YACHTMASTER REFRESHER Why going back to school is so useful
Racing sailors turned cruising sailors Liz Rushall and her husband Mark discover what it’s like going back to school
‘Why on earth are you guys doing your Yachtmaster?’ was the question our friends repeatedly asked. ‘Surely, you know all that stuff?’
We’ve both sailed since childhood, competitively racing dinghies, then keelboats. Sailing is our work and life. Mark is a British Sailing Team coach, we’ve both won championships together and with others, and raced keelboats offshore. In between times, since 2000, we’ve cruised Ragdoll our 28ft classic Honeybee, from Emsworth, having slow adventures around Brittany, Normandy, and the West Country. Generally, we’ve arrived on the day we had planned, if not quite always at our estimated time.
Although I did my Yachtmaster theory some 20 years ago, it’s just like I have a Maths O-level. It’s still a mystery to me. Sitting the course at night-school, during an intensely busy job, with a bunch of powerboaters talking jargon knowingly, it was as if I was reliving the horror of maths at school. Needless to say, as with my maths, I battled through the exam and unfortunately not much of it stuck.
Meanwhile, Mark learned his navigation on the hoof, cruising on friends’ boats during his student days and he is self-taught. Good at all things involving science and numbers, he was always a bit dismissive of things like compass deviation. We had a little hand-held GPS, a Walker trailing log, and more recently a very small detachable Garmin chartplotter and Simrad AIS. It all seemed to work – we were fine. What could possibly go wrong?
YOU NEVER STOP LEARNING
The real answer to the question ‘why do our Yachtmaster’ was a wake-up call that came last summer. We’d had a hectic few months, working late and trying to fit in our summer cruise around Mark’s Olympic coaching commitments. We were both tired and needed a break. Mark plotted our Channel crossing. Normally I try to get involved and have a crack at the passage plan too, but it takes me ages. I helped a bit with the tidal streams (which I thought I was good at) and had a quick, over-the-shoulder look. We decided to head for Cherbourg, to have options. We dismissed the idea of heading straight to Saint-vaast, as we’d anticipated a four-hour wait for the lock gates – tedious after a long crossing.
We left Chichester Harbour early, although I wanted to go even earlier. As soon as we had popped out of the harbour, the wind clearly was not as forecast. It was more WSW than west, so not the reach we had hoped for. We were keen to get to France, however, so we pressed on.
It was a big spring tide, so we expected to get swept hard eastwards and then back westwards. We reefed early, anticipating the wind against tide effect as we got towards France. But it was a horrible sea. Our little boat was sailing beautifully but struggled to keep to our estimated speed. We were