A Philosophy Of Boating Safety

HOW TO TRAIN YOURSELF TO MANAGE DANGER AT SEA, SAFELY, By: Paul Exner

To sail anywhere with autonomy — a sailor should prepare for unfamiliar horizons by training themselves to manage the routine dangers they may face.

Safety Training begins before any voyage embarks — and, the resulting safety-habits build crew-confidence in everyday sailboat operation — this routine mindset should also minimize catastrophe.

My article highlights the safety topics I believe sailors should train for — I also share the approach I use to coach danger-awareness and safety-minded preparedness. My concepts are based-on 45-years of sailing experience that I’ve refined over decades as a professional sailing coach.

I organize safety training into four areas:

1. A Philosophy of Safety

2. Personal Safety & Responsibility

3. Operation of Critical Sailboat Systems Underway

4. Deck Level Safety & Emergencies

First and foremost — I begin my training sessions by emphasizing two points:

1) The Goal of Boating is to move the boat from A to B, have fun, pursue a personal interest to grow-by during the journey, and arrive safely without breaking equipment, nor hurt anyone or anything.

2) The Role of Captain is to prepare and operate a vessel and manage crew to complete each voyage while safeguarding human life and assets, including environmental protection.

These sentiments quickly summarize what sailors “do” on the ocean — my words are crafted to nurture empathy as a guiding principle. If everyone aboard a boat conducts themself with these perspectives in mind, we’ve collectively made the boating-world a great place.

A Philosophy of Safety

Let’s look at Personal Safety first because “safety” begins and ends with individual people and the things they do, pay attention to, and don’t do — these are fundamental ideas that guide the theme behind safety training for ocean sailors.

The old saying: “one hand for yourself and one for the ship” is a metaphor… It obviously implies a sailor should hold onto the boat so they don’t fall-down, nor fall overboard.

But, when I look deeply into this metaphor it speaks volumes about the many proactive decisions sailors routinely make to safely complete a voyage with crew and assets in mind. NOTE: “self” AND “ship” — makes us think about what it takes to be danger-aware.

Before an ocean sailor can fully appreciate “seamanship awareness,” where “awareness” is given its due importance, great instructors realize the transformation toward safety-mindedness happens via mentoring and guided experiences — this takes time, and instructional skill is paramount to properly convey this sentiment.

Frankly, students look at “training” from their life-experiences first, and that either helps or hinders the rate at which they understand how to apply safety awareness to everyday sailing — SO, students must work hard to compare/contrast their life-experiences to specific safety facts taught in safety-training; I personally focus my instruction to bridge a student’s experience to specific dangers surrounding us before hammering-home routine safety drills. Let’s be real, once a sailor is “trained” they often don’t routinely practice safety drills again, instead they react to danger when it occurs later on.

I believe the best way to make sailors safe is to get them to consider safety-precautions, and create good safety habits — I accomplish this by teaching the philosophical perspective rather than how to react to danger.

A nurtured perspective that preempts “danger” built into safety training will lead the sailor to take the correct reaction to danger more often than remembering hard procedural responses.

It’s not the specifics of safety training that make sailors safe, it’s their understanding and practice of being safe that matters most! 

I use the metaphor above to teach safety-minded awareness. I validate the idea that a self-centered perspective IS valid IF the sailor also considers how their actions affect the ship and crew. In other words: one hand for the ship AND one-hand to: make decisions, take actions, pursue “the goal of boating.”

Personal Safety & Responsibility

The practical side of safety training focuses on hands-on, action-based activities and routines that go beyond check-lists. True practical training teaches a sailor to understand the mechanics behind each process.

Checklists are rarely at hand when danger is faced — checklists help outline safety-training curriculum but a sailor needs solid understanding of a topic’s relation to the big picture.

Personal safety is subdivided into four topics:

Health — without it, a sailor begins the day unsafe! Every aspect of being healthy is important, from preempting sea sickness to managing it offshore. From mental perspective to physical fitness. Healthiness obviously doesn’t begin the day of departure. The #1 thing a safe-sailor does is live a “healthy” life-style. My students prepare their health weeks in advance of our hands-on session — I guide them to design their own pre-departure regimen which includes mental visualization. When taken seriously, they embark healthy by building a foundation that prepares them to work safely aboard.

Clothing — Sailors who suffer foul weather, don the wrong gear. My clothing choices for an overnight-sail are nearly the same as what I pack to cross an ocean! I pack gear for warm and cold weather, with versatility and layering in mind. Sun protective clothing is better than ever today! When I feel physically comfortable, my mental mood is balanced — then, I can avert danger by sailing comfortably. To remain safe, my clothing choice must regulate my temperature while sitting, and while working up a sweat — my choices must allow me to move freely without encumbering me.

Personal Safety Equipment — keeping me aboard, preventing me from drowning, that helps me get found if I fall overboard, and preempts physical injury from falling or wounding my skin, muscles, and bones — are all required. I use my feet as tools — anti-slip shoes that fit my feet are essential to my safety and the safety of other sailors too if I use my feet to brace myself when responding to danger. Safety harnesses and electronic locating devices designed ergonomically to be operated simply improve my mood and make me feel confident. Sailing gloves for warm weather are different from those I wear on cold days. Headlamps with white and red-lights (sometimes blue) for night use are required — the simpler the better! I find no use for the blinker-light feature and hope manufacturers alleviate the blinking-light option for simplicity sake. Sea boots? Yes, I always pack boots! Even a small roll of rigging tape in my pocket, and a multi-tool allow me to affect a repair on the spot!

Systems Knowledge — builds confidence when I know how to safely operate everything I need on a daily basis. I never leave the dock without training my students how to set the anchor — I can respond to an anchoring emergency quickly by calmly giving a pre-departure briefing about my windlass, anchor tie-down, rode-markers, hand-signal communication for deployment and anchor retrieval. Engine operation and monitoring of its vital data is important safety training — including prop-rotation, transmission shifting, and how to power-up and down the propulsion system. Running rigging operation, reefing, sail-furling, halyard layout, line-handling, winch operation, even the nuances of specific components like cleat orientation, and how to best position ones self to crank a winch. The galley is an important area for safety training for obvious reasons: prevent fire or explosion, reduce the risk of getting doused by boiling water or sizzling oil. I also discuss interior handholds throughout the boat, especially in the galley when two hands are often required for cooking.

Operation of Critical Sailboat Systems Underway

Let’s dive into the training that improves safety of operation — specific to critical systems underway.

It’s the Captain’s responsibility to manage the boat overall, but crew must know their boat too, especially the ins-and-outs of the components “the boat” needs to sail and arrive safely.

Navigation — is arguably the primary task aboard every boat underway because, without it, the crew simply has no direction. There’s one crew member designated as Navigator (often it’s the Captain’s role) but all sailors aboard need safety training to understand the navigation system and process to keep the boat on track, and to make log entries essential to safe operation! The crew should be trained on: log-entry format with the important caveat that Course To Steer is derived as the Standing Order of the Watch! This simple guidance is the basis by which ALL activity aboard the boat is centered. Training that reveals nuances between the various course headings breeds safety because a sailor needs to know which heading to follow: Course Over Ground by GPS, Ship’s Magnetic Compass, Autopilot FluxGate Heading, Bearing to Waypoint, etc. It’s no surprise these values can ALL be different ALL the time while sailing — obviously the crew is safer when they know which “heading” to follow!

Piloting — is fun because it’s sailing time! When trained how to pilot a specific boat, the confidence gained makes sailing even more fun mostly because minute-by-minute management makes the boat run like clock-work. I’ll cover running rigging and propulsion below, but Piloting in this context deals with keeping the boat sailing toward its goal, avoiding collisions, and driving the boat with the correct power (sail or auxiliary), and routed where it needs to go. Keeping the boat on course via hand-steering or autopilot requires real skill, and safety training must reveal piloting-nuances about points of sail, sea-states, sail-power guidelines, helming techniques, and which wind/wave angles help the autopilot do it’s job. A well piloted sailboat maintains the status quo aboard the boat, manages its mood (so to speak), whereby things run SO smoothly that when danger crops-up it’s easily identified as separate from the norm, making the response to the danger clear.

Routine Mechanical Operation — Running Rigging / Aux. Propulsion / Electric Power Supply & Demand / Anchoring: Operational safety training for these systems deals with the when, why, and order of operation by singlehanded effort or via teamwork. Essentially, there’s a symphony happening underway that requires routine monitoring of system-status, so the appropriate action can be taken to manage the boat — analogous to Jazz music where the band follows a score but has freedom to improvise. Holding a course from A-to-B simply requires a certain amount of sail-power to drive the boat through a sea state at every moment in time. Demonstrating how to balance the boat under sail, and when to shift-gears is essential. Driving a boat under aux. power is an art, especially motor-sailing. Knowing when to switch between sail and engine-power alleviates stress by knowing the threshold to do so. There’s a lot of electric demand aboard sailboats underway: fridges, freezers, autopilot, entertainment, navigation, water-maker, etc. There are also several types of elec. generators: wind, alternator, solar, hydro. Monitoring elec. demand and supply, and knowing when, how and what order all components should be operated is powerful safety training — it’s not good when a battery gets SO depleted that a tired-sailor is now forced to hand-steer because there’s not enough electricity to run the autopilot.

Deck Level Safety & Emergencies

Good safety habits avert emergency response — but, accidents happen and things break-down. Unfortunately problems at sea require human intervention before an emergency no longer places extra responsibility on the crew — the additional time and stress an emergency puts on a crew may reach an unmanageable level.

Safety training that details how to respond to: fire, collision, grounding, sinking, crew overboard, etc. must be undertaken.

Paul Exner’s Summarized Perspective on Boating Safety

Life-choices are made, and emergency responders do everything they can, but sometimes our collective efforts are not enough! This perspective is an unfortunate reality, whereby every life cannot be saved even though all responses were meticulously carried out. It's for this final reason that I return to the beginning of this article and say: A self-centered, safety-minded perspective IS valid at sea IF the sailor also considers how their actions affect the ship and crew. In other words: one hand for the ship AND one-hand to: make decisions, take actions, and pursue “the goal of boating.”

Be safe.

Paul Exner / December 2022