The fear of sailing

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Daydream believer

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Most of my sailing is single handed & i have been sailing thus for About 13 years. I have been sailing with crews for 54 years. So all in all i have a reasonable amount of sailing under my belt. I have sailed round the norther half of Biscay, been to Holland as far as Amsterdam i sailed up & down the English Channel numerous times & last year i sailed round England via the Cally Canal on my own.
Today i met a single hander who has almost completed the same circumnavigation as myself. He was asking about the leg from Ramsgate to Dover. He suddenly admitted that he was S...t scared!!!
This lead me to thinking--- here is a man who has sailed round England & still is nervous about a short trip o Dover
I then realised that I am just as scared about journeys as he is.
If i sit in a strange port too long i get" marina bound" i listen to the wind in the rigging, i look at the swell outside the harbour & really do not want to go especially so the longer i stay.

Once outside & the sails are up & i am settled in i feel i can go on forever. It is just that horrible setting off bit i cannot avoid

How do others feel at the start of journeys. Are you excited & anxious to get going or do you have to force yourself?
 
Never any need to force myself, but now need to worry about when the Cally Canal was moved to England.
 
Camelia said:
Never any need to force myself, but now need to worry about when the Cally Canal was moved to England.
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We are clever!!!:p
I never said the Cally canal was in England
What i said was - i sailed round england.
I always say that because i did not sail round scotland , but through it
Neither did i sail round Ireland. I did however, go round jersey & guernsey & the Isle of Man on the way but dod not feel it necessary to mention it as it was not the point of my thread
So you can rest assured that the Cally canal is in the same place as it was last week
 
Daydream believer said:
Most of my sailing is single handed & i have been sailing thus for About 13 years. I have been sailing with crews for 54 years. So all in all i have a reasonable amount of sailing under my belt. I have sailed round the norther half of Biscay, been to Holland as far as Amsterdam i sailed up & down the English Channel numerous times & last year i sailed round England via the Cally Canal on my own.
Today i met a single hander who has almost completed the same circumnavigation as myself. He was asking about the leg from Ramsgate to Dover. He suddenly admitted that he was S...t scared!!!
This lead me to thinking--- here is a man who has sailed round England & still is nervous about a short trip o Dover
I then realised that I am just as scared about journeys as he is.
If i sit in a strange port too long i get" marina bound" i listen to the wind in the rigging, i look at the swell outside the harbour & really do not want to go especially so the longer i stay.

Once outside & the sails are up & i am settled in i feel i can go on forever. It is just that horrible setting off bit i cannot avoid

How do others feel at the start of journeys. Are you excited & anxious to get going or do you have to force yourself?
Click to expand...

yes, im just the same, once under way im fine, this happens even leaving from my own port!
 
Good subject. I have sometimes wondered the large number of apparently super-frightened leisure sailors. In part, the fear is well-found caution... but can easily get out of control, and with a sailing boat there's plenty of time to dwell on such thoughts. The weather conditions especially are of course beyond one's control, and the further one goes the less one can use a forecast before setting out.

I find it productive to dwell on the opposite - on how wrong those unproductive extreme fears always are. Numerous times I've thought ah, perhaps this is gonna be really bad ... and no, wrong yet again - it was all fine. It's always all fine, pretty much.

So I think you ought to trust your experience much more - you DO know what you're doing. Not being in total control is part of going to sea, but you should take heart from the fact that you're here in one piece, yet again.
 
Am I scared? Well, I don't know if "scared" is the right word but I am definately worried. Especially when sailing with my family and in particular the kids and especially when sailing offshore, far from land. The only way to minimise my worries is to prepare and maintain the boat as best as possible, learn the boat as best as possible and pay good attention to the weather forecasts.
Sailing with adults things are easier and a bit more relaxed.
 
I get the fear, not when leaving port but arriving or as soon as I turn round during a day sail.

Totally irrational but along the lines of, "Nothing's gone wrong so far so engine/rigging/rudder etc is bound to break/fail now". Of course it never does(yet!) but the fear is still always there.
 
I think I must be unusual. I don't remember ever being worried or fearful when setting off in a sailing boat.

I've certainly had intellectual, front-of-brain worries - are we going to clear that sandbank, have I left it too late to get sail down and we'll be out of control in a tight space, is the mast going to come down because we've got too much up or there's a fatigue crack developing or a missing split pin I didn't notice. But I don't remember any of these translating into a primal fear-of-life-and-limb emotion. Maybe I just haven't had enough near-misses yet :rolleyes:

Put me in a small fast motorboat, though, and I'm easy to scare.

Pete
 
I can't remember ever being scared at sea. As with prv, there are times when I've had concerns about various things but that's just rational and is all part of preparing yourself properly for those eventualities.

To actually be scared of departing though I don't get. I have faith in my boat, in my abilities and I don't set off into weather I'm unsure of so what else is there to be scared of?
 
Daydream believer said:
Most of my sailing is single handed & i have been sailing thus for About 13 years. Once outside & the sails are up & i am settled in i feel i can go on forever. It is just that horrible setting off bit i cannot avoid

How do others feel at the start of journeys. Are you excited & anxious to get going or do you have to force yourself?
Click to expand...

Interesting post but I agree with others if you do not have faith in your boat then you have the wrong boat!

I sail all year round mainly single handed and of course only go out in 'reasonable' weather conditions for the boat and myself but many times it has blown up offshore into a force 5/6 and I assure you that you do not have time to be 'scared'..

No one is bullet proof, but you can reduce the risks a lot safety wise for both you and the boat, many times I am asked why I do not have a boarding ladder fitted??

Why I reply, if you do go over the side and the boats doing 2 knots in 30 sec you will be 100' from the boat with no chance of ever catching it, and in the north sea it will most likley be time to meet your maker!

It's good to be scared as it keeps you alert!

Mike
 
Woodlouse said:
As with prv, there are times when I've had concerns about various things but that's just rational
Click to expand...

Actually, I think my worry about the mast falling down is not entirely rational :). The numbers suggest that it's a relatively rare event, it's just that my engineering instinct looks at that dirty great spar which we're keeping upright by a relatively inefficient arrangement of rigging (because shrouds at 45 degrees to the vertical would require an unfeasibly wide beam), sometimes with the boat pounding off a wave or a flogging sail shaking it about, and marvels that it manages to remain upright. It wasn't that big a deal on Kindred Spirit, with a relatively stumpy gaff-rig mast, three forestays (or things that could do the job) and three stays to the masthead each side, so any one wire letting go would not have been catastrophic. But Ariam has a very tall and minimalist swept-spreader fractional rig, with only one set of lowers - the loads in the cap shrouds must be immense, there's always the possibility of the bend inverting, and if any piece of rigging fails (potentially even on the leeward side) then the mast is coming down.

I wouldn't describe this concern as full-on fear, though.

Pete
 
Many years ago (about 25...) I had a friend join us for a sail back up the channel to Portsmouth from Falmouth. We'd got loads of time and the inital plan was to head across the channel and sail up the French coast, take in Brittany and the Channel Isles and then back across to home. When he saw the size of the Sadler 25 I owned at the time, he refused to go anywhere out of sight of land. Sheer terror and nothing myself or my friends (who were experienced sailors) could do or say would persuade him. he also didn't understand that he was in juts as much 'danger' being ten miles off the coast as fifty miles. We would always be within VHF and helicopter range and Sadler 25's had sailed the Atlantic. He was not convinced, but really enjoyed the sail up the coast...
 
Daydream believer said:
I then realised that I am just as scared about journeys as he is.
If i sit in a strange port too long i get" marina bound" i listen to the wind in the rigging, i look at the swell outside the harbour & really do not want to go especially so the longer i stay.
Click to expand...

Know exactly what you mean.

Think it may be true that most of life's journey is to overcome our fearful Ego. The sages throughout time seem to focus on it.

We might kid ourselves that the world 'out there' creates our problems, but the truth, according to the sages, is that the source of all our suffering is the Ego . It thinks it is trying to help but cannot see beyond the end of it's own nose. I think I agree with them.

The best example I heard was to convert the word fear into "excitement" .

Note to self, must try harder.

"The glass in which the ego seeks to see it's face is dark indeed"

( A Course In Miracles )
 
Some people will say that if you are not "scared" you are not having fun; which is true to a certain extent. I have been sailing since I was 8ish starting with Optimist and racing in Finns and other dinghies, what great fun it was but always felt "anxious" and over 4 decades later and lots of single handed, in yachts I still do feel "anxious" when sailing.

However, the feeling is very different when sailing with others as one tents to adopt a slightly different role because you are "in charge" or others and you stop feeling "anxious" about yourself and feeling "protective" about the others. Perhaps feeling anxious/scared/protective is being responsible.
 
I've been a bit worried when on deck in a F9 at night (not on Live Magic!) but I think that's only natural. My main concern on my boat is there not being a berth or space when I get to my destination. In a boat with average 3-4kt it can be a long tiring slog to get somewhere else and doubly so when you've already done 10 hours at sea with no real food due to single handing and a lack of gimbles :)
 
I'm only really 'scared' when the weather turns a bit rough and my family is on board (girls 10 & 12). I shouldn't be really as I know the boat is sound, and my sailing skills are good enough.
But the more you sail in hard winds & big waves the easier it becomes, like most things in life..
 
Being scared in a boat can be rational or irrational. We have a lady friend who will not sail out of sight of land, the result of a near-drowning experience as a teenager and I can fully understand her phobia.

I once took a young nephew sailing in flat water on a river on an ordinary sailing day when he was about ten years old. He spent a miserable hour cringing in the corner and could not be persuaded otherwise even though both his parents were with us. I have never seen this before with numerous guests and children and although I can understand how unfamiliar he found the situation, his reaction seemed excessive. Maybe that is why he has grown up to take holy orders.

I spend all winter fretting about how I am going to cope in the middle of the North Sea but as soon as I pass Pye End I am as happy as Larry.
 
johnalison said:
Being scared in a boat can be rational or irrational. We have a lady friend who will not sail out of sight of land, the result of a near-drowning experience as a teenager and I can fully understand her phobia.
Click to expand...

Still irrational, though, as she's no less likely to drown just because some cliffs are visible on the horizon...

Pete
 
I am currently restoring a boat, which so far has taken over 2 years and will probably take another year as I have run out of money. But I feel that that is an excuse for the nearer I get to launch day(should it ever come) the more terrified I get. The way I feel now makes me think that I should stop deluding myself and sell.
 
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