Early Season Sailing Needs Special Care
By Ian Savidge
With sailing just around the corner, soon it will be the time to grab your
gear, get down to the club and jump on a boat as fast as possible, knowing
that the maintenance crew will have prepared everything on your boat so
that you can just sign the sheet and leave the dock. Your crew, and you,
may be a little rusty from the winter lay-off, but you will have plenty of
time out on the water to put things right, and to check out your crew.
Right? Well no, actually, wrong, and hopefully not dead wrong.
Because even though the early season offers some of the most exciting and exhilarating
sailing, it also offers some of the biggest challenges of the season – keeping warming,
staying dry and above all, staying on board. Because at this early stage of the season, the
water is only a few degrees above freezing, and a dip in the lake is to be avoided at all
costs. Perhaps you will dimly remember from your physics classes that water conducts heat,
or cold, twenty four times more efficiently than air – and that translates into about three
minutes before you can no longer help yourself get out of the water, and ten minutes before
it really does not matter any more – at least as far as you are concerned.
So checking and briefing your crew becomes especially important – make sure they have
enough warm clothing, remind them to check each other for signs of frostbite (white
patches on the skin), watch out for shivering or loss of alertness, and avoid sending them up
on the foredeck unless absolutely necessary. If you have to send crew up forward, make
sure they are holding on properly, and if necessary, rig a jack line for them to grab.
And before you leave the dock, give the boat a thorough check-out. Remember that it has
been sitting out for several months through the winter, and even though the maintenance
crews have done their best to prepare the boat for the water, as skipper you owe it to
yourself and your crew to re-check everything thoroughly again. Now is the time to re-
familiarize yourself with the through-hull fittings, and to make sure that the wooden plugs
are at hand, and that you can locate the rest of the safety equipment. If your boat suddenly
starts taking on water, you can lose valuable time searching for the through-hull fittings,
and locating the cause of the leak. Perhaps it is just water siphoning through the head,
because the valve has been left in the open position, but either way, water flooding into the
boat is every bit as unnerving as a crew-overboard situation.
Also check out all the lines and fittings, and make sure they all look sound. And when you
leave the dock, make sure that there are no lines trailing in the water – Spring is not the
time to be unraveling a mooring line from your prop as you drift towards the shore.
And when you are sailing, even though you want to share the helm with your crew,
consider whether the conditions are appropriate for putting a less experienced crew
member on the helm – and brief the member and the rest of your crew before doing so.
Because the risk of creating an accidental gybe will be higher – and 80% or more of COB
situations are caused by accidental gybes. So prep your helmsperson for recognizing the
signs of a gybe – a telltale flutter on the luff of the mainsail – and make sure he/she knows
to push the tiller quickly towards the boom, or to swing the wheel away from the boom,
to get out of the danger zone. And make sure that the rest of the crew stay alert, and their
heads down.
So go out and enjoy early season sailing – and the more you anticipate possible hazards,
and the better you brief your crew, the more they will enjoy sailing with you, since they
will recognize that safety is your prime consideration.
Last reviewed on February 19, 2008.dc
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