TEN TIPS FOR SURVIVAL AT SEA

Derek tells a good yarn.  He and his wife Anthea are veteran cruisers from the lovely boat Sukanuk which shared a finger with Moonraker at Cammeray.  Derek confided that he comes from a stormy coastline in Wales where sailors use a special sign to foretell if it is safe to sail.  Essentially, a candle is lit, and placed on the bow of a boat intending to put to sea.   If it stays alight this is a bad sign: there is not enough wind to put out to sea.  If it blows out this is a bad sign too: there is too much wind to go out. (Survival Tip No. 1: Don’t sail.)

For experienced sailors this is a very funny joke. It cuts to the heart of the fact that they love sailing, and that they fear sailing too.  Hence the near-religious interest in the yachty community in safety and survival.

Each sailor has his or her own tips for safety, some learned the hard way from times they cheated death or sinking. The coronial inquiries arising from the modern ocean racing disasters like the Fastnet of 1979 and the Sydney to Hobart races of 1993 and 1998 are the source of many others. My favourite cautionary tale comes from the Sydney to Hobart 98 and is about the two men who survived the cyclonic winds and mountainous seas in a small life raft, unlike their colleagues from the other life raft from the same vessel. The raft floor was badly holed, but they were well prepared and the manufacturer’s repair kit was to hand. They quickly scanned the instructions.  (Survival Tip No. 2: Always carry a spare set of reading glasses). The first instruction was; “place the holed area in a warm, dry environment before affixing the patch. The glue won’t hold if it is wet”.  (Survival Tip No. 3:  Breathe. Don’t panic.)

Dean and I completed a two day ‘official’ course on safety and survival at sea recently and loved it.  Amongst other things we found out that our expensive buoyancy vests were not set up correctly and mine nearly drowned me on its first outing. (Safety Tip No 4: Don’t float upside down.) 

The life raft drills were great fun, reminiscent of childhood frolics in an old inner tube. However, the main thing we learned is that we never, ever, ever want to be dependent on a life raft. Too small.  Too flimsy. (Survival Tip No. 5: Don’t sink.) 

The second thing we learned was that it is almost impossible to haul yourself into a life raft while wearing all your survival gear. (Survival Tip No. 6: if you must sink, pack a rugby player or two with the life raft to haul you in.) 

The most disconcerting part of the course for us dealt with crew overboard (COB) procedures which outline for a skipper what each crew member should do in the emergency. For example Crew Member 1 to maintain watch and point to the person in the water; Crew Member 2 to deploy the COB retrieval equipment; Crew Member 3 to ready the winch or other hoist mechanism; Crew Member 4 to act as radio operator to call in a pan-pan.  And so on. And so on.

“What do you do,” I asked, “if there is only one person left on the boat after the COB incident”?  A reasonable question since we and many others sail two-up.    Our experienced, cheerful, resourceful instructor responded with a slight hesitation and a shifty look.  “Always wear a PLB (personal location beacon). A helicopter could find you. Try to avoid sharks.” Survival tip No 7: Don’t fall overboard unless you leave at least 8 sober, competent people on board, they know you are in the water, there is no wind or wave action and they want you back.

Most sailors are also alive to the risk of hitting floating or semi submerged items, like a reef, another vessel, a lost shipping container, a snoozing whale or a basking sunfish.  The goal is to have the person on watch to spot the said object before they hit it. Sailors are very alert when going through shipping lanes, but few claim they have ever seen a floating shipping container. Many fear hitting a big whale.  From all accounts the whale suffers terribly too, and can cry piteously. What’s a broken rudder compared to a broken back?  It can be some comfort to know that any whale you hit was already dead, but that has its down-side too. Safety Tip No. 8: Always sail upwind of a dead whale if it has been dead for some time.

Whales are one thing, but yachtie folklore has it that giant sunfish are something else again. Some say that a sleeping sunfish is a handy device invoked by ambitious racing skippers who sacrifice weight and strength of keel or rudder to generate speed. Safety Tip No. 9: Remember that the probability of hitting a sleeping sunfish while racing rises proportionately with the excess on your insurance policy and the above-specification stress you place on keel and rudder.

Anyway, survival course over, Dean and I started the Moonraker safety audit.  It was pretty daunting. There is no end to the magical, beautiful, ingenious, arcane, desirable and mostly dispensable things you can buy to feel safe.  In the end, however, it is clear that safety depends as much on attitude, common sense, practice and experience as much as it does the depth of your pocket.  We did supplement Moonraker’s already extensive equipment list with a few items, including a couple of $12 strobe lights to affix to our life jackets and a vacuum flasks for hot soup when it is rough. But we decided not to upgrade our perfectly functional expensive auto-helm system so we can auto-tack and thus hold our heads up in the yacht club bar, or to buy a satellite system, since our existing mobiles, computers, VHF and HF work OK where we are going.

Safety Tip No. 10: Be obsessive, systematic and thorough, and use only the best and latest equipment to cover every single aspect of safety you and anyone else can think of.  Amongst other benefits, this means you will have neither the time nor the money to sail, and you will be perfectly safe.