The Complete Ocean Skipper

Deep-water Voyaging, Navigation and Yacht Management

Tom Cunliffe

• Publisher: Adlard Coles
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781472918147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Aviation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Following on from his bestselling The Complete Day Skipper and The Complete Yachtmaster, yachting legend Tom Cunliffe turns his attentions to the third strand of the RYA syllabus. With the same hugely popular, highly practical approach, The Complete Ocean Skipper covers everything a yachtsman needs to know when planning an offshore cruise or ocean passage. All aspects of planning and preparing for – as well as setting out on – a long-distance cruise are featured: - Preparation: types of suitable boat, choice of rig, engine power, safety equipment, communication systems, crew preparation
- On passage: ocean weather systems, forecasting, deck routines, watchkeeping, self-steering, emergencies, heavy weather techniques
- Ocean navigation: electronic as well as celestial A unique and definitive handbook, The Complete Ocean Skipper goes beyond the theory of the RYA syllabus to ensure that readers are equipped with the knowledge of both what to do and how to go about it, in whatever circumstances. A veteran offshore yachtsman as well as an RYA examiner, Tom Cunliffe brings his experience to bear and packs this must-have guide with invaluable hands-on advice for offshore and coastal sailors alike. With clear, helpful colour photographs and diagrams throughout, this is the essential book for anyone planning for or dreaming about sailing further afield.

PART 1 • THE OFFSHORE YACHT

1HULLS FOR OCEAN SAILING

Hull considerations

Long or short keel

Catamarans

Stability

2SAILING RIGS FOR DEEP WATER

Bermudan rig

Alternative rigs

3ENGINES

Accessibility

Servicing

The drive chain

Tools and manuals

Troubleshooting

4STEERING

Rudders

Tillers and wheels

Self-steering

5SYSTEMS

Electricity

‘Need-to-have’ systems

‘Want-to-have’ systems

6ACCOMMODATION

The saloon

Sea berth

The galley

Fiddles

Hand holds

Lighting

On deck

1HULLS FOR OCEAN SAILING

The author’s Mason 44 Constance.

Choosing a boat for ocean sailing is different from deciding what to buy for weekends and holidays in continental waters, for two reasons. The first is that the vessel is going to be home, not an occasional bolt-hole from daily life. The second is even more serious. Weather forecasting for temperate zones such as Northern Europe and North America is now so reliable that it should be possible to cruise these waters for a lifetime and never be at sea in storm conditions. Sure, the Mediterranean can still produce local gales from nowhere, but the great winds such as the Mistral and the Bora are generally well foretold. Far out on the ocean, there is sometimes no escape.

Britain’s governing body of sailing, the RYA, defines an ocean passage for the purposes of its Ocean Yachtmaster certificate as being at least 600 nautical miles between ports, mostly more than 50 miles from land. The reasoning behind this is to place a yacht beyond the limits of reliable forecasting so that, as far as can be achieved without literally crossing an ocean, she was on her own and must make the best of anything that comes. Old hands will shake their heads and remark that this distance is nothing like long enough. I have much sympathy with them, but the point to take home is the essential concept that, on the ocean, forecasting – even if you can get it – isn’t necessarily going to be a ticket to a safe haven. If a storm has your name on it, then your boat must be able to ride it out safely.

Yacht club bars resound with tales of ‘50 knots across the deck’ in places like the West Solent. I’ve worked there much of my life and I’ve rarely seen anything approaching this in terms of sustained wind force. Maybe I’ve been lucky, but I doubt it. Fifty knots in open water with a long ocean fetch is a different story altogether for a short-handed cruising yacht. By the time it’s been howling for 24 hours out in the North Atlantic, kicking up 40ft seas that march northeastwards all the way from America, you’ll be wishing you were somewhere else. When the wind veers and sends the church-high waves crazy, a small crew – even a young one – may well have run out of the stamina needed to look after the boat. Sooner or later, the time comes for her to look after them. Whether a boat points two degrees higher than the average, or has a bigger bed in the aft cabin than the next boat in the show, becomes a laughable irrelevance. One message of this book is that seaworthiness is not defined simply by a set of numbers produced by authorities obliged by their calling to define the undefinable. Knowing a boat’s angle of vanishing stability is helpful, but it is a long way from the end of the story.

Boat manufacturers’ propaganda promises craft after craft whose spectacular performance is only equalled by their world-beating comfort and security at sea. The truth is that nothing on the ocean is given for free. A boat that really can look after herself, perhaps by heaving to with total reliability, pointing up at around 40° and never falling into the dangerous beam-on state, is unlikely to go to windward in flat water as well as one designed for the summer Baltic, with performance and space below as the main priorities. Advertisements for the high-performance yacht will show her powering along in 15 knots of breeze with a smiling crew having a grand day out. And so they are. They may stop smiling when the boat is being knocked around in a big broken sea with the autopilot disabled, the deep-reefed mainsail overpowered and the whole business having been going on for two days. Such a yacht may put in an excellent passage time on a downwind slide to the Caribbean from Europe and give grand sport on the day-sails between the islands. She may also cruise back to Europe without drama on the low-powered steamer route via Bermuda and the Azores, but should she opt to return by the exciting route up the Eastern Seaboard of North America, taking off for Ireland from Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, it could be a different story.

The bottom line to all this is to define your objectives carefully and, above all, honestly. Armed with this brief, you can then consider the choices from a position of understanding. No boat is all things to every sailor. The successful ones are those that have been chosen wisely to suit the character of their owners and to do the job they will undertake.

Hull considerations

A modern family cruiser with in-mast mainsail reefing.

A fast cruiser, probably more suited to the ARC than northeast Greenland.

What it’s all about for many people – anchored snugly under a tropical beach.

A strong economical all-weather cruiser.

Generalising is always dangerous, because boats do not necessarily fit into neatly defined categories. Rigs can be different too, with certain variants often being found on particular hull types, but, so long as the main hull forms are understood, an appropriate boat may be chosen. The rig can then be accepted or modified to suit the owner. It is the hull that defines all.

To state that the characteristics of cruising boats are varied would fall an old-fashioned sea league short of the mark. Some boats handle predictably in harbour, even steering sweetly astern in strong winds. Others, which may be fine at sea, are blown around marinas like empty crisp packets in a pub parking lot. Many that are wonderfully steady at slow speed going ahead cannot steer astern at all, leaving otherwise competent owners embarrassed on a regular basis in tight harbours, unless they mitigate the inevitable by fitting a bow thruster. Deep-sea storm survival tactics trashed as suicidal by modern writers working with fin-keeled yachts may still be reasonably safe options for traditional yachts modelled on workboats. A modern bulb-keel flyer can scud across an ocean in half the time taken by a heavy-displacement alternative. Do you care, or do you really quite like it out there and see no need to hurry? If you opt for speed, what are the trade-offs?

Among the main factors deciding a boat’s behaviour is the position of her rudder, or rudders, in relation to the keel, how long the keel is and whether the rudder is hung on the trailing edge of it, or is salient, with or without a supporting skeg. Further general issues are how beamy she is in relation to length; whether she’s a heavyweight or a lightweight; how heavy her displacement; whether her forefoot is deep or cut away; how well balanced her sections are when the hull is heeled over, and the windage of her topsides in relation to her underwater lateral area.

Set out here are some of the main categories.

Long or short keel

Taking shoal draught out of the equation for the moment, the most important split among monohulls is the long and the shorter keel. There are almost infinite varieties of both, but the definition is that the long-keeler hangs her rudder from the aft end of the keel itself, while the rudder on the short-keeled boat is a separate unit mounted as far aft as practicable.

As a general principle, long-keeled yachts are heavier, with deeper body sections allowing lower freeboard. They are also often steadier at sea, resisting tendencies to eccentric behaviour and broaching in gusty weather. Not all long-keeled boats steer well. Some, influenced by rating rules in the 1950s and 60s, shortened their keels in the hunt for less wetted area, with the result that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The Ocean Skipper
• Part 1 • The Offshore Yacht
• Part 2 • Ocean Navigation and Deep-Sea Seamanship
• Part 3 • Life on Board
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Further Reading
• eCopyright