Making good decisions at sea is about much more than going with your gut.

Leadership calls for communication that is unambiguous, delivered in a way that motivates rather than alienates. It also calls for listening, which is a source of strength, not weakness.

If you spend enough time on the water, then sooner or later you will wind up at one end or the other of a towline. Mechanical failure, running out of fuel, and wind dying are common enough that eventually we either need a Good Samaritan or we become one.

What I find most interesting about AIS is its capacity to foster new patterns of human behavior and perception.

Preparing for an anchor to drag actually begins long before it happens.

Most folks have a fair idea of what makes a good anchorage. You need shelter from the elements and room to swing 360 degrees. But what else?

Since we cannot see ground tackle at work on the seafloor, it’s important to visualize what is going on down there, how it all works and why it sometimes doesn’t.

Having respect for how transitions affect awareness can help you avoid a situation where your head is in the old game, when a new game has already begun

Positive stability is a vessel’s tendency to resist capsizing. Negative stability? Not so much.

A checklist serves as an unchanging memory prompt when detail and sequence are critical.

When visual references are reduced by darkness or fog, depth plays an even more important role in cross-referencing.

A natural range exists when two charted objects — one closer and one farther away — visually align and appear to meet, forming a line of position, or LOP.

For me, the words damage control conjure claustrophobic scenes from the 1981 German U-boat film Das Boot. Begrimed men, stripped to the waist in rising water, struggling to plug gushing pipes that depth charges ruptured, all while the prying ocean tries to entomb them in their fragile biosphere. 

Squat is a related pressure phenomenon. Also known as “smelling the bottom,” squat causes a vessel to ride lower in the water than normal. If the water is shallow enough, squat can have serious navigational implications for vessels of all sizes.

When a fine-bowed vessel glides through smooth blue water, the bow seems to cleave the water effortlessly, slicing a passageway through which to gracefully pass. To an extent, the eye does not deceive, but to one degree or another all vessels — finely shaped or otherwise — push, or displace, water to make way for the hull.

Kids quickly grasp that weight up high makes a thing less stable: think of a pogo stick, stilts or a unicycle. It is equally plain that weight down low makes a thing more stable: Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down. What is less obvious to kids and grown-ups alike is how free surface effect — liquid sloshing freely from side to side in or on a boat — functions like an invisible hand rocking a boat closer to the point of capsize than we know at a given moment.