by Simon Jollands | Boat Handling, Communications, Crewing skills, Emergencies, Navigation, Preparation, Yacht ownership
Simon Jollands took part in the 2023 Rolex Fastnet Race. This is the first of several articles on the race and focuses on the start. The 2023 Rolex Fastnet Race proved to be a classic offshore sailing event that lived up to its reputation as being one of the toughest...
by Simon Jollands | Communications, Crewing skills, Emergencies, Navigation, Preparation
This year’s Round the Island Race turned out to be a really thrilling and competitive event. 1100 boats entered the race, which took place on Saturday 1st July. The race started from the world famous Royal Yacht Squadron line in Cowes UK, with the largest and...
by Simon Jollands | Communications, Crewing skills, Emergencies, Navigation, Preparation
It is one of those sailing facts of life that, however hard you try to avoid it, sooner or later you will most likely find yourself aground. It has happened to me twice. Once when I was on a RYA training vessel near the entrance to Beaulieu River in the Western...
by Simon Jollands | Communications, Crewing skills, Navigation, Preparation
In a previous post, we looked at some of the basic principles involved with understanding tides, including what causes their rise and fall, the resulting tidal streams and the tidal range that varies according to coastal topography. For those who are learning or...
by Simon Jollands | Communications, Crewing skills, Navigation, Preparation
Following on from previous posts concerning traditional navigation methods, this post looks at some traditional methods used for fixing a vessel’s position at sea, within sight of land. Electronic fixes using chart plotters are very straightforward to record,...
by Simon Jollands | Communications, Crewing skills, Navigation, Preparation
In a recent post we discussed the importance of being able to estimate your position at sea if the vessel’s GPS fails. In this post we go a little further with a reminder of how we go about estimating and plotting our position using traditional methods, when out...