Online Book: Heavy Weather Tactics

As we have shared in earlier chapters in this Online Book, we now believe that for extreme weather where large breaking waves may be present, a Series Drogue, as designed by Don Jordan, is the best survival strategy. That said, heaving-to is still a technique that not only can save your bacon in a gale, but is also surprisingly comfortable and useful for taking a break from the demands of shorthanded voyaging.

In this chapter we tell you how to set up just about any boat to successfully heave-to.

As wonderful as heaving-to is, done wrong it can be dangerous. In this post we tell you about when heaving-to went wrong for us, and what to watch out for.

So how can we be sure whether or not heaving-to will result in a knock-down or roll-over in heavy weather? John tackles this difficult but vital question.

Changing survival strategies in the middle of a storm at sea is not something that any of us want to be faced with, but here are some thoughts from John about how that might be done safely.

In the previous chapters we have talked about heaving-to and various drag devices, but none of that is going to help us if we are caught on a lee shore. In this chapter I write about when that exact scenario happened to me and what we have done to prepare ourselves and our boat should it ever happen to us again.

One of our most useful tools in dealing with heavy weather at sea is our engine and in this chapter I relate how we used ours to good effect in a nasty lee shore situation. But the sad truth is that in many cases a yacht’s engine is disabled by heavy weather making it useless at the very time that the crew need it most, so I go on to share some solid suggestions of things you can do to storm proof your engine.

Several questions have repeatedly surfaced within the hundreds of comments on our Heavy Weather Tactics Online Book. So I have pulled those together in this chapter and added my thoughts.

It’s a sad fact that most production boat companionways are potential boat-sinkers. But it does not have to be that way. In this chapter I provide solid suggestions on how to stormproof your companionway.

Ever wondered about the safety of those big pilot-house windows that we increasingly see on modern designs? John has too.