What to Carry in Your Buoyancy Aid: 5 Items That Save Your Sailing Day

You have travelled to an open meeting. Four races scheduled, entry paid, early start, long drive. Halfway through race one something lets go, and now you have a choice. Make a quick fix on the water and finish somewhere down the fleet, or sail in, sort it properly, and write off races one, two and possibly three.

That is the real argument for putting a few bits in your buoyancy aid pocket. Not the dramatic emergency that never happens, but the ordinary breakage that costs you a whole day of sailing when you have nothing to hand. Five small items, most of them costing very little, and most of them fitting in one pocket without you noticing they are there.

Here is what lives in mine, why each one earns its place, and what I would leave out.

The knife is the one item that does two jobs, so it goes first. Mine is a rescue knife with a serrated blade and a shackle key built into it, which means one tool covers cutting and undoing, and it takes up almost no room in your buoyancy aid.

The serrated blade matters. Modern rope, particularly Dyneema, does not give up easily to a plain edge, and you want something that bites when you are wet, cold and working one handed.

The shackle key is the part that surprises people. It is not sitting there waiting for an emergency. It gets used almost every time I come ashore, because the main halyard shackle on my boat is stiff and needs that little bit of leverage to release. A tool you use every single session is not emergency kit, it is just kit.

If your knife does not have a key built in, carry a separate one. They are tiny, they cost very little, and you will use it far more than you expect. Have a look through the sailing tools and knives if you are starting from nothing.

This is the item that gets used most, by a distance. Something always works loose or wears through, and rope is what fixes it.

Most recently it was the outhaul. The loop around the boom was fine, but the outhaul control rope had worn through and snapped mid-session. Ten minutes with a spare length from the pocket and we carried on sailing. Without it, that would have been a trip back to the club.

I carry three lengths, about half a metre of each. Different rope for different jobs:

Be honest with yourself about the 8 plait. It is strong enough to get you round the course and back to the slipway, but it is not the finished repair. When you get ashore, replace it properly with the right rope for the job rather than leaving the temporary fix on all season.

Half a metre is the sweet spot. Long enough to be useful, short enough that three pieces take up almost no room.

Here is the good news on cost: you almost certainly already own this. The offcuts from the last time you replaced a halyard or a set of control ropes are exactly what you want. Most sailors have a drawer full of the stuff. If you do not, a metre of 3mm Dyneema costs very little and will sit in your buoyancy aid for years.

Small, cheap, and the difference between sailing and paddling your boat home. Shackles are the point where things attach to other things, and when one goes, whatever it was holding is now loose.

Carry one that matches the size you use most on your own boat. There is no sense carrying something that will not fit anything you own. If you are not sure, look at what is on your kicker, your outhaul and your halyard and take the most common size.

Worth knowing: a soft shackle made from Dyneema does the same job in an emergency and weighs nothing at all, so it is not a bad thing to have in there alongside a metal one.

The quiet workhorse. PVC tape holds pins in place so they cannot back out, and it will hold almost anything temporarily while you finish the race and deal with it later.

That second use is the important one. Not everything can be repaired on the water, but plenty of things can be held still long enough to keep sailing. A wrap of tape round a fitting that has started to move buys you the rest of the day.

Take a short length wrapped round itself rather than a whole roll. A full roll is bulk you do not need. You can find marine tapes in the chandlery section if you want something made for the job rather than whatever is in the garage.

The one you hope never to use, which is exactly why it lives in your buoyancy aid rather than the kit bag.

Here is the thing about being in trouble on the water: boats sail and motor past you all the time, and unless something looks obviously wrong, they assume you are fine. A capsize looks like a capsize whether you are having a laugh or genuinely stuck. Waving gets misread as waving back.

A whistle cuts through that. Blow it and you get an instant response, every time. Even if the person who hears it cannot help you directly, they can get the attention of the safety boat or the race officer far quicker than you can from where you are.

It weighs nothing. Put one in and forget about it.

You cannot prepare for everything that might go wrong out there, and trying to is its own mistake. Bulk is weight, and weight costs you on the race course. Every extra thing you stuff in the pocket is something you are dragging round the track.

Sometimes the answer is to accept it, sail in, do the job properly and learn from it. That is not failure, it is judgement.

The much bigger mistake, and by far the most common one I see at club level, is carrying nothing at all. An empty buoyancy aid, no options, day over.

Here is the uncomfortable part. The majority of what goes wrong on the water is not bad luck, it is maintenance that did not happen. A proper check over catches most of it before you launch.

Before the mast goes up, look at everything you will not be able to see once it is standing. Rigging, the top of the mast, any fittings and blocks up there, and the spreaders. This is your only chance to inspect them properly, so take it.

Before you go afloat, work through the high wear points:

• Ropes, particularly where they turn through blocks or run over an edge
• Cleats you use constantly, which wear faster than you think
• Universal joints and tiller fittings
• Sails, for stitching and small tears that will become big ones
• The hull, for damage and anything that has started to lift
• Rudder gudgeons and pintles

None of this takes long once it becomes habit. The pocket kit is there for the things that slip through, not as a substitute for looking after the boat.

Worth checking, because not all of them do. Mine is a Zhik, a couple of versions back from the current one, and the pocket has the two things that matter: drainage holes in the corner so the water that inevitably gets in can get out again, and a Velcro closure so nothing escapes when you capsize.

There is enough room in there for the five items with space left for a couple of energy bars on longer days.

If you are shopping for a new buoyancy aid, look at the pocket properly before you buy. A pocket with no drainage becomes a small pond, and a pocket with no closure will empty itself the first time you go over. Have a look at the buoyancy aids we stock from Zhik, Gill and Rooster, and check the pocket detail on each one.

Look after it, too. Rinse your buoyancy aid with a hosepipe when you come off the water, then let it dry somewhere out of direct sunlight. That keeps the aid itself in good order and stops the contents of the pocket corroding quietly over a season.

Almost everything here is sitting in your garage. Offcuts of rope from your last order, a spare shackle from a previous job, half a roll of tape. Add a rescue knife with a shackle key and a whistle and your buoyancy aid is ready, for less than the cost of one race entry.

The five items will not save you from everything, and they are not meant to. What they will do is turn a day-ending breakage into a ten minute inconvenience, which over a season is a lot of racing you would otherwise have lost.

Fill your buoyancy aid once, then forget it is there until the day you need it.