Keeping Watch

February 6, 2010

While on passages, Grace sails 24 hours a day, continuously. No rest stops, no motels, and no breaks. While the sea is a big place, there are other ships and boats also underway, and a collision at sea can ruin your entire day, as the saying goes. Thus, ever since man set to sea, watches have been kept. The classic watch system is to deploy the crew to take a rotating four-hour command of a vessel even as the captain of the ship is ultimately responsible for a safe passage. This watch rotates among the crew, and on short-handed ships, the four-on, four-off routine is part of sailors' lore. Often, these watches are shared by two people - allowing for a degree of companionship, and, more importantly, a second pair of eyes, ears, and hands in the event some change in the ship's sail plan is required.

On watch, my two rules of sailing come into sharp focus: don't fall off the bat, and don't hit anything. The watch is responsible for the safety of the entire vessel while other are asleep. In addition to staying on the boat, we take routine scans of the 360 degree horizon for ships and land masses. We've been in busy waters lately, sailing well-established shipping routes, and there's usually been one ship or another ahead or astern to keep an eye on. Most travel faster than us, and thus either close quickly, or overtake us. Each situation bears monitoring, and we're assisted by a recent innovation whereby larger vessels are required to transmit their course and speed, among other date, to other ships. We have a receiver for these signals on Grace, and our navigation display conveys this information to us in an easy-to-understand fashion.

When Grace set off from Fort Lauderdale, we adopted the 4-on-4-off approach, pairing Guita and Stephen with me and Jennifer, respectively, thus providing a mix of experience. Our initial passages were short: less than a day to Bimini and overnight sails to Nassau and Georgetown, and we were experimenting as well as learning about the boat and each other. We left Georgetown a few days ago, and as I write this at 3:00 a.m., we are on our third night of a seven- or eight night passage to Panama. This evening, over an al fresco dinner of fresh-caught blue fin tuna (cubed, marinated, skewered, and barbequed, over a bed of rice pilaf), we discussed our watch system and made a few adjustments.

With everyone feeling more comfortable with the boat and each other, we decided that we no longer needed two people awake and on watch together. If a second person were needed, they could readily be called or roused (we carry a whistle, easily heard). Further, the 4-on-4-off system made the night watches long and grueling, and resulted in each person (or pair) having the same watch window each day. There are as many theories of watch schedules as there are religions, but we decided to go with three-hour watches from 0600 (6 a.m.) through 2400 (midnight) and to use 2-hour watches for the wee hours of morning. I came on watch at 0200, relieving Stephen; in (now) less than an hour, Guita will relieve me. At 0600, Jennifer will take over, for the first three hour watch of the new day.

The schedule will result in each person's watch schedule moving up one time slot, each day. Tomorrow, I will have the 0000-0200 watch. It seems like this will work well; two hours under a faintly-moonlit sky, with reflected sunlight shimmering on rolling swells seems right and easy, even if tonight, the gentle forward motion of Grace as she crosses the 18th parallel makes me want to stay at the wheel through dawn.

More to come on this... the e-mail was cut short.

Received on 2/6/2010 by Jon Glaudemans