New Conservative wrote:
Hi all,

I haven't actually sailed a boat yet but plan to later this year. I am
therefore still a bit green when it comes to the intricacies of the
subject.
Say I'm keen to visit the West Indies and I'm leaving from say
Southampton, England. I'm on my own and will need to sleep every day,
even if only for a few hours. Is it safe to let a boat 'sail herself'
while I catch some shut-eye, or is this a no-no?

Is it safe - not really because of the risk of a larger vessel turning
your boat into smaller pieces. I had an acquaintance who was single
handing who was bashed into by a cruise ship. He swore he was just
below for 15 minutes having a cup of tea and updating the chart
position.

Ships can come over the horizon in about 10 minutes to your position
if moving at say 22 knots. They seldom keep a good lookout at sea in
my experiences, and a small boats lights at night are only visible 2
miles away. At 22 knots that's a pretty short time to notice a
contact and alter course for the big ship. Big ships often have their
radar off during the day too.

Can it be done safely
or would I have to drop all sail and just bob around in the dark for a
while until I've awoken?

Dropping sail just makes you a stationary target rather than a moving
one and increases your exposure time.

Obviously it'd make for a shorter passage if
I could somehow keep going 24/7. And ideas? Thanks.

1. Consider taking a crew member just for the offshore passage from
England to the West Indies. Crew fatigue is probably one of the
biggest causes of accidents on offshore trips

2. If you're determined to do it solo, invest in a Radar with a
"guard zone"; a radar detector like a CARD, and carry life insurance.
Get a timer that wakes you every fifteen minutes to look around.

3. The most dangerous times are within a few hundred miles of the
coast but that is probably 48 hours of sailing for a typical cruising
boat so you need to be alert for that time period. That's a long time
to be alert after an ocean passage.

In short it's not a good idea, although people do it.

Evan Gatehouse

New Conservative wrote:
Hi all,

I haven't actually sailed a boat yet but plan to later this year. I am
therefore still a bit green when it comes to the intricacies of the
subject.
Say I'm keen to visit the West Indies and I'm leaving from say
Southampton, England. I'm on my own and will need to sleep every day,
even if only for a few hours. Is it safe to let a boat 'sail herself'
while I catch some shut-eye, or is this a no-no?

Is it safe - not really because of the risk of a larger vessel turning
your boat into smaller pieces. I had an acquaintance who was single
handing who was bashed into by a cruise ship. He swore he was just
below for 15 minutes having a cup of tea and updating the chart
position.

Ships can come over the horizon in about 10 minutes to your position
if moving at say 22 knots. They seldom keep a good lookout at sea in
my experiences, and a small boats lights at night are only visible 2
miles away. At 22 knots that's a pretty short time to notice a
contact and alter course for the big ship. Big ships often have their
radar off during the day too.

Can it be done safely
or would I have to drop all sail and just bob around in the dark for a
while until I've awoken?

Dropping sail just makes you a stationary target rather than a moving
one and increases your exposure time.

Obviously it'd make for a shorter passage if
I could somehow keep going 24/7. And ideas? Thanks.

1. Consider taking a crew member just for the offshore passage from
England to the West Indies. Crew fatigue is probably one of the
biggest causes of accidents on offshore trips

2. If you're determined to do it solo, invest in a Radar with a
"guard zone"; a radar detector like a CARD, and carry life insurance.
Get a timer that wakes you every fifteen minutes to look around.

3. The most dangerous times are within a few hundred miles of the
coast but that is probably 48 hours of sailing for a typical cruising
boat so you need to be alert for that time period. That's a long time
to be alert after an ocean passage.

In short it's not a good idea, although people do it.

Evan Gatehouse

in message , New
Conservative ') wrote:

Hi all,

I haven't actually sailed a boat yet but plan to later this year. I am
therefore still a bit green when it comes to the intricacies of the
subject.
Say I'm keen to visit the West Indies and I'm leaving from say
Southampton, England. I'm on my own and will need to sleep every day,
even if only for a few hours. Is it safe to let a boat 'sail herself'
while I catch some shut-eye, or is this a no-no?

It's a legally dodgy area. The colregs say that you must keep an
effective watch at all times, and clearly the extent to which a
singlehander can do that is questionable. However, if you're sailing a
small boat which is unlikely to do serious damage to anything you might
be in collision with I don't see it as a morally dodgy area. Of course
your own boat may sink, but that's a risk you take... in fact the sea
is very large and (apart from choke points like the English Channel)
the number of vessels in any given area is very small so the chances of
a collision are very low.

Can it be done safely
or would I have to drop all sail and just bob around in the dark for a
while until I've awoken?

There's no safety benefit from 'dropping all sail and just bobbing
about'; you might as well be making way in the direction you want to go
(and the movement of the boat will be more comfortable).

Obviously it'd make for a shorter passage if
I could somehow keep going 24/7. And ideas? Thanks.

There are two strategies. One is period based alarms - when you go to
sleep you set an alarm to wake you at a particular time - and the other
is event based alarms. If you use a self steering gear rather than an
autopilot you may use an 'off course alarm' linked to an electronic
compass; you may have an alarm set to go off if windspeed exceeds a
predetermined threshold; you may have a proximity alarm linked to an
active radar transponder. People who race singlehanded employ both
these strategies.

One thing is that most successful singlehanded sailors sleep for very
short periods - often only twenty or thirty minutes at a time, although
ideally with many of these 'cat naps' in a twenty four hour period. You
can train yourself to get used to this sort of routine before you leave
(and take it from me it's horribly tough and you end up after a few
weeks feeling horribly fatigued).

--
(Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
;; This email may contain confidential or otherwise privileged
;; information, though, quite frankly, if you're not the intended
;; recipient and you've got nothing better to do than read other
;; folks' emails then I'm glad to have brightened up your sad little
;; life a tiny bit.

Evan Gatehouse wrote:

Ships can come over the horizon in about 10 minutes to your position
if moving at say 22 knots.

AFAIK the horizon is 22 odd miles away. A ship moving at 22kts would
therefore take about an hour to get to you.

"New Conservative" wrote in message
...
Hi all,

I haven't actually sailed a boat yet but plan to later this year. I am
therefore still a bit green when it comes to the intricacies of the
subject.
Say I'm keen to visit the West Indies and I'm leaving from say
Southampton, England. I'm on my own and will need to sleep every day,
even if only for a few hours. Is it safe to let a boat 'sail herself'
while I catch some shut-eye, or is this a no-no? Can it be done safely
or would I have to drop all sail and just bob around in the dark for a
while until I've awoken? Obviously it'd make for a shorter passage if
I could somehow keep going 24/7. And ideas? Thanks.
--

Martin Smith, the New Conservative Party.

http://www.newconservativeparty.org

Is this a troll?
If you've never sailed, I suggest you get some instruction and experience
before ever thinking about single handing. Tat process will answer most of
your questions.
There is a breed of looney (I hope you are not really one of them) who has
bought a boat and set off with no idea of how to sail, and they are usually
the ones who end up in the newspapers or in the morgue. Learn from their
mistakes, and take one step at a time. Such people are a menace, especially
to the rescue services.

Dan wrote:
Evan Gatehouse wrote:

Ships can come over the horizon in about 10 minutes to your
position
if moving at say 22 knots.

AFAIK the horizon is 22 odd miles away. A ship moving at 22kts would
therefore take about an hour to get to you.


Sort of. A bunch of common misconceptions revolve around the "horizon".
Your horizon, the water perimeter you see will be around 2-3 miles
depending on your height. The ship on the other hand being much higher,
and with lights high up at night, will have much longer horizon of its
own. Couple those to get the distance at which you see it, and you are
looking at 15+ miles.

On the other hand, take one of those bloody cross channel cats at 40
Knots and it get s a bit more interesting.

PyroJames

The horizon depends on the height of your eye - the dipping distance
tables in the almanac give the distance off for height. You will see
objects above sea level 'over the horizon' according to their height so
as the ship approaches, you will see more of it.

It is all in the yachtmaster shorebased course - possibly day skipper too!

Nick

Dan wrote:
Evan Gatehouse wrote:


Ships can come over the horizon in about 10 minutes to your position
if moving at say 22 knots.


AFAIK the horizon is 22 odd miles away. A ship moving at 22kts would
therefore take about an hour to get to you.

Nick wrote:
The horizon depends on the height of your eye - the dipping distance
tables in the almanac give the distance off for height. You will see

objects above sea level 'over the horizon' according to their height
so
as the ship approaches, you will see more of it.

70 foot high ship viewed from 3 metres high. I can't be arsed to do the
maths but I bet it isn't *far* off 22 miles.

What would you estimate?

Dan wrote:
Nick wrote:

The horizon depends on the height of your eye - the dipping distance
tables in the almanac give the distance off for height. You will see


objects above sea level 'over the horizon' according to their height

so

as the ship approaches, you will see more of it.


70 foot high ship viewed from 3 metres high. I can't be arsed to do the
maths but I bet it isn't *far* off 22 miles.

What would you estimate?


Not quite that far. Dipping distance(nm) is 2.08 * SQRT(height in
metres). 3 metres gives a horizon at 3.6 nm. The 21 metre ship has a
dipping distance of 9.5 nm. So at 13.1 nm you will see the tops of the
masts and at 3.6 nm you will see the hull down to waterline.

Nick wrote:

Not quite that far. Dipping distance(nm) is 2.08 * SQRT(height in
metres). 3 metres gives a horizon at 3.6 nm. The 21 metre ship has
a
dipping distance of 9.5 nm. So at 13.1 nm you will see the tops of
the
masts and at 3.6 nm you will see the hull down to waterline.

So it aint gonna hit you in 10 mins.