Entering harbour at night
Around most of the UK coast, it is possible for yachts to reach a destination in daylight during summer even with tidal gates restricting the time of arrival. So although British ports are busy with shipping at night there are surprisingly few yachts underway in the dark.
It is easy therefore to become unused to night pilotage, but if skippers are sailing longer distances, or simply short trips which become delayed, this means that knowing how to enter a port at night is an essential skill.
Trying to read a pilot book and work out tidal heights and streams and sketch a pilotage plan is hard work at a dimmed chart table so it makes sense to pre-plan while still in daylight.
When I started skippering, one of the hardest skills to master was pilotage. It became easier with practice but then came the time to tackle pilotage at night. My first night entry was Plymouth. It looks pretty easy on the chart: a huge bay with a couple of rivers flowing into it and plenty of navigation marks. In the dark, the plethora of flashing lights made navigation really confusing. The city of Plymouth and the fun fair on the Hoe were bathed in dazzling light whereas objects that might have been helpfully illuminated, such as the breakwater across the entrance, were inconsiderately pitch black.
Occasionally harbours are actually easier to enter at night than in the day. Langstone, which is rarely visited by most yachtsmen, has a large expanse of water with channels that can be difficult to pick out by day. At night the absence of background light makes finding the marks much easier, but such places are rare. Most harbours are populated to some degree and require good planning and pilotage skills to enter successfully after dark.
PILOTAGE
When approaching any harbour you need to have a good idea of what to look for and where. Fortunately GPS has taken the sweat out of finding the yacht’s position so it is easy to know where to look for the first mark (you do, of course need to
