Skipper trouble
Competence is required when things go wrong, says Chris Mardon
Why a competent skipper is required when things go wrong...
The following events are real, but names have been changed to protect anonymity
Skippers generally choose crews according to their individual skills, abilities and availability. However, I’ve not read much about the shoe being on the other foot when crews have a need to choose their skipper.
This is an important issue because choosing a bad skipper could risk putting the crew in danger. My wife and I learnt this lesson when we were invited for a trip aboard another person’s yacht in 1999.
With a bank holiday weekend a few days off and a big Azores high approaching the British Isles my mind started to wander from my office job in Bristol to where we could go sailing the next weekend. Sailing was and still is a regular summertime activity for my wife and me.
She had the answer to my wandering thoughts the moment I walked through the door at home. She’d had a call from Wilma inviting us to crew a large sailing boat to France.
Wilma and her husband, Dick, had been old sailing chums of ours for many years. We both owned our own yachts berthed in Plymouth and often spent summer weekends sailing in company to the various delightful coastal villages within a day’s sail of our home port.
On longer breaks such as our summer vacations my wife and I would usually sail across the English Channel to enjoy the best that France or the Channel Islands had to offer.
Wilma and Dick had recently met a couple, let’s call them John and Mary, who had taken a berth on the opposite side of their pontoon for their 50ft ketch,
Cape of Good Hope.
We agreed to meet Wilma and Dick with John and Mary on board the latter’s new (to them) yacht the coming Friday afternoon to see if there was any chance we could sail her to France.
Welcome aboard
We were subsequently greeted aboard John and Mary’s smart looking yacht and they proudly showed us around their new acquisition. The brand new lifejackets, liferaft and flares, the smell of new paint and the recently renewed standing rigging all gave us a sense of confidence in an apparently well-found vessel even though it was already many years old.
John had recently bought Cape of Good Hope and it added to our confidence that he’d had her coded for chartering but he and his wife had never sailed far and were eager to take her across the English
Channel with an experienced crew.
We asked them where they’d like to go and they said they would be happy to consider our recommendations. I suggested Lezardrieux in Brittany, about 110 miles south across the English Channel, as it was easy to get in and out at any state of tide (not common to North Brittany ports, many of which are behind tidal sills) and it had some good restaurants and shops for provisions.
After unanimous agreement on our suggested destination we asked our hosts if they had passports, euros, ship’s papers and charts. John expressed surprise that he’d need such documents but as they only lived 20 minutes away they could go home to get them.
They had no charts but we were able to collect ours from our yacht, only a short walk down the pontoon. Their naivety about passports and euros puzzled us a little but was of no great concern. John said he’d navigated in the merchant navy for many years which added to our confidence that he’d be competent enough to stand his watch.
We reassembled aboard Cape of Good Hope at about 1700 equipped with all the necessary documents, euros, charts and oilskins. After a short briefing on weather, tides, course and a watch system we slipped her lines and motored out into the River Plym and Plymouth Sound on our way into the English Channel heading roughly south-southeast towards Lezardrieux.
An hour after departure I popped below to mark our first Estimated Position on the chart and was surprised to find all the instruments were turned off. On telling this to John he announced that he’d turned the instruments off to save the batteries.
There was no wind worth a mention so I asked John why he was concerned about battery drain when the engine was running.
He said he had been having trouble with the alternator and was not sure if it was charging the batteries so had turned the instruments off just in case. He said that anyway he had a handheld GPS to plot our position.
It concerned us that John had put to sea with a suspect charging system but as everything seemed to be working perhaps it wasn’t faulty after all – but it did ring a small alarm bell in my head (ding!).
At about 2100 hours John announced that he and Mary would be taking to their bunk for some sleep before standing the 0100 watch.
As he disappeared below John popped his head back up to mention that if we suffered a sudden loss of power it would probably be due to a loss of oil from the gearbox.
He thought the leak had been fixed – and anyway he had plenty of spare gearbox oil. The alarm bell in my head was getting louder (ding, ding!). We were now much further from shore with no wind, only one engine to drive the boat and a skipper who had put to sea knowing he had a faulty gearbox. Relying on topping up a gearbox after it loses drive is foolhardy in the extreme as it would probably have suffered irreparable damage by then.
Dangerous manoeuvres
John and Mary’s night watch coincided with us crossing the shipping lanes which are some of the busiest in the world. Wilma preferred to sleep in the voluminous cockpit and we were glad she wasn’t able to doze off because it was clear to Wilma at one stage that Cape of Good Hope was on a collision course with a ship – but John was determined to hold his course no matter what because he thought it was his right of way (as an ‘experienced’ navigator he should have known that in the Colregs no vessel has a ‘right of way’).
When the ship failed to alter course he proceeded to shine a big torch at the ship’s bridge. This was met with a blinding beam from a searchlight on the ship as it continued on its course.
Wilma was eventually able to persuade John to alter course round the ship’s stern. She told us about this worrying episode later that morning. That alarm bell in my head was getting louder (ding, ding, ding!). This didn’t seem to be the actions of the experienced navigator that John had claimed to be.
The rest of the passage was uneventful and we motored into the Lezardrieux marina the next morning and tied up to a spare hammerhead pontoon.
As we were preparing to go ashore John said he’d run the bilge pump a while before we disembarked.
‘The alarm bell in my head was getting louder (ding, ding!)’
Hearing the hum of the pump and a trickling sound I peeked over the side and felt compelled to tell John that I could see pure diesel being pumped out into the river.
“Yes” said John, “It’s OK, we have a small diesel leak from the injector pump but we’re not short of fuel.” So our skipper had put to sea knowing he had a faulty diesel pump and was happy to pollute the river. That alarm bell was getting still louder (ding, ding, ding, ding!).
After a lovely meal at one of Lezardrieux’s excellent creperies and a night’s well-earned sleep we slipped our lines the next morning to go downriver bound for Guernsey. John, Wilma and I were in the cockpit while the remainder of the crew were down below preparing a cooked breakfast.
Tidal ranges on the north Brittany coast are among the highest in the world and they create severe currents and eddies in many of the rivers on that coast, the Trieux river down which we were motoring being no exception.
A few minutes after casting off John hit the Auto button on the autopilot, vacated the helm without a word to us and went down below to join the others for breakfast.
Wilma and I looked at each other open mouthed with surprise that the skipper would abandon the helm in a busy river. Seconds later Cape of Good Hope ran into a big eddy which turned her 90° to starboard barely 25m from the shore.
As neither Wilma nor I had any experience of the autopilot controls I shouted through the hatch, “John, we’re heading for shore and about to run aground.”
He shot up quick as Jack in the Box to put her back on course. I felt it might be timely to take the opportunity to explain the necessity of staying at the helm to avoid river traffic, obstacles, shoals and eddy currents. (ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!).
We made St Peter Port on Guernsey without any more dramas in time to enjoy a wonderful evening meal at Da Nello’s, my favourite restaurant on the island at that time.
Pot buoy threat
Well fed and watered we slipped lines at about 2100 for our return to Plymouth. There was now some wind but it was on the nose so John decided that rather than tack he preferred to motor in the dark along Guernsey’s south coast.
On expressing my concerns about motoring in the dark in an area strewn with crab pot buoys, John assured me that he’d fitted a very effective rope cutter.
A rope cutter should be a last resort item and should never be relied upon as a means of blindly motoring through a field of crab pots in the dark.
However, we’d not have been put into
‘The boat’s propeller was vibrating loudly every time we topped a wave’
serious danger if we had picked up a pot line; we weren’t off a lee shore and we had an anchor and a radio and it would be John’s wallet taking the hit if we needed a diver and a tow so I decided not to make an issue of it.
When we were due south of Les Hanois lighthouse off the south-west corner of Guernsey the wind was blowing counter to the tide creating a very steep sea. Cape of Good Hope was pitching violently and it wasn’t long before Dick returned Da Nello’s sea food dinner to Davy Jones’ locker.
It was at this time we became concerned by the boat’s propeller which was vibrating loudly every time we topped a wave.
John told us it was cavitating but he had a new prop on order that would be better suited to the boat. So he’d taken his boat to sea knowing it had the wrong propeller (ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!).
The remainder of our trip home was uneventful. After rounding Les Hanois we were able to bear away and make use of a comfortable Force 4 which took us all the way home on the final part of our weekend adventure.
Apart from the numerous alarm bells in my head John and Mary were good company and we had all enjoyed our weekend together. Some might think I was over-cautious being alarmed at the gremlins in John’s yacht, after all we didn’t suffer any disasters. I prefer to take the view that if all systems and equipment are working properly it reduces the chances of a disaster.
Luck runs out
As it was, the incidents that befell Cape of Good Hope in the coming weeks fully vindicated my concerns.
After our trip John fitted Cape’s new prop and started his chartering business.
A few weeks later my wife and I sailed to Fowey in our own yacht.
Shortly after picking up a visitors’ mooring we saw the harbour launch with its flashing blue light going out to sea at high speed. An hour or so later it returned with Cape of Good Hope in tow.
When the harbour master came to collect our dues he told us he’d been called out because she’d lost her propeller. Presumably John’s new one had not been properly secured.
The harbour master said he’d had to rescue Cape of Good Hope several times in the past few weeks due to a number of other faults. She’d needed another tow after a total loss of drive through gearbox failure and he’d issued the skipper with an environmental pollution summons after seeing him discharging diesel into the river.
Clearly, we’d been lucky to have escaped the consequences of John’s slapdash approach to his yacht’s maintenance. I don’t think John’s charter business could have been a great success as he sold Cape of Good Hope a few months later.
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