Night watches: Life and death is in your own hands
At times I love sailing at night above all other times. But I have never grown to love night watches. I have to indulge in desperate cockpit antics, of singing and dancing and making up doggerel, to stay awake just a little bit longer because the clock hasn’t finished with me yet. The screaming reluctance of head and body to be torn from too short a sleep, just because some mule is yelling in my ear that it’s my trick on the helm. If only night sailing could be a wholly indulgent activity, free of the discipline and pain of night watches.
Do you stand regular watches at night? Do you stand effective watches at night? These are some of the most serious questions for a short-handed crew. Since all small yachts on long passages are short-handed at night, almost by definition, the question interests us all. Not all the pros and cons of standing night watches carry the same weight, and this is where scope for debate can insinuate itself, like a thorn, into the otherwise eternally rosy relationship between skipper and crew. Night watches can deprive you of the best hours of sleep and leave the crew permanently tired and irritatingly fractious. Conversely, not keeping watches on a long passage can leave the crew without enough exercise to make them healthily tired while the intrepid but anxious skipper never gets more than half an hour with his deserving but increasingly cotton-woolly head down.
I used to be flexible, even casual about night watches. I used to mull over the pros and cons because, after all, no one wants to be slave to a single notion or, even worse, a damned rule. That was when I still thought there were pros and cons. Sailing with my crew of M and J from the UK down to Africa to position ourselves for our Atlantic crossing to the Caribbean we had plenty of time to get some real experience of nights offshore, and to develop a policy towards keeping watches at night. I ask you - a policy! All that experience, all those nights at sea, all that highly evolved policy, suddenly counted for nothing after a single rather frightening incident far offshore, when the nearest land was about three miles under our keel.
A policy, being a grand thing, takes some time to develop. Habits develop much more quickly. At the early stage of that Atlantic crossing we got into bad habits in Biscay when we were hit by two storms. By the time the storms came at us we were tired from days of beating to the west. We hadn't been at sea long enough to get into the rhythm and routine of the boat, but we had been bashing away long enough to be in need of sleep. The storm was a welcome chance to get our heads down and try out my favourite point of sailing - being hove-to. Why not? There was not a lot to look at with those massive waves and rain-reduced visibility, and not a lot we could do about it anyway, with only our storm canvas set. Anyway, we were a long way offshore and well clear of the shipping lanes, and hadn't seen much before the storm closed down our visibility and our minds. We kept watch, of course we did, but not person-on and person-off in regular routine. And since this was Biscay, where terrible things can happen to small boats, and since I had always spent time sleeping during previous Biscay storms without mishap, the seeds of our Grand Policy for offshore night watches were nourished.
We found no reason to question the fledgling policy as our trip progressed. We were on the classic milk-run with a side trip to Africa, and this meant our journey contained four major passages of about seven to ten days each. After Biscay and its mixture of storms and fast sailing came the passage from Spain to Madeira, then Madeira to the Canaries, and then the Canaries to Senegal. We kept night watches on all of them but not in a thoroughly convinced way. By which I mean, I was thoroughly convinced that we didn’t need to but I had my reasons for making the crew (as well as myself) keep night watches. Those night watches when sailing south to warmer latitudes are special. A special part of the wonderful experience of sailing in softer, warmer air than blows around north western Europe. At night you have the boat more completely to yourself than during the day. You can watch the sky and sea or just let your mind drift in a way which the bright light of day does not allow. In the south the conditions were ideal. We had no need of heavy sweaters or oilskins. Even at night we could sit in the cockpit with just a light shirt for warmth.
The stars far offshore were wonderfully bright but better than these was the moon. When we sailed with half moons they left the night sky to the tracery of the stars. Not so the big, blowsy full moon. That gave way to nothing. I had never seen such rising full moons as those around Madeira. The moon rose from the horizon as big and golden as the sun. A more primitive and ignorant mind than my own would have sworn that the Earth had a second sun. The certified silver light only came when the moon was well clear of the horizon, and then it lit the whole world. It gave enough light to read by. We barely needed navigation lights and sometimes just ran with a paraffin light in the rigging.
So yes, of course, the towering beauty of stars, moon, phosphorescence and other sea life during the night was one reason to keep night watches, but it wasn’t the main one. Frankly I wanted to keep the crew tired enough to sleep during the day so that I could get my own head down in the afternoons. First, I am not an easy night-time sleeper. Second, there isn't enough to do on a small yacht reaching and running southwards day after easy day to keep a crew busy. Third, I like some undisturbed time with my own thoughts, and decided a healthy crew needed this too. I'm not sure everyone welcomed my care for their mental wellbeing.
I am not a stickler for rigid routines. On our passages southwards we adjusted night watches according to weather and position. When the wind was strong, we stood guard against a gibe. In flat calm we dropped all sail and slept. When land was coming up, we kept watch. Far offshore, we did not. We did, of course, look out for ships but saw very few. If we had thought ships were passing, we would have stood watches. But our custom of looking around every time one of us woke confirmed that there was no traffic about, so we slept.
By the time we were ready to leave Africa we had our night watch policy in place. Once offshore we would only keep night watches when needed. The only two reasons to keep night watches at sea are weather and other vessels. Nothing else. There may be other things to hit in the deep ocean, like whales and logs and floating containers but these are random events and don’t carry lights. A person on watch will only see them by chance, and usually when they are off the beam and already on their way astern. There may be other things to guard against, such as a rigging failure or a burst seacock, but if you set night watches for this you should have done more maintenance before you ever set out.
Our conclusion about not keeping night watches was not an unusual one for offshore sailing. The Smeetons, doyens of blue water vagabonding, had their evening cocktail and tucked up for a full night in bed. But then who would dare disturb Miles, or more to the point, Beryl? Even those fellow voyagers of ours who had kept watches all the way down to the Canaries and Africa were not planning to keep watch on the crossing itself. Most written accounts say the same. I suppose there is safety in numbers, just as getting run-down at sea always happens to someone else. We had plenty of clichés to support our thinking. So much for clichés. So much for policy. After leaving Africa we never had a night on the ocean without watches. Four things account for this. First, boisterous variable weather in the first week made us keep someone close by the tiller all the time. Second, yet more languor and indolence. We needed something to burn off our energy. Third, my wish to keep us all in Zen-like touch with the boat and the tasks of sailing. Fourth, and the trump card, we nearly got run down by a fishing boat.
It was our third night since leaving the Casamance river in southern Senegal. We were in a lonely place, 300 miles from Africa and 200 miles south of the Cape Verde islands. We had kept someone in the cockpit day and night as we reached fast with a force six across a boisterous sea and had seen no ships since leaving. I thought we were done with shipping.
M came below to wake me at five a.m. “There’s something you should see,” he said and went back to the main hatch. "I've been watching it carefully. I thought it was a very large ship a long way off but it’s a smaller ship really close." M had only recently realised how close this ship was. What I saw filling the foreground was a large, ocean-going fishing boat less than half a mile away, dead ahead and on a converging course. It carried two white lights and a red plus enough deck lights to flood a football stadium. “It’s been on a constant bearing for ages but because I could see the red light I thought it would pass ahead of us.”
Long before he called me M had switched on all our deck and mast lights. Tricolour, bicolour, steaming and spreader. The ship obviously hadn’t seen us. We were sailing at five knots. The ship was doing about eight knots. It was getting bigger very fast on a direct collision course.
M had plugged in our battery-sucking, half-million candela Megabeam to add to our illumination. "Shall I shine it on our sails?" he asked. This was no time for niceties. I could see the newspaper headline: "Courtesy sinks small yacht". I asked him to shine the light straight at the bridge while I prepared to gibe. If that ship had a helmsman it was time to wake him up.
Despite the huge half-million candela beam of light the ship kept coming. Its bow, clear as day in our light, rose and fell massively in the swell. It seemed taller than our mast. It would break us in two if it fell on Petronella like that and all they would know of our elegant ferro hull would be some bits of hard core in the trawl net. I was sheeting in for the gibe when the ship began to turn away. I gibed anyway. We were one hundred yards away and I wanted a lot more than that. I didn’t want to be caught if they turned back. We ran off to the south for half a mile and then came back on course to the west. The monstrous fishing boat was a mile away and we would cross its stern.
I have had a few near misses with fishing boats in the past but this shook me more than the others: partly because it happened so quickly; partly because that fishing boat was not behaving like others I have met. On Dogger Bank and in Biscay a flash of a light or a torch has always been enough to turn even the biggest of them away. I had no confidence in this one. I had no evidence they were keeping watch. I had plenty of evidence that they were not. They had not responded to our lights. If they had radar, it wasn’t on or working or being looked at.
Nor was I very happy about sinking so thoroughly and finally just here. This blind ship would be no help if it rammed us and ran on, as it surely would. There was no passing traffic here compared to the North Sea or Biscay. Our life raft with us in it would travel west with the wind and current to a shore over two thousand miles away. Even Biscay gives you more hope than that.
Two points come out of this. First, our lights were obviously no help. This wasn’t the Solent where yachts are commonplace. Out here, commercial skippers probably do not expect to see sailing boats with their puny masthead tricolours. Even if that ship had seen our masthead light, and not confused it with the Christmas star, it might reasonably have deduced from its height that we were miles away. After all, we had made a similar mistake about it. Deck lights, despite their greater wattage, are even less use. They are too low to be seen half the time and never by a ship keeping a sporadic watch. Also I have since come to appreciate that most fishermen don’t keep a forward watch. Forward is where the wind and spray hits you in the face. All the action that fishing crews are interested in is off their stern.
Second, our safety at sea depended wholly on our own lookout. I won't even trust an offshore ship to keep radar or VHF radio watch. Four hours after our encounter with this fishing boat a small coaster crossed our bows close enough for J to alter course. In bright daylight, through the binoculars, I saw no sign of a turning radome on that well maintained coaster. I called them on the VHF. No answer. Of course not. VHF, the radio all we yachts carry, is the wrong radio medium when far offshore.
It isn't even as though the time on night watches needs to be spent in purgatory to be effective. I never insisted on manacling the crew to the tiller or lashing them to the main mast. The bottom line was just that we each took turns at staying awake for three hours while the others slept. Every twenty minutes at least the night watch had to take a 360 degree look around the horizon and if anything was sighted they had to keep track of it. What they did for the rest of the time, and where they did it, was their prerogative. I reckoned that an interval of twenty minutes would keep us safe from hitting any vessel with lights, other than a very low flying aircraft. A paranoid or draconian skipper could specify a shorter interval - such as seventeen and a half minutes - but I like round numbers.
We hadn't been wrong to suppose there was very little shipping out here, just as there hadn't been very much on our route south from Spain. Our observations confirmed this, but our observations had an important flaw to them which I now had another two and a half weeks of ocean solitude to reflect on. I drew a very big lesson from a simple fact: our log entries recorded that we saw more ships at night than day. This cannot be because more ships were out and about near us at night rather than during the day. It had to have something to do with our watch keeping and their visibility.
During the day, even without formal watch keeping, someone was usually on deck. We had no need to look for ships because it was pretty certain that if one got close we would see it before we hit it. We logged very few ships at all in the deep ocean of the crossing but all those which we saw during the day came as a surprise. Two were only three miles away when we spotted them, and one of these was right on our nose where we could hardly miss it. A ship close to a small boat horizon is less distinct in daylight than its lights are at night, and unless we are looking carefully and systematically we may not see the day-time ship. At night the main reason for being in the cockpit is to keep a look-out and there is nothing much to distract us from periodically scanning the horizon. If a ship is out there in the dark we will see its lights at two or even three times the day light range.
So imagine this. After our first few days out of Africa we have no sightings. We conclude that there is no shipping to bother us and therefore that night watches are unnecessary. Every day would confirm our view that there were no ships to worry us and every night we would be oblivious to the lights of those that passed. With good luck we would arrive in the Caribbean well rested and able to report that there was so little shipping that watches were not needed. And others like us would say the same. And with just a little less luck we would have had a very bad fright one night or even been run down.
You can be flexible about keeping night watches or not, you can even develop a policy, but in the end your life depends on you and your crew, not the watches other vessels are keeping. There is more shipping out there than you will ever see, whichever bit of sea you are sailing on. At night all small yachts are running with reduced crews and lower levels of watch keeping, whether crewed or single handed, and a positive stance is needed. You and no one else have to take responsibility for your boat's safety.
The proof of this particular pudding is in another article on this website, praising the value of AIS.
At times I love sailing at night above all other times. But I have never grown to love night watches. I have to indulge in desperate cockpit antics, of singing and dancing and making up doggerel, to stay awake just a little bit longer because the clock hasn’t finished with me yet. The screaming reluctance of head and body to be torn from too short a sleep, just because some mule is yelling in my ear that it’s my trick on the helm. If only night sailing could be a wholly indulgent activity, free of the discipline and pain of night watches.
Do you stand regular watches at night? Do you stand effective watches at night? These are some of the most serious questions for a short-handed crew. Since all small yachts on long passages are short-handed at night, almost by definition, the question interests us all. Not all the pros and cons of standing night watches carry the same weight, and this is where scope for debate can insinuate itself, like a thorn, into the otherwise eternally rosy relationship between skipper and crew. Night watches can deprive you of the best hours of sleep and leave the crew permanently tired and irritatingly fractious. Conversely, not keeping watches on a long passage can leave the crew without enough exercise to make them healthily tired while the intrepid but anxious skipper never gets more than half an hour with his deserving but increasingly cotton-woolly head down.
I used to be flexible, even casual about night watches. I used to mull over the pros and cons because, after all, no one wants to be slave to a single notion or, even worse, a damned rule. That was when I still thought there were pros and cons. Sailing with my crew of M and J from the UK down to Africa to position ourselves for our Atlantic crossing to the Caribbean we had plenty of time to get some real experience of nights offshore, and to develop a policy towards keeping watches at night. I ask you - a policy! All that experience, all those nights at sea, all that highly evolved policy, suddenly counted for nothing after a single rather frightening incident far offshore, when the nearest land was about three miles under our keel.
A policy, being a grand thing, takes some time to develop. Habits develop much more quickly. At the early stage of that Atlantic crossing we got into bad habits in Biscay when we were hit by two storms. By the time the storms came at us we were tired from days of beating to the west. We hadn't been at sea long enough to get into the rhythm and routine of the boat, but we had been bashing away long enough to be in need of sleep. The storm was a welcome chance to get our heads down and try out my favourite point of sailing - being hove-to. Why not? There was not a lot to look at with those massive waves and rain-reduced visibility, and not a lot we could do about it anyway, with only our storm canvas set. Anyway, we were a long way offshore and well clear of the shipping lanes, and hadn't seen much before the storm closed down our visibility and our minds. We kept watch, of course we did, but not person-on and person-off in regular routine. And since this was Biscay, where terrible things can happen to small boats, and since I had always spent time sleeping during previous Biscay storms without mishap, the seeds of our Grand Policy for offshore night watches were nourished.
We found no reason to question the fledgling policy as our trip progressed. We were on the classic milk-run with a side trip to Africa, and this meant our journey contained four major passages of about seven to ten days each. After Biscay and its mixture of storms and fast sailing came the passage from Spain to Madeira, then Madeira to the Canaries, and then the Canaries to Senegal. We kept night watches on all of them but not in a thoroughly convinced way. By which I mean, I was thoroughly convinced that we didn’t need to but I had my reasons for making the crew (as well as myself) keep night watches. Those night watches when sailing south to warmer latitudes are special. A special part of the wonderful experience of sailing in softer, warmer air than blows around north western Europe. At night you have the boat more completely to yourself than during the day. You can watch the sky and sea or just let your mind drift in a way which the bright light of day does not allow. In the south the conditions were ideal. We had no need of heavy sweaters or oilskins. Even at night we could sit in the cockpit with just a light shirt for warmth.
The stars far offshore were wonderfully bright but better than these was the moon. When we sailed with half moons they left the night sky to the tracery of the stars. Not so the big, blowsy full moon. That gave way to nothing. I had never seen such rising full moons as those around Madeira. The moon rose from the horizon as big and golden as the sun. A more primitive and ignorant mind than my own would have sworn that the Earth had a second sun. The certified silver light only came when the moon was well clear of the horizon, and then it lit the whole world. It gave enough light to read by. We barely needed navigation lights and sometimes just ran with a paraffin light in the rigging.
So yes, of course, the towering beauty of stars, moon, phosphorescence and other sea life during the night was one reason to keep night watches, but it wasn’t the main one. Frankly I wanted to keep the crew tired enough to sleep during the day so that I could get my own head down in the afternoons. First, I am not an easy night-time sleeper. Second, there isn't enough to do on a small yacht reaching and running southwards day after easy day to keep a crew busy. Third, I like some undisturbed time with my own thoughts, and decided a healthy crew needed this too. I'm not sure everyone welcomed my care for their mental wellbeing.
I am not a stickler for rigid routines. On our passages southwards we adjusted night watches according to weather and position. When the wind was strong, we stood guard against a gibe. In flat calm we dropped all sail and slept. When land was coming up, we kept watch. Far offshore, we did not. We did, of course, look out for ships but saw very few. If we had thought ships were passing, we would have stood watches. But our custom of looking around every time one of us woke confirmed that there was no traffic about, so we slept.
By the time we were ready to leave Africa we had our night watch policy in place. Once offshore we would only keep night watches when needed. The only two reasons to keep night watches at sea are weather and other vessels. Nothing else. There may be other things to hit in the deep ocean, like whales and logs and floating containers but these are random events and don’t carry lights. A person on watch will only see them by chance, and usually when they are off the beam and already on their way astern. There may be other things to guard against, such as a rigging failure or a burst seacock, but if you set night watches for this you should have done more maintenance before you ever set out.
Our conclusion about not keeping night watches was not an unusual one for offshore sailing. The Smeetons, doyens of blue water vagabonding, had their evening cocktail and tucked up for a full night in bed. But then who would dare disturb Miles, or more to the point, Beryl? Even those fellow voyagers of ours who had kept watches all the way down to the Canaries and Africa were not planning to keep watch on the crossing itself. Most written accounts say the same. I suppose there is safety in numbers, just as getting run-down at sea always happens to someone else. We had plenty of clichés to support our thinking. So much for clichés. So much for policy. After leaving Africa we never had a night on the ocean without watches. Four things account for this. First, boisterous variable weather in the first week made us keep someone close by the tiller all the time. Second, yet more languor and indolence. We needed something to burn off our energy. Third, my wish to keep us all in Zen-like touch with the boat and the tasks of sailing. Fourth, and the trump card, we nearly got run down by a fishing boat.
It was our third night since leaving the Casamance river in southern Senegal. We were in a lonely place, 300 miles from Africa and 200 miles south of the Cape Verde islands. We had kept someone in the cockpit day and night as we reached fast with a force six across a boisterous sea and had seen no ships since leaving. I thought we were done with shipping.
M came below to wake me at five a.m. “There’s something you should see,” he said and went back to the main hatch. "I've been watching it carefully. I thought it was a very large ship a long way off but it’s a smaller ship really close." M had only recently realised how close this ship was. What I saw filling the foreground was a large, ocean-going fishing boat less than half a mile away, dead ahead and on a converging course. It carried two white lights and a red plus enough deck lights to flood a football stadium. “It’s been on a constant bearing for ages but because I could see the red light I thought it would pass ahead of us.”
Long before he called me M had switched on all our deck and mast lights. Tricolour, bicolour, steaming and spreader. The ship obviously hadn’t seen us. We were sailing at five knots. The ship was doing about eight knots. It was getting bigger very fast on a direct collision course.
M had plugged in our battery-sucking, half-million candela Megabeam to add to our illumination. "Shall I shine it on our sails?" he asked. This was no time for niceties. I could see the newspaper headline: "Courtesy sinks small yacht". I asked him to shine the light straight at the bridge while I prepared to gibe. If that ship had a helmsman it was time to wake him up.
Despite the huge half-million candela beam of light the ship kept coming. Its bow, clear as day in our light, rose and fell massively in the swell. It seemed taller than our mast. It would break us in two if it fell on Petronella like that and all they would know of our elegant ferro hull would be some bits of hard core in the trawl net. I was sheeting in for the gibe when the ship began to turn away. I gibed anyway. We were one hundred yards away and I wanted a lot more than that. I didn’t want to be caught if they turned back. We ran off to the south for half a mile and then came back on course to the west. The monstrous fishing boat was a mile away and we would cross its stern.
I have had a few near misses with fishing boats in the past but this shook me more than the others: partly because it happened so quickly; partly because that fishing boat was not behaving like others I have met. On Dogger Bank and in Biscay a flash of a light or a torch has always been enough to turn even the biggest of them away. I had no confidence in this one. I had no evidence they were keeping watch. I had plenty of evidence that they were not. They had not responded to our lights. If they had radar, it wasn’t on or working or being looked at.
Nor was I very happy about sinking so thoroughly and finally just here. This blind ship would be no help if it rammed us and ran on, as it surely would. There was no passing traffic here compared to the North Sea or Biscay. Our life raft with us in it would travel west with the wind and current to a shore over two thousand miles away. Even Biscay gives you more hope than that.
Two points come out of this. First, our lights were obviously no help. This wasn’t the Solent where yachts are commonplace. Out here, commercial skippers probably do not expect to see sailing boats with their puny masthead tricolours. Even if that ship had seen our masthead light, and not confused it with the Christmas star, it might reasonably have deduced from its height that we were miles away. After all, we had made a similar mistake about it. Deck lights, despite their greater wattage, are even less use. They are too low to be seen half the time and never by a ship keeping a sporadic watch. Also I have since come to appreciate that most fishermen don’t keep a forward watch. Forward is where the wind and spray hits you in the face. All the action that fishing crews are interested in is off their stern.
Second, our safety at sea depended wholly on our own lookout. I won't even trust an offshore ship to keep radar or VHF radio watch. Four hours after our encounter with this fishing boat a small coaster crossed our bows close enough for J to alter course. In bright daylight, through the binoculars, I saw no sign of a turning radome on that well maintained coaster. I called them on the VHF. No answer. Of course not. VHF, the radio all we yachts carry, is the wrong radio medium when far offshore.
It isn't even as though the time on night watches needs to be spent in purgatory to be effective. I never insisted on manacling the crew to the tiller or lashing them to the main mast. The bottom line was just that we each took turns at staying awake for three hours while the others slept. Every twenty minutes at least the night watch had to take a 360 degree look around the horizon and if anything was sighted they had to keep track of it. What they did for the rest of the time, and where they did it, was their prerogative. I reckoned that an interval of twenty minutes would keep us safe from hitting any vessel with lights, other than a very low flying aircraft. A paranoid or draconian skipper could specify a shorter interval - such as seventeen and a half minutes - but I like round numbers.
We hadn't been wrong to suppose there was very little shipping out here, just as there hadn't been very much on our route south from Spain. Our observations confirmed this, but our observations had an important flaw to them which I now had another two and a half weeks of ocean solitude to reflect on. I drew a very big lesson from a simple fact: our log entries recorded that we saw more ships at night than day. This cannot be because more ships were out and about near us at night rather than during the day. It had to have something to do with our watch keeping and their visibility.
During the day, even without formal watch keeping, someone was usually on deck. We had no need to look for ships because it was pretty certain that if one got close we would see it before we hit it. We logged very few ships at all in the deep ocean of the crossing but all those which we saw during the day came as a surprise. Two were only three miles away when we spotted them, and one of these was right on our nose where we could hardly miss it. A ship close to a small boat horizon is less distinct in daylight than its lights are at night, and unless we are looking carefully and systematically we may not see the day-time ship. At night the main reason for being in the cockpit is to keep a look-out and there is nothing much to distract us from periodically scanning the horizon. If a ship is out there in the dark we will see its lights at two or even three times the day light range.
So imagine this. After our first few days out of Africa we have no sightings. We conclude that there is no shipping to bother us and therefore that night watches are unnecessary. Every day would confirm our view that there were no ships to worry us and every night we would be oblivious to the lights of those that passed. With good luck we would arrive in the Caribbean well rested and able to report that there was so little shipping that watches were not needed. And others like us would say the same. And with just a little less luck we would have had a very bad fright one night or even been run down.
You can be flexible about keeping night watches or not, you can even develop a policy, but in the end your life depends on you and your crew, not the watches other vessels are keeping. There is more shipping out there than you will ever see, whichever bit of sea you are sailing on. At night all small yachts are running with reduced crews and lower levels of watch keeping, whether crewed or single handed, and a positive stance is needed. You and no one else have to take responsibility for your boat's safety.
The proof of this particular pudding is in another article on this website, praising the value of AIS.
