Finding Land

LAND HO! 

After a long time at sea, land might become more of a distant memory than something that you think is out there on the horizon. You have been sailing for weeks and are heading towards a new land, but what will it look like as you get closer? Will land just jump out over the horizon? Will you even notice it off in the distance? 

Land on a clear day is visible far off on the horizon as a grey haze. After weeks of sailing, the land will appear as an oddity on the horizon rather than appearing as "land". Upon, closer inspection, you will then realize that you are looking at your destination!

While you might think it will jump out at you, the truth is, land will silently hide on the horizon. It will not call out to you, and it will not attempt to make its presence known, unless you know what to look for. Land, especially tall land, will usually have a permanent cloud cap. After a long voyage, you will be accustomed to looking at the clouds and determining which direction they are moving. This has been your method for spotting and tracking storms for the entire passage, and by this time you will be an expert at watching clouds. Clouds over land will call on your attention because they will not move! 

You will notice a permanent and stationary cloud that does not move on the horizon, long before you will see the land beneath it. As you sail closer to it, the landmass will appear from over the horizon.  

Once you get closer, the outline of the land will become clearer and you might even be able to make out identifying features of the terrain.  

Land will make itself clearer as you continue to sail closer to it, but spotting it from a distance can be an entertaining challenge! Most islands out in the ocean have mountains or other high features that will make them visible from a distance; some islands will try to hide in the misty edge of visibility by laying low to the seas surface with no identifying features. 

The Bahamas are famous for having very flat islands that are difficult to spot at a distance, but they do offer another trick to finding land. The shallow turquoise waters of the island chains will shine up into the clouds, giving the bottom of the clouds a turquoise tint. The islands in the Bahamas are very low and hard to spot, but this will give you the indication of their presence hundreds of miles away! 

Does Having Crew Make Sailing Safer?

When we set out to cross the ocean, we felt the need to have a third crewmember. This concept came from a few sources: our parents, our friends, and random strangers.

Our parents wanted us to have a third person, preferably someone who has already crossed an ocean, on board for peace of mind. They knew we could sail the boat, and they knew we knew what we were doing, but they were worried that should one of us become ill or injured, the other person would then be single handing. They viewed a third crew as a backup to one of us so that we would never be sailing alone. 

Friends would always ask if we were having a crewmember for the "long stretch". They simply asked because sailing is a lot of work, and the thought of sailing continuously seems like an impossible amount of work! They thought that having a third crew would make life easier while cruising across the ocean. 

Lastly, every random person we met or came in contact with would ask if we were going to have crew on the voyage. This came from people in a grocery store, people in the comments section on YouTube, and people we met along the way. As soon as they learned we were planning to cross an ocean, they would quickly pipe up with "Are you going to have crew?" 

Hearing from so many people for so long that we needed crew made us start to believe that we needed a crew member for the passage!  

We picked up our first crew member in Florida. He was a one armed sailor who talked a big talk. He said his limp arm was not a hinderance, and we believed him! He was a recreational drug user, but said he was not addicted and he understood there would be no drugs, nor drug use, while on our boat. To top it off, he was an amazing cook!  Then we got out to the real world of sailing and it turns out that anything I asked him to do, he would respond with "I can't do that, my arm..." Then it turned out that he didn't even know how to sail! The final straw came when he stole our dinghy and went to shore on a drug run in a storm. So, was he really making us safer? 

As you can imagine, we got rid of him as quickly as we could, even paying for his flight back to Florida so that we would never have to deal with him again. Oddly enough, we thought that we still needed a crewmember to be "safe" so we began searching online through crew finding websites. 

We found a new crewmember. He has a skippers license for the Mediterranean, and he races sailboats, so he definitely knows how to sail! We chatted on Skype as a phone interview and all seemed to be going great. He even had two very strong arms! He flew to the Bahamas to meet us so that we could all sail to the Azores together with the safety of three people. 

Well, it turns out that people aren't always as advertised. His racing exploits were all done on Hobies, which may sound like an exotic boat class in Europe, but here in the states (where they are made) they are considered dinghies for kids to play and learn to sail in. He knows how to sail, that is for sure, but he has no comprehension of the forces involved! In high winds and full sail, he steered through a jibe, causing us to crash jibe! As he was on his way to this unfortunate event, I was telling him to correct the course as he was about to jibe and his response was "I know" with a very nonchalant attitude!  

He was also infatuated with speed, always wanting to squeak out any potential power available. If the winds were light, he was not satisfied with sitting around to read as we waited for the winds to return. He would yell at us (yes, actually yell) until we would put down our books and get out every sail in the locker to put up. The fact is, we have sailed Wisdom for thousands of miles and we know what she does with different sails in different winds. When there is no wind, there is no speed regardless of the sails we fly. To appease him (and to get him to stop yelling at us) we would go through all the sail changes from the working sails to the light air sails, expending a lot of energy and time in the sun to achieve no gain in speed. After a few days of this, he became tired and stopped insisting (by yelling at us) to change the sails. The problem was, we were all very tired and should a storm come up on us, we are now all very tired. 

On one of his early morning watches, the drifter (our light air headsail) was flying. He knew the takedown windspeed for this sail is 7 knots of true wind, yet he kept it up as the winds built. Suddenly it was 25 knots of wind and we were cruising along at 7.5 knots under only the drifter! I awoke to the sounds of gusting winds and rushing waves. When I asked him if he wanted to switch sails, he responded with "No, we are finally sailing quickly!" Lo and behold, the drifter ripped!

Lastly, one night while on my watch, we were full sail as the winds were light and I saw a strong squall approaching us. I went forward to lower the sails and setup the storm sailplan. He heard me working and came up onto the deck yelling at me with fury and rage! He was pissed off that I was changing the sails without "consulting him first". I told him that this is my boat and I am the captain, to which he responded "I will not bow to you!" 

Ha ha ha! Seriously, what is wrong with this guy in his head?! First, this is my boat. Second, I am the captain and he is crew. Third, when he came to the boat we went over the rules (which he agreed to) and one of the rules is that Maddie and I make the choices, he just follows orders.  Lastly, I am on watch and he is off watch; Go back to bed!

So, that argument took place while the squall continued to approach us and the sails weren't getting changed. While this may sound like a lot of complaining, this is only a sampling. Everyday he would do something dangerous (like never wear his life jacket, even alone on night watch, or wait until a squall hits to decide to reef) which made us feel very unsafe anytime he was at the helm!  In the end, we stopped in Bermuda to part our ways and get rid of him! 

Now, was it safer having him on board? We ripped our drifter, almost destroyed our mainsail when he was raising it without making sure all the sail ties were untied (it is amazing the noises sailcloth will make as a strong person puts all their might into a winch), reefed many times in the dark with high winds and a pitching deck, and trying to explain to him that crash jibes will break our gear and boat.

Once he was gone, Maddie and I were alone again, and we were able to sail Wisdom the way we like to: safely. We would reef early and with daylight, and we always wore our life jackets while on deck (and we would clip in too!) The biggest weight off our chest came from the lack of yelling that occurred on the boat once he left. His horrible attitude brought the morale WAY down, which made the experience of a lifetime a marathon of sorrows. If the winds were not blowing, he was pissed and made everyone else miserable. If the winds were blowing, he wasn't satisfied with our speed and became angry that we weren't going as fast as he imagined that we should be sailing. Without him, we simply set the sails and watched the sun setting over the horizon. We baked and ate delicious meals while we relaxed and read our books. 

After our experiences with two horrible crew members, we wonder: does having crew actually make you safer? 

Our thought is if you are a cruising couple who is able to sail your boat alone: No.  If you are a racing yacht who is obsessed with performance and speed: Yes. Cuising is a lifestyle, one where you are out there on a boat you are able to manage either alone or as a couple. Adding an extra person only means that you now have less space and use food & water more quickly!

Imagine picking up a stranger and bringing them into your house. Now imagine that you have to live 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for weeks on end! That is what having a third crew member is like on a cruising yacht. 

Reinforcing Roles on a Boat

We will never have crew again on our boat, but if you do choose to have crew on your yacht, it would behoove you to really grind in the roles and rules of the boat. 

A friend of mine recommended that you also have the crew members sign a "contract" which lists all the rules and roles. Out at sea, laws don't really matter when you are dealing with someone who has intense anger issues, but it might help somewhat. 

When a crew gets out of line and you tell them their place in the pecking order, having a piece of paper that they signed might help bring them back down off their high horse. Understanding the roles became an issue for us when our crewmember began thinking that this was "his boat" and that "he was in charge". 

He would frequently yell at us, call us lazy, and say hurtful things that would make Maddie cry. Then he would yell at me for plotting our course without "consulting him first". Weather information, route planning, and sail changes (in his opinion) all needed to be run by him for a final decision. 

Naturally, this is not the case and he was merely having delusions of grandeur. The order on the boat was made very clear to him:  

Herby is Captain and is in charge of making course decisions, looking at and interpreting the weather, and making sail plan decisions. If it had to do with where we were going, how we were getting there, and what sails were flying, Herby and only Herby was in charge.

Maddie is 1st mate (but her true title is Admiral) and she makes choices with me. She can give her opinion on where she wants to go and suggestions about weather and sails, but the final decision is ultimately made by the Captain. 

Un-named crewmember is last on the list. He follows orders, holds the course set by the captain, and is responsible for letting the captain know if a sailchange is needed while on watch. While off watch, he does the dishes and sleeps. He has no say or opinion with regards to sail choice, course, weather planning, or navigation. 

To give an example: say we are sailing from Point A to Point B, and along the way we see a pretty island. Maddie can say "Hey, that place looks cool, lets stop there for lunch!" I as Captain then have to look at the weather and see if we can stop there because of the weather. Next, I check the charts to see if we fit in there and can anchor safely. After all that is done, then I decide if we can pull in or not and stop for lunch. The crewmember, has no say in the matter. If they love islands or hate islands, their opinion has no weight on what occurs.

Now, I feel that we are also all people, so I am very lenient with this rule and will listen to their opinion and try to make them feel like they are part of the team, part of the boat!  

If the crewmember has an interest in learning how to do the functions of Captain, I will gladly take them under my wing and show them everything. They can watch as I look at the sky, check the barometer, take our noonsite, plot our course and check the charts. I am also very happy to teach them how to do all of these functions! I got my first ocean sail on board another boat as crew, and the captain was a wonderful teacher. He showed me everything and taught me how to carry out a lot of the tasks because he knew my next time out in the ocean was going to be on my own boat without any guidance. I would love to return the favor by educating someone new to cruising on how to safely sail across oceans and cruise in comfort. 

The problem is the line between crew and captain seems to have gotten blurred in the eyes of this one crewmember. All of a sudden, he felt that he was captain and making all the decisions. He began yelling at me one day when he saw a text to a shoreside weather person. I texted the shoreside person what our proposed route was and asked him to check for storms along that path. Our crewmember became irate and began yelling at me. 

Crewmember: "How can you have a course plotted?!" 

Me: "I have to have a course plotted, we are crossing an ocean." 

Crewmember: "You didn't consult me on this course! All decisions about this boat need to be run by me for approval!" 

To this I laughed, which only set him off even further. I thought he was delirious or just joking around, but it turns out he was very serious about this matter. 

Me: "I am the captain, I don't have to ask you about anything. I make the choices and you carry them out. I go over the weather and course with you as a courtesy because I think it's nice to let you know what we are doing and where we are going, but you are not involved in the decision making process." 

Crewmember: "You are not in charge, you are not in command of this boat." 

At this moment, I realized that he was not joking and I had to put him in his place, which led to more arguing until I told him to go back to his bunk and start the day over again without yelling. 

At this point, when he was having delusions of being a captain on his own boat, and a written & signed contract would have been helpful to remind him of his place in this boat.

The Goal of Celestial Navigation

GPS is a wonderful creation that has raised our expectations in positions to unrealistic but attainable levels. It is not uncommon to see a GPS touting an accuracy of a few feet! You might want to achieve these same results with a sextant, only to have your dreams dashed in the waves.

The goal of accuracy for a sextant is 25 nautical miles. Yes, not feet, but miles. While a GPS is considered good if it can place you within 10 feet of your true position, a person calculating their position with a sextant on a boat at sea is considered good if they can calculate their position to be within 151,903 feet! 

This might sound ridiculous, but the reasoning behind it is rather sound. Celestial Navigation is not to plot your position and get you to slip between a reef and a wreck on a chart, that is the realm of visual navigation. Celestial Navigation is to get you to your next landfall. Land can be spotted from very far away, and if you can get close enough to see it, you can then sail towards it, letting visual navigation take over from there. 

When calculating your position, you can use very VERY precise measuring techniques which will let you calculate your position down to under 400 feet. The problem is this sort of refined measuring is done on land, which is not moving, and at rest, which is not sailing. The measurements can then be repeated daily to finally work down the exact numbers and find your precise position. 

On a yacht, you are sailing forward, so your measurements are off to begin with. Next, you are on a pitching deck, being rocked side to side as you ride up and down waves. You have to hold a sextant perfectly stable while being tossed around as your altitude changes constantly!  

If you take a course on celestial navigation or read about it in a book, it will typically have the calculations carried all the way down to the second (of time and location). 1 second of time is 1/60th of a minute. 1 second of latitude & longitude is 1/60th of a nautical mile in latitude, and 1/60th of a nautical mile at the equator to nothing at the North Pole. If you try to carry your calculations down to the second, you will find that your not going to gain much in accuracy for the amount of additional work you need to put in. It is best to take all of your recordings and calculations down the the minute (of time and position). 

Think about it, when you take your noon site and record the time. If you record to the second, you will then have a very accurate reading. If you take it to the minute, you could be off by as much as 59 seconds! But what does 59 seconds come out to be in the grand scheme of things? The boat is moving, you are pitching around, and if all you need to do is get a general idea of where you are, why do all the extra math?! 

If you take your noon site at 16:00 vs 16:01, the difference in your longitude will be minimal

 16 : 00
  -12 : 00

   4 : 00
x15 x0.25

60*0'W 

 16 : 01
 -12 : 00

  4 : 01
x15 x0.25

60 + (0.25x60) 

60*15'W 

What this means is that your longitude is going to be calculated as one of these two positions. If you were to measure the time of the noon site down to the second, your answer would fall somewhere in between 60*0'W and 60*15'W. Yes, that would be a much more accurate calculation, but you can assume that your true position is somewhere between 0' and 15', which means that you are not that far off!  

Imagine that the true time of the noon site was 16:00:30, this would mean that the true position would be around 60*07'30". Your calculations would only have been around 7.5 nautical miles off. Not bad for skipping an entire section of calculations! 

You might be wondering how you can verify what your true position is out at sea and how you would then calculate your error, and the answer just makes it more logical to stop the calculations at the minute. You check your calculated position with a GPS reading of your present coordinate at that time. The GPS, which is accurate down to a few feet, will tell you where you actually are; so why go through all the extra headache and math to figure out your position to a few miles closer when at the end of it all, you will verify it with a GPS? 

In practice, I have found that I am usually within 4nm of our true position. This is far lower than the acceptable 25nm radius of error, and this lets me know that should all the GPS's in our yacht fail, I can trust my calculated coordinates to get us to land. At first, you might find that you are way off, but with practice, you will zero in on a very accurate noon site while only taking your measurements and calculations down to the minute. 

The Value of Effort

Sport sailing is all about getting the most out of every puff of wind. Coastal sailing is about getting from one place to the next as quickly and comfortably as possible. Ocean sailing is about making it to the other side.

While the goal in all three types of sailing involves getting somewhere, and quickly, the first two categories can be viewed as sprints where the latter should be viewed as a marathon.

Ocean sailing is an endurance sport, there is no way around it. Every action you take requires energy, and you have to be able to keep up that pace for the entire ocean! This leads to different decision processes as to sail selection and trim, as well as course.

If the winds are light, but you have clouds building around you, you are presented with a few options:

Option 1 would be to take down the working sails and put up the light air sails. When the winds change, then take down the light air sails and put the working sails back up.

Option 2 would be to grab a book and wait for the stronger winds to reach you so you can keep sailing with the sails you already have set.

This choice came up on our third day of ocean sailing, when our crew member got frustrated that we were ghosting along at 2 knots on a broad reach under mainsail and staysail. He suggested that we swap the sails out and put up the drifter. I attested that this would require a lot of energy and that it would be the same result in the end: we would move slow.

Being how he is rather Type A and in a rush all the time, I told him that we would do it as a learning exercise, to see when something is worth the work.

I was relaxing and reading my book as we ghosted along at 2-3 knots and recommended that he do the same. Instead, we all got up, sleepy and tired since we just finished our night watches, and swapped the sails over. The entire conversion took about 15 minutes to complete and a fair amount of effort. The light air filled the drifter and we began moving along once again, at 2-3 knots.

So, was it worth all that effort?