Two’s company

I had an email the other day from an old friend who was getting ready to set off across the Pacific. ‘What do you do for a watch system?’ he asked, ‘when there are only two of you.’ A lot of yachts making ocean passages are crewed by just two people, usually a couple and often not youngsters, to put it delicately.

Across the Atlantic and on any overnight passages it all comes down to crew. On one of our earlier yacht, Tetranora which we took across the Indian Ocean we were initially three though illness forced one to fly home from Yemen. Cousin Frank and I fell into a comfortable three on and three off rhythm for the rest of the trip to SE Asia. Another of our yachts, Seven Tenths sometimes had three crew though often it was just me and Lu, my wife. On our current yacht Skylax we originally planned for a friend to make the crew numbers up but this all fell through at the last minute. With two on board we were on a three hours on/three hours off rota. On seven tenths