Tom Cunli e

Tom Cunliffe

Tom contrasts two passages he made many years apart to illustrate how basic seamanship and planning make all the difference

As a young sailor I’d never heard of ‘tactical navigation’. When the issue first came to my notice I set it aside as being downright esoteric, yet all it often means is travelling a little further in order to arrive a lot quicker. Here in home waters north of 50 degrees latitude, it doesn’t take more than an awkward turn in the weather, coupled with a spring tide, to encourage thoughtful mariners to educate themselves, but many of us don’t give the question much consideration until supper starts jumping off the table.

Strategic tacking was a shut book to me as I hacked out of Cherbourg one long-ago Easter to face a 60-mile beat home. My boat was a 22-foot centreboarder whose pointing ability in a big sea was lamentable. The track to the Needles and home lay due North and a solid 25 knots of breeze was blowing from 20 degrees west of the desired course.

‘Aha,’ I said to my wife, ‘Let’s stand to the westwards on starboard and get the losing tack out of the way while we’re fresh. Then we’ll flop over and make it back in a single long board.’

Sounds almost rational, doesn’t it? But that’s not what happened. Modern oilskins were a dream as remote as manned flights to Mars, and after we had hammered upwind for six hours we were wet through

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“The full import of this sinister turn of events did not make itself felt until we went about”

and already seriously cold. Just before we tacked, I noticed that although the breeze had eased a touch, we were pointing more towards the North. The full import of this sinister turn of events did not make itself felt until we went about. Only then as the wretched wind continued to veer, did I realise that it was still smack on the nose. The tide had walloped us down towards Alderney making our net gain little more than zero. I was slumped over the tiller, cursing what I imagined to be pure bad luck, when my bride handed me up a coffee followed by a hot-water bottle to tuck under my saturated sweater. In those days, her sailing experience was almost nil, but she had no shortage of common sense and she surely deserved a better skipper.

‘Am I right in thinking,’ she said, throwing up neatly to leeward before ducking the square green wave swamping the tiny cockpit. ‘that if we hadn’t gone so far to the west, we’d be better off now?’

There was no arguing with that. It didn’t take a Christopher Columbus to work out that if we’d put to sea on the other tack, we’d have been headed, not freed by the shifting wind, which meant that once we’d come about we’d have been almost laying the Needles. The pill stuck in my throat.

I settled the wobbly ‘hottie’ and recalled the weather bulletin I’d only half-listened to. My concern had been to ensure it wasn’t going to blow a whole gale, rather than whether the breeze might veer or back. When we finally slipped past the lighthouse the following morning I was so exhausted I had arrived at the ‘waves are green hills’ state of hallucination. I never forgot the lesson, which was clearly to work onto the right side of the rhumb line so as to make the most of what the Clerk of the Weather serves up next. Like Shakespeare’s ‘tide in the affairs of men,’ if you get this right you’ll cruise home with a smile on your face. Blow it, and you’ll end up miles down the tube, or motoring in the rain and wishing you’d never left the marina. When you’re unsure about what the weather will do, stay near the rhumb line and assume the great dealer will slip you a low-value card from the bottom of the pack. A two of clubs won’t then be a disaster. If you get a favouring shift, you can ease sheets and hooray for even odds!

Almost twenty years later I was able to test this theory on a 1,200-mile windward passage from Iceland, past Greenland’s Cape Farewell, and on to Newfoundland, a trip spiced by ice and fog. My yacht was far more able than the centreboarder, but she wasn’t noted for tight pointing. A day out of Reykjavik, we ran into the business end of a series of frontal depressions tracking between us and the Arctic Circle. The weather was vile, the seas square-sided and for a fortnight our boat never laid her south-westerly course for more than an hour or two. She managed the passage

ABOVE

Thrashing into a fresh breeze and head sea is not always the wisest move

BELOW

Tom’s command Saari pounding across the channel in chilly conditions

“We made the best of a bad job by following the axiom, ‘Always stay on the tack that is taking you nearest your destination.’’’

surprisingly well despite the horrors, however, perhaps because she had an unusual ability to heave-to sweetly. In that respect she was a winner.

In our situation morale could easily have collapsed, but we made the best of a bad job by following the axiom, ‘Always stay on the tack that is taking you nearest your destination.’ What this meant in practice is illustrated by my log. The weather entries are italicised. The rest relates what was happening.

* Wind backing into the south. Barometer dropping like a ballast pig. Cloud base lowering. Rain and poor visibility. Course made good, around WSW. This sounds like a warm front approaching. We sail as hard as is sensible on the port tack, ten degrees or so free of closehauled. * Blowing 45 knots from the SW after a steady veer. Barometer levelled out. Rain eased but still coming in pulses. Seas building. The warm front has now passed. With such a sea running there’s no point trying to sail closehauled, so we heave to on the starboard tack for a day or so. We’re drifting more or less south-eastwards at two knots, making up some of the ground we lost northwards of the rhumb line on the last tack. * Mega hailstorm. Glass shooting up like a lift. Very windy indeed, and veering. Mate spotted wearing gloves at the helm. Poor show! This is the cold front. It’s tough right now, but with luck there will be a day or two of north-westerlies behind it.... We stay hove-to, bend on a stiff scotch and keep our heads down. * Blue sky and flying clouds. The odd anvil round the horizon. Blowing 25 from the west-northwest. Barometer

ABOVE

Square riggers were in general not vey good at going to windward, but the seamanship and know how of the skippers enabled them to make good progress upwind

TOM CUNLIFFE

Tom has been mate on a merchant ship, run yachts for gentlemen, operated charter boats, delivered, raced and taught. He writes the pilot for the English Channel, a complete set of cruising text books and runs his own internet club for sailors worldwide at tomcunliffe.com rising more slowly. Seas 20 feet high and confused. Tumbling over each other every so often. Sun gleaming through the crests. Distant bergs in view. Lovely. This comes four hours after the previous entry, and it’s our best chance. We let draw on the starboard tack and cram on every stitch we can carry. The lee deck is regularly buried and we take heavy water from time to time as an awkward one breaks to windward, but the boat is going great guns and we’re logging six knots. She’s a nudge south of her best course but nobody is dismayed, because we all know what’ll happen soon.... * Barometer dropping. Wind backing. Right on the nose now. 100% cirrostratus. Dirty to windward. Here comes the next one. We stay on the starboard tack, knowing we can afford to lose ground to the south, because we’ll make it up when we tack as the wind backs seriously to the left of the rhumbline. * Wind south by east. Piping up. Barometer dropping, etc. Exactly what the text book said. We’re now on port tack and cracking along almost on course. When we can’t stand it any more, we’ll heave to and begin the cycle again.

It’s surprising how effectively even a modest boat can work to windward, so long as the skipper sticks to the old ways. Often, you don’t need a forecast to predict a change in wind direction. In many places, a summer afternoon sea breeze will veer steadily as the earth spins. A passing front generally veers the wind in our hemisphere, although the breeze may back as it approaches.

Clipper ship captains weathered Cape Horn knowing this, and humbler merchant sailors regularly arrived upwind in vessels whose performance wasn’t worth a spent match by our standards. For us, as it was for them, the secret is not to curse but to think, and to remember that while no boat ever made ground to windward without being driven hard, if she’s broken in the process, she doesn’t get there at all. That, like so many other things at sea, will never change.