5 expert tips: How to prepare for a cold front when sailing offshore

A cold front offshore can see race-ending conditions, Hugh Brayshaw shares advice on how to prepare and sail through it with Andy Rice

Hugh Brayshaw wasn’t long into his offshore career before he encountered the importance of negotiating a cold front in the right way. “It was the first leg of the 2017 Solitaire du Figaro, and we were in the middle of the Bay of Biscay with the prospect of a double cold front coming through,” he recalls.

“We knew before setting off this front was going to hit us on the second night of the race. The forecast was predicting these huge wave heights and the highest wind reading was 54 knots – which is still the most amount of breeze I’ve been in.

“Fortunately I’d put in an early reef and was also early to switch down to the smaller jib. So maybe I lost a little bit to begin with, but three or four boats had to abandon because their mainsails ripped or blew apart from just over-flogging.”

From this and subsequent occasions, Brayshaw has seen the huge risks – and opportunities – that come with every cold front.

“It’s something I try to get across to my guys on the RORC Griffin Youth Programme. It’s an opportunity to make some gains if you’re behind, or extend your lead if you’re already ahead. You might get hit by some hard rain and a lot of wind, but with the right attitude you can really make the cold front work to your advantage.”

Crack off

In the English Channel typically you know that when a cold front is coming through, the wind will be coming from west-south-west and then does a right-hand shift with the front, after which the wind will move to more like west-north-west.

Because you know there’s going to be a shift at some point, it pays to crack off slightly to build speed and get to the shift a bit quicker than if you stayed on normal upwind VMG.

For a conventional keelboat you might only be talking about cracking off 5° or 10°, but on boats where you can handle more power – like a canting keel boat or a multihull – you might even crack off as much as 15° because the extra distance sailed is more than justified by the extra boat speed.

Be ready to tack

Everyone on the crew needs to be aware of what’s about to happen. You need to be ready for a quick tack when the cold front hits. If the front is arriving in the middle of the night, it’s even more important to have fully briefed everyone on how things are going to be set up for the change of wind speed and angle. Make sure everyone is aware of what sort of compass numbers you’re anticipating as the shift arrives, and how much the wind is likely to increase.

Sometimes it’s super obvious when you get to the shift, it’s pretty much an ‘autotack’. But other times it can be really quite slow moving and there’s not too much activity in the clouds. So it’s good to keep an eye on the AIS to track the other boats in the fleet and how the cold front is progressing. That’s a useful source of real-time knowledge that’s well worth watching when you’re trying to judge the best time to tack.

Talk it through

For teams who only get together a few times a year, or maybe have come together for the first time to do a big offshore like the Rolex Fastnet Race, it’s inevitable that you won’t have had much time to sort out your communications and understanding between each other. As much as possible, and especially in rough conditions, you really want to avoid all the shouting back and forth from the foredeck to the pit and to the back of the boat. Instructions are bound to get lost or misunderstood.

Talk through your planned manoeuvres in detail before the front arrives, or ideally even before you leave shore. It’s so easy to get ropes twisted over each other, or getting the sail up from down below and attaching the wrong corner to the wrong sheets or halyards.

Make sure you’ve got some of your most experienced people in the pit, crew who knows the pattern of what looks right or when it looks wrong.

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Tack and peel

Seeing as you’re expecting more breeze on the other side of the wind shift after the arrival of the cold front, a tack-and-peel can be a really slick manoeuvre, so get set up for one in advance.

If you’ve got a tuff luff with two grooves, ideally you want to hoist the smaller headsail up the windward side of the current headsail. When you tack and the smaller headsail is now taking the strain as the new working sail, it’s pretty straightforward to pull down the old, bigger headsail on the windward side of the small jib.

Add and extra reef

When the conditions are really rough, sending people up on to the foredeck is a bit of a last resort. If changing down to a smaller headsail seems too hazardous a manoeuvre, putting a reef in the mainsail is the simpler and less risky way of reducing sail area without sending people forwards.

Remember, it’s much easier to shake out a reef than putting a reef in, so make sure you do your reefing well in advance of reaching the cold front. Better to be safe than sorry, and take your preventative medicine early rather than pay a high price later on.

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