Colour blind

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magicol

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I have a very good friend who has become an enthusiastic and very competent sailing buddy. He is keen to extend his experience and knowledge through the RYA Yachtmaster certification. He is colour blind. He has contacted the RYA but while waiting for a response I wondered if any forum members had experience of sailing with colour blindness and of taking any of the Yachtmaster courses with this condition.
 
Make sure he does the Ishihara card test in natural daylight as intended, lamplight can affect results.
The MCA are the ultimate arbiter of your eyesight and after failing Ishihara, I went their head office and passed their Lantern Test, which works in a different way. Worth checking.
If he reallyknows he is red/green colourblind, like many men, then as above, daylight only.
 
I have sailed with two people who are coloured blind, one experienced the other not experienced but before retirement was a motor mechanic.

With the unexperienced chum, we had left Ramsgate heading south through the Gull Stream. He was helming and I was about to go below to the chart table and I said 'Aim for the distant red buoy'. He said he couldn't see anything ahead. So I set a course for him and I stayed and watched. Before long he said 'is that the buoy ahead you meant?' Yes it was. I then realised that when I saw the red buoy, I just saw the colour, not the outline. As soon as he spotted it, I also could see the outline of the buoy. I can't remembered now what colour he then thought he could see. I think it was a shade of grey that he could see.
 
IIRC many years ago there was a device on sale , consisting of two pieces of differently coloured glass. These modified the incoming light so that red and green (and possibly other colours ?) could be differentiated by colourblind users.

A websearch has failed so far to bring up details...
 
For my MCA medical the doctor conducting the medical used to be able to carry out an eye test by holding up a chart and making you read out the letters from a distance with each eye, then he got you to read the dots on the colour blind book.
However on my last test 3 years ago I was informed I needed a separate eye test by a qualified MCA recommend optician.
It's also an extra charge for the eye test.?
My crewman was turned down for his skipper training as he is red/ green colour blind and has night blindness. But he recently qualified as a bus driver, how he did I don't know because he can't see the traffic lights ( not that's a problem for bus drivers)?
 
sarabande said:
IIRC many years ago there was a device on sale , consisting of two pieces of differently coloured glass. These modified the incoming light so that red and green (and possibly other colours ?) could be differentiated by colourblind users.
Click to expand...
I've seen a chap use that device on a YM exam.

Have a chat with your optician they should know what it is.
 
I would be very interested to hear if those colour-correction devices are permitted on ENG1medicals for YM commercial endorsements.
I don't think so but I am out of date.
 
tillergirl said:
I have sailed with two people who are coloured blind, one experienced the other not experienced but before retirement was a motor mechanic.

With the unexperienced chum, we had left Ramsgate heading south through the Gull Stream. He was helming and I was about to go below to the chart table and I said 'Aim for the distant red buoy'. He said he couldn't see anything ahead. So I set a course for him and I stayed and watched. Before long he said 'is that the buoy ahead you meant?' Yes it was. I then realised that when I saw the red buoy, I just saw the colour, not the outline. As soon as he spotted it, I also could see the outline of the buoy. I can't remembered now what colour he then thought he could see. I think it was a shade of grey that he could see.
Click to expand...
Which suggests that even a 'daylight only' endorsement isn't risk free.
 
tillergirl said:
I have sailed with two people who are coloured blind, one experienced the other not experienced but before retirement was a motor mechanic.

With the unexperienced chum, we had left Ramsgate heading south through the Gull Stream. He was helming and I was about to go below to the chart table and I said 'Aim for the distant red buoy'. He said he couldn't see anything ahead. So I set a course for him and I stayed and watched. Before long he said 'is that the buoy ahead you meant?' Yes it was. I then realised that when I saw the red buoy, I just saw the colour, not the outline. As soon as he spotted it, I also could see the outline of the buoy. I can't remembered now what colour he then thought he could see. I think it was a shade of grey that he could see.
Click to expand...
Sufferers do vary quite a bit. A grandson has a degree of colour blindness that only affects subtler shades, but a fellow club member is quite badly affected red/green. Oddly enough, he is a wildlife expert and vastly better than me at picking out the identities of birds. I believe that colour blind people are less easily fooled by camouflage and that our wartime aerial reconnaissance was almost entirely done in B&W more effectively than the US colour film.

It was, of course, a stroke of genius to replace the old black/red buoyage system with red/green, something that only a committee could have done.
 
R.Ems said:
Surely if you look through a red bit of plastic at a white light, it will make the white light look red?
Click to expand...

I don't have the manual to hand, but from memory, you use a combination of the two filters to determine the light.
If the light is visible through both the red and green filter it is white, or something like that. :)
 
R.Ems said:
Surely if you look through a red bit of plastic at a white light, it will make the white light look red?
Click to expand...
From Force 4 website for the item. Without testing, it might be that the white is the colour of filter but I suspect that you would use both filters to check and confirm.
"The Seekey helps to distinguish colours at night for those who are Red/Green colour blind; it also helps people with normal colour vision to distinguish colour in poor light and at great distances.
Red lights are only visible through the red filter, green light through the green filter and white lights shine through both".
 
Thank you everyone for contributing to an interesting issue. A predominately male condition, I understand that at least 1 in 12 men are colour blind yet I can find no reference to it on the RYA website. Is colour blindness not viewed as a disability in sailing?And therefore not part of any inclusion and diversity strategy?
 
magicol said:
Thank you everyone for contributing to an interesting issue. A predominately male condition, I understand that at least 1 in 12 men are colour blind yet I can find no reference to it on the RYA website. Is colour blindness not viewed as a disability in sailing?And therefore not part of any inclusion and diversity strategy?
Click to expand...
I think you have to be actually blind, to qualify as disabled..good try though :)

Years ago I did a bit for Sailability, the RYA charity section which gets disabled people out on the water.
I took out a blind-from-birth married couple, in the old Greenland Dock in London.
They kept talking and they knew when to tack etc (instead of us crashing into the dock wall) by echolocation, like bats. Quite uncanny!
 
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Our neigbour was colour blind and when his non driving wife was with my mother going somwhere, she would call the traffic light colours as a habit. A friend, also cb, just used the position of the lights.
On taking my medical for a driving licence, the doc asked what colour pencil was on his desk. I jokingly said red, when it was green. He said 'You had better be kidding, or I will have to fail you'. (portugal, no exceptions for that and if you can't read or write, tough)
 
There was no colorblind test when I took YM exams.

I've sailed about 30,000 miles without any incidents due to my colour-blindness.

I carry a red light filter in the pocket of my foulies. If I see a light and I'm not sure if it's red or green, I look at it through the filter. A green light will disappear, a red will remain visible. With the advent of electronic charts, I have barely used the filter in the last 5 years of navigation.
 
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