The interesting thing about going back through our achieve and creating the blogs after the fact, is the things that I have forgotten. At the time that I am writing this blog, August 2024, I had simply forgotten about this event. I had always seen these videos as a diary, that I can go back and look at. I am only in the same year of publication and I find that I am already doing what I thought I would do much later in my life.

It was a blowy day in Bangor and named storm Isha, 21 - 22 January 2024, was on its way. So, we had put storm lines on in addition to our normal ropes and we had secured Salty Lass as much as we could.

Additional thoughts on our man-over board video

There had been a few comments with regard to the man overboard video that we had done which we wanted to share with our viewers.

• Getting into a dinghy from the water - The trick is to get one leg into the dinghy, Having a leg in the dinghy and say your arm, is enough for the person to roll the person into the water into the dinghy. We have yet to try this but seeing as I am a lot heavier than Beverley, I can imagine this would still be a lot of hard work for her.
• You could use the anchor - After this suggestion, we did think about this option and dismissed it because, if you think about it, the front of the boat will be bouncing up and down a lot, so you are talking about pulling somebody aboard clinging to the anchor chain while standing on the anchor. That is going to be quite dangerous. There are a lot of obstacles around the person as well as if it goes wrong and they fall into the water, you will have a heavy object, the anchor right by there head. If the sea is calm enough to go over the front then on Salty Lass, they can come over the rear of the boat where there is a sugar scoop and a stern ladder. Another consideration, is the lifting capacity of the windlass, ours is 100kg and seeing as a 14stone person dry is about 89kg, then you will be at the very limit of your equipments capability.
• Using a bosuns chair - We do have a bosuns chair aboard, but we tried using our fender step. Now I couldn't go in the water as we were in the marina, but if the casualty was not incapacitated in some way, or suffering from cold shock then this method could work.

Other issues with regard to man-over board are:-

• Cold shock - Cold shock can paralyse you and it stops your ability to do things. In fact it can even stop you being able to breath, which is why you will die. This is why being prepared is such an important factor, which is why we have thermal gear. Our thermal gear is called Mullions and it has about 5mm of insulation built in, which provides about 2 hours of sea survival time. Without the Mullions then we would only have a sea survival time of 10minutes.
• Life jacket - It is important that you have the right kind of life jacket with a lifting ring. I have tried to be lifted with the lifting ring and I can tell you now, it is quite painful as the life jacket crushes your chest. What you need is another product called mobile life savers. but each life jacket will need to be fitted with one of these, so that you also pull up the persons legs.
• Tethers - If the weather is bad a good tether will keep you onboard, so that you do not go overboard in the first case. When looking for a tether, make sure that you have a round sided hook. In a Clipper race, one man was wearing a teather with a square profile hook. When, the man got swept off his feet, by a wave, the hook got jammed under the tether lines in such a way that the side of the hook took the strain and snapped.

We used a sling to pull me onto Salty Lass and we found that we needed to modify the sling to make it work better. Our modifications were:-

• Sling tidy - We have rip stock nylon around the sling to keep it tidied, I stitched the rip stock to the sling so that we had one less thing to deal with
• Shape - The sling naturally went into a line, but we want a triangle, so I added pipe to the sling to give the sling rigid. So that I could still bend the sling I cut the pipe at various points and put bungee cord in the pipe to force the pipe bits to go straight
• Weight - Our sling floated, so I added weights to the sling so that it went under the casualty

Hurricane Force 12

The hurricane came during the night and in the gusts we were getting over 5° lean. So, Beverley decided that we needed to lift our fenders on the leeward side and drop the fenders on the windward side. It was pitch black out there, but the safty of Salty Lass and the other boats around us, is the important thing, so you make sure you are safe, then you make sure that the boat is safe. Another issue was our solar arch, one of our grub screws had worked itself loose, so the solar arch lifted. So we put the solar panel back and we attached a line between the solar panel and the boat. The other issue that we had was that our insulation that we use on Salty Lass in the winter got wrecked, but seeing as that is only a very cheap item, we did alright.