Sole and inescapable responsibility is yours

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There is no doubt that watersports and sailing in particular are fabulous activities to pursue in the UAE during the winter months. The wind blows regularly every afternoon, rarely too light or too strong for a pleasant sail. The temperature is perfect and the sun doesn't burn as severely as in many other sailing destinations. The tides are mild and there are few navigational hazards to avoid, particularly the nasty underwater type. We mostly have to deal with the arrival of new navigation marks and errant construction vessels or a fishing boat speeding along at night without lights.

The DOSC Rally fleet aims to travel further afield than just an afternoon sail, often cruising 30 or 50 miles for the night and with a longer cruise to the Musandam planned over three weekends. On these longer trips the boats have to be more self sufficient to cope with the vagaries of the weather and unforeseen events. The generally benign sea conditions in the UAE can create a false sense of security and having a well prepared boat, with good safety equipment and some experienced crew on board is sound advice. And the principle tenet of sailing can never be ignored, namely:

"The Safety of a yacht and her crew is the sole and inescapable responsibility of the owner, or owner's representative who must do his best to ensure that the yacht is fully found, thoroughly seaworthy and manned by an experienced crew who have undergone appropriate training and are physically fit to face bad weather. He must be satisfied as to the soundness of hull, spars, rigging, sails and all gear. He must ensure that all safety equipment is properly maintained and stowed and that the crew know where it is kept and how it is to be used." ORC Special Regulations.

For those new to the region or to sailing, a key question to answer is where to find relevant advice, the first of these being weather information. The Dubai airport provides daily forecasts to give a general flavour of the region and each morning these are faxed though to the media, sports clubs, hotels, etc. For more detail, the better websites include windguru.com and windfinder.com that provide forecasts for the whole planet, and it is easy to zoom in on the Gulf area and to step through the forecast every four hours to see how weather patterns will change.

These models use one of just a few weather modelling supercomputers as the source for their digital forecasts and the models do vary a bit. If you are planning a long voyage or want to know the range of forecasts for a particular event, it is useful to compare the sites. For the coastal regions of the UAE they seem to be accurate about 60 per cent of the time, reasonably good about 35 per cent and perhaps five per cent when they are completely wrong. They don't often miss the shamals when they come, but they do sometimes miss the sudden desert sandstorms that bubble up off the Hajar mountains. And over the past decade we have had perhaps five good squalls roll down the coast from the Straits of Hormuz that come as a discrete line on the horizon and bring 50 or 60 knot winds, which cause havoc for yachts caught out at sea and sometimes even those in harbour. During one midday squall many years ago, a huge marquee erected on the lawn at DIMC for a formal dinner was lifted off the ground and flew 100 metres before catching against the fencing, and both DOSC and JASC have seen dinghies and catamarans overturned if they are not properly secured. Then there is the 100-year cyclone, like Gonu that blasted Oman, though to be fair we knew it was coming.

For historical information on local winds and tides, check out dubaicoast.org. There are a number of fixed government weather stations along the coast and the Jumeriah station is available on the internet, where you can see real time wind strength and direction, air pressure and temperature, tide strength and direction, etc, with about a 15 minute delay.

Putting thought and preparation into what the conditions may be leads naturally into what equipment will also be required, in the event of something going wrong. The UAE coastguard specifies a minimal list of safety equipment that all boats operating in UAE waters must have and it is inspected as part of your boat registration. Namely:

• Life jackets (for all persons on board)

• First aid kit

• Fire Extinguisher

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