Entry & progression
The heavy weather decision that matters is made forty-eight hours out, in good visibility, with a cup of tea in your hand. Everything you do inside the storm is damage limitation on a decision you already made.
The options, in the order you should consider them
- Do not go. Stay alongside, or stay at anchor in a lee. It costs a day and no one thanks you for it. It is very often correct.
- Alter to avoid. Buy sea room early. A course alteration of thirty degrees, made two days out, is worth more than any amount of seamanship made two hours out.
- Run for shelter. Know the closest genuinely safe harbours on your route — genuinely safe in the forecast wind direction, not on the chart in general. Many yacht harbours become traps in a specific quadrant.
- Heave to / reduce and hold. Take the sea on a comfortable heading at the speed that lets you keep steerage and stop the slamming. You will lose ground. Accept it.
- Run before. Effective, and it invites pooping and broaching. Watch the following sea. Watch the surfing speed.
Tropical revolving storms
- Give them room. The forecast track has a forecast error, and the error grows with time. Plot the danger area, not the track line.
- The dangerous semicircle is the side where the storm's translation adds to its rotational wind and where you will be blown into the path. The navigable semicircle is the less bad one. Neither is good.
- Do not attempt to cross ahead of the system. Ever. Not with a fast yacht. Not with a good forecast.
The motions that break things
- Synchronous rolling — encounter period matches natural roll period. Change speed or heading; either will detune it.
- Parametric rolling — a stern or bow quartering sea can pump a roll to alarming angles in a few cycles on a fine-formed hull. Change speed or heading immediately; it does not stabilise.
- Slamming — reduce speed before the hull tells you to. Structural damage from repeated slamming is cumulative and expensive and often invisible.
- Broaching — following seas, high speed, loss of directional control. The cure is speed, and less of it.
Preparing the vessel — the yacht-specific list
- Beach club and garage doors: closed, dogged, and checked by a named person.
- Tenders and toys: secured for a knockdown, not for a Mediterranean afternoon.
- Free surface: press up or empty the slack tanks. Fuel, water, the pool, the jacuzzi.
- Galley: hot food and drink cooked before it gets bad. A crew that has not eaten is a crew that will not perform.
- Guests: briefed, seated low and central, sick bags distributed without embarrassment, and a crew member assigned to them by name.
- Crew rest: rotate people out early. Fatigue arrives before the weather does.
WARNING — The owner will ask you to press on Sometimes politely, sometimes not, sometimes through the management company at 0200. It is the most predictable event in yachting. Decide, before the phone rings, what your answer is — and make the decision on the vessel's limits and the forecast, not on the conversation. Log the decision, the forecast you based it on, and the time you made it. Log the request, too. That entry has ended careers, and saved more.