Heaving-to
There are many great descriptions of how to heave-to on the web and I’m not going to write a comprehensive guided here… just a quick note on why heaving-to is so useful and when you’re likely to need to heave-to yourself.
What is heaving to?
Heaving to can be considered to be ‘parking-up’ at see without anchoring. You will drift but the boat will be in a relatively stable position and the boat will be easy to control. Heaving to is also a relatively straight-forward procedure
When to heave-to?
- Man overboard situation.
- Crew rest in difficult sea conditions.
- Extreme weather.
- Pic-nic
This sailboat-cruising.com piece provides quite a comprehensive look at heaving to and is worth a read.
Man overboard
The potential emergency situation of a MOB is why, on SAOR, we want all are members (we are currently a syndicate of just 6) to be confident with heaving to. It is something that the helmsman needs to do pretty much automatically when a crew member goes overboard.
We will of course endeavor to ensure this manoeuvre will never be needed in practice, but you never know. We will write a separate blog on MOB as is applies specifically to SAOR and our preferred approach etc.
A good graphical illustration of heaving to...
I like this illustration as it’s very difficult in a live situation to see what’s going on. This graphic/simulation has no such issue and demonstrates the theory quite well.
Heave to in practice
No we understand the theory let’s see how things happen in practice.