Jimmy Cornell: ‘Some of my most memorable sailing was due to unforseen detours’

Cruising doyen Jimmy Cornell on how to avoid pitfalls, and make your cruising adventure a true trip of a lifetime.

When it comes to regrets, I have none. But on all my voyages the golden rule has been to know what NOT to do. I learned that valuable lesson on my very first day on a sailing yacht.

At the time I was working at the BBC World Service and the BBC yacht club had a 40ft sloop called Ariel based on the Hamble. I signed up for a sailing weekend along with a friend from television news called Charlie McLaren. We travelled down on Friday, met the captain and sailed to the Isle of Wight, planning to spend the night at Yarmouth. As we neared the island, the captain told Charlie, who was the mate for the weekend, to get the crew to lower the sails.

Suddenly there was a loud crunch and Ariel came to an abrupt halt. Even I could tell that we’d run aground. The boat was heeling over at an angle and rocking in the swell. Then, while lowering the mainsail, the wildly swinging boom hit the other crew hard on the head, the violent blow splitting his scalp open.

With blood gushing all over the place, we took him below and put a towel around his head. Charlie offered to make him a cup of tea, but as he was pouring the water into a mug, the grounded yacht gave a sudden lurch and the boiling water all splashed into his sea boots.

Screaming like mad, Charlie ripped his boots off, yet by the time he’d pulled off his woollen socks both legs were already covered in blisters.

With the situation now bordering on the desperate, and no prospect of getting afloat on our own, the captain hailed a passing motoryacht and asked them to pull us off, which they did. He then contacted the Coastguard by VHF and was told to head back to Portsmouth, where the hospital had an A&E department.

We motored across the busy Solent waterway, and saw an ambulance with its blue lights flashing waiting for us. I bade goodbye to the captain and took the train back to London. “How was your weekend?” asked my wife Gwenda when I got home.

“Very interesting. I think I’ve learned a lot,” I told her. “Not much about sailing, but a lot about what NOT to do on a boat.”

Over the years I came to realise that learning what not to do fully accords with the ruling principles of voyage planning. The primary objective is to plan a route or passage that takes best advantage of prevailing winds and favourable seasons. Essentially that’s about always being in the right place at the right time, or, better still, not being in the wrong place at the wrong time!

According to the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, ‘Voyage planning is common sense’. The definition of common sense is the basic level of practical knowledge and judgement that we all need to help us live and travel in a reasonable and safe way.

Avoiding pitfalls

For the last 35 years I have kept a record of the global movement of sailing yachts based on the number of arrivals in key locations around the world (see full feature in the October 2023 issue of Yachting World and at yachtingworld.com).

Worldwide it is estimated that at any given moment there are around 10,000 boats undertaking a long voyage. The vast majority of those adventures have a happy ending. Bearing in mind the many challenges that sailors on ambitious voyages have to overcome, it is quite remarkable how there are relatively few failures.

From the cases of unhappy or abandoned voyages that have come to my knowledge over the years, and from conversations with owners and crews, I narrowed down the most common factors that contribute to the ‘failure’ of a voyage. These are: the boat itself; problems with the crew; an inability to be self-sufficient; inadequate funds; or having the wrong attitude to life at sea.

These are such important matters for anyone planning a long voyage that I conducted several surveys among long distance sailors, as well as participants in my rallies, to find out more about those causes.

Article continues below…

Managing finances

Applying those criteria to my own experience, the choice of my various boats has been generally right, and every one of them fulfilled my expectations. But when it came to the financial aspect, the early part of my first voyage was quite difficult as we’d spent all our money on the boat, and had absolutely no savings.

However, although I had resigned from my job at the BBC, I was asked to send back reports on any subject of interest that I might come across. Most of my reports were sent to a programme called Hello Tomorrow, which dealt with developing countries. The programme was produced by the BBC World Service and sent to radio stations around the world. Often an interview that I’d recorded at a previous stop had already been broadcast in the country where we had just arrived.

This made my task much easier and I had no problem finding new material everywhere: visiting an experimental farming station in the jungle of Panama; the Potato Institute in the Peruvian Andes; or a tea plantation in the highlands of Sri Lanka. Besides providing us with a modest, but regular income, my work provided an excellent opportunity to meet interesting people in every country we stopped.

The financial aspect of long-distance cruising is now very different from when it was still possible to do it on a limited budget. My advice on cruising budgets is to be prepared for the costs to be higher than expected, and to have recourse to some reserve funds in a serious emergency.

I’d also urge everyone to think carefully before making a clean break with shore life during the current economic uncertainty, creeping inflation and currency fluctuations. If possible, you should keep a shore base in case you are forced to change plans, whether for health or financial reasons, to have somewhere to return to.

Build routines

Sailing with our two young children on the first voyage imposed on us a certain discipline. We established a routine with regular meals, schoolwork, rest periods and watches, a pattern that continued even when I was not sailing with my family.

There were other rules that became routine, such as always checking the anchor with a mask if we were spending any length of time in an anchorage. Some of my later crew found my insistence on a regular routine as pedantic and at odds with their expectations of a cruising life. In most cases, they had joined me for a limited time and were looking forward to a nice and enjoyable vacation.

They were irritated by such onboard routines as keeping regular watches, being quiet when the off watch crew were sleeping, or not having unlimited use of fresh water. I realised that it was not the routines they could not accept, but the concept of discipline.

Stay flexible

Having done all my early sailing at a time when there were no weather forecasts available on ocean passages, my offshore tactics had to be based on the actual conditions being experienced. This is how I learned the importance of being flexible when it came to route planning.

Seizing a potentially promising opportunity had always been my attitude and this is how our planned three-year world voyage on the first Aventura ended up lasting twice as long. Looking back on that voyage, and those on the following four Aventuras, I realise that some of the most memorable highlights of my sailing were thanks to those unforeseen detours.

Having transited the Panama Canal, rather than take the direct tradewind route to Tahiti, on the insistence of our children Doina and Ivan we turned left to visit Paddington Bear’s original home of Peru.

From there we continued to Easter Island and Pitcairn, two of the most interesting islands in the world that we would have otherwise missed.

A chance encounter with an Englishman on Easter Island led to an even longer detour and extended our South Pacific sojourn by at least one year. When I told him I was a journalist and working for the BBC, he asked whether we were planning to sail to the Ellice Islands for the forthcoming independence celebrations. He painted a very tempting picture of the planned festivities, and I was hooked on the idea.

So rather than continue west, as planned, towards Australia, from Fiji we turned north and witnessed the birth of Tuvalu, the smallest independent nation in the world. During the independence festivities, I met Ieremia Tabai, chief minister of the neighbouring Gilbert Islands, and future president of Kiribati, who invited us to come to their own celebrations the following year.

By now we were so seduced by the South Pacific and its people that we decided to spend as long as possible there instead of rushing west to complete the second half of our circumnavigation.

From Tuvalu, we sailed south to New Zealand to avoid the cyclone season. The following year we returned to the tropics, and from Tonga sailed north, crossed the equator and eventually made landfall at Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati.

Similarly, after the launch of Aventura III in 1998, my planned round the world voyage started with an expedition to Antarctica, accompanied by my son, Ivan But on our return we decided that rather than continue west, we’d sail north all the way to Alaska.

The unplanned detour started with a leisurely cruise through the spectacular Chilean fjordland, a wonderland of ever-changing scenery, with sparkling glaciers, tumbling waterfalls, and countless sheltered anchorages. On a stretch of 600 miles, there was not one single settlement, not even a house, and we met only four cruising boats and about as many fishing boats.

From Chile we continued to Easter Island and Pitcairn, both of which we’d visited 22 years previously. But we took our time to call at places that we’d missed in the past: the Austral and Line Islands, as well as Hawaii and Alaska. Aventura III’s tortuous world voyage was eventually completed 12 years later.

My willingness to change plans and take detours is probably explained by my being open-minded whenever I am faced with an option that looks challenging but has the potential of richer rewards.

Pick crew carefully

After that first voyage, whenever possible I sailed with Gwenda, or my children Doina or Ivan. When they could not join me, I had no choice but to take on crew. It was not long before I discovered that the crew problems I’d witnessed on other boats were now affecting me as well.

On a few occasions, I was disappointed to discover that even old friends behaved differently on the boat than ashore. Some of the worst were those who had their own boats and some offshore experience but were unable to accept my role of captain. This sad experience was obviously not unusual, and I realised that’s the reason why the majority of cruising boats are sailed by couples on their own.

There must be some truth in Hemingway’s advice that “one should only sail with people you love”. The risk of having problems with occasional crew is virtually impossible to avoid because in most cases they happen after the passage has started.

This is one of the reasons why I always advised participants in the ARC to set an initial course to the Caribbean that passed close to the Cape Verde islands, not only because they would encounter better winds from there on but mainly because it gave them the opportunity to stop and get rid of a difficult crew. It happened every year.

The right attitude

However, I’ve come to believe that the most important factor that can have a bearing on the success of a voyage is your attitude to the sea and sailing – and to cruising life in general.

Setting off on a life on the ocean is a major decision that entails a complete change of both lifestyle and mentality. Leaving on a sailing yacht just because it is a convenient way to see the world is not a good enough reason. I have come across this attitude among sailors I have met, some of whom were unwilling, or more often unable, to make the transition from a shore-based mindset to becoming a full-time sailor.

This may not be a major problem on a relatively short voyage, such as sailing to the Caribbean and back, but can have serious consequences for those who leave on a longer journey of several years. The ultimate success of a voyage does not depend on the boat, finances or crew but on you and your attitude.

Having the right attitude is as difficult to define as having common sense. You either have it or you don’t. Life at sea can be difficult, uncomfortable, occasionally hard and dangerous. You must be physically in good shape and psychologically able to deal with the demands of a challenging existence. Before committing yourself to a long voyage, it would be advisable to do a short ocean passage to decide whether that’s the kind of life you’d enjoy.

In my 50 years of sailing I’ve met many outstanding people, and invariably what made them stand out was their attitude. What I most admired in them was their profound respect for the sea.

What they all had in common was that special mindset to embark on a long voyage, which required qualities such as courage, perseverance, determination and self-confidence. The fact that we live in an age when it is so much easier and safer to sail to the remotest parts of the world has not changed those requirements in any way.

Looking back on my eventful life, I realise above all how fortunate I am to have reached this age without having any regrets for the things I’ve not done. And that’s only because I have done everything that I always wanted.

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

Build your knowledge with a subscription delivered to your door. See our latest offers and save at least 30% off the cover price.

The post Jimmy Cornell: ‘Some of my most memorable sailing was due to unforseen detours’ appeared first on Yachting World.