SAFETY

A couple of 60-year-olds who plan to go cruising wrote in asking for advice on safety at sea.

Well safety is safety. It is a given, regardless of your age, your boat, or where you are sailing. Most boats are equipped with required safety gear like fire extinguishers, life preservers, flares, horn, etc. That is all ordinary equipment for most boats, and most people know how to use it, and hope they never need to. SetSail published a group of reports back in 2001 covering topics like Man Overboard, Staying Onboard, Life Rafts, and EPIRB beacons. Check the archives for these articles.

Common sense should be applied to safety issues as well. Our deck has very a good non-skid surface, but we know we have to be careful of the slick paint along the gutters and surrounding some of the hatches. We both have a pair of deck shoes at the bottom of the companionway steps that we put on at night or in boisterous weather. Of course in port one tends to forget. I should have had them on when I hung up the laundry 3 days ago--caught my little toe on the genoa car, yet again. Ouch!

We don't keep jerry cans tied along the side deck and especially not in the cockpit. If they come loose they can be lethal hazards. Think about a 40-pound battering ram hitting you. If there is fuel in them and it spills, you not only have a mess to clean up, but there could be fire hazard or loss of footing. I well remember while doing a delivery in the Med., a wave interrupting the transfer of oil from a Jerry jug making a "skating rink" of the aft deck. No fun, and dangerous.

Any gear that does have to remain on deck should be firmly secured. Likewise, stow the boat well down below. I recall, one stormy passage, being in the leeward bunk when SUNFLOWER bounced or fell off a wave, and the opposite locker door fell down. I was pelted with a barrage of flying missiles. A plastic container of popcorn flew out, hit the floor, the lid popped off and popcorn flew everywhere! Now we have extra catches on those locker doors, firmly in position before we set sail.

In port we have a lot of stuff sitting around on the shelves and the table. It all has to find a home when we go sailing. The things that aren't put away in lockers are consolidated in tight groups on the shelves and then chocked in with my throw pillows. I use a lot of throw pillows! In the galley I have nonskid material in the lockers to keep things from sliding about. But jars and such will still tip over unless they are held solid enough with other items. So I am careful to keep my lockers "full"--even if it means putting empty jars or cans back in the voids.

When you need to do something with potential danger to either person or boat, make a plan. Then talk through the plan with your mate. Keep the communication open and agree on verbal commands or visual signals. I'm thinking of things like going up the mast in particular. But even small things--hoisting a Jerry jug of water aboard from the dinghy, for instance, need some consideration if you are to save your back and your balance.

COMFORT

Now there's a subjective topic, all being relative in degree to the seeker of such comfort, and we all want to be comfortable, whether we're senior sailors or not. Perhaps when you're young you don't recognize being uncomfortable as easily. And I think a lot of people just expect sailing to be uncomfortable, so they just put up with it.

Staying dry is pretty high on my personal list of comfort factors. I'm very lucky to have lived and sailed aboard 2 very different kinds of boats, but both of them were/are dry. I don't think I ever thought about it much until the delivery in the Med mentioned above.

The owner called his aft cabin "The Aquarium" for obvious reasons. And it wasn't because he left the port above the bed open. Well, he did that too, but it was not as significant as the water pouring through closed hatches; across the chart table from deck leaks; over the floor because of water squirting up around the rudder stock, well, I could go on...

Warm goes with dry. We've sailed around in tropical climates for more than 10 years now, so you wouldn't think staying warm would be a problem. It isn't in normal circumstances. If you unfortunately get into one of those"YUK" passages with squall after squall, and tons of rain in between (tropical conditions), you will be on deck coping with sail changes and all that a lot. That is when you will get cold. Invest in good foul weather gear. We have Henri Lloyd. At first it seems far too heavy--hence "hot"--to wear in the tropics. Not after a couple of hours out in the wet it isn't. In those conditions we spell each other more frequently than our usual watches of 2 hours, and make hot drinks and soup to take the chill off as well.

Warm is good, but you don't want to be HOT. So we have 12-volt fans on board to move the air around. They are of various types and are strategically located to bring relief. One is above the chart table, in the galley, over the bed, in the workroom, and most useful--one is portable. It's just a 12-volt car fan mounted on a stable teak base and has a long cord and plug end. (We have 12-volt outlets.) It normally sits on the floor of the main salon to cool us at the dinette. It also clamps to the table top while on passage and can be directed to the person off watch trying to sleep in sometimes closed, overly warm conditions. I can move it to a good position while Al works on the engine, or under the cockpit, to help him stay cool.

Warm, dry, not hot--and stay out of the sun. Dodgers and awnings make for comfort aboard. We sailed SUNFLOWER for four years without having a dodger. Now I couldn't begin to think about doing without it. Great place to huddle while on watch and keep out of the spray or light rain, and also provides shade. It took much longer for us to erect a sailing awning. Our main sheet came right from the boom into the cockpit. It wasn't until we moved the main sheet to a traveler mounted just forward of the dodger that we could put up some shade while sailing. We have a large awning to use in port, as well as a fore deck awning, and another piece that attaches to the aft end of the main awning to combat sunlight streaming into the cockpit.

You spend a lot of time in the cockpit, either while sailing, or as an extension of your living room in the tropics. Give some thought to comfortable seating. Cushions should be a closed cell foam as they will invariably get wet. Regular foam stays soggy forever. Originally, we had 3 cushions: two ran the length of the cockpit, and one across the back. We have cut them in half now. You don't have to use all of them at once, and being smaller, they are easier to store. We have some 16-inch squares of closed cell foam for throw pillows too. Al's favorite is a big acrylic bag filled with styrofoam pellets--a bean bag for the cockpit! Nice for scrunching up in the corner.

Sailing for anybody, not just Seniors, doesn't need to be uncomfortable. Give some thought to how you want to live on board and you will begin to organize your comfort accordingly.