A 3-hour night watch cycle for a crew of four


Longer passages


hours in the sack followed by a quick ninety minutes doing the business. And very nice too!


/2 126 | MANUAL OF SEAMANSHIP


A formal watch pattern becomes essential when a boat is to be at sea for two nights or more. 24-hour systems come into favour on long voyages, but short-handed crews may prefer to stick with the two and three-keeper options described above. The advantages are that anyone who has had a bad night of it can be given a longer stretch below the following day, and rotating the system is easily done if that is what you want. The writer and his wife have crossed many an ocean on ‘three-on, three-off’ for the dark hours, and catch-as-catch-can in the daylight. If you’re unhappy about such easy-going arrangements and prefer to keep things on the straight and narrow around the clock, four hours is not too much for a daylight watch alone. You can either run three of these, which rotates the night watches perfectly, or if you all like the watches you have and find your body adapts better to a fixed system, run two and a pair of dog-watches (see below) to keep things as they are. Rolling watches Four crew means you can have two on watch easily, but on a small vessel out of shipping lanes, there is really no need to have two people on deck unless a task demands it. This means that if Joe and Jess are scheduled for the watch from 2300 - 0200, only one or other need actually turn out at first. So long as the second watch partner is ‘on call’ and someone on deck is doing the job conscientiously, the watch can organise their own timetable so far as I’m concerned. If they opt to split their time into halves, one way or another they are going to get 41


Some skippers choose to formalise such arrangements. On other boats the watch contrives to change in such a way that you start your trick with one person, end with another and never have the same watch mate two nights running. There seems no reason to quarrel with this or any other system which can be made to work, but many will prefer to keep it simple.


The classical four-hour watch-on-watch system No description of watches would be complete without the ancient four-hour arrangement still used on commercial and naval vessels. I have employed this successfully on fully crewed ocean crossings. Given enough hands, the skipper and cook can even stay outside the cycle so the galley staff can rest up for the day’s work ahead, while the skipper is permanently on standby. Such luxury is rare, but so long as flexibility is allowed in the area of how many are actually required on deck at a given time, watch-on-watch can be highly successful, even with modest crew numbers. Here’s how it goes:


0800 - 1200 — Forenoon watch 1200 - 1600 — Afternoon watch 1600 - 1800 — First dog watch 1800 - 2000 — Second dog watch 2000 - 0000 — First watch 0000 - 0400 — Middle watch 0400 - 0800 — Morning watch


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161  |  Page 162  |  Page 163  |  Page 164  |  Page 165  |  Page 166  |  Page 167  |  Page 168  |  Page 169  |  Page 170  |  Page 171  |  Page 172