Visibility

How to be seen

We all hope the lookouts on those huge container ships will see our little sailboats in rain, mist, and low light. Should we find ourselves in trouble, we pray that our rescuers will be able to make us out in the breaking waves.

Some sailors have long recognized the value of being highly visible. Many ocean-racing boats have brightly colored hulls and decks. In New Zealand, sailors are strongly advised to sew bright orange stripes on their sails. Yet most cruising sailors own boats with white sails, white or blue hulls, and gray or white masts and so are difficult to see at sea.

It is very easy and inexpensive to dramatically improve your boat’s visibility. Whether you’re bluewater cruising or just daysailing around the coast or lakes, it’s worth the effort. Painting the top few feet of your mast international orange will make the boat much more visible from a distance without affecting its aesthetics. I painted the top 4 feet of Hawk’s masthead. It’s very visible in profile, but from the front and back, the mast section is much narrower and a 6-foot stripe would be better.

I did this from a bosun’s chair, after first masking off the area I wanted to paint. I taped the mainsail track and other hardware and covered the deck for 6 feet around the mast base to guard against paint drops. I sanded the mast lightly, cleaned it with acetone, and brushed on two coats of orange paint. It doesn’t need to be a perfect high-gloss job.

To further increase visibility, sew international-orange panels onto your storm sails. Many New Zealanders also sew an orange triangle on the heads of their mainsails and working jibs. A sailmaker can do this quickly and inexpensively.

Making the hull and deck both highly visible and aesthetically pleasing requires a little thought. The paint job needs to be quite good, since it will be seen close up, and the color and pattern need to be large and bright without being too much of an eyesore. Many Open Class raceboats have a hot pink, bright orange, or yellow circle about 3 feet across painted in the center of their foredecks. This dramatically increases visibility from the air.

You could paint a similar bull’s eye on the hull sides at the bow or stern to make you more visible to ships, but it is better to get the bright spot higher up. One way is to use a high-visibility color for the dodger and cockpit spray cloths. Those concerned with aesthetics might opt for two sets of dodgers and cockpit cloths, a bright and garish one for offshore use and a less garish one for local use.

At night, you need the appropriate navigation lights, and a powerful hand-held spotlight trained on your sails will dramatically increase your visibility. Some cruisers have masthead strobe lights, but international law says these must be used only in a true emergency.

Making yourself visible is also important. The usual colors of foul-weather gear—blue or dark red—are more fashionable than visible. Bright yellow or orange will improve your chances of being spotted if you go overboard. E.S.

Seamanship

Light line only

Many years ago an acquaintance was nearly strangled when his knife, which he wore on a strong lanyard around his neck, got tangled up in the anchor chain as he was easing a 45-pound hook over the bow roller. It could have ended badly had he been alone. It’s certainly a good idea to attach lanyards to valuable items like flashlights, knives, shackle keys, and so on so that you don’t lose them overboard, but make sure the line is weak enough so it will snap easily if whatever it’s attached to gets caught up in a flailing sheet or anchor rode. One way to do this is to connect the implement to the lanyard with a plastic clip. Better to lose a knife than a hand or a life. P.N.

Passive radar reflector

Wooden boats with wooden masts make poor radar targets; the same is true of fiberglass hulls with carbon-fiber masts. Even boats with aluminum spars are notoriously unreliable targets, which is why all sailboats should carry passive radar reflectors. Yet few boats have these permanently mounted.

Instead, most rely on corner reflectors to reflect a radar signal directly back to the scanner that transmitted it. These work well on many navigation buoys, but size is important: a 12-inch corner reflector is theoretically less than 1 percent as effective as a 36-inch reflector.

An individual corner reflector has significant nulls, or areas in which it does not reflect effectively. Some products combine several reflectors in various orientations to provide something like omnidirectional coverage, but the individual reflectors are then smaller. Sailors should permanently fit as large a reflector as their boat can physically accommodate, as high up as possible, but they should not assume these will always makes them visible, especially in rough conditions. For circumstances in which being seen by radar is particularly important, a much larger reflector might also be carried, stowed flat but able to be quickly assembled and then hoisted in the rigging. A.B.

Safety

Will we collide?

To evaluate the risk of a collision, check whether the vessel in question is maintaining a steady bearing relative to you. Initially, you can do this by keeping your head still and seeing whether the other vessel remains in place over a particular stanchion, shroud, or other likely reference. If you’re not sure if the vessel is moving, take a bearing with a compass and keep checking as the range closes. You might even use the electronic bearing line on your radar. In confined waters, it is easier to tell whether the other craft appears stationary relative to its background. While difficult to prove mathematically, this old rule of thumb works every time unless the other craft is almost on the beach. If the other vessel stays in front of the same distant field or headland as you approach, you are on a collision heading, so watch out. T.C.

Words from the Wise

“Bad-weather seamanship, in the strict sense of handling a vessel at sea, only really starts when she is too far offshore to run back to the shelter of the land. It is the most satisfying art of all, as success depends entirely on the men aboard, with the vessel they have selected and prepared; it is too late then to wish for something different, and there is no possibility of consulting anyone else. No sport is more magnificent than deep-water sailing in bad weather, and none requires more courage, nor sustained effort of body and mind; nor does any pay a bigger dividend to careful preparation.”