How to pass your Yachtmaster Practical Exam

The RYA Yachtmaster Offshore has long been the qualification that cruising yacht sailors, both amateur and professional, have aspired to. Quite aside from the fact that it is the gateway to working in the yachting industry if the desire so takes you, it is good to know that you have mastered the sweep of skills and experience necessary for you to be deemed competent at skippering a sailing yacht.

I’ve wanted to test myself and see if I was up to scratch for years, and I finally got the courage up to put my skills under the spotlight earlier this summer. I was going to be taking the test with my friend Andrew, as we’d been talking about doing our Yachtmaster for two decades.

Last month I shared my experience of preparing for a Yachtmaster exam to get our rusty skills and knowledge back up to standard, and to check that there weren’t any major holes in our repertoire. Now that the RYA Yachtmaster scheme has turned 50, we were also interested to see how things have changed with technology.

Things like chartplotters and mobile internet have made some areas massively easier, but bring their own challenges, and in the first part, we discovered that navigating these systems and knowing what information to trust requires just as many skills and as much judgement as the old methods.

If anything, they also bring more opportunity for distraction from the real world with plenty of potential for making navigationally serious mistakes. The standard for passing the RYA Yachtmaster Offshore exam is just as demanding as it ever was.

Having looked at safety briefs, marina boat handling, navigation and pilotage, it was now time to move onto boat handling under sail, the more critical safety manoeuvres, as well as some of the softer skills involved in skippering a crew. The exam was looming…

Skippering the boat

Part of the reason for having our supercrew, Row, on board for the prep week was that it’s all well and good sailing solo, but a skipper needs to be able to lead and manage a crew safely, and ideally create an atmosphere on board that is harmonious, effective and enjoyable, striking the right balance between being clearly in control, facilitating everyone to play their part, and enjoying life at sea.

Briefings

A huge part of this is around good, early communication in the inevitable form of briefings. Now, this isn’t patronisingly sitting everyone down and telling them to do things they are totally capable of doing, but of communicating what you want to happen, before it happens.

Briefings can be brief and on-the-go, as long as they are clear and you are confident your crew understand. It also demands some degree of foresight and competence on your part – if you haven’t anticipated something, you can’t brief for it. Whether it’s leaving a berth, setting sail or fighting a fire, everyone having a job and being equipped with the skills to do their jobs should engender a satisfying sense of competence and achievement for everyone involved.

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Andrew and I were struck by how much we’re both used to just getting on and doing stuff on our own boats, either by ourselves, or without making sure the crew know what we’re thinking. Talking out loud was a helpful habit during the week. In marina manoeuvres, we tried to warn crew on the foredeck that we were about to turn, or go astern, so as not to unbalance them, and our coming alongsides were a lot smoother when everyone knew what order to get the lines across in.

Soft skills

Whether you’re sailing with strangers you’ve never met before, or with your family who know your flaws only too well and are occasionally good enough to point these out to you, managing interpersonal relationships on board is a skill that’s hard to teach but critical to a safe and happy crew. The more competent and in control you feel, the easier this will be, and thinking ahead will help you keep your stress levels down.

Under the eye of an instructor or examiner, we were of course on our best behaviour. It helped that all of us genuinely enjoyed our time on board and each other’s company, but thinking through what your crew may be feeling or thinking will help. Swallow your pride and do some of the jobs others might not enjoy.

As long as the boat is under control and you’ve got some capacity, make everyone a cup of tea and offer the choccy round. Give people things to do, but let them rest when they need a break too. Make sure they’ve all got suncream on. Keeping an eye on their wellbeing isn’t always easy when you’re nervous, stressed, or don’t quite know where you are.

Command and safety

At the same time, you are responsible for keeping the boat safe. There will be times when you need to make it clear who is in charge, and what you are and are not happy with on board. Andrew and I are used to scampering around a boat, but reminding each other to clip on before going forward for a man overboard, or finding a safe way to adjust the mainsail leech line was a useful reminder to err on the side of caution. Demonstrate that you can pre-empt risks and avoid or mitigate for them.

Boat husbandry and housekeeping

Serious problems on board are more likely if you don’t keep on top of the little things. We worked hard to make sure the boat was in a good state during the week; tidy the galley up and stow the crockery before you set sail, coil the halyards and lines away once you’ve finished reefing. A snake’s wedding in the cockpit is going to lead to jammed lines and tangled feet. If you’re happy with the picture of where the boat is and how she’s sailing, look around you to make sure the details are right too.

Man overboard

Man overboard is just about one of the most serious events that can happen on board a cruising yacht at sea. Getting them out of the water as quickly as possible is of paramount importance. When I last did a sailing course nearly two decades ago, the drills were the same as they’ve always been – choose whether you want to get back to the MOB under sail or engine, do your manoeuvre, then fish out the fender and bucket with a boathook.

I’ve spent some time for the magazine testing not only the sequence of actions in this manouevre but how you then actually get the casualty out of the water, and was chastened by just how hard it really is to lift a dead-weight casualty from the water onto deck, especially if they are incapacitated.

I was encouraged, therefore, that the RYA’s approach to MOB training has moved on, breaking it down into three areas: preventing man overboard in the first place, getting back to the casualty, and getting them out of the water.

The usual points of minimising time on deck, clipping on in rough weather or when alone on deck, only going forward on the windward side, and all the other precautions, are something to drill into your crew, and as skipper, it’s important to ensure a safe culture on board.

Man overboards are no longer taught exclusively under sail. Yes, we practised sailing back to a fender in the water, but this should only ever be as a backup to the fastest and most reliable way to get to your MOB, and on boats with engines, that is under power.

The order in which we did the drill during our training was as follows:

1. Raise the alarm – Shout man overboard and point at the casualty.
2. Stop the boat – Stop the boat by crash-tacking to heave to, and ensure crew don’t release the sheets. At this point you are close to the MOB and under control.
3. Mark the mob – Throw in the horseshoe and danbuoy, then allocate someone to point at the MOB. At this stage you should also be able to communicate with them.
4. Make a distress call – Someone can then go below to hit the VHF DSC distress button and to mark the MOB on the plotter, but don’t bother with a voice Mayday call at this point – it’s too slow unless you have a large crew.
5. Start the engine – Check the lines are clear, start the engine, furl the jib and centre the main.
6. Prepare for recovery – As you motor round, the crew can get the MOB recovery kit ready – a grab bag in the cockpit locker contained a 6:1 handy billy with a sling already attached.
7. Rig the handy billy – The handy billy is hoisted on a spinnaker halyard, and guyed forwards to stop it swinging – we used the spinnaker pole downhaul, but a clip to the shroud might also work. The tail can be taken to a primary winch via a turning block if extra power is needed. Before crew go forward, they should clip on to prevent a second MOB, so have tethers in the bag too.
8. Depower the main – Once downwind of the MOB, come onto a close reach and the main can be eased out with the deck crew forward of the shroud, and if a topping lift is fitted, scandalise the boom to keep it clear of heads. If you’ve got lazy jacks, you could drop the main, but don’t drop the main onto deck where everyone will be working.
9. Approach and attach – As you come to the MOB, aim upwind and drift down. A loop of rope can be thrown over the casualty, which will be easier than trying to catch them with a flimsy boathook.
10. Hoist them aboard – Get them to put the sling on if they can, or use the loop of rope secured to the handy billy to hoist them. A floating loop of line pre-attached to their lifejacket, like the MOB Lifesaver, would also speed things up here. If they’ve not been in the water long, and you’re only doing a short lift, focus on getting them out of the water rather than keeping them horizontal.

Practise alongside

It’s a highly informative process to try out this last part whilst alongside in the marina, with the ‘casualty’ a real person lying on the pontoon. While they would be wet, heavier and needing lifting further in real life, this is
a very safe and controlled way of practising with your system and adjusting it until everyone is happy they know what to do.

Having done this exercise now, I am keen to do a full man overboard drill at the start of every season and at the start of every trip so that everyone on board knows what to do – it is this practice that is the deciding factor in whether you can get an MOB back or not.

Manoeuvres under sail – picking up a fender

Sailing back to a fender is a good skill to have, were your engine to fail during a MOB – a line wrapping around the prop, for example – or just to get back to a favourite hat or fender that’s gone overboard. It’s like sailing onto a mooring, but easier in many ways without having to factor in the tide.

The basic principle is that you want to approach on a close reach with enough space to slow down and arrive under control, able to spill all the power from the main. There are two slight variations in that you can bear away on a broad reach to start with as you sail away from the fender, or you can reach away, then dip downwind after the tack. If you do the latter, the dip down will need to be a significant bear away.

As you’ll be sending crew forward to the shrouds, you’ll still need to furl the jib and scandalise the main on your final approach. I managed to get myself confused once or twice and went to put the fender on the windward bow like a mooring, which isn’t going to work.

Mooring under sail

There are a few manoeuvres that everyone should be able to do. While you may rarely sail onto a mooring buoy, knowing how to do so is a good skill to have should you have engine trouble or just for showing off. At the same time, it’s a good indicator of a sailor’s feel for the boat and how it will respond to the elements.

When approaching into wind and tide together, our Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 37 from 2008 had a fairly shallow forefoot, so as soon as our speed dropped off, the bow tended to pay off quickly.

You don’t want a flogging genoa over the crew on the foredeck either, so furling the genoa away is a good option, but you will sail slower and with more leeway, so need to be slightly higher upwind than you first anticipate.

With wind and tide opposed, you would clearly approach under genoa alone, but with wind and tide at roughly right angles, you’ll need to judge which approach is needed. There were two factors that caught us out a couple of times, interestingly more important in lighter airs.

The first is that as the boat slows down the tide becomes proportionally more important, and secondly, at the same time apparent wind will decrease and move aft, further filling the mainsail. The lesson was to prepare for a wind-against-tide approach much more readily than we might otherwise have done.

Sailing onto a pontoon

You are unlikely ever to sail into a marina finger berth and I wouldn’t advise trying. You may, however, find yourself having to sail back into harbour with engine problems. While a Pan Pan call is pretty ubiquitous these days, a Yachtmaster should be able to deal with engine problems at sea, and if not, to sail themselves back into harbour rather than depending on being rescued.

Most harbours will have a pontoon or berth with a relatively open approach, and it’s reasonable to expect to be able to sail onto it. The calculation of which approach to use is much the same as for picking up moorings under sail, though with other boats around and a solid pontoon to hit, the consequences of getting it wrong are higher. Handling a boat in confined waters means you’ll need to keep control at low speeds, and be thinking ahead about escape routes if it’s not going according to plan.

For us, sailing on the mid-river pontoon opposite Warsash at the bottom of the Hamble river offered a good open approach, and just enough wind to get away with a wind-and-tide together approach, though a genoa-only approach may have been safer.

Sailing downwind

The dangers of a crash gybe are well known, particularly from the mainsheet and boom scything across the boat, with a high potential to damage both crew and boat. I had sailed a bit close to a gybe with the jib collapsing earlier in the week, and when I had intentionally gybed, I hadn’t fully centred the main.

Although no harm was done, the boom did clatter across noisily. Matt gave a stern warning about the dim view an examiner would take of this – a potential instant fail – and we agreed that looking at rigging for downwind legs would be worthwhile, including both preventer and poling out the genoa.

Rigging a preventer

Rigging a preventer is relatively straightforward. We chose the longest, strongest line we had on board in the form of a spinnaker sheet. This was led from the end of the boom, where it was secured with a round turn and two half hitches – both a strong knot and easily released under load – then forward outside everything to the bow fairlead, and then aft to a cockpit winch.

When poling out a headsail in the past, I’ve always set the pole using the pole uphaul and downhaul then clipped the sheet into the end then unfurled the headsail. This works fine in settled conditions for short legs clear of shipping. Were you to need to gybe, change course, or furl away the headsail quickly, however, it would leave you with the dangerous proposition of a loose, heavy pole potentially swinging freely on the foredeck that also prevents you sheeting the sail in for an upwind course without first unclipping it from the pole.

Coming up with a solution

Matt set us the task of rigging the pole in such a way that it could be locked in position whether the sail was set or not, and that the headsail could be sheeted in for upwind sailing without going forward to unrig the pole.
After a bit of head scratching, we found a solution.

The pole could be held in position by the pole uphaul, the downhaul, which served to pull the pole forwards and down, and an additional aft guy, which was an extra line taken from the pole end to the aft mooring cleat. We attached a third sheet, in the form of a spinnaker sheet, to the jib’s clew, through the pole, and aft to a spinnaker block at the stern and then onto a primary winch.

The result was that chafe was minimised, the pole could be locked in position whether the sail was set or not, and if we did need to gybe or sail upwind, the normal jib sheets still had a proper lead, albeit the pole would need to be held aft and the headsail with a couple of reefs to keep it clear of the pole.

The day of the exam

The exam starts a day or two before the examiner turns up, in that he or she may want to see a passage plan you’ve prepared in advance. If this is the case, the examiner will have passed the information to you via the school providing the training.

It’s best to do this two or three days before the exam so you haven’t got a last-minute panic, but not too far in advance that you’ve forgotten the sums you’ve done and why you made the choices you did. I was set a passage from Bembridge to St Vaast on the Cherbourg peninsula, giving me a potentially fiddly drying harbour at either end, though the forecast given was a conveniently favourable Westerly Force 4-5. With passage plan complete, and some last-minute swotting up on lights, shapes and sounds, Andrew and I retired for an early night.

After the windless drizzle of the day before, Friday dawned bright and breezy with a forecast of a good Force 5 from the southwest and plenty of sunshine – enough that we’d have to be on our toes, but at least something we could get our teeth into. Matt had reassured us that making mistakes wasn’t the end of the world during the exam, if we showed competence in getting ourselves back on track.

Minor mistakes are to be expected and it’s more important how you respond to your own mistake. The only sorts of things that would probably be an outright fail, other than flunking our lights and shapes, are safety critical things such as a collision, running aground, an inability to navigate and pilot, or an uncontrolled gybe.

We were joined at 0900 by our examiner Andy Wright, an RYA Yachtmaster instructor trainer, examiner and centre inspector, an MCA Master 200 who works as an RNLI area lifesaving manager and who also volunteers with the Rona sailing project. There’d be no ‘getting away with it’ here.

We began the day with a coffee and chat, and Andy spent some time asking about our reasons for taking the exam, before laying out what he would be looking for. ‘I’m not going to be trying to catch anyone out, but what I want to see you demonstrate is that you can skipper the boat, navigate the boat, handle the boat under power and handle the boat under sail.’

The safety briefings

We began, as we had with our prep week, with safety briefs, with Andy and I splitting above and below decks.

With the engine bay open, Andy took time to probe our knowledge of engine troubleshooting, asking us to point out various parts of the engine, the different significance of blue, black or white smoke from the exhaust (incomplete combustion, burning oil and overheating, by the way), and how to change filters, impellers and belts and how to bleed the fuel.

On deck, we were asked to explain when and why each kind of flare would be used. None of it felt overly pressured, but it was certainly an in-depth examination of our knowledge.

During the day, these conversations continued as he drew information out of us in areas that were not being practically demonstrated on the day – 15-20 minutes on lights, shapes, sounds and collision avoidance, including how we’d handle different scenarios in traffic separation schemes.

He asked us to talk through our passage plans, and then went further to see whether we knew if the boat we were on was legally allowed to do so, and what the administrative and immigration requirements would be on either side of the Channel – a tricky one given the ongoing chaos and confusion that surrounds small boat crossings these days.

Being tested underway

In between these chats, we got underway. First with our marina manoeuvres in and out of a selection of increasingly tricky berths, putting the boat into positions that we might not have chosen, including a berth two space into a gulley with a yacht moored either side of the space and a boat opposite. Ferry gliding in bows-first wasn’t too tricky, but with wind and tide pushing us on, getting out again was harder. I opted to use prop walk to pull the stern out against a bow line – slightly unconventional, and it needed a bit of oomph to keep our bows clear, but I got away without a collision.

We then had half an hour or so to each prepare a short passage plan and pilotage from each end, this time from Hamble to Portsmouth and back. As these weren’t Andrew’s home waters, he was relieved that I was going first.

I know Portsmouth well, but hadn’t been in for a while. With a plan complete, Andy asked me to explain the route I’d chosen. While I had the route in the chartplotter, I’d picked waypoints near easy-to-find buoys so I could see I was in the right place from the cockpit, and I’d elected not to cut the corner over the shallows off Hill Head to keep us clear of a lee shore.

I’d also have to use the Outer Swashway on the way in, as we’d be close to low water and lacking depth by about 0.3m to get in via the Inner Swashway.

Emergency on passage

Underway, and with Row on the wheel, I had decisions to make about how many reefs to put in, and I was torn between sailing the boat properly and being overly cautious. Starting with one reef, with the breeze creeping upwards, life was comfier with two reefs in. I had to stop myself from any gung-ho attempts to tighten leech lines, electing for a quick heave-to to sort them out. Coffees needed to keep on flowing during the passage, and lunchtime was upon us before I knew it.

While the pasties were heating in the oven, there was time for a fix on the chart, or would have been had the fender not fallen overboard. We went through our drill and I was relieved to get back to the MOB first go. Andrew and Row looked at me to see if we were doing ‘the whole thing’ and as Andy hadn’t flinched, we rigged the handy billy, attached the fender to the sling and hauled away until it was safely aboard – it’s a complex process that really does need practice, but it had gone well.

A sense of relief

Once safely in Portsmouth Harbour, it was my turn to find and pick up a mooring buoy under sail. Tied up and handing over skippering duty to Andrew for his turn in the hot seat, I suddenly felt a wave of relief that my passage, pilotage and handling seemed to have gone okay. It was only early afternoon, however, and we wouldn’t be finished until we’d done our night navigation.

Andrew’s passage went well, too, in a building breeze that was more on the nose on the way back, while I was below wrestling with getting a tray of meatballs and sauce into a wildly swinging oven. I’m ashamed to say that when it was Andrew’s turn at MOB, despite a flawless approach, I messed up the lasso and missed the fender. Sorry, friend.

Night navigation

By the time we were back on a mooring inside Calshot Spit it was time for dinner and a brief respite, before plunging on into our night nav exercises.

Much like earlier in the week, we were asked to navigate to unmarked locations and Andy gave us a bit of time to prepare these. While we were doing this, he also checked our knowledge of how the radar worked for collision avoidance and for navigation, and how to extract relevant information from both the chartplotter and the AIS.

My night nav began well, using multiple sources of position information as requested, and just about making sense of my hastily drawn sketch and notes, looking for the characteristics of particular lights (you’ll need to know how quick VQ compared to just Q really is) and using the radar to plot our course.

As it was top of the tide, however, every ship in Southampton seemed determined to set sail, including the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary cruise liner with attendant tugs, police launches and party boats following behind. Cowering at the side of the channel, my plan was thrown into disarray and I lost the plot on radar, and we were blinded by disco balls and oil terminal lights alike. Luckily, Navionics is by no means banned, and a quick range and bearing in the palm of my hand gave me a course and distance to my imaginary point. Another step closer.

Still, Andrew needed to pilot us up the Hamble River, where Hamble Point’s sector lights can be easily lost in the welter of shore lights, and I was asked to bring the boat alongside, stern first at the end of a long gulley, giving me another chance to mess things up, right up to the last minute.

Debriefs

But with the boat tied up and put to bed, Andy took each of us off for a quick chat on the pontoon. Fortunately, he was pleased with how we had done and broke the news that we had both passed. Phew – mission accomplished!

We could finally open those beers and enjoy what we had just achieved. Both of us had found the week intense, all-absorbing and demanding – perhaps unsurprisingly. As a result, we felt that we’d been forced to up our game when it came to our sailing and skippering, and our skills had been updated by a decade or two.

We were now much better-rounded skippers than we’d been before. There were lots of learnings and some new skills to take back to our own boats, too, but we had also had a fun week along the way.

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