RYA Yachtmaster Exam: A day-by-day account of the Preparation you need to pass

Theo Stocker knew he was a competent sailor, but not having an RYA Yachtmaster ticket was a gap he needed to fill. Here's how he handled the intense week of preparation and the one-day exam

Any very competent and highly experienced yachtsmen and women don’t have any qualifications at all and are content to keep it that way, but not being a Yachtmaster bothered me.

I was pretty sure I was up to the standard, but I didn’t know. Becoming an RYA Yachtmaster is something I’ve wanted to do for years.

Unlike RYA Day Skipper etc, the Yachtmaster is not an attendance-based course, but a one-day exam in which an examiner will form an objective opinion of your abilities, and recommend you to the RYA/MCA Yachtmaster Qualification Panel to become a Yachtmaster… or not.

Technically, no instruction is required beforehand and the theory course is not compulsory. However, you will certainly need theory knowledge of the level of the RYA Yachtmaster Offshore shorebased course, with practical experience and skills to match, to stand any chance of passing.

It is strongly recommended to have a few days’ preparation, ideally immediately before the exam, with the same boat and crew. Many sailing schools offer a Yachtmaster preparation course, normally of five days, with your examination at the end of it.

I completed my preparation course and exam, together with my friend, Andrew, at the Hamble School of Yachting.

During the pre-exam training it was made abundantly clear this was not a course on which we could be taught what we needed to know; this should have been gained over our years of experience.

The week’s aim instead was to run through the Yachtmaster syllabus to reveal our weaknesses and bad habits.

Swatting Up

Andrew and I spent five days swatting up. The preparation course, led by instructor Matt Sillars, included Collision Regulations (I quickly found that I’d had significant ‘skills fade’ in my detailed knowledge of the IRPCS).

We practised safety briefings and engine checks; marina boat handling; navigation and pilotage; safety drills; manoeuvres, including downwind sail handling and rigging a preventer; and some of the softer skills involved in skippering a crew.

Thoroughly prepared, the exam was looming…

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Exam Day

The exam starts a day or two before the examiner turns up, as they may want to see a passage plan you’ve prepared in advance. It’s best to do this two or three days before to avoid a last-minute panic, but not too far in advance that you’ve forgotten the sums you’ve done and why you made the choices you did.

I was set a passage from Bembridge to St Vaast, giving me a potentially fiddly drying harbour at either end. After completing our plans, we did some last-minute swatting up on lights, shapes and sounds.

Exam day dawned bright and breezy with a forecasted good Force 5 from the south-west. Matt reassured us that making mistakes wasn’t the end of the world, if we showed competence in getting ourselves back on track.

The only sorts of errors that would probably be an outright fail, other than flunking lights and shapes, are safety-critical things such as a collision, running aground, an inability to navigate and pilot, or an uncontrolled gybe.

We were joined at 0900 by our examiner Andy Wright, RYA Yachtmaster instructor trainer, examiner and centre inspector, and an MCA Master 200 who also works as an RNLI area lifesaving manager.

There’d be no ‘getting away with it’ here. We began the day with a coffee and chat, while Andy spent some time asking about our reasons for taking the exam, before laying out what he would be looking for: “I’m not going to be trying to catch anyone out, but what I want to see you demonstrate is that you can skipper the boat, navigate the boat, handle the boat under power and handle the boat under sail.”

Safety First

We began, as we had during our prep week, with safety briefings. With the engine bay open, our examiner took time to probe our knowledge of troubleshooting, various parts of the engine, the significance of blue, black or white smoke from the exhaust (incomplete combustion, burning oil and overheating), how to change filters, impellers and belts and how to bleed the fuel.

On deck, we were asked to explain when and why each kind of flare would be used. None of it felt overly pressured, but it was certainly an in-depth examination of our knowledge.

During the day these conversations continued on areas that were not being practically demonstrated on the day – including 20 minutes on lights, shapes, sounds and collision avoidance, and how we’d handle different scenarios in traffic separation schemes.

We were asked to talk through our passage plans, and our examiner went further to see whether we knew what the administrative and immigration requirements would be on either side of the Channel – a tricky one these days.

Getting Underway

We began with marina manoeuvres in and out of a selection of increasingly tricky berths, putting the boat into positions that we might not have chosen, including a berth two spaces into a gulley with a yacht moored either side and another boat opposite.

Ferry gliding in bows-first wasn’t too tricky, but with wind and tide pushing us on, getting out again was harder. I opted to use prop walk to pull the stern out against a bow line – slightly unconventional, and it needed a bit of oomph, but I got away without a collision.

We then had half an hour or so to each prepare a short passage plan and pilotage, this time from Hamble to Portsmouth and back.

I was asked to explain the route I’d chosen. While I had the route in the chartplotter, I’d picked waypoints near easy-to-find buoys so I could see I was in the right place from the cockpit.

Underway, and with our fourth crewmember on the wheel (it’s recommended to have crew so you can demonstrate leadership and also help handle the yacht), I had decisions to make about how many reefs to put in, and was torn between sailing the boat properly and being overly cautious.

Next we were tested on our MOB recovery with a fender overboard. We went through our recovery drill and I was relieved to get back to the MOB first go.

Andrew and crew looked at me to see if we were doing ‘the whole thing’ and, as our examiner hadn’t flinched, we continued rigging the handy billy, attached the fender to the sling and hauled away until it was safely aboard, just as we had in our preparation week – it’s a complex process that really does need practice.

Once in Portsmouth Harbour, it was my turn to find and pick up a mooring buoy under sail. Handing over skippering duty to Andrew for his turn in the hot seat, I felt a wave of relief that my passage, pilotage and handling seemed to have gone okay.

However, we wouldn’t be finished until we’d each done our night navigation.

Night Navigation

Back on a mooring inside Calshot Spit it was time for dinner and a brief respite, before plunging on with night nav exercises.

We were asked to navigate to unmarked locations and given a bit of time to prepare these. Our examiner also checked our knowledge of how the radar worked for collision avoidance and for navigation, and how to extract relevant information from both the chartplotter and the AIS.

My night nav began well, using multiple sources of position information as requested, and just about making sense of my hastily drawn sketch and notes, looking for the characteristics of particular lights (you’ll need to know how quick VQ compared to just Q really is) and using the radar to plot our course.

As it was top of the tide, however, every ship in Southampton seemed to set sail, including the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary cruise liner with attendant tugs, police launches and party boats.

My plan was thrown into disarray as we were blinded by disco balls and oil terminal lights alike. Luckily, Navionics is by no means banned, and a quick range and bearing in the palm of my hand gave me a course and distance to my imaginary point. Another step closer.

Next Andrew needed to pilot us up the Hamble River, where Hamble Point’s sector lights can be easily lost in the welter of shore lights, and I was asked to bring the boat alongside, stern first at the end of a long gulley, giving me another last-minute chance to mess things up.

Pass Or Fail

With the boat put to bed, we each headed off for a quick chat. Fortunately, our examiner told us we’d both passed. Phew!

Both Andrew and I had found the week intense, all-absorbing and demanding. We’d been forced to up our game, and our skills had been updated by a decade or two. There were lots of learnings to take back to our own boats and both of us felt we were now much better-rounded skippers than before.

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