Safety at sea carries a fairly standard set of advice, from installing safety lines to the type of life raft to carry, but the reality of life afloat is that major safety gear is at the end of a long and rarely traveled dead end that occurs only in the most extreme circumstances. What warrants much more attention is a general level of comfort and a feeling of safety, a sense of being secure and comfortable on the boat so that life is led with a sense of ease rather than of imminent crisis.

But how do you achieve that? Some of it is how you fit out the boat and some of it is your attitude to sailing. For example, Brian and I have a rule on the boat, which is that if one of us does not feel like setting sail--maybe because of the weather forecast, maybe it's just how we feel on the day--we do not go, and there are no recriminations.

Our advice to the questioners would be to make sure that your reefing system is simple (we are not big fans of in-mast furling--too complicated and liable to go wrong), that you can easily launch your dinghy and that you have a good system for anchoring with an adequate back-up system. Look at back-up systems for everything-- no matter how all-encompassing your maintenance programme, things will go wrong. Too often people try to manhandle things on the boat rather than rigging halyards to take the grunt out of boat handling/dinghy launching/gear loading. If you can afford it (dollars and power), fit an electric winch for those tasks that require brute force.

We also have a few boat rules that neither of us breach; it is important to establish trust between a short-handed crew. Our personal boat rules include not going out of the cockpit at night without waking the other person. You sleep a lot better at night off-watch knowing that you can trust the on watch to adhere to the mutually agreed rules; otherwise you keep waking up and sneaking on deck to see if the crew are still on-board. A friend recalls a night when he heard his partner moving around on deck, after a while he got up to look--no one in the cockpit, no one on deck. He rushed down below to check the heads, other cabins, etc, found no one. Rushing back on deck he found his partner in the cockpit asking what was the panic. Apparently she had been standing right in front of the mast, invisible, when he looked around the deck from the cockpit. After his heart had stopped pounding, they agreed on their own rules for short-handed sailing.

As regards comfort, that is something that comes naturally with becoming a long-distance cruiser. You very soon recognise that you spend more time at anchor than ever you do at sea, so time spent making your boat comfortable--whatever that means for you--is time well spent. For Brian and I, having our boat set up so we could run computers and receive e-mails on board was important to us (though we accept that for many people it would be a liability rather than a benefit). For other people, being able to use their sewing machine easily without ripping the boat apart would be important for them. The key is to set up the boat so that it meets your particular interests.

Our personal experience as we have grown older while cruising is that we have simply made our boat more and more comfortable as the years have gone by, and are still well able to sail the same boat but with more confidence and safety than we did when we had a somewhat more cavalier attitude.

(Colleen and Brian have finished their circumnavigation, and their beloved THETA VOLANTIS is now for sale. Even if you're not in the market for a new boat, click here to check out a very detailed listing that is full of interesting information.)