Safety & Seamanship

Even the best helmet will fail if poorly fitted. Expect this to take some time. Measure your head and get the right size. Loose is no good, and too small will sit high or give you a headache.

Head protection has become a hot topic among sailors. Volvo Ocean Race helmsman wear surf helmets with retractable visors. Americas Cup crew wears them, along with body armor and breathing equipment. Amateurs in high performance beach catamaran and dinghy classes are adopting them in big numbers, and some youth, college, and Olympic sailing programs have made them mandatory, like PFDs. Even cruisers are beginning to wonder about trips up the mast, heavy weather sailing, and even routine bumps. Is it the new thing, or just transition period until we work out where they make sense?

I recently interviewed Mark Bologna of Landfall Navigation. Hes a safety expert, major supporter of safety training and has decades worth of experience selecting and servicing inflatable PFDs. The first thing I asked Mark was whether or not I was overly concerned about the inflatable lifejacket issues mentioned above. His unequivocal No, and follow up advocacy for training and regular gear inspections paralleled most of the opinions above.

In the early 1800s Norwegian sailors started wearing cork filled vests dubbed the Seamans Friend. And over the next two centuries, life jacket design and the materials used have continued to evolve. One of the most promising offshoots has been the inflatable personal flotation device (PFD)-invented and patented by Peter Markus and one thats drawn our interest for over three decades.

At night, when only the counted seconds between the lightning flash and thunder-crack offer any clue of what is to come, the intertropical convergence zone seems otherworldly.

As an avid climber I pay attention to my aches and pains. To blindly ignore them puts myself and others at risk. The same is true for sailing.

Stagger while you anchor? It sounds like Ive either been drinking too much or sailing too long. Bear with me.

We often get questions about anchoring rights. While it is commonly understood that the first boat arriving in an anchorage has privileges, many see this as a matter of etiquette, but it is also a legal issue. The below citations are from the case Juniata 124 F. 861 US Admiralty Court, E.D. Virginia, 1903. Other rulings we reviewed generally agree.]

When we had a larger boat and made offshore hops, conventional ditch bag thinking made sense. But when I downsized to a 24-foot trimaran, it dawned on me that with just a little adjustment, my day bag could ably serve my near-shore sailing needs. (See What to Pack in a Ditch Kit, PS May 2014, Abandon Ship Bags: Dont Leave the Boat Without Them, PS March 2001, and Bags Fit for Sea Life, PS December 2012, and The Get Home Toolkit, October 2018.)

A closer look inside a ditch bag for the coastal daysailer