sport fish or fishing commercially. A license would allow them to take paying passengers out on charters, or it would let them command boats on which they’d been deckhands. A Maine lobsterman wanted to take tourists out on Sundays and charge them to haul traps on days when commercial lobstering isn’t permitted in that state. One woman, a school nurse, had summer jobs lined up driving launches out to islands off the Merrimac River. 

Me? I do some teaching at a sailing center in Boston, and a ticket would let me spend more time on the bigger boats and run an occasional charter. 

The basic license, Operator of Uninspected Passenger Vessels, is where it all starts. Sometimes called a “six-pack license,” it allows a holder to carry up to six passengers for hire in coastal waters. To qualify, besides passing the US Coast Guard exams, you need 360 documented days underway, 90 of which must have been in the past three years. The next step is to pursue Master credentials. At the Atlantic Captain’s Academy, this involves a two-day course on top of the OUPV curriculum. A Master allows you to captain a Coast Guard-inspected vessel with more than six passengers. The size of the boat and where it can be operated depends on your prior experience.

With various study options from which to choose, an eight-day in-classroom course worked the best for me. Setting aside a single solid chunk of time was easier to plan for than committing to a longer time frame, and the course in Gloucester was relatively close to where I live. Metcalf offers courses in several other New England locations, as well as online instruction.

Alternatively, Steve Wilson, the lead instructor at the Boston Sailing Center, who along with a friend had plans to be in Florida for the winter, opted to take one of Metcalf’s online programs that met in a Zoom classroom for three hours every Monday and Wednesday night for nine weeks, starting in January. When they returned to the Boston area in late spring, they and most of their Zoom-mates met in Maine for a day to take the proctored exams for OUPV credentials.

“Anyone who embraces Zoom technology and can learn that way, it’s awesome,” Wilson says. Before each class, he spent time becoming familiar with the material in Metcalf’s textbook, and after each class, he and his partner spent additional hours studying, working through exercises, and taking practice tests. He estimates that involved another 12 or so hours a week, sometimes a bit more. Near the end of the course, Metcalf held two optional weekend study days, and he was available throughout to answer questions over the phone or by email, Wilson says. 

During the online course, students had ample time to get to know one another, Wilson says, and his classmates came from a variety of backgrounds, as was the case with my class. A few of the students in his class were auditing the course with no intention of taking the exam at the end. They just wanted to learn the material to become better boat operators.

Cruising Solo

While the Atlantic Captain’s Academy and many other schools across the country offer a variety of schedules that employ Coast Guard-approved curricula to help mariners earn their credentials, they aren’t required. 

Tim Murphy, a CW editor-at-large and a New England-based marine journalist, first earned his OUPV credential when he was 18 and living in New Orleans. In high school, he’d signed up as a trainee on the brigantine Young America and was invited back as a volunteer. That, in turn, led to a six-month job crewing, so he was at sea every day and able to rack up 180 days of sea time. Meanwhile, his family was living aboard, and with them, he sailed all throughout the Bahamas, so in a period of three years, he had all the sea days needed.

Murphy says that a car ­accident during the summer after his senior year left him idle for a few months, so he spent the time studying and memorizing Chapman Piloting & Seamanship. He also used flash cards his father had employed while earning his own license to memorize all the mnemonics sailors rely on to remember navigation rules. Then he walked into Coast Guard headquarters and passed the tests. A year later, when he turned 19, the minimum age for Master credentials, he qualified for a license allowing him to captain vessels up to 100 tons, 200 miles offshore.

Murphy let his ticket expire in the 1990s, but in 2018, after buying hisPassport 40, Billy Pilgrim, with the intention of going off cruising with his partner, he decided to renew his credentials and used a few texts the boat’s previous owner had left to prepare on his own again.

“It was so hard,” he says with a laugh. “It was really hard.” But ultimately successful. Murphy again now holds those same Master’s credentials and will be able to use them if the opportunity arises in his travels.

By the Book

Back in the hotel in Gloucester for Day Two, we spent more time going over currents and tides, and then many hours poring over navigation rules. That night, we went home to review navigation general material—buoys, lights, weather—and took a practice test that we corrected in class the next day.

Day Three was all about mnemonics. “Red over red, captain is dead,” meaning the lights displayed on a vessel not under command. “Red over white, a fishing boat at night,” meaning a commercial fishing boat not trawling. “Red over green, sailing machine,” meaning a sailboat displaying its masthead tricolor. They were endless. “Turn to port, go to court,” meaning what action to take as a give-way power vessel in a crossing situation.

There were horn signals to memorize, whistles, gongs and bells. All followed by practice quizzes and more practice quizzes. Ditto on Day Four.

On Thursday, Capt. Davis had us roll out the paper charts and grab our Weems & Plath plotting tools and dividers for a three-day deep dive into current set and drift, plotting, dead reckoning, speed, fuel—you name it. I’m not sure I’d ever used up an entire eraser before.

Then finally, on Sunday, it was the day of reckoning, with exams in Navigation General, Chart Plotting, Rules of the Road, and Deck General. Navigation and Deck required minimum scores of 70 percent. The other two, 90 percent.

It was intense. It was challenging. But in the end, Metcalf was right: It was doable. 

That afternoon, a few of us stuck around to study and take an add-on exam for a towing endorsement. And a couple of weeks later, most of us turned up for the two-day Master’s course. Two of us also opted for sailing endorsements.

So what’s the plan? Well, that’s still in the works. But already my Inland Waters Master credentials have earned me a few bucks and provided some new opportunities. And one thing I know for certain after a full summer on the water is that I’m definitely a better and more knowledgeable sailor. For that alone, it was well worth the effort. 

Mark Pillsbury is a CW editor-at-large.

The post Plot a Course for Captain Credentials appeared first on Cruising World.

In 1974, Australian journalist Murray Davis assembled a ragtag crew of sailors and scribblers in Newport, Rhode Island, and put out the first issue of Cruising World. The bet Murray made that summer was a big one: 65,000 big ones, if bets are measured in printed magazine copies. Ten years later, he sold the brand to The New York Times Company. Paid circulation had grown to 120,000 copies addressed to high-net-worth individuals (in the parlance of Madison Avenue). Davis retired to a life of ease on Newport’s tony Ocean Drive.

In some ways, the joke was on Madison Avenue. Davis’ genius was to tap into a countercultural zeitgeist impelled by skyrocketing oil prices, back-to-the-garden dreams of self-reliance evinced by the Whole Earth Catalog, and a particularly prominent June 1973 Time magazine story called “The Good Life Afloat,” which placed, of all boats, a Westsail 32 front and center. 

“Beached though he may be by responsibilities ashore,” the Time story went, “the cruising sailor can still feel a certain smugness about his boat. She can take him across an ocean whenever he is ready to go. Just a few years ago, the men who owned boats like these were usually looked upon as oddballs, dropouts, or dreamers ready to up-anchor and take off for the islands. They were incurable eccentrics, antiquarians putting in their time refurbishing relics of another age. But suddenly those old-fashioned boats and their gear seem strangely up-to-date. The cruising sailor seems less eccentric. The boats they have preserved have now become objects of envy.”

Playboy magazine took the idolatry a step further in a 1976 feature: “Your ultimate destination in a Cigarette boat may be no farther than the forward berth, but there is no navigable place in the world beyond the range of the Westsail 32.”

Davis came to the subject honestly. For the first half of the 1960s, he’d written a column about the Western Australian waterfront scene for The Age, a Melbourne daily. That lasted till his wanderlust overtook him. In 1967, he and his wife, Barbara, and their two small children boarded a 21-ton, yawl-rigged Falmouth Quay punt called Klang II and sailed themselves to America.

“Every escapade needs a hook to lend it legitimacy,” Nim Marsh wrote in a 2004 profile. Davis’ hook was, in his own words, “to watch Australia’s challenge for the great symbol of sailing, the America’s Cup.” He would cover the races in Newport, in which Australian hero Dame Pattie was to compete, reporting back to his readers in Melbourne. As the Davis family sailed halfway around the world, they befriended some of that era’s giants of the cruising community—Eric and Susan Hiscock, Miles and Beryl Smeeton, Blondie Hasler—as well as young up-and-comers such as Lin and Larry Pardey and Bruce Bingham. The first issue of CW included dispatches from all of them.

Though Davis tapped into a deep vein, he didn’t invent the worldwide cruising community; instead, he discovered one that by the 1970s was already thriving. To locate the father of this community, he’d have to look back still another 50 years to a man named William Washburn Nutting—arguably the most influential cruising sailor that today’s cruisers have never heard of.

We All Sail in the Track of Typhoon

 “I think it is reasonable to say that a country is only as big as its sports. In this day when life is so very easy and safe-and-sane and highly specialized and steam-heated, we need sports that are big and raw and, yes, dangerous. Not that we recommend taking chances in the roaring forties in the middle of November or crossing the Atlantic on the fiftieth parallel at any time of the year. This sort of yachting, I suppose, will never be popular. But I do hope that if there is any result from my book on the Typhoon, it will be to inspire a confidence in the possibilities of the small yacht and instill an interest in the sea and a desire to explore.”

Thus wrote W.W. Nutting. His 1921 book, The Track Of The “typhoon,” lit a fire whose flame still spreads more than a century later. “I feel that what American yachting needs is less ­common sense, less restrictions, less slide rules, and more sailing,” Nutting wrote.

A line he borrowed from a US Navy sub-chaser commander distilled Nutting’s ultimate disdain for his own safe-and-sane era: “Is ‘Safety First’ going to be our national motto?”

Like Davis, Nutting started his career scribbling on the waterfront scene—in Nutting’s case, from the Manhattan offices of The Motor Boating Magazine in the years just before World War I. Nutting was a gregarious man who gathered around him a Parisian-style salon of other men who were interested in something entirely new under the sun: sailing on the ocean “for the fun of the thing.”

In the 1910s, there was no seagoing cruising community. Yacht clubs had begun to proliferate after the Civil War, but with a focus that seldom extended beyond inshore racing. A handful of America’s wealthiest Brahmins very occasionally raced to Bermuda or across the Atlantic, but with large crews of paid professional sailors. Amateur sailors had made well-publicized ocean voyages: Joshua Slocum, who published his enduring bestseller about the first recorded solo circumnavigation from 1895 to 1898; Howard Blackburn, who in 1901 crossed to Portugal in 39 days aboard a 25-foot Friendship sloop. Still, before World War I, there was neither a cohort of long-distance cruising sailors nor a fleet of seaworthy yachts to take them sailing.

Nutting changed that. In summer 1913, with scant experience of sailing, piloting or navigation, he sailed the 28-foot cutter Nereis, mostly singlehanded, from New York to Newfoundland. Along the way, he survived several near calamities. Off Nantucket, Massachusetts, he was knocked overboard by the boom. Only dumb bloody luck and a loose lazy jack saved him from drowning. But that summer’s experience inflamed his adventuring spirit, and the stories he published inflamed others. With friends he met during those travels, Nutting began to dream of a shorthanded trans-Atlantic voyage—and of the boat that could accomplish such a trip.

One of those friends was Canadian engineer Frederick W. “Casey” Baldwin, the first British subject to take flight in March 1908, shortly after the Wright Brothers’ first Kitty Hawk flights, and the man who would go on in 1919 to set the world speed record of more than 70 mph across the water in a hydroplane that he designed and built with Alexander Graham Bell.

Though World War I interrupted the conversation they had started in 1913, Nutting and Baldwin reconvened in fall 1919 to work out their plans—for the boat and for the voyage. Nutting wrote: “Finally we got down to the inevitable subject of boats and more particularly of cruising boats.” 

Their choices were limited to one of two categories: fishermen or racers. There simply were no other choices. Fishermen—­adaptations of Friendship sloops, oyster dredgers or Gloucester schooners—accounted for all the boats sailed in shorthanded transoceanic voyages. These tended to be rough-hewn, solid, seaworthy and slow. Casey, by contrast, had collected silver by racing lightly built boats with long overhangs designed under Nathanael Herreshoff’s Universal Rule. Casey, Nutting wrote, was “all for a big boat—as big a one as possible without going beyond the strength of one man in the matter of the mainsail and the ground tackle, which are really the limiting factors.”

Nutting’s tastes were shaped by his summer on Nereis. “I think a singlehander should be as small as possible without ­sacrificing full headroom—say, 28 to 30 feet on deck,” he wrote. But, conceding that singlehanding wasn’t the most desirable way to cruise, he consented to a compromise: “a 40-footer, fisherman style, ketch rigged with an auxiliary motor.”

Ocean Sailing “For the Fun of the Thing”

Back in New York, Nutting delivered his commission to yacht ­designer William Atkin, a pal and stablemate at Motor Boating, who pushed the length to 45 feet before the boat was done. Baldwin oversaw the boatbuilding at Bell’s laboratory in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, and on July 3, 1920, Typhoon launched.

As Davis legitimized his escapade with the hook of an America’s Cup summer, so Nutting latched onto the Harmsworth Trophy Races, set for August 10 in Cowes, England, to ­legitimize his. “Not that there was any serious motive behind the cruise of the Typhoon,” Nutting hedged. “We were not trying to ­demonstrate anything; we were not conducting an advertising campaign; we hadn’t lost a bet. I had the little vessel built according to Atkin’s and my own ideas of what a seagoing yacht should be, and we sailed her across the Atlantic and back again for the fun of the thing. We feel that the sport of picking your way across great stretches of water, by your own (newly acquired) skill with a sextant, pitting your wits against the big, more or less honest forces of nature, feeling your way with leadline through fog and darkness into strange places which the travelers of trodden paths never experience, chumming with the people of the sea—these things, we believe, are worth the time, the cost, the energy—yes, and even the risk and hardship that are bound to be a part of such an undertaking. We did it for the fun of the thing, and we believe that no further explanation is necessary.”

They did it, all right, crossing from Baddeck to Cowes, 2,777 miles in just over 22 days. Along the way, they encountered several gales, which Nutting illuminated for his steam-heated readers in full, breathless detail: “It was a roaring, wild, wonderful night, the sky pitch black, the sea a driving stampede of weird, unearthly lights. The countless crests of breaking waves made luminous patches in the blackness as though lit by some ghostly light from beneath the sea, and the tops, whipped off by the wind, cut the sky with horizontal streaks of a more brilliant light, like the sparks from a prairie fire.”

For a shipmate, Nutting could have picked no one better than Baldwin. “Casey, drenched and grinning, was in his element,” he wrote. “The wind was still increasing, but there was no trace of concern in his voice as he shouted back a ‘cheerio’ through the racket. He was enjoying himself as only the man at the wheel can at such a time.”

At Cowes, word of Typhoon’sexploits quickly spread through the harbor. General John Seely, the Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire, brought regards from King George V, a sailor himself. The Earl of Dunraven, who’d challenged the America’s Cup with three Valkyrie iterationsbetween 1887 and 1895, came aboard Typhoon. But the most consequential acquaintance Nutting made was Claud Worth, vice commodore of the Royal Cruising Club, established in 1880.

Birth of a Cruising Community

“Before leaving England,” Nutting wrote, “there is one institution we must mention because I hope that some time there will be such a one in our country. This is the Royal Cruising Club whose membership included many of the real cruising yachtsmen of England. Why can’t some such club be started on this side of the Atlantic?”

One of the first things Nutting did when Typhoon returned to New York that November was to propose what would become the Cruising Club of America—established in 1922, with Nutting elected as its first commodore. The club’s purpose? “To encourage the designing, building, and sailing of small seaworthy yachts, to make popular cruising upon deep water, and to develop in the amateur sailor a love of true seamanship, and to give opportunity to become proficient in the art of navigation.” You can walk down the dock of any seaside marina today and judge for yourself what kind of success Nutting had. Or, you can simply flip through these pages.

It’s not for his seamanship that we remember Nutting today. “He was a charming character and good company, a good sailor in some ways, but foolhardy and had too much courage,” recalled George Bonnell, an early CCA member.

Neither is it for his yacht-design eye, the musical equivalent of a tin ear when you compare it with others of his CCA cohort: John Alden or Olin Stephens or Philip Rhodes.

But for infectious enthusiasm, no one ever beat Nutting. Shortly after founding the CCA and publishing Track Of The “typhoon,” he became infatuated with a boat type he’d seen on a Copenhagen canal during the war: the redningskoite, or Norwegian rescue boat, as developed by the Scottish-Norwegian designer Colin Archer (1832-1921). 

Virtually no one west of the Atlantic in 1924 had ever seen such a craft. He wrote: “Although strange to an eye accustomed to the racing type yacht, or to the fisherman type as we know it today in America, these boats held a fascination for me and I resolved that one day I should own one and try it out.”

On one winter’s evening, Nutting found a book that contained the drawings for a Colin Archer-designed redningskoite: “The lines scale to about 47 feet overall. After a few rough measurements we decided that if the boat were reduced to 32 feet overall, we could get the headroom under a trunk of reasonable height and sitting headroom under the side decks, and so, for convenience, we had the design photostated 16 inches overall, or to a scale of one-half inch to the foot. With these lines to work from, I spent a couple of evenings making a skeleton model.”

Nutting’s old pal Atkin helped him clean up the lines. Together, they named the design Eric for the Viking explorer Erik the Red, and Atkin published them.

It was aboard someone else’s version of a redningskoite that Nutting, with three shipmates, crossed the North Atlantic from Norway by way of Iceland in summer 1924, then set off from Greenland on September 8—after which, none of them were ever seen again.

“It is more than too bad that Mr. Nutting should not have lived to see the popularity of his child,” Atkin wrote many years later about the Ericdesign, “for some 175 sets of blueprints of the 32-footer were sold by the designer within three years after the plans appeared in Motor Boating, and many more have been sold since.” Argentine solo sailor Vito Dumas famously circumnavigated in anEric during the 1940s. And the fact that Robin Knox-Johnston’s Suhaili, the boat that won the 1968 Golden Globe solo round-the-world race, was built to an Ericdesign inspired a California entrepreneur to commission an adaptation for fiberglass-series production.

The result was the Westsail 32. Yes, the Westsail—object of so much love, and of so much derision. (“Wet Snail,” anyone?) The Westsail, with Nutting’s hand in its creation all but erased after the decades, was the very image that launched so many 1970s cruising dreams. 

“This wonderfully sturdy sailboat,” ran the 1976 Playboy ­feature, “embodies within its wide stubby hull all of the ­wanderlust fantasies harbored by each of us: that marvelous dream of shucking the niggling demands of daily life and simply taking off, boosted by the wind and sea, to probe the corners of the earth. A Westsail skipper turns each cruise into a long reach to Pago Pago.”

Or to Greenland.

Nutting started a fractious 100-year conversation that we, cruising sailors all, still gather round—whether we remember him for it or not.

CW Editor-at-Large Tim Murphy is the author of Adventurous Use of the Sea (Seapoint Books, 2022), which tells the full story of William Washburn Nutting and 16 other influential cruisers and yacht designers from the past century. Murphy develops marine-­trades curricula for the American Boat and Yacht Council.

The post The Most Famous Sailor You’ve Never Heard Of appeared first on Cruising World.

Steve Brown knows a thing or two about heavy weather. Throughout his sailing career, Brown and his wife, Trish, took on a four-year circumnavigation aboard their Oyster 56, Curious, sailed a 30,000-mile circumnavigation of the Americas—sailing north from Camden, Maine, and then an east-to-west transit of the Northwest Passage—and spent more than his fair share of time in the Southern Ocean. 

Brown is up for debating the superlatively inhospitable places on Earth. 

“Southern Georgia, in the South Atlantic, is the most unforgiving place I’ve ever sailed,” he says. “Although there was this one time, coming up the Le Mer Strait between Staten Island and Tierra Del Fuego.” 

The sailing was the fault of his ­mountaineering interests, he claims, and he originally took to the sea for adventure. He followed in the footsteps of mountaineer-sailor Bill Tilman, and decided he needed to learn how to sail in order to “fill in the blanks on the map.”

A starter dinghy was followed by a Furia 44, and then by the circumnavigation in the Oyster 56. When he bought the AeroRig Bestevaer 60C Novara, an aluminum-hull schooner designed as a research vessel, the expeditions stepped up a notch. 

Along the way, there’s been brash ice and icebergs, rogue waves and drogues, penguins and polar bears. He’s a sailor who’s had the real-life experience of switching from gale-force storm management to survival tactics after conditions transcend control. 

His current role is as mentor and ice ­pilot as Novara pursues a multiyear mission in the Caribbean working with coastal communities to educate and ­combat climate change, followed by a planned 2025 Northwest Passage.

Know Your Boat

Brown’s first piece of advice on heavy-weather management, offered during the Cruising Club of America’s 2022 seminar in Newport, Rhode Island, was: “Don’t go out in it,” but there were a few more lessons shared.

“Take your boat apart from stem to stern and know every inch of it,” Brown told me during a recent call. “If you’re going to be far from marinas and chandleries, ask yourself: If it breaks, can I live without it? Can I fix it? If you can’t live without or fix it, then you need a spare.

“When I prepared the boat in Camden for the 2014 Northwest Passage, I spent two and a half months for 15 hours a day on Novara getting to understand it and stripping it from stem to stern,” he says.

If you look at what Randal Reeves did, Brown said, in Reeves’ preparation for the Figure 8 Voyage of the Americas, he took that boat to pieces. “If you’re going to do something that demanding,” Brown says, “then you really have got to have gone through everything. If something goes wrong, then you’re not thinking, Oh, what can it be? You know, because you’ve taken the boat to pieces.”

Kirsten Neuschäfer, during her preparations for the 2022 Golden Globe Race, took apart her Cape George, Minnehaha, starting forward and finishing aft. 

“You’ve got to strip down everything and know it’s in good condition,” Brown said. “When you know every inch of your boat, you know the strengths and weaknesses of your rig, hull, and systems. You’re able to assess problems quickly and are prepared to come up with solutions. The one thing that I didn’t strip down on Novara was the steering system. It’s an incredibly complex system, and when we sought advice, we decided that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Unfortunately, moisture had built up on top of an exposed bearing. We got up as far as Newfoundland when the bearing broke.”

Be Prepared

Weather forecasts, man-overboard drills, storm sail management, a hot meal ready to go—each step you take in preparation gives you a greater chance of weathering a storm. Practice until you know what works for you, your boat and your crew. Make sure everyone knows the MOB drill and can perform each role.

Get regular weather forecasts that extend five to seven days out, of wind and seas. Remember, GRIB files have winds but not gusts or waves. Study the areas you plan to sail to familiarize yourself with the depths, sea bottom, landmasses and winds. All of these can play a role in wave size, windspeeds and wind directions.

If a low-pressure system is forecast in your area, study the wind directions and speeds. Try to avoid a blow by charting a safe course that minimizes your time in the path. If you can’t avoid the system, check equipment and chafe points, and remove solar panels before conditions deteriorate. As much as possible, attend to self-care: Get some sleep. Shower and clean up. Prepare meals and coffee. 

“Get the main down, and get it out of the way,” says Randall Reeves, one of Brown’s fellow CCA heavy-weather panelists. Reeves completed his record-breaking 2019 Figure 8 sail of the Americas aboard Moli, his 45-foot aluminum sloop, becoming the first person to sail solo and nonstop around the Americas. “I have two drogues on board, which I flake out and lash down on deck if a gale is in the forecast. I run what-if scenarios in my head and ask myself, What will I do?” 

Stormy Weather

What’s your plan if you are overwhelmed by wind or seas? 

As the wind builds, reef down, Brown says. Know beforehand what your sail plan is, and have your canvas ready. Know how to heave-to, and practice. And know how to manage your boat under hove-to conditions. 

Heaving-to is a fantastic survival tactic, and it’s the go-to method for high-latitude experts such as Skip Novak, Brown says, but it’s absolutely essential to test it out. His boat, Novara, is an AeroRig and can’t heave-to. “I experimented with possible methods, but with little success,” he says, “so we researched other ways to ride out a storm.” 

If the boat can no longer handle even the smallest of storm sails, take it down to bare poles. “We’ve had to do this only once, in 65 knots of wind off South Georgia,” Brown says. 

Heavy Weather Sailing, Eighth Edition, by Martin Thomas and Peter Bruce, has an excellent section on storm tactics, ­including shortening sail, heaving-to, ­running before the wind, and drogue devices. Brown’s advice is included in the book, and he has written several reports on the Jordan series drogue based on his experience and the experiences of other sailors who have deployed the JSD.

“If there’s one piece of kit you need to put on your boat, it’s a Jordan series drogue,” Brown says. During Novara’s 2017 passage from South Georgia to the Falklands, while the boat was running under bare poles, wind and seas built to unmanageable levels. The boat carried too much speed running down the waves and was susceptible to a knockdown if it turned up into the face of a wave, or a pitchpole. 

The drogue was ready on deck, lashed down, with the bridle in place, as wind and seas built. “We put it out off the stern, into 35 knots of wind,” Brown says. “Conditions worsened to 65 knots, with higher gusts and monstrous seas. The drogue slowed our speed, and we went below, and slept, ate and played cards for 48 hours. You need sea room to do this.”

His exchange with Neuschäfer before the 2022 Golden Globe Race focused on sizing her Jordan series drogue for her Cape George. Neuschäfer deployed the drogue during storm conditions off Cape Horn and held on for 12 hours.

While competing in the 2008 edition of the GGR, Susie Goodall deployed a Jordan series drogue off her Rustler 36 during a storm 2,000 nautical miles west of Cape Horn. The drogue’s rope gave way at the bridle as she battled 60 knots of wind and massive seas. Goodall pitchpoled, was dismasted, and was knocked unconscious. 

Although she survived and was ­rescued, her boat was a total loss. The JSD ­manufacturers, along with heavy-weather-­sailing experts, used her experience to update recommendations for drogue sizing, based on boat tonnage. The key is to research and know which drag devices are appropriate for your boat, and know how to use them.

There’s a fantastic database on drag devices that offers an exhaustive list of options, Brown says. “If you look closely at the list, you can see my favorite, the ‘Milk Churn.’ Who among us doesn’t have one milk churn you could lob?

The great thing about this is that there are firsthand narratives of sailors using all of these techniques. You can actually read about some guy who chucked a milk churn. It’s worth taking the time to read. People who have been through this have shared their experiences, or at least those who survived did.”

A Curry on the Shore of Antarctica

During a January 2018 passage from the Falkland Islands to the South Shetlands, after making 685 miles south in five days, Steve Brown and Novara’s crew studied the GRIB files showing winds building above 30 knots and the sea state worsening. 

“We changed course with the intention of running before the wind to Deception Island,” Brown says. Novara made a fast passage, but conditions rapidly deteriorated, with 45-knot winds, driving snow, and poor visibility. Ice and snow built on the rig, sails and deck. 

Using radar and charts, Novara was able to enter Neptune’s Bellows, the pass into Deception Island’s caldera, but AIS showed multiple boats already in the intended ­anchorage of Telefon Bay. In Brown’s words:

We went into sort of a second choice: Pendulum Cove. We needed to get into the lee and out of the wind. We came around a bend and, as we prepared to lower the anchor, we were hit by a 100-knot gust.

Novara was knocked down literally as we were preparing to drop the anchor. The blow washed the aft mainsheet over the side, and it wrapped around the prop. The boat popped right back up, which is amazing since we had the centerboard up and the rig was heavy with ice. But once the mainsheet wrapped the prop, all I could do was steer straight up the beach.

Fortunately, with volcanic soil, there’s almost no rocks inside Deception Island, and we just plowed a big furrow. Novara is very round with a big keelson, and the ­centerboard is inside the keelson, so we plowed up the beach and sat there. The wind was raging, it was snowing like crazy, and we’d blown the jib. We tried to tame it—the aft jib—which had broken free and shredded itself, but we couldn’t. So I just said to the boys, “OK, everybody down below.” And they asked, “Well, what happens now?”

“I’ll put the kettle on and make a chicken curry for tea,” I replied. And that’s exactly what I did. We were inside. We were sort of safe. We weren’t going anywhere. 

I made a big curry with all the trimmings, Naan bread, and everything, and we waited until conditions eased. Then we went out and had a look. 

Novara has a big cable, three big anchors and a lot of chain. I told the crew that we would drag ourselves off on the high tide. We’d gone aground almost at high tide, but there was another 20 centimeters of tide over the next three days, and Novara’s got lots of ground tackle. We have two big bow anchors, with 200 meters (656 feet) of bow chain, a stern anchor with another 60 meters (196 feet), and four shorelines with 100 meters (328 feet) each. The plan was to put out three anchors, connect them to our winches and, at the highest tide, pull ourselves off.

We had a plan. Everyone has a role. We know what we’re going to do. Everybody’s fine, and there’s confidence and optimism in the event. 

When you sail with a crew, you have to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the team you put together. When you’ve got a diverse team, you have to understand how best to keep them happy, how best to keep them fit, make sure they look after themselves. This starts before you leave the dock. That’s the biggie for me—understanding the boat, and if you’re sailing with crew, understanding the team that you’re working with. 

You need to make sure you have the trust of your crew. You don’t want a skipper running around like a chicken with his head cut off. You tell them not to worry. I’ll start cooking dinner and it will be all right. Cool heads will prevail in these situations.

You have to put the pieces of the jigsaw together, when it comes to crew, and if you’ve got one piece that doesn’t fit, then it makes life difficult. The thing is, by and large, you look for people who have that third dimension, who can cope in that extreme situation. The Antarctica crew were, without exception, experienced sailors.

On Deception Island, we were up on the beach. When anything like that happens, within the terms of the permit you receive to explore these places, you have to notify the authorities. I notified the UK coast guard, and they picked up the phone to the Chilean n­avy, and it was out of my hands. We could have gotten ourselves off the beach, absolutely no question. But the next thing you know, there was a Chilean navy ship coming down to rescue us. They sent the RIB over, and I went to see the captain on the ship, and he said: “We’ve come to rescue you. We’ll take the crew off, and we’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

I told him that I was not leaving my boat. I needed to get Novara off the beach. And he said, “I don’t have permission to do that.” Following approval, he agreed to pull us off the beach.

They had a massive winch on the ship. I mean it was huge, with a big reel of 4-inch-wide polypropylene line. We made a bridle, and they connected it to the back of the boat. The weight of the line alone pulled the boat off the beach. It wasn’t even tight. Novara was once again safely afloat. —TN

More Info

For information on the Novara One Planet mission, led by Nigel Jollands and Veronica Lysaght, and the multiyear, worldwide climate awareness project,
visit novara.world.

The post Wicked Weather: High Latitude Sailing Strategies appeared first on Cruising World.

When Jimmy Cornell set off with his young family in the 1970s on his first world voyage, there were no reference books for world cruisers. World Cruising Routes—which Cornell first published in 1987—was the type of book he wished he’d had. The only electronic navigation device he carried on board was a ­battery-operated depth sounder. Offshore cruising was done by celestial navigation, with time signals obtained by shortwave radio. GPS was decades in coming. 

But pilot charts have been an essential planning tool for sailors since the middle of the 19th century. Cornell’s Ocean Atlas, by Jimmy and Ivan Cornell, was first published in 2011 as a way to provide hundreds of pages of information drawn and updated from traditional pilot charts, and to illustrate the voyages that Cornell described in his 2012 World Voyage Planner. Changes in global weather patterns—some of which are extreme—made it necessary to publish an updated third edition this year.

Cornell has sailed 200,000 miles in all oceans of the world, including three circumnavigations, and voyages to Antarctica and the Northwest Passage. In the past 35 years, he founded the ARC trans-Atlantic rally, organized 36 trans-Atlantic, two trans-Pacific and five round-the-world rallies, and organized one round-the-world race. He is the author of 20 books, some of which have been translated into seven languages. 

When I set off from Florida to sail the world in 1989, World Cruising Routes was the most referenced book on board. We paired that with pilot charts to determine our sailing seasons and routes for more than 10 years. Cornell’s books have sold more than 200,000 copies and have helped thousands of sailors fulfill their bluewater dreams. 

I caught up with Cornell in mid-September as he was on his way to the Cannes Yachting Festival, where he planned to introduce the Exploration 60.

Q: What can we expect to find in the third edition of Cornell’s Ocean Atlas?

In the 12 years since the first edition of this atlas was published, there has been a marked intensification of the effects of global warming on weather conditions throughout the world. In this fully revised and updated edition, the main focus is on all changes that may affect offshore voyages. Its purpose is to provide the necessary practical data to plan a safe voyage in these changing times. 

The most significant and visible change has been the increased intensity and extent of tropical cyclones, both in the duration of the critical seasons and the areas affected. Because this phenomenon has such a major impact on voyage planning, in order to provide a full perspective on the current situation, this new edition contains all relevant facts for every area of the world that is affected by tropical cyclones.  

Because the main safety threats in any of the world’s oceans are tropical storms, the latest edition of the Atlas contains detailed information on tropical storms for the past 10 years, such as critical seasons and areas, and the earliest and latest cyclones in every ocean.

To present an accurate picture of the actual weather conditions that prevail in the world’s oceans, the pilot charts featured in this atlas are based on the data collected by a network of meteorological satellites, augmented by
observations obtained from meteorological buoys and other sources, during the past 25 years. The most detailed information is displayed in wind roses, with every single wind rose being based on a total of 218,000 samples of data. 

Q: You spend a lot of time talking about trade winds. Why?

One of the most noticeable phenomena is the decrease in the regularity and reliability of trade winds, as witnessed by sailors on some of the frequently traveled ocean routes. As the polar regions are getting warmer at a faster rate than the lower latitudes due to global warming, the poleward temperature gradient is weakening, and affecting the strength and consistency of trade winds. 

The most traveled ocean route in the world is the trans-Atlantic passage from the Canary Islands to the Eastern Caribbean, which is sailed every year by well over 1,000 boats. Once regarded as one of the most reliable trade-wind routes in the world, as the winds on the direct trans-Atlantic route have become increasingly unreliable, the majority of sailors now prefer to sail a more roundabout route by attempting to reach, as soon as possible, the lower latitudes, where there is a better chance of finding favorable winds before setting course for their destination. I’ve included information on the routes in the Atlas.

Similar tactics also apply to one of the longest transocean routes, from the Galapagos Islands to the Marquesas. As steady southeast winds can be counted on only well to the south of the Galapagos Islands, the accepted ­tactic now is to sail an initial ­southwest or west-southwest course until the area of ­prevailing southeast trade winds is reached. 

Q: To what basic safety measures should boaters adhere when planning a voyage?

Arriving in the tropics too close to the start of the cyclone-free season should be avoided, and a safe margin should be allowed by leaving a critical area before the end of the safe period.

Cruising during the critical period in an area affected by tropical storms should be avoided. Those who plan to do so should monitor the weather carefully and make sure to be close to a place where shelter could be sought in an emergency.

Q: I read recently that we might see large-scale changes in the Gulf Stream. Did you find any evidence pointing to this?

I’m dealing with this matter in some detail in the new edition of the Atlas, but it is a very complex issue, and I wouldn’t like to summarize it in a couple of short sentences.  

Q: How do the Atlas and paper charts fit in with today’s ­available GRIB files and offshore weather forecasts? 

GRIB files are of only limited use because they cover only the initial stages of a long passage. The entire purpose of the Atlas and its pilot charts is to assist in planning a voyage or a passage in any of the world’s oceans.

Q: Do you use pilot charts for planning or passages on your own voyages? 

Of course. All the time.

Q: Did you find any positive changes compared with prior editions of the Atlas?

There is no doubt that global weather conditions are changing: slower in some parts of the world, faster than expected in others. All I can say is that with careful planning, it is still possible to set off on a long voyage, even in these changing times. But I must advise anyone who is seriously planning to leave on such a voyage: The sooner you do it, the better. 

Visit cornellsailing.com for information on Cornell’s Ocean Atlas and Jimmy Cornell.

The post Talking Trade Winds With Jimmy Cornell appeared first on Cruising World.

Aaron Maynard owns an electric-­bike shop in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where a customer came in one day seeking a folding bike. 

“I asked him specifically why he wanted a folding bike because we sell many models,” Maynard says. “He said that he and his wife were going to sell their house and their belongings, and move onto a sailboat for a few years. After he left, I looked up ‘45-foot sailboat’ online. What I saw totally enthralled me. I began researching boats nonstop. I ordered a catalog from The Moorings and read it from cover to cover. In the back of the catalog, there was information about learning to sail.”

The next day, Maynard called Offshore Sailing School and signed up himself and his wife, Michele, for a certification class. They had never set foot on a sailboat when they attended the Offshore Sailing School at the South Seas Island Resort on Captiva Island, Florida, in 2018, joining the increasingly large ranks of people who are taking certification courses either to learn the basics or to gain advanced skills.

And make no mistake: It’s far from just newbies like the Maynards signing up for classes these days. For boat ­owners, some insurance companies require sailing certifications, and some charter companies have tightened up certification ­requirements for bareboat sailing as well. 

John Gaston was an experienced sailor and boat owner who had completed basic and intermediate cruising certification courses in Canada. He was looking for advanced cruising certification when he came across Barefoot Offshore Sailing School in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. He knew the school’s instructor, Rob McLean, who was associated with the courses in Ontario. Gaston signed up and completed his Sail Canada Advanced and Offshore courses in the southern Caribbean.

“I find that taking sailing courses provides excellent training to prepare for situations and response options,” he says. “I would rather learn from other people’s training and experience because you don’t know what you don’t know. A sailing course tends to be a safe and controlled environment.”

Taking the classes helped the Maynards and Gaston live their sailing dreams. The Maynards went on to complete multiple certifications, purchased a yacht and placed it in a BVI charter fleet, and have chartered 14 times over the years. They also bought a boat that they keep closer to home. Gaston recently completed an offshore sail-training trans-Atlantic crossing. 

Class Is In

No matter what sailing interests students have these days, there are classes available to help them achieve their goals. The American Sailing Association has certified close to 600,000 sailors at more than 400 sailing schools around the globe. 

Jonathan Payne, executive director of ASA, says that he sees two common paths in ASA sailing education. “One, someone takes in interest in local sailing courses. They make a long-term commitment to learn at a sailing school near where they live and attend weekend classes,” Payne says. This typically takes six weeks.

The second path, he says, is a ­weeklong destination school. “This is a full-­immersion, intensive course where students do a fair amount of study before arriving,” he says. “Once they are there, they are in class and running maneuvers sunup to sundown. The skill-building happens on the water.”

Of the two paths, the sailor who studies locally over a longer period might build a broader base of knowledge, while the other might be looking for a deep dive into the aspects of chartering. “A student in a course stretched out over six weeks might learn more about sail trim and sail theory, whereas someone on board a boat 24 hours a day might learn more about seamanship, bilges, and troubleshooting the engine,” he says. “There are certain things that happen on the water when you’re living on a boat. You have the opportunity to learn ­problem-solving in the moment.”

For the ASA local courses, Basic Keelboat Sailing (ASA 101) teaches skills inside a marina. Basic Coastal Cruising (ASA 103) takes the student outside the marina, and up and down the coast. Bareboat Cruising (ASA 104) is required to charter a boat.

“You can learn to sail in Colorado on your weekends, or sign up for a charter yacht in Greece,” Payne says. “There are a lot of options.”

US Sailing, the governing body for the sport of sailing in the United States, offers similar building-block tracks: Basic Keelboat, Basic Cruising and Bareboat Cruising.

Doris and Steve Colgate, founders of US Sailing-certified Offshore Sailing School, come from a racing background and have more than 160,000 graduates in over 60 years of teaching. Offshore offers one-week training courses in Florida and the British Virgin Islands, where students earn certifications for boats up to 50 feet. 

Students attend for a variety of reasons, according to Beth Oliver, vice president and director of sales and marketing. Some are new to sailing. Others are veteran sailors who want to experience the BVI. “These are people who either want to charter on their own, or who are considering purchasing a yacht and living aboard,” Oliver says. “They’re adventure-seekers with an active lifestyle, and want to share this enthusiasm with like-minded people. Many of our students are highly educated professionals, so continual learning is important to them. They like to share their skills with family and friends. Many want to pass on the sailing lifestyle to their children and grandchildren as a sort of legacy.”

 For those who want to charter, Offshore offers a combination course: Fast Track to Cruising. “We like to say that we can take you from your couch to the captain’s chair in one week,” Oliver says. Textbooks are sent in advance, and students arrive at class prepared to learn.

Offshore is the official sailing school of The Moorings, one of the world’s largest charter companies. The Moorings offers Offshore Sailing School courses in the BVI and Royal Yachting Association courses in the Mediterranean, according to Amanda Kurland, charter sales representative for The Moorings and Sunsail. These sister companies offer several levels of courses in multiple places. Sunsail has destination sailing schools in the United Kingdom, Croatia, Greece, Australia and Grenada.

Some people do the training because they want to purchase their own boat when they retire, Kurland says. Others are jumping from lake sailing to ocean ­sailing. Still others have the goal to ­charter a bareboat.

Blue Water Sailing School, an ­ASA-certified school in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, offers destination sail ­training charters closer to home. These are seven-day liveaboard courses where the vessels anchor out at night. Classes are available in Florida, Rhode Island, the Virgin Islands and the Bahamas. 

Blue Water owner David Pyle says that he also finds two basic groups of people looking for sail training: those who want to go cruising on their own boat someday and those who want to charter. “We try to get students to a point where they’re comfortable, confident and safe on a boat,” Pyle says. “It’s kind of like getting a pilot’s license to fly a small plane. You can get the training and certification, but of course you want to be safe and competent before you fly a plane on your own.”

Pyle says that approximately 15 to 20 percent of basic-level students return later for advanced courses. “We get a lot of people who have this goal to purchase their own boat,” he says. “They want to see if this is for them. I was just talking to a couple from Nebraska. They’ve never sailed, and they’re interested in finding out if this is for them. This is not uncommon.”

Pyle and Oliver agree that the most challenging aspect for students is often the amount of material they need to learn. Most students are also fairly anxious when it comes to docking. “Students who have been away from testing for a while might get nervous about the written-test ­component, but our instructors determine each student’s learning levels and preferences, and work with them individually, quizzing everyone each day on topics, so most are very comfortable by the time they take the written tests,” Oliver says.

There’s a lot of repetition and refreshing as the course goes along. Some students fear that they lack the physical strength for sailing work, but the sailboats have equipment such as winches to assist the student with maneuvers. Other students have a general fear of the water and ­seasickness, but most of that can be overcome with time on the boat.

Pyle says that it’s not uncommon to work with sailors who have had smaller boats, such as a 25-foot boat on a lake, but now want to go coastal sailing on a 40-foot monohull or offshore sailing on a 50-foot catamaran.

West Coast Multihulls in San Diego runs a sailing school with training on multihulls. Students who complete AS 101, 103 and 104 can take ASA 114: Cruising Catamaran Certification. It’s a five-day liveaboard class offered around Catalina Island and in the Sea of Cortez.

“We are catamaran experts with the largest sailing catamaran fleet on the West Coast,” says Guinevere King, general manager at West Coast Multihulls. “People come to our school to learn how to sail catamarans and experience the liveaboard cruising lifestyle in Southern California and in the Sea of Cortez.”

Most students want to get ASA 114 certifications while building their sailing resumes so that they can bareboat charter. “We also have a large percentage of our students who are looking to buy a catamaran and cruise the world with family and friends.”

 West Coast Multihulls also offers ASA 105 and 106 advanced courses for experienced sailors. The company recently added ASA 107 and 108, which cover celestial navigation and passagemaking.

“Our instructors share their knowledge and expertise with their students in a supportive environment,” Kurland says. “Our students gain confidence and invaluable real-world experience on board, which you can’t replicate by watching a YouTube video.” 

Barefoot Offshore Sailing School ­instructor McClean says that because there are so many levels and types of courses available, he doesn’t see a typical student but rather a thread that links them all. It’s people who want to sail, who want to live on a boat and learn for a week, who want to go offshore.

“Fifteen percent of our students are new to sailing,” he says. “Forty to 50 percent have already taken an initial course and are there to advance their skills.” The school welcomes all levels, he says, “but we do encourage people to take that first level at home. Someone can get far more out of their investment if they can learn the basics of tacking and jibing before coming to the Grenadines. It’s an ideal location for learning. You’re exposed to 8- to 15-knot winds, waves offshore off the islands, and a guaranteed variety of good winds.”

McClean says that the most important skill, in any context, is ensuring the safety of the crew and skipper. Other tough skills for students include navigating in ­unfamiliar waters, understanding weather, and anchoring at night. “Probably the most challenging [skill] we teach is crew-overboard drills,” he says, adding that students practice in multiple circumstances at multiple times. “If you’re not confident on all points of sail and you can’t manage a beam reach, then you need training and practice.”

After the introductory and ­intermediate courses, some students apply for advanced courses, including sailing at night. Some want to learn offshore sailing on a trans-Atlantic course. “We have a discussion with them to verify that this a good match for them,” McClean says. “The last thing they want is to wake up and find that this is the last place they want to be.” 

Award-winning journalist Theresa Nicholson is CW’s senior editor.

The post Back to School: Sailing Education Benefits Everyone From Beginners to Offshore Racers appeared first on Cruising World.

Tacking a sailboat through the wind is one of the great joys of sailing. For a few seconds, everyone aboard the boat is engaged, whether steering, trimming or moving across the deck. A racing crew will practice the routine of crisp tacking to avoid losing ground to the competition. The cruising sailor can make the most of this maneuver by tacking with preparation and care.   

The world’s top helmsmen turn the boat slowly to keep momentum. The faster you turn a boat, the more it will slow down. Crews don’t like being surprised by a boat that is suddenly turning without any warning—especially those working below, say, with a pot tumbling off a stove. 

A cadence should be followed leading up to, during and after any tack. The skipper should let the crew know well in advance that a tack is being contemplated. Everyone on board should prepare to perform a specific job. 

The sail trimmer needs to check that the jib sheet is ready to run. The new sheet should have two turns on the winch and be ready for trimming. The mainsail trimmer needs to make sure the traveler is cleated in its proper position so that it doesn’t go careening across the track. I recommend easing the jib sheet early. Backing a headsail slows a boat and makes it hard to trim in on the new tack. Let out the jib just before the sail starts to back. The turning boat will help move the sail across to the new side of the boat. As the jib starts to fill, add turns of the sheet onto the winch. 

There are three things to concentrate on when tacking: steering, sail trim and crew weight position. 

When you turn the rudder, a force is created that slows the boat before it starts turning. A slow action will reduce the forces slowing the boat. Prioritize trimming the sails for the new tack, which will help you accelerate. Ask your crew to stay low while moving across the boat. Crews should change sides during most tacks when the boat is directly upright. In light winds, the crew should delay crossing over to help the boat heel on the new tack. Dinghy sailors call this a “roll tack.” Heeling gives a boat a longer waterline and more speed, and helps the sails set better. The combination of coordinating smooth steering, efficient sail trim, and proper crew weight position will help the boat to accelerate. 

An announcement about an upcoming tack should be conversational. No yelling. One person should note what the new course will be after the tack and advise the helmsperson. Selecting a point on land or a compass course gives the helmsperson a helpful reference. The helmsperson should alert the crew by saying, “Tacking in three boat lengths.” Just before turning the wheel, the person steering should count down the time to the turn: “Three, two, one, tacking now.” Again, turn the wheel or tiller slowly. Let the boat coast into the wind.  

When the boat is heading directly into the wind, increase the turn rate to get the boat on the new course and get the sails to fill. You should sail a few degrees low, of course, and keep the sails eased to help the boat accelerate. When the boat attains full speed, head up to a closehauled course and trim the sail all the way in. Everyone on the boat will quickly settle in and appreciate a quiet sense of accomplishment. 

Be strategic when tacking. Look for a patch of water with smooth waves. Tacking into steep chop makes it difficult to regain full speed. Sometimes, I will wait 15 seconds or longer to find an easy set of waves to tack through. 

Sailboats are most efficient when maneuvering by sailing at full speed before making a turn. I like to tack in a good puff of wind, which also helps with acceleration. On a breezy day, tacking slowly gives the sail trimmer time to trim the sail in. If the boat turns too quickly, the jib will take a long time to be trimmed properly. The helmsperson should keep an eye on the jib and turn only as quickly as the trimmer can pull in the headsail. 

If the wind is particularly strong, the mainsail trimmer can reduce the pressure on the helm by easing the sail out as the tack is completed. If a boat is heeled over too far, it will be uncomfortable for the crew and make considerable leeway.  

In very light winds, avoid tacking frequently. It takes a long time to recover from a maneuver to regain full speed. Study the wind puffs on the water. Try to locate areas with more wind. Once you locate stronger wind, head in that direction to sail in it. 

Making good tacks gives a crew a sense of accomplishment and brings everyone together as a team. With a few practices, the crew will make the tack a thing of beauty.

 6 Tips for Better Tacking

1. Verbally prepare the crew for a tack.
2. Find an area of smooth water to tack in.
3. Start the tack when your boat is sailing at full speed.
4. Tack in a strong puff of wind.
5. Avoid turning too fast.
6. Coordinate steering, sail trim and crew weight position.

Hall of Fame sailor Gary Jobson is a CW editor-at-large.

The post Boathandling: Making the Turn appeared first on Cruising World.

What do I need to charter a sailboat? 

That’s one of the most common questions that ­prospective sailing-school students ask, says Jonathan Payne, executive director of the American Sailing Association.

“If someone wants to charter, they need to feel confident,” he says. “They should have confidence in their sailing skills, docking skills, and know how to troubleshoot an engine. They should have navigational skills to manage unfamiliar waters. And they should have minimal anxiety.”

Although some sailors may already have the chops needed to bareboat charter, many look to the ASA and US Sailing to gain the skills—and the paperwork—that charter companies around the world often require.

Basic Keelboat Sailing (ASA 101), Basic Coastal Cruising (ASA 103), and Bareboat Cruising (ASA 104) are the foundational courses for learning to sail and charter a sailboat. The ASA has over 400 schools around the world. Local and weekend classes are spread across six-week courses, while destination schools in Caribbean hotspots offer seven-day liveaboard training.

US Sailing, the national governing body for the sport of sailing, offers similar building-block tracks: Basic Keelboat, Basic Cruising and Bareboat Cruising. 

“Our students are often people who want to explore the world under sail and visit destinations you can get to only by boat,” says Beth Oliver, vice president and director of sales and marketing at Offshore Sailing School, which offers one-week training courses in Florida and the British Virgin Islands where students earn US Sailing certifications for boats up to 50 feet.

While many US-based charter companies do not require a ­specific license and will look at training along with a sailing résumé, most charter firms in European waters require an International Certificate of Competence, or ICC. US sailors can apply for the similar International Proficiency Certificate once they have completed bareboat-cruising classes. Many international charter companies accept the IPC, but sailors should check ahead of time. Understanding the process, selecting a course, and choosing where to train can be confusing. Companies that offer classes can help narrow the options. 

“When someone interested in a charter calls, we discuss options and steer them in the direction we think is right for them,” says Amanda Kurland, charter sales representative for Sunsail and The Moorings. These sister companies offer numerous choices. “The Moorings offers Royal Yachting Association courses in the Med and Offshore Sailing School courses in the BVI,” Kurland says. Sunsail has destination sailing schools in the United Kingdom, Croatia, Greece, Australia and Grenada. These are destination schools where a week of sail training is often part of a long-planned vacation.

Blue Water Sailing School, an ASA-certified company based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, offers destination charters closer to home. All levels of classes are available in Florida, Rhode Island, the Virgin Islands and the Bahamas. The (relatively) close offerings might appeal to sailors who aren’t ready to commit to a week in Dubrovnik.

“We try to get people to the point where they are confident enough to take their family out for a daysail or, more advanced, maybe take a boat and live aboard for a week,” says Blue Water owner David Pyle.

West Coast Multihulls in San Diego operates a sailing school with training exclusively on multihulls. Students who complete ASA 101,103 and 104 can take ASA 114—the Cruising Catamaran Certification—a five-day liveaboard class offered around Catalina Island and in the Sea of Cortez.

For all types of sailors, once the foundational training and courses are complete, the world really is your oyster. US Sailing and the ASA offer auxiliary certifications on navigation and safety at sea, and advanced courses such as Offshore Passage Making. Barefoot Offshore Sailing School in St. Vincent and the Grenadines offered three trans-Atlantic courses in 2022 on board a Bali 4.1 catamaran. ASA and Sail Canada certifications were available on all three passages.

See the following pages for special charter education resources offering more information on sailing schools.

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What is it with boats that sail with their fenders out? I’ve observed this apathetic habit nearly everywhere I’ve been on water, but never so much as I see it in Southern California. I have called Los Angeles home for the past eight years. Maybe it’s the old New Englander in me, or perhaps I’m just getting older, but it seems that every year, I see more and more boats underway with their fenders out. They bob from the lifelines like a pair of dirty running shoes dangling from knotted laces on a railing the day after track season ended.  

I’m not whining about boats motoring to the fuel dock or headed back to their slip after an afternoon cruise. I’m talking about the boats I see when I am halfway to Catalina, a 30-mile sail from Marina del Rey. Out there, I’ve seen more boats than I can recall sailing hard over with their sails full, rail in the water, and fenders out as if the owner were anticipating a collision with one of the many container ships crossing their bow in the commercial shipping lane. 

It’s not like fenders enhance a boat’s aesthetic. And don’t get me started on how many fenders I have seen out during the cruising-class starting line on the Wednesday-night sunset-racing series.

Matty, a dedicated ­crewmember on my boat for our cruising-class races, calls those dangling fenders “California racing stripes.” He is an Angelino native and, until this past summer, enjoyed the liveaboard life in Marina del Rey for eight years on his 1974 Coronado 35 sailboat. Matty’s coined phrase set the stage for an engaging debate while the rest of our crew laughed, like a sitcom audience, at our passionate opinions about fender etiquette. Matty claimed that stowing fenders was not worth the effort. I’m obsessed with a clean and tidy deck, always. 

Unlike Matty, who is a recreational sailor through and through, I used to earn a living crewing and skippering a variety of yachts in places such as New England, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. I spent much of my career working under sailors of a different generation. The result: I believe anything on a boat that is not in use should be securely stowed. 

I argued that leaving fenders out and tied to the lifelines could be a hazard. A jib sheet could unexpectedly snag during a tack or jibe and wrap around a fender. A crewmember could lose his or her footing when rushing up to the foredeck, and maybe trip or even fall overboard. 

Stowing the fenders does not require much effort. My 7-year-old daughter, Samantha, is the person on my boat who stows and sets the fenders, and she does a marvelous job. To help make the task easy for her or anyone else pitching in, I fitted each fender with a brass fixed-eye boat snap (an inexpensive stock piece of hardware that is like a carabiner but has an eye cast to the end of it) to the short run of line that is tied to the top of the fender. On a calm day, with my boat secured to the dock, I clipped the brass fixed-eye boat snaps to the lifelines and ran the fender lines through the eyes on the snaps. I lifted the fenders to the desired height, just high enough above the water to keep them dry and prevent marine growth from building up on the bottom of the fender and cover. I knotted each fender line to the corresponding snap with two half hitches so that the fender would always hang from the same height every time. 

My lifelines are close to level on my boat, so I set all my fenders to the same height. This way, nobody has to think about which fender goes where, tying knots, or adjusting heights when setting the fenders. Also, the brass fixed-eye boat snap makes for an easy clip-on, clip-off process. 

When we depart for a sail, Samantha pulls up each fender and lays it on the deck after we are clear from our dock. Then, she unclips the fenders from the lifelines and carries them back to the cockpit one by one. We have a space in our lazarette reserved for the fenders when we go on our daysails. When we’re out cruising, I lash the fenders to the mast and stow them under our dinghy, which is tied down to our foredeck. When we are moored or anchored, I sit the fenders on our deck up at the bow and lash them to the bow pulpit.

After our sails have been furled and we are heading back to the dock, Samantha works in reverse order. She pulls the fenders out of the lazarette one by one and walks them forward to clip them to the lifelines. To ensure that the fenders are always set in the right location, I wrapped a strip of black electrical tape on the lifelines where each fender should be set.

I also have fender covers, which are well worth the money. I buy dark ones that don’t show much dirt. Without them, the rubber surface of the fenders becomes sticky and collects grime. That grime then rubs off onto my topsides, making for an ­unpleasant-­looking boat. 

But sailing with dirty topsides is a whole other topic. Don’t get me started on that one either. 

Will Sofrin is an author and wooden-boat builder who has sailed professionally throughout Europe, New England and the Caribbean.

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I used to get stressed out about docking, especially when a crowd was judging every step of my technique. But, after countless rounds of practicing the art of parking on water, I’ve realized that I am much more anxious about disembarking than docking. It’s the going from a dead stop that flusters my feathers, especially if there is a lot of traffic. At least when I am approaching a dock, my boat has some way, meaning I have steerage and control. 

Today, I have the most manageable docking situation one could dream of. My slip is deep in California’s Marina del Rey basin. It points west into the prevailing wind and is shrouded by a row of tall buildings. Disembarking is an easy affair because the water is almost always like glass, and I never have to contend with currents or tides. I simply cast off my dock lines, push the boat back, hop on board, and turn the rudder. I don’t even use the reverse gear. I wait until I have cleared the dock, and then I shift the engine into forward just before I spin my wheel to head out.

Disembarking has not always been this easy. The trickiest scenario for me was the Nantucket Boat Basin in Massachusetts, during the Opera House Cup Regatta in August 2022, surrounded by millions of dollars’ worth of pristinely manicured wooden boats with miles of shimmering varnish. Many of the boats raft up, packing the basin so tightly that the first boat in must be the last boat out to head to the racecourse the following morning. 

Simply casting off the dock lines and pushing back is not an option. Most boats have traditional underbodies, meaning they have a keel-hung rudder, and backing straight out can be a real challenge. This is even truer for the ones with an offset prop, which is a propeller that is not on centerline. These heavy, old wooden boats don’t do so well moving in reverse, even before you add the potential adverse effects of prop walk.  

Prop walk occurs when a vessel is at a dead or near-dead stop. With no forward way, the sudden force of the propeller turning causes the boat’s stern to pivot laterally, also known as yaw. Understanding how this works can make you look like an absolute whiz when docking your boat in a tight situation. 

The effect occurs on a ­majority of single-engine vessels because most have a shaft that is angled slightly downward, resulting in a propeller blade that is not oriented perpendicular to the water’s surface. The downward angle of the propeller blade results in a downstroke thrust that is less than the upstroke thrust. The differential in thrust output pushes the vessel’s stern sideways.  

The effects of prop walk can vary. It’s more pronounced on boats with keel-hung rudders, but it’s still present on boats with spade rudders. Other factors, such as shallower depths and wind, can reduce its effects. Boats with saildrives should not experience prop walk because the saildrive is oriented parallel to the surface of the water. 

And then, there are multihulls. Catamarans typically have an engine in each hull. They spin in different directions so that the torque balances out. As many sailors will tell you, the luxury of having twin engines can be helpful when trying to pivot any boat in tight quarters. God forbid one of the engines goes out because your steerage will then be limited mostly to turning the boat in the direction of the lost engine in forward gear, and the same when in reverse gear.

So, how does one use prop walk to their advantage? Well, the first thing is understanding the direction of spin. A right-handed propeller rotates clockwise if viewing it from the stern looking forward. A left-handed spin rotates ­counterclockwise. A right-handed fixed propeller will tend to push the stern of a vessel to port when in ­reverse, and to starboard when ­running forward. 

How do you determine if your boat has a left- or right-handed prop? My boat has a Yanmar 2GM20F. The online engine manual confirms that the direction of rotation is clockwise. My boat has a right-handed prop.

To teach my wife, Alicia, how to use prop walk to her advantage, we motored out into the center of a channel on a day with little traffic and no wind. We brought the boat to a dead stop about two boat lengths from a channel buoy. Alicia turned the rudder hard over to starboard, shifted the engine into forward gear, and throttled up for two seconds. She then quickly throttled down and shifted the engine back into neutral. 

Next, Alicia shifted the engine into reverse gear for two seconds, stopping any forward momentum. She then shifted back to neutral. Both bursts had to be quick and strong because we were trying to prevent the boat from moving forward or backward. 

The prop wash encountered resistance from the hard-turned rudder. As a result, our boat began to rotate on a center pivot access to port. 

Watching the buoy for reference, Alicia repeated the process multiple times, rotating our boat to 180 degrees within a boat length. We then brought our boat over to the fuel dock and tied up starboard-­side to. When ready to disembark, without springing the boat, we cast off our dock lines. Alicia ­repeated the process we had practiced. As expected, the stern kicked out to port. She then shifted the transmission back into reverse gear, throttled up slightly, and smoothly backed our boat away from the fuel dock like a pro.  

Will Sofrin is a wooden-boat builder who has sailed professionally throughout Europe, New England and the Caribbean. He is also the author of All Hands On Deck: A Modern-Day High Seas Adventure to the Far Side of the World. 

Wrangling Cats

Disembarking on a catamaran requires a whole different skillset. Collin Marshall, head sailing engineer and commissioning skipper for Kinetic Catamarans in South Africa, says that he prefers to back out off the dock because the stern takes longer to get blown back in compared with the bow. This is due to the lateral resistance that rudders create, as well as the forward windage on deck from deckhouses and the mast, which is typically stepped farther forward than on a monohull.

Marshall starts by springing the catamaran forward to help kick the stern out from the dock. Then, with the stern out and engines in reverse, he splits the throttles and aims the stern in the direction he wants to go, away from the dock.

“Keep the rudders straight,” he says. “Remember that you have two engines very far apart, so forget about the rudders and wheel. That’s where people make mistakes, because they will turn the wheel and then forget to straighten it out, and then, in a pinch, they might focus on the throttles, forgetting about the rudders being turned over, adding more chaos to a situation.”

He also says that having a bow thruster (even in just one hull) can make all the difference. With that tool, he can parallel-park a 50-foot catamaran on a dime no matter where the wind is coming from. -WS

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