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/
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