Safety & Seamanship

Material Safety Data Sheets must be available to employees and they must be trained to read them. Failure to abide by this rule set by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Hazard Agency is the second-most frequent employer violation. Even when MSDSs are available, few employees ever read them. Culturally, we believe instructions and warnings are a joke. Well, its your funeral … literally.

The loads of a flying jibe in late summer squall are enough to shred sails, rip out deck or boom fittings, bend or break the boom gooseneck, or even bend the boom itself. The novice sailor learns very quickly to be wary of an unintentional jibe.

Ideally, you don't put yourself in a position where an accidental jibe can happen, but even an experienced sailor can get caught off guard by sudden, violent wind shifts in mountainous coastal areas or in night-time squalls. The most common way to take the fright out of an unintentional jibe involves a preventer, something weve examined in a number of previous reports. Preventers are especially useful when sailing deep downwind in rolly conditions, when exaggerated yawing lets the wind sneak behind the mainsail.

Getting over seasickness as quickly as possible must be the focus and responsibility of all on board. Having dealt with 400 seasick sailors (out of 1,200 sail-training students) on ocean passages over the past 42 years, I have become very experienced at prevention and treatment. The following steps to avoid or lessen the severity of seasickness has served well over those years.

Foam life jackets can be hot and cumbersome on a long passage-especially if youre a kid and like to move around a lot. With Spinlocks debut of the Deckvest Cento Junior auto-inflatable PFD with a harness, sailing youth-and petite adults-now have an alternative to those bulky foam PFDs.

When we talk about safety and sailing, the topic inevitably focuses on seamanship, equipment, and maintenance, not potential health risks linked to harmful chemicals. In fact, one of the reasons many of us go sailing is to escape to a cleaner place.

For maximum maneuverability, the control lines-one port, one starboard-should attach at the widest part of the boat. This maximizes leverage and places the effort close to the center pivot point. On a catamaran, closer to the transom works because of the wide beam, but for monohulls, attaching near the pivot point at the keel will be more responsive. For maximum responsiveness, the drogue should be as close to the transom as practical-this results in more responsive steering and minimal drag. We found the best compromise to be around 65-80 percent of the way aft, where there is still enough beam, but less risk of the control lines fouling.

When a fire strikes at sea, you need to respond quickly, aggressively, and with a cool head, and you will not give up easily. At some point it is going to be prudent to leave the boat; serious burns will make survival in a raft difficult and gasoline and propane can explode. If the fire is well developed or started with an explosion, there may be time only for a quick Mayday call and to abandon ship.

Over the last few decades, theres been exponential growth in the availability of accurate weather forecasts and the net result is safer voyaging. Government spending on weather data gathering and forecast development has soared. Satellites and data buoys have filled in some of the oceanic gaps caused by an absence of weather balloon sampling at sea. State of the art, algorithm-driven, model data and ensemble-based forecasting have turned electronic guesswork into a better understanding of atmospheric volatility. The net result is an increase in the validity and reliability of marine forecasts and a trend that has stretched 24-hour forecast accuracy into 48- and 96-hour time frames. So, if anything deserves the label don't leave homeport without it, it is todays, better than ever, marine weather forecast.

Spring is when many sailors have to bite the bullet and have their liferaft inspected, an expense that costs 10 to 30 percent of the price they paid for the raft-or more.