Pass Your Day Skipper

Publisher: Adlard Coles Nautical; 3rd Ed, £12.99
Publication Date: 2008

When attending the first RYA Instructor’s Conference in Cowes someone asked Bill Anderson, the mastermind behind the RYA Training Scheme, whether the RYA had any plans to produce text books for the various courses. In reply, he held up a copy of Eric Hiscock’s Cruising Under Sail and stated that everything that anyone would need to know was contained within that volume. Since those early days however the RYA has published a great many text books on many nautical subjects and there has been a proliferation of others joining the RYA Training bandwagon. ‘Pass Your Day Skipper’ is another of these and one needs to ask why one would use this rather than any of the others that are available?

Some reasons might be: the cartoons by Mike Peyton help to lighten the subject matter; the use of highlighting to make revision easier; and a symbol from chart 5011 at the bottom right hand corner of each recto that helps to programme it into one’s mind (The answer is found overleaf).

The plain English writing style is like a personal letter from an erudite friend and helps to make the information easy to assimilate but, my pet bugbear, there are some careless mistakes including grammatical, like the ‘,’ before ‘but’ on the first line of page 6 and examples of what I consider to be bad practice, such as advising the stuffing of charts into plastic covers! I know of some eminent yachtsmen though who would agree with him on that but hopefully not on the use of a ‘parallel rule’ for plotting (on the creased chart after it had been stuffed into a plastic cover?) nor the advice to use a soft pencil without specifying a 2B.

Then there are examples of words used, like Chart Datum on page 10, before they are defined, - in this case on page 15 but indexed as page 16! On page 35 he advises to ‘fix your position’ using ‘a transit’, which would be difficult with a single position line!

The section on Weather is again clearly explained but spoilt by errors. On page 37 he infers that average atmospheric pressure is 1000 mbs instead of 1013.2 mbs. On page 42, the Beaufort Wind Scale is described as relating to various ‘sea states’. And there is no mention of Buys Ballot’s law! In the chapter on Safety he illustrates a ‘Mayday call’ combined with a ‘Mayday message’ without any explanation of the difference between the two. Another potentially useful book spoilt by inadequate proof reading. - Ian Galletti