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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Goblyns Hoard" data-source="post: 1835591" data-attributes="member: 19970">I don't have Carlzog's experience with tall ships, but I have almost 30 years of experience of dinghy/yacht sailing.... which is enough to know that I'd be lost on a tall ship even as an experienced sailor of smaller boats.I have also had the privilege of sailing across the north sea.  Most tall boat sailors would scoff at me calling that proper blue-sea sailing, but we're talking about anywhere from 24-36 hours at sea (depending on conditions), almost all of which is out of sight of land.Credentials out of the way....There is absolutely no way that I would allow someone to use their survival skill to avoid getting lost at sea... unless that survival skill was specifically set (as part of the character's background/style/etc) as water based survival.  If the sky was clear I would allow him a survival to know which way was north from the stars... but that would just tell him which way he wanted to go - not how to make the boat go that way!If for any reason the stars weren't pretty much completely visible then it's going to be profession (sailor) for pretty much anything.  The water looks the same in all directions, the wind can gradually turn from one point to another during the course, even a compass only tells you a relative direction, it doesn't point to 'home port', so whilst it may have been north of you 5 hours ago, now it might be north east and you simply don't know.The reason for all of this - tides.  Unless you know which way the tides are going (or ar sufficiently insight of lands that their effects can be deduced) tides are invisible.  Knowledge that tides exist is no help in understanding where they are going right now, here in this particular part of the water... only having sailed those waters is going to really let you understand the tides.  Even looking at the wave's doesn't help as waves are just the rolling of the surface in response to the winds (i.e. they can go in the opposite direction of tides).And on the actual manning of the ship - count me in with Carlzog... any skeleton crew is going to need to be incredibly good at what they do to man a ship of that size - particularly if they also have to watch over escape attempts by the slavers they've captured.  I'll leave predictions of numbers to him, having only the barest experience of tall ships (having watched them being sailed)</blockquote>

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