How to run a happy ship

Toby Heppell gets advice on skippering with friends and family from Pete Goss, Dee Caffari and Conrad Humphreys

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Good leadership sounds like something required of the Navy, or a perhaps a committed race team and not something necessarily required for a day’s sail with friends and family. In reality, although we might not all think about our skippering skills in leadership terms, good leadership is often the difference between a skipper people like sailing with and a bad one, or an enjoyable day on the water with a happy crew or a long sail with arguments.

ACCEPT MISTAKES WILL HAPPEN

In a perfect world no one would ever make any mistakes and we could all go about our lives in a blissful and error free – if rather dull – utopia. Expecting an error-free sail is, in itself, a relatively large mistake. A good skipper should look to minimise the possibility of significant errors, but also be able to allow those they are sailing with to make mistakes and so learn and improve their own sailing skills.

‘In order for people to improve you do need to give them a level of responsibility,’ says Pete Goss, who has raced in the VendŽe Globe, sailed to Australia in an open lugger and is now cruising around the world with his wife Tracey. ‘A big part of that is allowing them to do things wrong. If you see someone making a mistake, your role as skipper is to judge the potential consequences of that mistake, and if you know they are likely to be fairly minimal, sit back and allow it to happen. Then you can gently coach them afterwards.

‘Shouting at someone, even through urgency not anger, when they don’t know what they are doing wrong or perhaps have not even had a chance to do something wrong, drastically reduces their confidence and only has the effect of making them less likely to give things a try in the long run.’