Taking the night shift
Thanks for your feature online on night watches. I’m very choosy about who
I’m going to sail with, particularly on overnight/multi-night trips.
I was once a last-minute addition to crew that was doing an offshore race. It didn’t take me long to figure out that half the crew thought this was a cruise.
Night fell, they went to bed and didn’t get up until morning; hard to say they were missed. During the day, they just sat in the cockpit reading. That was manageable, but when we hit a couple of squalls, they came on deck to take pictures and selfies of the rest of us struggling to change the jib.
On another occasion I made sure that I had met the crew and sailed with them beforehand. They weren’t the most experienced guys but keen and willing to help. The day of the race they brought another guy on board who acted like he knew everything. I knew we were in trouble when he got mad at me for saying ‘starboard and port’ rather than ‘right and left’.
As night fell, everyone started checking their ipads for different weather forecasting sites and Mr Know-it-all kept asking for the heading. He insisted the boat stay on heading in order to hit the mark that was 70 miles away, even though we had no wind. The others agreed with him because they thought otherwise they’d be lost out on the water.
We ended up abandoning (their idea, but at this point I had just given up). By