FIRST OCEAN CROSSING: How We Prepared Our Sailboat To Sail Across An Ocean [103]

Hi guys, in this video we're going to explain how we prepared our boat Skua to cross the Atlantic Ocean. This is not a how-to video as you probably know this was our first ever Atlantic crossing but a lot of you guys had so many questions about our boat equipment and just in general our techniques about crossing the Atlantic Ocean so we figured we'd make a whole video about it. Our approach when preparing to cross the Atlantic was to bear in mind the big four. Keep water out of the boat, keep the rig up, keep the boat steering in the right direction and keep the crew fed and happy. As part of the prep for crossing when we were in Spain we replaced the standing rigging so all these metal wires which hold the mast up. We also replaced the chain plates because of the chain plate issue we had in the med and the bowsprit fitting. So all of this is brand new and we're really super confident in it and it was partly to cross the Atlantic but also partly because we knew it'd be much easier to do in Europe than once we got into these islands. We also carried spare rigging wire so that we could make up new stays. The Yankee which is our furthest forward headsail and the main are both new from Far East Sails. The staysail we haven't replaced that's quite old but other than that the sail inventory is all new and we carry our old sails that they replaced so the main and the big genoa as backups in case there were any rips or problems with the sails. In terms of communications we use this Garmin inReach SE+. We are not sponsored by Garmin in any sort of way, we paid full price, we are paying full price for the plans. The reason why we chose this device is that it's very budget friendly, not just the device but also the plans, the data plans. So this is essentially a satellite messaging system and it can do two main things. One is send and receive 160 character messages and the other one is tracking so people can follow along your journey. Your track is displayed on a and you can post updates to it. You can also request weather updates on the inReach. We didn't find the weather updates to be very accurate so we had Ryan's brother on shore sending us the summary of the forecast that he looked up on Windy. Overall we were really happy with the inReach, it worked perfectly however we regretted a little bit not getting a more expensive system where we could receive grip files and sort of check the weather on our own and even being able to write longer messages than 160 characters because it is very challenging. We went for the unlimited messages plan with the inReach and we were very happy we did it because we spent a lot of time alone on watch and sometimes just messaging our friends and family home really made a difference and made our day sometimes. So this is our Hydrovane wind vane, it did almost all the steering across the Atlantic. It's as old as me so it's over 30 years old and obviously this air vane is very DIY. I made this in the yard in an afternoon before we set off with some aluminium tube and some spinnaker fabric and it worked flawlessly, doesn't use any electricity, it's very robust and reliable unlike most autopilots. So we're really really happy with it, would totally recommend it, takes hardly any maintenance and it'll steer you around the world. So that's what we relied on because we knew we could rely on it but we do have some other backup systems as well, we have the electronic hydraulic autopilot which is a below decks autopilot and I think hydraulic autopilots are generally thought of as the best ones you can get and then we also had a tiller pilot which attaches on here which steers the wind vane rudder because the rudder of the wind vane, although it's fairly small, it does steer the boat so it can completely independently steer if anything happened to the boat's main rudder then we can just steer with this as an auxiliary rudder and you can just steer the boat using this or use the tiller pilot to steer the boat using that. In terms of electronic instruments the main things we used were the M-TRAC AIS we've got which also displays speed and course, obviously GPS based, so that alone gives you pretty much all the information you need whether there's any ships nearby, your speed over ground and your course over ground so you can do quick checks and just see what's going on and we mounted that just inside the companionway so you can see it from inside the boat or outside. We did also have the wind instrument on so that we could tell if the wind was picking up, obviously you can tell if it's getting windy but you can have rules in place like once it touches 20 knots we're going to put a reef in and stuff like that, I find it quite useful. We also had a tablet and we mainly used that for sort of every day at noon or around lunchtime we'd check our position, sometimes I'd work it out with the sextant and then Eleanor would check how accurate that was. It's nice not to be constantly thinking of how many nautical miles you've got to go, it's nice to wait until noon and then check how many miles you've run in the last 24 hours and check how many to go, it just makes it less of a drag like I've only gone six more miles out of three thousand in the last two hours or whatever you know. So we have a spare tablet, we have obviously our phones have ways to figure out where we are as well, they're all GPS capable and we do have a standalone GPS unit and the inReach, we have loads of GPS units but they could all be fried by a lightning strike basically. So as well as the electronic navigation systems that we had on board we did carry a sextant as well and I kind of learned how to use it on the way to the Canaries, partly this was just as a way of keeping myself entertained I do like learning stuff like that but partly obviously it is a backup system if the boat got hit by lightning for example and it killed all the electronics on board then we would have a way to find out where we were. The sextant basically measures the angle between the horizon and any object in the sky like the sun, the moon, planets or stars, a celestial body and then from that you can work out either your latitude using the sun at noon or you can work out a more accurate position fix using stars or planets and I learned everything from David Birch's book which I found to be really really good, a few people have asked about that and yeah I'd really recommend it, it's like a really thorough in-depth course but it's also kind of quite easy to follow, well structured. Although this Davis sextant is plastic and not very expensive I found it to be more accurate than we needed for ocean crossings. In terms of keeping the crew fed and happy obviously provisioning was a big one, we worked out 10 meals that we would be happy having underway so happy cooking them and happy eating them, some of them were really bland for those times when we were feeling seasick or nauseous and some of them were full of flavour and would make us really happy so we chose those 10 dishes and then multiplied them by the amount of times we would have them, we did that for breakfast, lunch and dinner and we calculated it based on an Atlantic crossing taking 32 days and then on top of that we had emergency food so we bought loads and loads of pasta, rice, pasta sauce and tinned fish and things like that so that in an emergency situation when we are stuck out at sea for more than a month we'd have something to eat. In terms of water we have two water tanks they hold around 300 litres of water, we have the water maker and we tried as much as we could to keep the tanks topped up but in case of the tanks leaking or the water getting contaminated we had some emergency water so big bottles of water like this that we could drink from for a number of days until we could get to land. So in case of leaks there were two things we kind of carried these softwood bungs which every boat has or should have if there's a problem with a seacock then you can push one of these into it it should be softwood because then I think it expands more and there like everyone has them you know we've got different sizes some are big and the other thing was this stuff leak hero obviously we haven't used it and hopefully never will but we have heard of boats being saved with underwater putty so we did obviously carry some I'm not sure how it would have worked out obviously these things are kind of hypothetical until there's a real situation but we'd rather have it and not need it and obviously on board we've got lots of stuff like plywood bits of metal bolts you know all that kind of stuff that you carry around on your boat which will probably come in handy if you crack the hull somehow or damaged it or hit a container then it would be the right kind of stuff to give you the best chance of surviving we also have a few bilge pumps we have the small bilge pump which is right in the bottom of the well and just keeps any water that's kind of coming in from the rain or whatever tiny leaks in the deck that kind of stuff keeps that pumped out then we have a big bilge pump which is for like emergency situations and that one's above the small bilge pump so that it's rarely ever used it shouldn't become clogged and they're two completely different systems they have separate hoses going to different through holes and then we also have the manual bilge pump which is actually pretty important because we found that with the boat moving around you'd get like a tiny bit of water in the bottom of the well where the bilge pumps are and then that water would keep like hitting the float switch of the bilge pump and triggering it so you get a bilge pump just like cycling all the time which isn't great because obviously it's using electricity so what i would do is every few watches i would just like pump that little bit of water in the bottom of the well out using the hand pump and then that would just stop that cycling of the little bit for medical emergencies i did a lot of research online and i got this book which is called skipper's medical emergency handbook and this book basically has sort of flow charts and schematics about each emergency and what to do the steps how to take the steps and the medicines to take for each emergency so this was really good as a visual guide in an emergency because even though i read about what to do a million times i'm sure i'd be panicked enough to forget all about it once things actually go wrong so knowing that this was on board it was a huge reassurance in terms of the kit itself i researched a lot online and i looked at the list on this book and then i narrowed it down by thinking about what's most likely going to happen in terms of i'm lucky enough that my mom's neighbor is a nurse and she could help me get a hold of everything i needed but what you could do is find a doctor that will be able to prescribe the medicines as long as they understand your situation so i organized the kit based on the emergency or the body part where things went wrong so i made a bag with medicines that work for any stomach pain and diarrhea there is one about eyes ears and lips one with antibiotics and there's burns and infections as well because they're very related i have two bags this is just one of them with bandages there's one more in the head but this has got even stuff to stop a really really big wound bleeding wounds there's all sorts like steri strips and things like that we have loads of strong painkillers in case we break a bone or something like that and then syringes and tourniquet because we have a few injectables and then we got just a basic first aid bag that's comes with all the usual sort of first aid little things like ice bags instant ice bags or small bandages so nothing extreme but still really useful and because of all these medicines i'm not a medical person at all i made a huge spreadsheet which explains what each medicine does and how to take it what to do on top of that we had my mom's neighbor barbara as a contact on our e-reach so that if a huge emergency that none of this could tell us how to deal with we could ask her and obviously she knows way more than us and she has doctor friends so she could have helped a lot so this is what we used as a grab bag obviously it's not actually a bag but it's fairly tough and it floats and it's bright so if you had to throw it in the water while you're jumping in your life raft then hopefully you could see it to retrieve it there's all sorts of lists on the internet about what to put in a grab bag and i'm not the best person to tell you what to put in it so if you're curious then go check it out there's tons on there there's a few other things we did to make the crossing a little bit easier on us one of them was making reefing easier so we changed our reefing system to make it as smooth as possible so that we wouldn't need the other person on deck and we wouldn't make a lot of noise another thing that made things easier was to have two preventers basically permanently rigged a preventer is a line that is rigged so that it prevents accidental jibes and we were basically using them to jibe so the boom wouldn't swing across the cockpit feeling clean makes a huge difference it makes you feel a lot better so we tried to have showers as often as possible but because the boat moves around a lot we never had indoor showers we have a really basic shower in our head but it's just way too dangerous to try and wash yourself in there so we always had outdoor showers out in the cockpit so that we would be safe finally we had a lot of different kinds of entertainment podcasts books films anything to sort of distract us from being out at sea for 25 continuous days and we found that to be absolutely important because when you are sailing on the ocean the boat never stops moving and the wind never stops blowing so you're so exposed to the elements and it always feels like you are constantly voyaging which is quite exhausting so being able to escape that feeling was absolutely important okay so this is what we did to prepare our sailboat to sail across an ocean but there were a lot lot more things that we thought about we've read about and prepared for that wouldn't fit into this video we just wanted to give you an idea of what went into preparing us and the boat for it and we hope you enjoyed that if you enjoyed this video subscribe to our channel and give us a like and if you'd like to support our production we are on patreon we wanted to give a special thank you to some super generous new patrons tanya chip andy bob and rob thanks so much for joining the crew and welcome on board