An ‘action guide book’ for mariners, inspired by the aviation world’s discipline of thorough checklists for everything.

What if….?

“What ifs?” are dark questions that lurk ...Read more]]> Book Review – SeaWise Emergency Action Guide and Safety Checklists for Sailing Yachtsby Zvi Richard Dor-ner and Zvi Frank. Cornell Maritime Press, a division of Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.

An ‘action guide book’ for mariners,
inspired by the aviation world’s discipline of thorough checklists for everything.

What if….?

“What ifs?” are dark questions that lurk in the minds of many sailors, and not just those new to sailing, but those new to a particular boat, signing on as crew for an ocean passage, perhaps, or just relaxing as a guest for a weekend.

Safety Checklist side

Too often, “What ifs?” are questions that get left unasked, shoved aside by blind trust in the skipper or in the face of sunny reassurances and thus left to fester in the musty corners of the imagination.

Even responsible captains who plan carefully and brief thoroughly can fall prey to assuming their crew will somehow know what they need to know in the unlikely event an emergency arises.

Left unaddressed, especially for those who come aboard nervous to begin with, “What ifs…?” can lead to anxiety if not disaster.

The SeaWise Emergency Action Guide and Safety Checklists for Sailing Yachts, from Schiffler Publishing’s Cornell Maritime Press, brings all this out into the bright light of day in a handy, new flip booklet brought to reality by a duo of Israeli sailors – Zvi Richard Dor-ner and Zvi Frank – who have come together to create what they dub “action guide books” for mariners.

Emergency Action Guide side

These action guide books – there’s a SeaWise Emergency Action Guide and Safety Checklists for Motor Yachts, too — are inspired by the aviation world’s discipline of thorough checklists for everything.

Spiral bound, tabbed, and printed on waterproof paper, the SeaWise Safety Checklist for Sailing Yachts read one direction is a collection of safety checklists divided into twelve sections.

Flipped over and read the other direction, it becomes the SeaWise Emergency Action for Sailing Yachts, with guidance addressing fourteen different emergency scenarios.

The Safety Checklist side begins with a checklist for every captain for pre-voyage planning: reminders of information that should be written down in the logbook for each specific passage.

This is followed by checklists for pre-departure safety briefings about procedures and equipment – briefings that go two ways, so that the captain obtains information about the crew as well as the crew about the boat.

Safety Checklist: On Watch

The next section is on the responsibilities of the watch keeper, for both day and night passage-making, and summarizes, in a helpfully concise and accessible format, the Rules of the Road, buoyage, vessel lights and sound and distress signals.

This is followed by a checklist for heavy weather preparation, reminding crew of many small preparations to take before the bad weather hits that are all too easy to forget while worrying about the bigger preparations.

The next four sections provide boat owners a place to assemble in one place the specific specifications of their boat for the crew’s reference. This includes pages to sketch in your boat’s sail plan, deck plan and stow plan (but, unfortunately, no pages for electrical or plumbing). There’s even a page for your boat’s polar diagram, a neat graph of your boat’s potential performance in given wind speeds and points of sail, so that you can calculate if you are making the best of the conditions.

Wrapping up the checklist section are lists of materials and tools to inventory for damage control, medical needs, sail repair and engine maintenance. This last category, of course is general, and should be customized for your engine and/or generator.

Emergency Action Guide: Medical

Taking all the preparations recommended by the Safety Guide will reduce the chances of ever having to use the Emergency Action Guide side of this book, but bad things can happen to even the best prepared mariner.

When those bad things do happen, they require prompt and appropriate response, and the Emergency Action Guide is constructed to provide “concise and direct guidance” for dealing with each possibility, in those very moments when one can hardly think straight.

In an “If…, then…” flowchart format, the Emergency Guide addresses flooding, collision, running aground, fire, loss of steering, engine failure, emergency communications, medical emergencies, man overboard, extreme weather, rig failure, abandon ship, rescue and disabled skipper scenarios.

All this information is packed into a compact 8 ½” x 6” package that will easily find a place in the cockpit on passage, handy for constant review and reference. The pages can be marked on with pencil to customize and update lists and diagrams, and used in conjunction with a seagoing logbook to record specific information for each region travelled.

We of Women and Cruising have long advocated the use of checklists aboard for responsible organization. Here is a book that gives cruisers a huge head start.

SeaWise Emergency Action Guide and Safety Checklists for Sailing Yachts by Zvi Richard Dor-ner and Zvi Frank. Cornell Maritime Press, a division of Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.

Also on this website

• More book reviews

I am a single, laid back, 34 yr old female, that is physically fit, a college grad, and currently living in Florida. I’m seeking a life change and am considering a career in the sailing/boating industry.

I have been sailing most of my life…attended sailing camps in the summer as a kid, and then instructed ...Read more]]>

Amanda’s question

Gwen Hamlin answers

Dear Amanda!

 Your letter could have been written by me 25 years ago. I was just about your age when it all began for me.

If you go to my first Admiral’s Angle column, you’ll get a pretty good idea how I got started. No reason for me to type it all up again here.

What are sort of opportunities exist in this industry?

There are lots of opportunities, and unexpected pathways for getting to them. It may be hard to walk up to an island charter company, show a squeaky new captains ticket and expect to get hired as a captain, but you can work your way in.

Is it a disadvantage that I’m a woman?

I never found it an issue being a woman. Neither did most of my other woman captain friends. The trick is simply not to think of it as an issue. Be game to do whatever is needed; if you don’t know how, ask to learn. You’ll be amazed how many of the male charter captains don’t know how to do some of the mechanical stuff, that at least I thought they would have a head start in knowing how to do!

I know some women captains had issues with guests who gave them some grief in not being as assertive as they pictured a male captain would be. I ran into very little if that. I often attribute that to being their dive instructor too. Holding their lives in my hands, so to speak! But mostly, I found, people who will book a boat with a woman captain self select out to being better adjusted people!

The reality of course is that many of the crewed charter boats — whether with the big bareboat companies or private — are run by husband/wife teams, often experienced or returned cruising couples. That doesn’t mean you can’t work without being married, or that you must get pigeon-holed as a chef, but it is a typical arrangement. The good news is that charter boats are getting bigger and bigger and carrying more guests, so there is often a place for a third crew member. In such a situation, keep yourself positioned as an asset and avoid becoming in any way a burden or a liability. Take care to avoid being a third wheel or a threat!

When I was in the biz, I was one of a very few female owner-operators/captains. Other women captains found gigs with single males, some of whom needed paper captains (i.e. The guys didn’t have the correct licenses). Several worked doing captain-only gigs for the bareboat companies. Even with a captain’s ticket, many start out/ or double as charter chefs. Don’t let the “chef” moniker put you off. Just being a good cook can be enough on many boats.

Starting as a deck crew/stewardess is a great way to get sea time as well as inside experience on what is wanted and expected in the charter biz. Every boat and situation will be different, though, and the best asset you can bring is good people skills, natural hosting abilities, flexibility,…..and, like I said, a knack for cooking, cleaning and varnishing doesn’t hurt!

The more qualifications you can walk in with, the better. For the Virgin Islands I believe you would want as a minimum a captain’s license and the STCW endorsement, but you should check with the charter companies themselves and/or the clearing houses for the crewed charter yachts for the most current standards.

If you scuba dive, being a divemaster or dive instructor adds to your options and makes you more valuable. At least be a competent snorkeler.

If you have certifications from sailing organizations that let you teach and/or give certifications, that’s an asset with bareboat companies.

Is it better to be located within the area I wish to work- such as the Virgin Islands – to apply for a job?

Being where you want to work geographically is a huge advantage. Employers in the islands want to know you are committed to being there, that you can take living there! Too many vacationers breeze through with frivolous ideas of stopping to work. But moving there without a job can be awkward if your budget doesn’t allow you to get a place to live while you hunt.

Is the compensation, in general, enough to live on?

Compensation in the charter biz is usually enough to live on because part of the job is living aboard. It won’t make you rich, even (or especially) if you are an owner operator!, but it does afford the lifestyle.

Does working in this industry set myself up for an isolated lifestyle?

You ask if you are setting yourself up for an isolated lifestyle. It certainly was not my experience. There are isolated times, of course, and there are frustrations when your newest best friends — your current charter guests or a cruising boat team you’ve become friendly with — go home or move on. This does not mean the relationships are shallow, they just come and go, and often come back again. There are, of course, sailors, charter teams, and cruisers who choose to keep to themselves, but I would generally consider it a very social lifestyle. It is what you make it.

What you are setting yourself up for is not having a typical life, marriage or kids, pension etc. It’s a fact of life that, as a woman, your window to have children is small, and if that is important to you, you may be making it harder on yourself.

Are there networking sites or job boards?

There are job boards and crew agencies, many based in Ft Lauderdale. I personally think of these as catering to the mega-yacht trade, which is actually another possible way to go. There are all kinds of training opportunities in Ft Lauderdale for these kinds of crew positions. Mega yacht crewing is all a LOT more formal than Virgin Island chartering, and I’ve heard there is bias is against women in deck positions.

There are also boards that match volunteer crew up with boats making passages. This can be a good way to get offshore experience. Many of the major sailing rallies have crew wanted bulletin boards, and our W&C resources page has some suggestions.

Good luck,
Gwen Hamlin
Admiral’s Angle

If you have a question about going cruising that you want answered, email it to: kathy@forcruisers.com

Indeed, no  cruising cookbook I have ever seen has so deliberately set out to ...Read more]]> Although it is a hefty paperback, The Boat Galley Cookbook by cruisers Carolyn Shearlock and Jan Irons is likely to help raise your waterline, because it consolidates in one volume many culinary resources cruising chefs have previously felt obliged to carry.

Indeed, no  cruising cookbook I have ever seen has so deliberately set out to be a comprehensive examination of how to meet the challenges of cooking afloat.  “We each faced a huge learning curve when we first began cruising,” say the authors, “so, we’ve tried to pass on all the  things we wish we’d known!”

The Boat Galley Cookbook is divided into two main sections.  In the first – “A Galley Frame of Mind” – the authors present tips on how to adjust your thinking from land to sea.  They advise on how to outfit your galley from scratch, make good provisioning choices for your voyage (including figuring out options available in foreign markets), and effectively store and protect various foodstuffs for passages.

Possibly  the most important section in the whole cookbook is the one on how to make  intelligent substitutions when some important recipe ingredient – like  buttermilk or sour cream — is not available.  (I can’t tell you how many times in a remote location this chapter would  have been a godsend!)  Another chapter  summarizes all the measurement equivalents and conversions you’re likely to  encounter moving from country to country.  There is even a chapter introducing some less familiar cooking  techniques that we cruisers pick up – like cooking in a thermos or baking in a  pressure cooker.  Before The Boat Galley Cookbook cruising cooks had to collect this information willy nilly.

Two  other helpful chapters in the section zero in on the very pertinent issues of  planning meals for underway consumption and on the special concerns when stormy  weather is on the horizon.

The Recipes section of The Boat Galley Cookbook shows equal consideration  for cruisers’ needs.  The section starts “Meal  Ideas for the Boating Life” with nine lists of recipe “inspirations” for  different situations, for example, ideas for breaking the monopoly of  sandwiches for lunch, good one-pot meals, hot weather meals,  and five-minute appetizers.  They have even specifically cross-referenced recipes for creatively using such cruiser standbys as pasta and cabbage!

Finally,  running my eye through the recipes themselves, it seems like they have covered  almost everything anyone could ever want to do.  Nineteen sub-sections of recipes run from beverages and breakfasts right  through desserts, plus there’s a section on using canned meats and one on  meatless main dishes.  I was pleased to find  many cruiser favorites typically shared around the fleet like Chinese Cole Slaw  and Fish Sausage, and I particularly double-checked the recipe for the  “Tropical Painkiller” – what could be called the national cocktail of the  Virgin Islands (and so often over-looked) to be sure it was accurate.  It was!

About  the only remotely critical observation I could make on this wonderful  compendium is that the recipes seem based primarily on ingredients already  well-known to North American cooks without exploring the unusual vegetables,  fruits, products or dishes we encounter in the lands we have sailed to  visit.   Although the authors encourage  readers to be bold in asking about unfamiliar vegetables in open markets,  include some tips about shopping in Central American “mercados”, and provide a  useful key to deciphering cuts of meat in Spanish (you will need a magnifying  glass to read this section), they do not go much into specifics.  In a book this comprehensive about everything  else, this would have been a welcome inclusion.

On  the other hand, cruisers spend a lot of time trying to reproduce the flavors of  home in situations far from home, and The Boat Galley Cookbook will  prove itself a valuable aid in so doing.

The Boat Galley Cookbook: 800 Everyday Recipes and Essential Tips for Cooking Aboard  is available on Amazon.com.

More info

• Buy The Boat Galley Cookbook on Amazon.com.
• Learn more about the Boat Galley Cookbook: Boat Galley website
• Watch this video to meet the two authors (Carolyn Shearlock and Jan Irons) and learn how the book came to be:
  
• The Boat Galley Facebook page

More on this website

• All book reviews
• Galley Advice from 18 Cruising Women: 18 cruising women offer tips and advice for setting up your galley and cooking aboard, discuss the gear that they couldn’t live without, and invite you into their galleys.
• Carolyn Shearlock: Everything I needed to know to go cruising …
• Jan Irons: Plan ahead to make lemonade from lemons

If you have a book that
like us you would like to review,
let us know!

Email kathy@forcruisers.com or leave a comment below.

I have been surfing the internet looking for ideas and suggestions on how to best tell them and have not ...Read more]]> Sabrina writes

We will be headed to my parent’s home next week. While we are there we will be telling them as well as my brother’s family that we are sailing away in 2013 (finally – yay!). I have been surfing the internet looking for ideas and suggestions on how to best tell them and have not been able to locate much. I didn’t see anything specifically on the Women & Cruising. Perhaps I missed it. Jessie’s book “The Cruising Woman’s Advisor” has some good info and so does Liza Copeland in “Cruising for Cowards” but I am looking for more input as I develop our discussion points and strategies for this discussion. Any advice, suggestions, hints or resources you have on this topic for me would be greatly appreciated. Fair Winds ~~_/)~~_/)~~_/)~~ Sabrina

Gwen Hamlin answers.

In truth, these days, it should be much less stressful than it used to be for families to watch you go because there are so many ways for you keep in communication to reassure them.

No longer is it the letter sent to a GPO address in some remote destination in hopes it will arrive before you pass through!

First: We had a slightly similar situation in that Don’s older, historically unadventurous parents , were very anxious about our going.

We did not task load them. We told them we were going for a cruise “down island” in the Caribbean. We added distance bit by bit, until his mother finally demanded when we were going to sail around the world like the couple in an article she’d read in the paper! We told her we didn’t really have any plans to sail around the word. That we wanted to go for the South Pacific.

I sometimes think that it is the enormity of a plan (in time or distance) that daunts onlookers. (Also by never claiming to be doing a circumnavigation, there was no sense of “failure” about NOT doing a circumnavigation. (We stopped in Australia after ten years.))

Then we made every effort we could to keep in touch. We added SSB/ham email on board so we could drop them a note every day if we wanted to, even in the midst of a long ocean passage. Back then it was a big deal to get his parents and daughter started on computers themselves, (not likely to be such a huge leap these days.)

Then we gave them planning scale charts, first of the Caribbean and Central America, later of the Pacific, and then set them up to receive our Winlink position reports so that his Dad could plot our progress across the big expanse of blue. Later we gave his daughter and nieces and nephews inflated globes so they could talk about where we were.

We sent post cards to all the family kids with appropriate pictures and pretty stamps as another strategy to fire their interest and keep them remembering who we were!

I started a website that was initially conceived for the family (and for former charter guests in the event we wanted to drum up charters in some foreign islands). I composed regular updates, which I posted on the website and later via a blog, but honestly, the persons who most appreciated that effort were never actually the family, but other cruisers! But in the end I’m glad I did it, but I’m glad I did it for me! It’s a fabulously detailed document of memories.

It is ironic, but it is a fact of life, as many cruisers will attest, folks back home often could care less about the details of your journey.

SPOT personal satellite tracker Photo: www.findmespot.com

These days it is so much easier. In addition to on board email, you can have a satellite phone, which eases their peace of mind about your ability to call out should you need help.

SPOT, the satellite tracker has a neat new model that in addition to posting position reports, interfaces with your SmartPhone to send out text messages over the satellite network. The nice thing about SPOT is you can carry it ashore on remote hikes as well.

Facebook actually is a real natural with cruisers. You can just say “All is well we have arrived” or you can add a link to a blog for those who want more info. I haven’t directly asked, but I see no reason why you couldn’t use SPOT to post to Facebook. A side benefit is you can friend all these cruisers you meet and part from, and keep a finger on the pulse of where they are and what they are doing.

Many destinations now have cellular networks (third world areas are often more advanced by having leapt over the whole wired network stage). In Fiji and Australia and in Indonesia this past year we were able to email and even Skype via cellular.

Plus, we made regular trips back to the States and made a circuit of our families. They see you are alive and thriving…plus you get to fill your suitcases with boat parts.

The long and short of it is, that if you wish to expend the effort you can stay as connected as you need to.

Understand, there are some cruisers who choose to just blow off those family connections and to live in the now of their experience. There is something to envy in that, but it would not have worked for us. For us the effort was worth the effort.

And here is the irony. We are currently back in the US, in Florida, and we regularly realize we have let days and days go by without a call or an email to his folks, which would never have happen when we were aboard. Even when they are here, just a few miles away wintering in their RV, our land lives can get so busy that a week can go by without touching base.

The truth is they heard from us much more regularly when we were cruising, and in the end there is no magic in geographical closeness. Just think how often people can be in the same town and not be in touch.

Cruising, on the other hand, can give you enough time to make the effort and something interesting to talk about! Plus, you are living a flexible enough lifestyle that if there is a calamity at home, you can jump on a plane and fly back. Try doing that with a full time career.

One last thing.

Safety precautions: Emergency MOB (Man Over Board) alert wristband

If you can explain to your family all the preparations you have made, the courses and certifications you have taken, the safety precautions you have installed, the equipment you have aboard to make passages safely, then you will help them have confidence in your ability to do what you are setting out to do.

Introduce them to this website (Women and Cruising Website) and have them read the Twelve Sailing Families collection. It will fire them all up to see that all those families had resistance from their families too but they can’t help but see in the end what a wonderful experience they all had. There’s also a little “If they can do it with kids, well then you should be alright” factor!

It won’t of course, completely stop them missing you, stop them worrying about you. But if you do what you can, they do adjust. And then there’s the fact that after 20+ years sailing, I feel much safer out there than driving down a highway back here. Bad things can happen anywhere, and are far more likely in our back yards than out there!

This is not my most organized response, but I wanted to dash out some moral support as promptly as I could. Good luck, and keep in touch with us. You might want to write a little post for the Women and Cruising website on how you end up addressing this and how it went.

Sincerely,

Gwen Hamlin
Admirals Angle

Read also on this website

• Communications Resources
• Staying in Touch  (Admiral’s Angle column #14)
  Out of sight of land no longer means out of touch: the ways and means cruisers stay in touch with each other and back home.
• Home for the Holidays (Admiral’s Angle column #16)
  Planning, compromises and new traditions keep holiday spirit alive.
• Logs and Blogs (Admiral’s Angle column #37)
  The tradition of recording voyage experiences doesn’t just preserve memories but encourages others to follow.
• Guests Aboard (Admiral’s Angle column #40)
  Some counsel about managing visits and visitors to enhance their experience and maintain crew sanity.

More information (external links)

• SPOT Personal Tracker
  Keep family updated with your location! SPOT notifies friends, family or an international rescue coordination center with your GPS location and status based on situation and need – all with the push of a button.

If you have a question about going cruising that you want answered,

- email it to: kathy@forcruisers.com,

- or join the next Women and Cruising seminar!

I’m a sucker for a well-told tale, and Swept: Love With a Chance of Drowning by Torre DeRoche is just that.  Decades ago, sailing sagas were told by weathered men sailing solo on distant seas; today they are told by the women convinced to go along.

Not unlike Janna Cawrse Esarey’s Motion of the Ocean, Swept ...Read more]]>

I’m a sucker for a well-told tale, and Swept: Love With a Chance of Drowning by Torre DeRoche is just that.  Decades ago, sailing sagas were told by weathered men sailing solo on distant seas; today they are told by the women convinced to go along.

Not unlike Janna Cawrse Esarey’s Motion of the Ocean, Swept is the true story of a young woman who falls for a guy who has a dream of sailing the world.  She doesn’t know he has the dream when she falls for him, and, when he falls for her, he doesn’t believe her when she confesses she is deathly afraid of the ocean.

Somehow love counterbalances terror just enough to get her aboard for passage to the South Pacific

Torre’s fears are realistic, and her experiences — good and bad — are as well.  This makes Swept a particularly timely recommendation for WomenandCruising.com readers as her experiences and insights partner perfectly our current feature collection addressing Fear.  She evokes vividly and accurately the worries of brand new sailors.

What is also realistic — and unfortunate — is the strategy the man in her life, Ivan, uses to persuade her aboard.  It’s the “I will do everything,” “nothing will happen, so “don’t worry about it” three-prong approach.  Torre is smart enough and has the right instincts not to buy into all that, but she has the bad luck not to find good mentors until she is well into her voyage.  Her trials and tribulations make for great drama, of course, but I found myself thinking over and over, “What a shame she didn’t find Women and Cruising to turn to!” and so smooth out a whole lot of the bumps!

On the other hand, her portrait of Ivan is even-handed and insightful into all the complexities that make Ivan the man he is.  He isn’t just a guy who read Moitessier’s sailing sagas and wanted that for himself; his motivations are more complex.  He’s no villain.  He just wants something so badly he sometimes overlooks practicalities and realities and jumps over important items on the To Do List in his eagerness to get going which results in some unnecessary crises.

Like all cruising sailors, Torre discovers the great magic of the lifestyle: that the wonderful times wipe away the memories of the tougher moments.  And, what is fun for newbies and old hands alike is Torre’s well-evoked sense of the Coconut Milk Run, the places, the characters, the cravings and the rewards, and, yes, the misadventures as well as the adventures.  An artist, Torre’s word pictures bring alive on the page scenes so many of us have experienced.

Swept: Love With a Chance of Drowning can be purchased in regular book or Kindle e-book format from Amazon.com through www.WomenandCruising.com. Remember, every item you purchase through our Amazon.com links benefits this website ….which gives newbies like Torre better resources for a smoother experience!

Read also on this website

• Relationships & Roles Aboard: 6 Mistakes men make in sharing their sailing passion (Lessons I learned the hard way), by Nick O’Kelly
• Women & Cruising’s feature articles on Fear
• Cruising Women’s Bookstore: Books that cruising women write about cruising.

More information (external links)

• Visit the ‘Swept’ website
• Visit Torre DeRoche’s blog: The Fearful Adventurer: Exploring the world one terrified step at a time 
• Buy Swept: Love With a Chance of Drowning in regular book or Kindle e-book format from Amazon.com

If you have a book that
like us you would like to review,
let us know!

Email kathy@forcruisers.com or leave a comment below.