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    Yachting Monthly's 200 Skipper's Tips: Instant Skills to Improve Your Seamanship
    Yachting Monthly's 200 Skipper's Tips: Instant Skills to Improve Your Seamanship
    Yachting Monthly's 200 Skipper's Tips: Instant Skills to Improve Your Seamanship
    Ebook271 pages1 hour

    Yachting Monthly's 200 Skipper's Tips: Instant Skills to Improve Your Seamanship

    By Tom Cunliffe

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    About this ebook

    Dip into any of the 200 tips in this handy book to make yourself a better yachtsman. They are the very best of the Skipper's Tips from the pages of Yachting Monthly magazine. Each tip is a pearl of wisdom from Britain's foremost yachting writer, Tom Cunliffe. Discover practical skills that you won't find anywhere else. Each tip is illustrated and there's something for everyone – from complete beginner to ocean navigator. Skipper's Tips is a treasure trove of nautical know-how, covering everything from seamanship and life on board to navigation and safety, with lots more in between.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFernhurst Books Limited
    Release dateAug 27, 2010
    ISBN9781118315507
    Yachting Monthly's 200 Skipper's Tips: Instant Skills to Improve Your Seamanship
    Author

    Tom Cunliffe

    Tom Cunliffe has many years of experience cruising all round Europe and from the Caribbean to Russia and Brazil to the Arctic. He is an RYA Yachtmaster examiner and a training consultant for Sailing USA - the governing body of yachting in the USA. He is a regular columnist for Sailing Today, Classic Boat and Yachting World in the UK, and SAIL in the USA.

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      Book preview

      Yachting Monthly's 200 Skipper's Tips - Tom Cunliffe

      PREFACE

      Longer ago that I’d care to admit, the editor of Yachting Monthly asked me to pen a few tips for skippers and crews. I wasn’t acknowledged as author of these early efforts, but I soon found I was delivering a group of them each month. I’ve never had proprietary rights to this page of goodies and I fully expected that it wouldn’t last, but it kept right on going through the GPS revolution and the arrival of the reliable chart-plotter. Today, I still sit down once every four weeks to deliver these bite-sized chunks of information.

      Writing tips isn’t always the easiest of jobs. For a start, pitching the right level of reader expertise takes some thought. A jewel for one skipper might be blatantly obvious to another. Some perfectly competent people have no natural interest in electronics but feel that maybe they should. For them, a quick idea about checking a waypoint might save a lot of embarrassment. To a technophile whose greatest delight is pressing buttons and reading manuals, it’s an insult to put it in the magazine. On the other side of the five-pound note, an old gaffer who uses rolling hitches and topsail halyard bends as matter of course may take amiss any offer of help in securing to a single bollard. He’s right, of course, but I wonder how he’d get on peeling spinnakers on a dark, windy night.

      Another pitfall for the tip-writer is the inevitable danger of repetition. After all, sailing is not exactly astrophysics. I often think there isn’t much to it really, yet every time I go out there I discover a fresh slant on an old issue. After twenty years, a degree of saying what has been said can’t be avoided, but at least I try to offer the nugget in a different way or from a new perspective.

      Please bear all this in mind as you dip into this little book. Also, try to be kind to my old-fashioned insistence on referring to boats as ‘she’ and people as ‘he’ where only a personal pronoun will do. English is inadequate in this department, and no disrespect is intended to the ladies. I can’t keep writing ‘he or she’, and the day I use ‘their’ for a single person will be the day they tip my last remains in the broad Atlantic.

      I’m grateful to Wiley for coming up with the idea and to YM for giving us our head to get on with it. You may recognise some old friends or the tips may all be new to you, but, whoever you may be, I hope you find something useful.

      Tom Cunliffe

      June 2010

      SEAMANSHIP

      1 A QUESTION OF COURTESY

      Not all boats that race are flat-out ‘Grand Prix’ jobs. Many a cruiser enjoys the odd weekend’s sport with the local club. Such a boat could easily be taken for a cruiser, which on any other day she may well be. Today, however, she isn’t flying an ensign, and this is the international sign that she’s racing. As soon as she finishes or retires, she should hoist her ensign again so that her fellow competitors and anyone else around knows that she’s no longer subject to the racing rules. Right now, those of us who are cruising might like to give her clear wind. It could be us one day.

      No ensign? Then she’s probably racing

      2 WHOSE RIGHT OF WAY?

      A useful aide-mémoire when crossing another vessel in daylight with both boats under power, is to ask yourself which of her sidelights you would be seeing if it were dark. A red (port) light would suggest that you are to take care, so stay out of her way. Green is for ‘go’, so if you see her starboard bow you can stand on carefully.

      Picture the lights to work out who has right of way in daylight under power

      3 IDENTIFYING A COLLISION RISK

      Out at sea, collision risk is checked by ascertaining whether or not the vessel in question is maintaining a steady bearing relative to you. Initially, this is spotted by keeping your head still and seeing whether a distant ship remains in place over a particular stanchion, shroud, or other likely item. If it looks like a possibility but you are uncertain, you will take the ship’s compass bearing, and keep checking as range closes. You might even use the electronic bearing line on your radar.

      Line up the ship with a stanchion if there’s nothing in the background to use as a reference

      In confined waters, it is more convenient to note whether or not the other craft appears steady relative to its background. While difficult to prove mathematically, this old rule of thumb works every time unless the other craft is almost on the beach. If the other vessel stays in front of the same far-off field, chimney or parked car as you approach, you are on a collision heading, so watch out!

      4 DIVER DOWN!

      Learning all the code flags is no longer a part of any yachting syllabus, but every watchkeeper must be aware of the meaning of the ‘A’ flag. It says: I have a diver down. Keep well clear at slow speed. Sometimes these flags are made of plywood, sometimes of fabric, but it is always dive boats that show them. Watch out for them and comply with their request. If you miss one, you could be responsible for causing a serious accident. Even if you don’t hurt anyone, you’ll get a well-deserved earful from the cox’n of the dive boat.

      Be vigilant if you see Flag A flying

      5 TURNING UP

      The only certainty about how to make fast to a cleat is that there are a number of equally good ways of doing it. In deciding which to use, the questions to ask are:

      If I secure it like this, will it be impossible for the rope to come off by mistake?

      Will it also be impossible for the rope to jam up on the cleat?

      Have I put the turns on in such a way that, as I begin to take them off again, the rope can be surged under load if required?

      Three ‘yes’ answers, and you’ve got it right. Notice that in the first picture (Cleat 1), care is being taken that the second half of the initial turn on a poorly but typically aligned cleat cannot lock under load against the first half. Cleat 2 shows a neat, safe job in progress, with figures of eight going on in a non-jammable way. Cleat 3 shows a classic ‘half a turn, two figures-of-eight and a final round turn’ solution. Usually a winner, but if you’re short of rope or the cleat isn’t big enough, have no fear of using a locking hitch as in Cleat 4. These are not the only ways, though.

      6 LOOK ALOFT

      If you set your rig up yourself you may be completely confident in it but if it was left to anyone else to do, it’s worth checking your pins and clevises before a passage. If you can’t conveniently go aloft, rack the binoculars down to their shortest range, clean the lenses and take a serious look aloft. You’ll be surprised at what you can see.

      Use binoculars to check your rig

      7 WHERE’S YOUR BALL?

      We all know that we should hoist a black ball when we drop anchor, yet many of us neglect to do so. One reason for this is that the ball is often tucked behind a tool-box at the back of a locker and it’s easy to ‘forget’ to go and get it. So why not stow it in the anchor locker where it’ll always be to hand?

      A good skipper should keep his crew informed – it’s a great way to boost morale

      8 NEVER STOP COMMUNICATING

      Any skipper can become so involved with the challenges of command that he or she forgets to keep the crew in

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