Transcription
We interrupt our program to bring you this important message.
[Music]
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, in whatever time zone you're in. This is a bit of an odd recording, so I apologize for that. If you've come for your usual fix of sailing and shenanigans, perhaps this isn't the one for you. The reason I'm doing this is because I tried to film what amounts to a sort of an after-action review of my Yacht-Master course. Okay, so while the iron is hot, I wanted to debrief and just sort of articulate a few points, a few thoughts I had on the experience. It quickly ballooned into like a 20-minute monologue, and we decided to cut that part away from the episode so as to not subject anyone with no interest to that discussion. As such, I'm going to do it now as a whole separate thing, and here we are.
So, to give you all the lay of the land, I have just completed my Yacht-Master Offshore. So you have Yacht-Master Offshore, Yacht-Master Ocean. Yacht-Master Offshore gives you, as well as something in the vicinity of 200 miles offshore. Then you do your Ocean, which gives you, sort of, as the name would suggest, oceans. You can go as far and wide as you like. You do need to get a commercial endorsement on top of those things to, to, to use it for, uh, for work.
The course was pretty rewarding. What's required is firstly a theory course and then a practical course, and at the end of your practical course, you are assessed, and that's where you get the final tick in the box. So the prerequisite for the practical course is the theory course. I did my theory course with a company online, completely online, by correspondence. It was a really good service. You can check them out if you want. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I was very happy with the service. Basically, they send you, download an app, they, and you can get modules, all the modules online through your laptop, and you can also download them to your iPad so you can take them on the road. And then there's a series of quizzes and three exams. So you do an exam on your COLREGs, an exam on your navigation, and an exam on your passage planning, which essentially brings everything together. You don't need to be invigilated unless you're planning to go on, and they tell you this when you do the exam, unless you're planning to go on to do like 200 or more, actually many, thought like huge boats, huge, huge boats. So for sailing and yachting and chartering and, you know, whatever you might plan to do in a sailboat, you do not need to be invigilated. You set your pace, and I actually recommend that. And let, let me circle back to that point later because it's kind of imp, for me, it's kind of important, and there's sort of a cautionary tale that goes with it, but I'll circle back.
So you do your theory, you pass your exams, you get your, you get a certificate for that. Then you take that and you take your prerequisite miles, which is like two and a half thousand miles in, uh, coastal, or 50% of which needs to be coastal waters. And, and it's all clearly laid out online. You tick the box for the prerequisites, you fill in your form, you send off your certificate for your theory, and you go and you show up to your practical course. Now, I did my practical course in Plymouth with Sea Regs Training School. Again, not affiliated with them in any way, but I was very happy with the service, and I think they're a great, a great mob of people to do your training with.
Essentially, what the course is, and this is the way you should look at it, because basically on day one for us, what happened was we were sat down and we were shown this diagram, and essentially what it is is sort of the pathways to for your training. And they say, "What do you want to do with your qualifications should you achieve them? What's your goal? What's your, you know, what's your desired end state? Are you trying to get a Yacht-Master Ocean and a commercial endorsement so you can deliver boats or take people out sailing? Or are you just seeking to achieve the highest level of training you can for your own ends?" And depending on what your answer is, they will sort of say, "Well, you can go one or two ways. You can do the Yacht-Master Offshore and then subsequently do the Ocean, or you can do the Coastal Skipper." Which is essentially the same assessment, and it's certainly the same course, but at the end, for the assessment day or days, you are held to a perhaps a slightly different standard. And what they say is basically, "Okay, we'll take your goals on board, and we'll do the course, and at the end of the course, your instructor will recommend that you take one course or the other depending on how you've performed and how proficient you've been throughout the course."
And this is an important point to note, and one of the things I really wanted to get across is that you have to go into this like it's a polishing course at best. You are not there, and it was made very clear to us on day one, that we're not there to be instructed. This is, this course is a polishing course. It's called Yacht-Master, and I know that's probably overstating it, and the fact that I finished it certainly does not imply that I've mastered anything, but it's not a beginning course. There are other courses for that. And if you haven't nailed your theory, and you're not completely proficient and confident in what you're doing behind the tiller or on the wheel or, you know, at the mast, then perhaps you're in the wrong course. So that's the first thing that I want to say is that you've got to go into this course expecting to have just be basically, it's supervised to practice and some sort of critiquing. You're not there to be taught stuff. And if they say, "Hey, give me a course to steer," or "Do a blind nav," you're in charge. You're on the helm, and you're on the sheets. Do it now, right now, in, you have two minutes. You need to be able to do that quickly without going to your almanac or your charts or your notes. You know, don't get me wrong, they're not going to be like, "Time's up, you took too long." If you, you know, take a second, but if you have to refer to your notes or you have to like be prompted too many times, then that's, that's going to put alarm bells up for them. That's going to make them think, "Or maybe you're not ready." And they might recommend that you do a lower exam or no exam, which did happen. Apologies if those two blokes are listening, but I think it's an important cautionary tale.
There were three guys on the course, myself and two others. We were all surprised to hear that, you know, we're not going to be instructed per se, but that was fine. We all pressed on, and we all decided to go for the Yacht-Master Offshore. And this is the cautionary tale I alluded to in the beginning. The two guys had just finished the preparatory theory course at the school that we were doing the practical course with. So they had just done an intense week course, and both had passed their exams. I, however, went the other way, and I did my theory in my own time over the course of a month and passed my exams separately without help or with help, but like by correspondence. And I had a lot longer to absorb things and to look things up and to muddle through. I've got two here, but I filled four of these notebooks with just example problems and note-taking. I did it, I did a lot of stuff just taking my time because, well, I wasn't in a hurry. I wasn't there on a course for the week, and I wasn't under any pressure to do the exam. I did it in my own time when I was ready, and as such, I took my time, and I did, I did probably a bit more preparation than perhaps was done on the, on the course. Now, I'm not recommending, I'm not speaking against the course, but the takeaway here is that you need to be, you need to have internalized this stuff. So if you've done your theory some time ago, don't just go in there expecting that you'll be, you'll cover all of that again because you won't. You'll be required to know it on day one, off the top of your head, ricky-tick. And as such, uh, one guy was sort of suggested that perhaps he'd take the coastal exam, and he was, he opted out. And one, one gentleman had to leave the course for personal reasons. Like, both of these guys were competent, capable sailors. They were total, they were both a pleasure to sail with. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were in no way different to me, other than the theory, and not even so much the fact they didn't know it, they just needed a little, they just weren't quite, they hadn't absorbed it. So that's a huge recommendation that I would make to anyone following up: make sure your theory is like that.
And if you can do that, the rest is kind of fun because you're out in a, in a nice little boat, like a bit, we're on a Bavaria 36, which is an easy, simple boat to manage, to drive, and you're just out like polishing your skills. You, you know, you'll sail onto a dock, you'll sail out to a mooring, you'll do man overboard drills, you'll spring off docks, you'll back into a slip, you'll go bow first into a slip, you'll do night navigation. All these kinds of things, which is just, uh, it's just fun. It's a good course, and it's a good way to like polish your skills and to practice what you've learned in the practical course in reality. So it's actually a really rewarding course from, once you get past that hurdle.
So to move on a bit, um, the outline of the course, and your mileage may vary, this is not set in stone, so you know, don't quote me, but this is perhaps what you could expect if you go to the same school or a similar school. You show up on day one, you acclimatize, meet, meet and greet, go through the aforementioned conversation about what your goals are. You then pretty much pull straight out of there, and you get underway, and you start familiarizing yourself with the boat. Basically, get a safety brief on the boat, which you will be living on for the duration of the course. Over the course of the week, you'll be given a passage plan, which is kind of the culmination of all the theory that you have to demonstrate. So my passage plan was from Salcombe on the South Coast of the UK to Cescay in, in France. And basically, they say, "Okay, pick a day. Let's make it any day this week. Get the forecast for that day, and do me a passage plan." So pilot, pilot plan into port, pilot plan out of port, courses to steer over through the duration, forecasting, obviously, customs notes, all those things that you will have done in your exam, you need to do that. We were given our destination and our departure ports on the first day, and you've essentially got your own time to do that.
Here's how my days would go: I'd be up at five, I'd be doing my passage plan for two hours. Seven, it'd be breakfast, and then we'd be underway by 7:30, 8 o'clock. We'd do the day's activities. We'd get in at 7:30, 8 o'clock in the evening. We'd have dinner, and then I would disappear into my cabin again for more passage planning. Um, and I would, I would just do flashcards for COLREGs at night for about an hour every night for five days. So you weren't getting a lot of sleep, probably on five or six hours of sleep at night. It's fine, it's a week, you can do it, it's okay. It's not a booze cruise, it's not a piss trip. It is a serious course, and you should approach it as such.
Towards the end of the course, the tempo drops down a bit, and you start to like pick and choose the things you want to work on. And the instructor is aware of how your passage plans are unfolding. He'll be talking to you about them, and if you're behind, well, he'll give you time to catch up. The way it shakes out in the test, you spend much more time actually demonstrating skills behind the wheel, and then you do demonstrating your passage plan, which for me was like a 15-minute discussion at the very end of the course. He's like, "Yep, show me your chart. Shame, why did you choose to live here then? What time will you get there? What are your alternates?" You know, just show me your pilot plan in and out, and it's just like, have you ticked all the boxes?
So, let me talk you through what happened on the day of my exam. I woke up, got the boat speak and span, cleaned the boat. I had to get out the storm sail because it was going to be a stormy day. And the working jib. So we had storm sail on the deck, the working jib was hanked on, uh, to the temporary stay. Like, I had the boat 110% clean, dry. I had a cup of tea on the bench waiting for the instructor. As soon as I saw him coming down the dock, I marched down there, shook his hand, said, "Hey, going, sir?" Yes, it was like, "Sir, pleases and thank yous and introductions," and very, very official, very like professional. Like, this is your customer, and you're taking him out sailing. He came aboard, we did some paperwork, discussed the exam that I was going to do. Said, "Okay, no worries." And he said, "Right, cool. Let's get underway. Shall we take me out of the marina and bring me back?" That was it. He said, "Drive out, do what you want." He didn't even come upstairs. So he stayed downstairs with his paperwork. I had two guys with me who were there as training aids to assist the assessment. We pulled out of the slip, no worries, because you have prepared the boat to be stern in, so you just drive straight out. Slip the lines, drive out, turn around, come back. Turned around, come back. It didn't go well because the storm was starting to set in at this point. So it's like probably 20-something knots. You've got the tide going one way, the wind going the other. It's gusty as. And I came in, everything was going great, and this huge gust knocked me off my line, and it was an absolute disaster. The stern got away, the lines were not on the dock. I ended up essentially parallel parking between two slips. So I think you get extra points for that, but it wasn't, it wasn't good. Anyway, we moved on. I was, I was doing like, I was like this. I was like, "Oh god." Anyway, we moved on.
We then went out of the marina for keeps. He said, "Right, but just, just sail me," sorry, "motor me onto that mooring." So just pick up a mooring. Pretty easy stuff. He's looking to assess which way you approach the mooring based on the tide and the wind, how you make those decisions, how you manage the crew to pick up the mooring. Are they clipped in? Are they wearing life jackets? Are you in control of the situation? We picked up the mooring. We went downstairs, we did a little Q&A on, uh, tides. You know, he asked me where high water is today, things like that. Just basic, just picking, picking at my knowledge, looking for weak spots. And then we had a, had a cup of tea again, and a bit of a chat, just an informal chat. And we were underway. Said, "Okay, I want you to sail me across the bay to a little town that's just across Plymouth Harbour." No worries. So we slipped the mooring, put sails up, sailed out. Do I know the right of way? Do I know to stay out of the way of boats with restricted ability to maneuver? Do I know about the local regulations to stay away from warships? It just so happened that a Dutch warship was on its way into port as I'm doing the exam, which was kind of a pain because I had to stay well away from this thing in order to, well, it's illegal to approach a warship. They're very unhappy about that. So we're sort of playing keep away from this boat under sail, trying to, listening in on the radio, trying to figure out where it's going. And we got across, we got through. Came in, he said, "Okay, sweet. Can you put an anchor down for me?" Yeah, turn the motor on, get rid of the sails, put an anchor down, and we'll, uh, we'll stop for lunch. All right, stop for lunch.
At this point, he gave me a blind nav exercise to do after lunch. He said, "All right, cool. Can you do me a blind nav from where we are now to this, this port hand marker a little bit down the way?" And for that, for me, that was essentially an exercise in contour tracking and courses to steer. So I would be downstairs without a chart plotter, and just my map, just the tide tables. And in order to figure out where I was, he said, "Oh, sorry, the chart plotter is not working. You need to shoot a few bearings to landmarks, a church and a fort and a hilltop." And I just triangulated where I was and gave a course to steer to the 10, a 10-meter contour. That was fine. Everything was good. Then we sailed away from there, back to the marina. What do you know? Man overboard goes over. Man overboard drill. This was in 40 knots. It wasn't going well. It took me, it took me about 15 minutes to get the guy out of the water because it just, it's gusting to 40 knots. It's just really hard to do. But demonstrated the skill set, demonstrated command control, didn't give up. Don't give up. Never say you can't do anything because that's kind of like a, you're done, mate. If you throw your hands in the air and give up, then they do not want you to be wearing the badge of a Yacht-Master.
Now, this was something I wanted to know about, um, going into the course, because I had heard stories of people, this, you know, the man overboard drill is like the thing, the thing that everyone worries about. And, yeah, it's a big deal. You need to be able to do it. But the question mark for me going in was like, "Should I do it the fastest, most sensible way, aka crash stop the boat immediately, heave to, motor on, sails down, go and get the guy out of the water?" Or girl, which is the sensible thing to do? That's what you do in real life. If I fell overboard and some tit with a perfectly working engine and hands on deck did the sailing drill in lieu of coming to get me with the motor, I would deck him a sec as soon as I got on board. That's just crazy. But then you wonder, "Oh, do I do the drill? Do they want to see the drill?" So I asked the instructor about this. I asked everyone who would tell me, and they all told me the same thing: When you do the exercise, the man overboard goes in, you need to go downstairs, do the right thing, call them, call in the Mayday, put the man overboard mark her down, instruct the crew, do the crash stop, and go for the engine. Don't wait to be told, go for the engine. You're in charge. Do the right thing. When they want you to demonstrate the sailing maneuver, he will tell you. When you try to turn the motor on and put it in gear, your motor doesn't start. That's the clue. That's the like, "Oh, all right, cool. We're doing the drill now." So once I, once I was told that, I was like, "All right, now I know what to expect. I know, you know, I've found the balance between like real-world sensible maneuvering and the drill that they want to know you can do." Should you need to. I won't go into how to do the drill, save that for the instructors and the course. The only thing I would say is don't ever jibe. Driving is out. No driving. Everything is round and round. Tacking to windward. No driving. Anyway, got that done. Then it was, "Bring me back." Now, your mileage may vary. If you have a full complement of students on the course that are doing the exam, you'll be out there for a lot longer, and you'll be sort of cycling through the hot seat. But because it was just me, it was essentially like a, maybe a 12 exercise. We left in the morning, we got back at last, just after dark. And I got regular breaks. But they don't want to put you in a hot seat all day relentlessly. You need some time to get your brain space. It's pres, there's a lot of pressure. He said, "Yeah, sweet. Just bring me into the, do a find your way home however you see fit." I just followed the lights. You know, I'd been sailing in here at night for a week now. I knew the way home. He said, "Pull me into the slip." No worries. Pulled into the slip. And it was COLREGs flashcards and the passage plan sort of justification, if you will. And you get a sort of an after-action debrief, and he tells you all the things you did well, all the things you didn't do well, and tells you straight away whether you passed or not. You're not left wondering if you've passed or failed.
I wrote some takeaway points, and my god, this is a, this is a big one. I'll try to cut it down, but I'm also not going to try to cut it down because if you're like me going into this course, you will want to hear every single piece of advice you can get from somebody.
Prerequisite miles: Don't assume you know everything just because you've got lots of miles. The course is there to learn, it's there to polish you, it's there to assess you, and it's there to teach you the RYA way. A good example of that that happened to me was that, you know, I have done all my miles on a 30,000 pound, 42-foot boat with lazy jacks. We're short-handed, and we're usually doing ocean passages. When we reef, we don't typically come up, you know, hard up to windward and motor to windward and do all of that. We reef off the wind. However, the RYA way is, uh, round up to wind, vang, main topping lift, you then ratchet down a good solid reef, nice drum tight, the crinkle is right down on the boom, and then you carry on underway with your reef in. I didn't do that because I hadn't done the Day Skipper course. So we, and I was reefing not to demonstrate the skill, but because it was 40 knots and we really needed the reef in. The third reefing, so I put it in the way I always put it in, and it was probably two inches off the boom, so it wasn't a perfect reef, I'll give you that. But they really quizzed me, and even the guys on deck, um, one of whom had his Yacht-Master, was like kind of looking at me like, "I don't know what he's grilling you about. I don't know what he wants to see." And it was only after that it came out that it's like, "Well, how do you take a reef on your boat?" I have lazy jacks for one, and I get the reef in off the wind, and I'll get the sail as flat as it needs to be. But if you're reefing in a hurry off the wind, short-handed, we'll just get the bloody thing in as quick as you can, and we crack on because there's more important things to do, and I don't want people out on deck. But that's not the RYA way. And the fact, yeah, my miles mean nothing. So the takeaway there is check your ego at the door. Your mileage means nothing. It is just a prerequisite to make sure you're not completely greenhorn.
Yeah, I've said the theory thing already, but I'm going to say it again. Make sure your theory is up to stuff. If there's one thing that will instantly make you just have the worst time ever on the course, is if your theory is not up to par. There just isn't time to be relearning or learning things that were covered in the theory, like chart work, like fundamental chart work. There's just no time for that. If you did an intensive course, take some extra time, go back to square one, do it, do your theory again, like get the books, internalize it, make sure you know your stuff.
Never give up. No matter how badly it's going, don't assume you've failed. Just keep going. I had some whopper screw-ups, like I told you before, I parked the boat sideways across two slips because a gust got the stern, and I got through. So don't assume you failed just because you screw something up. They don't want to fail you. They want to know that you won't give up because in the real world, maybe you've got a boat full of customers, and your propeller shaft falls off, or your mast falls down. You have to be in charge. You have to be the one that's like, "I've got this, guys. I've got this. We're going to be fine. I'm qualified for this." You have to go into it with that in mind.
I hope this helped. I hope it was easy enough to follow. I hope somebody has some takeaways and and feels empowered and or at least a little more informed going into their course. Good luck. Get after it. I hope this helped. Thanks for watching.