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I agree with your fundamental point about not using devices, but specifically on the night vision here’s a tip for iphone users in case you ever do have to use your phone (eg backup navigation) at night:
https://medium.com/@ImJasonH/dim-your-iphone-screen-with-three-clicks-4a01deb79f71
It lets you setup a shortcut that dims the screen significantly below the brightness you can get with the normal controls and has saved me searing my retinas on many occasions.
(feel free to direct me if this should live somewhere better)
Hi Nick,
Sounds like a good tip, although as you say, still better, I think to stay away from devices.
The role of a watch-stander on passage is very nearly analogous to that of the pilot flying during an airliner’s cruise phase. Most of the lessons learned, and regulatory / procedural guidance developed, on the aviation side carry over quite well to our situation.
Yes, the plane or boat is mostly taking care of itself on autopilot, second-to-second and minute-to-minute. You don’t have your hands on the wheel, and are free to process other tasks.
The human who’s in charge is still responsible for keeping an eye on the weather, looking for conflicting traffic, communications, systems monitoring, reassessing possible tactical adjustments to the route, preparing for and executing changes to the plane or boat’s configuration, planning for emergency response options, updating the passage plan, maintaining logs….
If you are staying on top of the watch-keeping tasks, you do not have time to mess around with unrelated trivialities. And if you are messing around with Snapchat or Discord, it’s a pretty good bet that you aren’t paying enough attention to your actual tasks.
As for messing with equipment underway. Again, our airborne colleagues have lessons for us. Airplanes have lists of stuff that you are allowed to troubleshoot while in flight, with specific procedures to follow for each of them. If you can’t solve it with those procedures, you abort your attempts, declare an appropriate level of emergency, and get the bird safely on the ground before doing anything else. When these rules are violated, people die (e.g. the IAA Flight 8501 crash). The same principle applies aboard ship: you need to distinguish between things that require troubleshooting while underway, and things that need to be left alone until you are in a stable and non-dynamic situation.
I couldn’t disagree less 😉
all excellent points
during WW2 aircraft mechanics were selected on the basis of the otherwise ghastly Seadhore music test. They figured, if they can’t hear well, how will they know that something is wrong with the engine.
incidentally, we ended up slimming electronics down to a third, because we want to focus on the sailing and not on digital signal. I stared into screens my entire work life, why would I want to do that all the time at the ship.
last, bit bit least, the biggest surprise going out on longer passages is the flow of off and on watches, just being part of everything and the like. And yes, it starts after about a day and a half.
40 years ago I didn’t like wind instruments because they promoted sailing by the numbers rather than paying attention to wind, heal, rudder, sail shape and load. I am still finding that whenI put the cover on the wind instrument, many sailors can’t tell me the wind direction.
Hi Carl and George,
While I have a full instrument suit on the J/109 and enjoy “racing the numbers: I agree that learning to sail without is important.
I joined a delivery cruise recently where I was given the watch with the new (inexperienced) owner…. he spent 7 1/2 days (and nights) staring at the Nav App on his iPhone, to the point where he adjusted the autopilot courses via blue-tooth. I tried to talk him into some hands-on helm time to no avail. As I left the boat in its new slip, I suggested that he plot out a day cruise on the nav system, then put everything away and go analog/eyeball navigation: comparing the two plots is a great excercise!
John, these discussions are fabulous. Is there a way to compile them and allow me to make them available to my crew?
Hi David,
Thanks for the kind words, you could consider a group membership for your crew: https://www.morganscloud.com/register/group-of-5/
That gives you five memberships for the price of 4 and you have control (on your account page) of who you issue them to. If a crew changes you can even change the membership to match.
Very useful tips! We are shorthanded on SEAMER and often give kids little “quart”, translates to quarter. 15 minutes is all they can sustain at their age anyways. Sometimes, it’s just so the person on watch goes to the bathroom without waking the other adult, throwing something in the oven or grabbing a coffee, that type of thing. We are not truly unavailable during those little watches. They sit in the captain’s seat, boasting with pride, feeling privileged we trust them for such an important duty, because it is a big one. We’ve shown them what to look for, but also what to listen for. Above all else, they are left with the prime directive: if you are unsure about anything, give us a shout. Their instincts are surprisingly good.
We’ve also recently dealt with unstable technology, including for most of the duration of a crossing from Fiji to NZ. We simply could not leave the station unattended, even for a hot minute, in case the autopilot gave up. But it would last only seconds and come back on. It was very random and we were on our toes. When it came back on, it would maintain the COG at the time of reboot. Regardless, those seconds it was off was enough to steer us off course or put us in a bad situation with respect to the waves in bigger swell. Hence, the kids were very useful to look out for those “no autopilot computer” pop up if we needed to leave the station. Plenty of task that require 2 adults on a sailboat, like putting up or pulling down a sail. After much troubleshooting, turns out it was a bad contact between the autopilot and the NMEA backbone. There was nothing wrong with the autopilot itself, of which we had a spare, ready for plug and play. Sure, the autopilot is nice, but it needs a babysitter, even when it works A1. I, for one, am scared for life! I think the parallel to aviation made by another reader is very acute.
I however have to confess that if I don’t grab a good book at night after my initial recon, I would fall asleep for sure. We don’t allow each other to get outside the cockpit during night watches, although my husband regularly breaks that rule and there is little to do on most nights despite the things you have listed. I do read under the red light and find that I do remain especially aware of my surroundings during that simple activity. I can’t do music or movies. I find it too distracting and it would use all my hearing capital which should be directed at the boat. The duties of the watch come first, the book second and I don’t find them particularly conflicting. I stop reading regularly to adjust the sails, scan the horizon, take a look at radar, tend to an alarm given by radar AND for writing in the log book, of course. Some people find we are a bit anal about the log book, but day or night on our vessel, it’s always been a must. They sure have yet to find themselves on a boat that suddenly goes completely dark on them. We have, mid Pacific. It sure was nice to know where we were steering to when only the compass and our headlamps remained.
Hi Marie Eve ,
Great to get the children involved like that. My father was a huge believer in giving me responsibility for important things at an early age, and I think the benefits have stayed with me for life.
Your experience with the autopilot highlights a fundamental weakness with NMEA 2000: https://www.morganscloud.com/2013/05/26/nmea-2000missing-the-obvious/
Sadly I’m not sure what to with about it other than use really good cabling: https://www.morganscloud.com/2020/11/10/maretron-better-nmea-2000-cabling/
On reading, being a huge reader myself I get it. That said we will have a tip in the next (and last) part that may help with the problem of falling asleep if not reading.
We are all in for a ton of responsibilities for the kids. It’s important they feel involved.
Thank you soooo much! I’ve been a member since November, I should have thought of coming on here for information. I will give those articles on NMEA 2000 a good read.
Amongst the book read this past year on night shift was The Wager by David Grann. I discovered the sentence for falling asleep on a watch back then was death. Being a lawyer, I went on a bender looking for the history of this rule. Fascinating. I for sure prefer today’s law, but still, that outlines how important it’s always been. I’m on a streak of shipwreck books, like John Kretschmer At the Mercy of the Sea. That will keep any sailor awake.
Wow, Bluetooth controlled devices, phone controlled devices, NMEA, must be nice. (Maybe) I do have NMEA for MMSI and Bluetooth for the fridge, so no distractions there. I can get well enough distracted in me own brain. Just this past summer the first mate, or captain, depends, asked why I kept looking behind all the time. I said to watch out for all those !?*$#× salmon fishing guides trying to kill us! Ooooo, bad, bad things.
NAVY days haunt me on this one still.
Years ago I served on a vessel with a watch alarm. It’s parameters where adjustable but basically it required the watch to push two buttons on opposite sides of the helm station in sequence every 15 minutes or it woke up the off watch/captain. Maybe this would not be practical on a short handed sailing yacht. If the watch is quietly tucking a reef when the alarm cycles, but the discipline of getting up and moving every 10 to 15 minutes was really helpful.
I found it interesting that technology distractions was your first stop. Sign of the times I guess. When I read the title, I expected tips on keeping alert and physically comfortable (but not the kind of comfort that leads to sleep…).
I believe that instrument data, and more importantly, understanding instrument data, in the age of digitalisation, is a fantastic aid to watch keeping. The burden of process heavy navigation has been removed, leaving more time for seamanship and watching. A simple example is the heading and COG vector, especially vector length, where the arrow head shows position based on time interval that the vector is set to (assuming that capability). At a glance, I can see where I will be and I can alter course to counter tide and leeway, without recourse to plotting EP or CTS. There is no doubt that instruments are a great aid. Of course, too many pointless instruments are just overheads, getting in the way and providing data overload. Understanding instrument source of data and implications if that data is lost, especially on integrated multi function displays, and decision making, is a weakness in the UK which the RYA is moving forward on to address.
There’s a very big difference between automation & technology that helps you with your task (e.g. the HDG / COG vectors Alastair describes) and technology that distracts you from your task (eg. Snapchat, Discord, Reddit, Candy Crush, Pokemon Go, messing around with the chartplotter and radar configs in a pilotage situation when you really need to be doing an every-minute visual scan for other boats).
Hi Alastair,
I agree, I would not go back to hand plotting on paper on a bet! And don’t get me started on how little I miss getting a wet ass while taking a sextant shot and then making myself seasick while working it out! In my earlier comment, I more meant wind instruments and that I think learning to sail without them is a good idea, just to get a feel for things.
Good discussion points, but the lead photo of the watch stander sitting under the dodger is a concern. Frequently dodger glazing is either impaired by UV or salt spray . I like watch standers to be where they have maximum visibility. On a trip from the Eastern Caribbean back to Maine, I was on watch sitting outboard of the aft helm and I noticed a barely visible suspicious object ahead which we left to our port side clearing it by about 10’. It was a steel 50 gallon drum that was submerged save about three inches visible. Would have ruined our day or worse had we hit it.
Hi Jane,
Sure, it’s a trade off. Visibility against exposure and tiredness. Note that on that boat standing allows one to look over the dodger, which Phyllis and I have always insisted on. (More on when we look over the dodger in the next post.)
So, anyway, glad you spotted the barrel, but on the other hand is it really practical to sit exposed to the wind, spray and sun, 24/7 in case there is a barrel? After all, you would not have seen it at night, and probably not in heavy weather, and with something that small, even a glance away or it being up sun, would, I think make it difficult to spot.
Phyllis and I would say that level of vigilance would be too exhausting, and getting over tired is dangerous too. So would take the risk of being behind the dodger (most of the time). Like most things, this is another risk balance decision that each of us must make for ourselves. One other thing, we were really fastidious about keeping the glazing well polished and clear. I do agree that we see a lot of horribly fogged dodger glazing out there.