Your cruising destinations, near and far
Cruising guide author Robert Bailey explains the importance of not being completely dependent on electronic chartplotters
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Although there is a legal requirement (Safety of Life at Sea V Regulation 34) to make a passage plan, the main reason for one is for the safety and comfort of the crew.
The greatest challenge facing any skipper is to carry their crew willingly with them. It’s vital to understand your crew’s strengths and limitations.
Successfully executing a plan is one of the most rewarding aspects of sailing. Most of the time you are not just interested in a single passage but a cruise, and it is necessary to look at a ‘cruising plan’. Before Decca and Global Positioning System (GPS), the essential part of the passage plan was to understand how the navigator would plot their position regularly during the passage. Crossing the Channel involved estimated positioning and a pre-dawn approach on the French coastline to pick up the lighthouses. The echo sounder was used to pick up Hurd’s Deep to confirm the distance off if only one lighthouse was visible. A picture of where the boat was, the forces acting on it, and any hazards needed to be available to the navigator. A plan was essential.
Today’s chartplotters are enormously powerful in the amount of information presented and the understandable way it does it. What can be easier than a picture of a boat on a chart with a line pointing in the direction of travel? The ease with which it’s available has often meant that the other aspects of navigation are left unexplored, to the detriment of the passage plan.
It has been suggested (paraphrasing a certain Helmuth von Moltke) that ‘No plan survives contact with the enemy’. Don’t take that as an excuse not to make one. It emphasises that the plan should answer both the ‘how’ and the ‘what if’. You’ll go a long way to satisfying the crew’s needs by answering the second point.
Plan creation
Like all journeys, a voyage has the following stages:
Deciding on an objective
Gathering information
Making a plan
Undertaking the passage
Monitoring progress
An objective could be: ‘To sail from the Solent to Weymouth’. A better on
