Make the call, Skipper

A cross-Channel passage brings your yacht to the edge of a busy traffic separation scheme. Get her across safely while ships bear down at twenty knots.

A straightforward coastal hop turns serious when visibility closes to 200 metres. Manage the boat, the sound signals and the navigation until you can see again.

A crew member goes over the side under full sail in a Force 4. Every decision from the first second to the final lift shapes whether he comes back aboard.

An eighteen-mile passage hinges on rounding a spring-tide headland before the stream turns foul, and your crew would rather have a long breakfast. Timetable seamanship, tested.

After a long day's sail you close a harbour you have never entered, just as the light goes. Pilotage plan, sectored light and buoyage against a shoreline full of impostor lights.

At 0300 the wind veers and strengthens, the anchor alarm sounds, and your quiet anchorage becomes a problem to be solved in the dark. Work out whether you are dragging, and what to do about it.

A slow crossing of Salt Channel, a waypoint laid on a buoy instead of a route, and a spring tide draining away under the keel. What happens when the two meet, and what a skipper does about it.

The engine dies a mile and a half short of Black Point with the fair stream running out and a westerly filling in behind you. Fifty minutes of open gate, one building race, and a refuge four miles beyond it.

A northerly onto the mainland coast west of Black Point, rising through the afternoon, with the Westhaven sill shut until 1645 and Midhaven nine miles beyond a race. Every hour you wait costs a mile of the sea room you will need.

Visibility closes to four hundred metres halfway across Salt Channel, and the AIS shows an 89-metre cargo vessel on a steady bearing. In restricted visibility nobody stands on, and the alteration that works is the one made early and made big.

Mid-crossing of Salt Channel, ten miles from either shore, an unpreventered gybe puts a crew member down in the cockpit with a head injury. The radio call, the first aid and the destination are all one decision, and none of them waits for the others.

The wheel goes light and spins two and a half miles short of the Salt Sound approach buoy, at twenty to midnight, with an unfamiliar entrance ahead and six hours of darkness to go. The seamanlike answer may be the one that gets you nowhere until morning.