FAQ

Everything you adjust on your boat, you adjust outside your own head. Mental training is the work on what runs inside it: how you settle before a start, how you carry on after a mistake, how you decide under pressure, how you sit out eight hours of calm without losing yourself. It is training, not a conversation about feelings. You rehearse something the way you rehearse a tack, until it holds while you sleep.

It should do two things: move your development along faster than it would go on its own, and make sure that at the decisive moment you actually produce what you can produce in training. The second is the harder one. Almost every sailor can do more than they show on the course or in a tight berth. And what makes you better in a race makes you freer when cruising, and leaves room for enjoyment.

No. We work with healthy people on performance, safety and enjoyment, not on clinical conditions. Radioing in should feel like an appetite for freedom and the best sailing of your life, never like a visit to the doctor.

Psychotherapy treats disorders with clinical significance and belongs in the hands of doctors and qualified therapists. Mental training trains abilities every person already has and can build on: directing attention, regulating tension, handling mistakes, setting goals and pursuing them. We do not diagnose and we do not treat.

The field. We know the place where you have to apply what you learn with us, because we are sailors ourselves, with our own strengths and weaknesses. Much of it we have lived through first-hand. A general coach has to have it explained to them what letting go in a tight berth in a crosswind means. We have already been there, and that shortens the way.

No. The most common level is the ordinary call with no emergency at all: ‘Channel Zero, this is [name], reporting for training. Standing by.’ You want to get better, get more out of it, move more freely. That is reason enough.

Every world-class athlete works with their head. That is standard, not luxury. Anyone who skips it leaves the advantage tied up in the marina while the competition has long since sailed. The methods were developed and studied in elite sport over decades. The only new thing is that hardly anyone in sailing uses them.

Sailing is a costly sport in time. Drive out, rig up, two hours afloat, de-rig, drive home – two hours of training swallows five. Add whole months when frost and ice stop everything. And for children, every session depends on a parent with a car.

Do the arithmetic once. A young sailor training once a week from April to October, plus ten regatta weekends, reaches a good two hundred hours a year. A committed cruising sailor with four charter trips lands at around one hundred. That is a few per cent of the year – for everything the sport costs in money, kit and lifetime.

Mental training creates training time where there is none. It needs no water, no boat, no weather and no trailer. It runs through the winter, between passages, through illness, and on every evening you cannot get out.

It does not replace an hour afloat. It makes the few you have worth more.

We have no standard programme, we have a buffet: methods that are scientifically studied and proven in practice. Which of them work for you is something we find out together. It differs from person to person and cannot be settled in advance at a desk. Four tools form the foundation of any serious approach:

• Goal setting. Goals that pull you rather than crush you, and that you can check at the end of a day.
• Inner dialogue. What you say to yourself when it gets tight. The sentence before the start decides more than the last trim adjustment.
• Visualisation. Running the manoeuvre, the race, the harbour entrance through your head until it is familiar, before you sail it for the first time.
• Managing emotion and tension. Breathing, attention control, anchors and rituals that reliably put you in the state you need right now.

Beyond that it depends on what you bring: start routines, attention anchors for long legs, handling pressure from outside, work on your own role in the crew.

That is one part of it, the best known and the smallest. Going through movement sequences in your head — mental technique training — helps with a tack or hoisting a spinnaker. It does not help when you are shaking at the start, when you check out inside after a premature start, or when after eight hours of rain you no longer want to make a decision. That needs methods that work on tension, attention and inner dialogue. Running it through is one tool in the box, not the box.

Positive thinking tells you the gust is not that bad. Mental training gives you something to do instead: a breathing sequence, a point to look at, a sentence, a routine to follow. Fearless never means disrespectful here. The sea is not talked down; you are made able to act.

No, you have to practise it. Scepticism is not an obstacle; usually it is a good sign. People who look closely also notice sooner what works for them and what does not.

No. No incense, no energies, no promises nobody can keep. If we work with a totem, we also explain why it works, and the explanation is self-efficacy, not magic.

Individual tools work immediately: a breathing sequence or a start ritual is something you can try on the water the next day. Before a change holds and survives a bad day, it takes longer. A typical mental training project runs between three and twenty-four months. Three months when a specific occasion lies ahead of you. Two years when you want a development accompanied across several seasons. What suits you is something we settle in the first session.

Do not expect a straight line upwards. Experience shows that mental training can first lead to a dip in performance before the improvement sets in. Anyone who changes established routines temporarily loses the automatic response they have relied on. That is normal and not a sign that something is going wrong.

It is, however, the reason why short-notice intervention shortly before a competition is not advisable. Start two weeks beforehand and you risk racing right through the dip.

Mental training is an independent part of professional training, not an add-on. Like technique, tactics and fitness, it needs time, seriousness and regularity to work. It is also a question of attitude: treat it as a side dish and you will experience it as one. Between sessions there is practice, reliably and in small doses.

The aim behind it is independence. We give you methods you can apply without us, and we work on principle towards making ourselves unnecessary. That does not mean a long engagement is a bad sign — accompanying a development across several seasons is something different from making you dependent on a method. The difference is whether you end up holding the tools yourself or always need someone to hold them for you.

The other way round. Calm is not a renunciation of ambition, it is the condition for your ambition arriving. The same calm that lets you win lets you enjoy it.

Children learn complex technique best between roughly nine and thirteen; mental methods take hold from about ten to twelve. With younger ones we work playfully, through the boat and through self-efficacy, not through method.

No. People returning after twenty years away, and people who fulfil the dream of their own boat at sixty, are among the most rewarding briefs there are.

Then we tell you, and we stop at that point. We are mental trainers, not therapists. We help you find the right place, and the door stays open for when you want to carry on out on the water.

Yes, and with no back door. What is discussed in a session stays there. One single person has authority over that confidentiality, and it is the person being trained. Not us, not whoever pays, not whoever made the introduction.

That holds when parents book, when a club commissions us, and when a crew trains together. Something is passed on only if the person trained expressly wants it, and then only to the extent they set. With minors, the young person decides; in a crew, the skipper responsible decides for what concerns them.

The reason is not pedantry. Anyone who is not certain a sentence stays in the room does not say the decisive sentence. And then we are working on the wrong thing.

Because the phrase puts many people off and runs empty quickly on a website. We say it just as readily as: head work, mental seamanship, learning composure, building assurance. And we often say it through the benefit: groundwork for enjoyment, groundwork for performance, groundwork for success.

Both. Individual work, crew and team training, workshops at clubs and schools, evening talks. With a team you are not buying the individual head, you are buying what happens between the heads.

Not by results alone. What we measure it by, we set together, and we set it at the beginning. It starts with taking a fix: where you are now, what is holding you back, what you want to reach. From that we derive your goals, and from those the methods from the buffet that suit you.

So there is no standard list of success criteria here. For a racer it might be start quality; for someone returning to the water, the number of departures she handles herself; for a crew, how they find their way back together after an argument. What they have in common: we record it at the start so you can compare later, and we look at what you yourself control.

This is not coaching off the peg. It is a tailored training solution, and so the measure is tailored too.

Sailing may be the most mental sport there is, and hardly anyone notices, because the struggle inside a person’s head is invisible from outside. No other sport demands endurance, risk assessment, patience and decision under real danger all at once. That is why the head here is not one adjustment among many. It is the decisive one.

Six things come together:

• Duration and solitude. A race or a passage lasts hours or days. You are alone with your head, no time out, no substitution.
• No final whistle. You cannot abandon a mistake and start again. You sail on with it.
• Real risk. Wind, sea, darkness. Anyone who cannot steer their fear decides badly, precisely when it counts.
• Waiting and enduring. Calm, delay, hours of nothing. Patience is a requirement here, not a talent.
• Shared responsibility. In a crew, everything hangs on communication and clear roles under pressure.
• Control of the uncontrollable. Weather and water will never obey you. The only thing you can steer is your head.

Because you cannot see it. A runner who cracks cracks visibly. A sailor who checks out inside stays sitting at the helm and looks exactly as before. Half the race is long lost before anything looks like defeat.

We always work in the same place, inside the head. Only the aim changes. Racers get faster in the head, cruisers get safer, and anyone looking for enjoyment gets freer.

Because you do not need an interpreter. Nobody has to explain to us what a botched start costs, how the third night feels, or what happens when your family is watching from the cockpit while the berthing goes wrong. Any school will teach you the seamanship. None of them will teach you the composure.

Seamanship is practical mastery on board. Mental Seamanship is the same mastery turned inwards: calm, focus and the ability to decide, treated as something you learn and practise, like knots and manoeuvres.

No, it is the missing half. The boat moves the body; the head moves the pleasure. We start exactly where nautical training stops.

Alongside the day skipper, coastal, offshore and ocean tickets there is one qualification no examination board tests and no school issues: the steady head. That is the fifth ticket. There is no certificate for it, but you can tell immediately who holds it.

It can be trained. Calm is not a character trait, it is a state you can produce once you know how. That is precisely the content of the work.

The same calm that gives you pleasure in fine weather saves your life in heavy weather. Every safety measure only works with a clear head. Lifejacket, harness and distress signal are worth nothing if the person in between freezes.

No. Fearless, not disrespectful. Fear is a poor adviser; caution is a good one. We take away the paralysis, not the judgement.

Not remotely. Letting go is the highest psychological hurdle in the whole sport. Some people hang about in marinas for weeks, unconsciously inventing one more workshop project after another, purely to avoid having to slip their lines. No boat was ever finished. Leaving the berth starts in the head.

By the reason. It is always practical, always plausible and always new. The pump, the forecast, the tank, the seal, the crew who can only make it next week. If you have been almost ready for three weeks, you are not working on the boat.

In Germany we call this Hafenkino — harbour cinema. It means the people on the pontoon who watch you come alongside, and who are not necessarily hoping you succeed. Berthing under observation is the most feared moment in cruising. It can still be trained, because you are not changing the audience, you are changing your procedure. My berthing is not a performance, it is a routine. And once you are through with us: At the Hafenkino, I am the one selling the popcorn.

The start is the densest moment of the race: a great deal of information, very little time, high stakes, everyone at once. That is a textbook case for tension control and fixed routines, not for yet more practice starts.

In sailing there is no final whistle. You cannot abandon the mistake and start again, you have to sail on with it. That is exactly why processing mistakes in real time is an ability in its own right, and exactly why it can be practised.

By deliberately letting tension down and building it up again, instead of holding it high throughout. Anyone who waits three hours at full stretch has nothing left when the pressure finally comes. Waiting is a technique.

Rebuilding confidence after a fright is one of the classic doors in to us. We do not go straight back out to open sea; we build up again in steps you control yourself. Where the boundary to trauma lies is set out in G3.

That makes you the normal case, not the exception. In aviation and the merchant marine, you grow into responsibility after qualifying by serving as an officer under supervision, and only then become master. In leisure sailing, the moment the certificate is handed over you are solely responsible. That intermediate step is precisely what is missing, and precisely what we offer.

Because examinations test knowledge and handling, not responsibility. Taking over a vessel with a crew means carrying responsibility for living people, often family, friends and children. No syllabus prepares you for that feeling.

A well known pattern. Impostor feelings flare up particularly at changes of role: as responsibility grows, so does the fear of being found out. For many people the ticket is a lifelong dream, and it is precisely afterwards that the private trembling starts. Almost nobody talks about it, which makes it worse.

Same cause, other direction. Anyone lacking the yardstick to see their own mistakes overestimates themselves. Neither pattern, the private fear or the blind overestimation, goes away through more seamanship. Both go away through an accompanied transition into responsibility.

It is yours, but it does not stay yours. A calm skipper is the best equipment on board. The mood on board is a mirror of your head. Your crew sails on your calm.

That is exactly what the channel is for. You are not alone out there.

Anyone who uses professional weather routing for a passage is not thought weak, they are thought professional. You learn from it and you have expertise behind you. Mental support works the same way. You use the tools the professionals use, so that your guests get a safe passage, and therefore an enjoyable one.

To be clear: we can neither treat nor cure seasickness. It arises in the balance organ, not in your thoughts, and we promise nothing against it. What can be influenced is everything alongside it: the anticipatory dread before slipping lines, the attention that keeps travelling down into your stomach, and how you handle the shame afterwards. What we can offer: our experience and our network.

Yes, it sharpens everything. No corrective, no second opinion, no relief watch, and sleep deprivation over days. From the outside, single handers seem braver and mentally stronger than average — what it looks like on the inside, nobody knows. The great single-handed offshore races show one thing clearly: the mental load of loneliness is immense. Single handers need robust routines and an inner dialogue that carries them when nobody else is there. That is exactly where mental training can make the difference.

Yes, and this group is constantly overlooked. Crewing often means trembling along without a hand on the helm. Losing control is more demanding mentally than carrying responsibility. That is good material to work on.

Because a radio call has a low threshold. You call, somebody is listening, and nobody has to fill in a form about their feelings first. Zero stands for zero fear and for the still point at zero. Whenever your head calls, we are listening.

Officially, no. The marine channels run from 1 to 28 and from 60 to 88. That is exactly why we chose it: the quiet zero beyond the working channels. A channel on which no business is conducted.

It is the most honest image we found. We rejected the pilot, the lighthouse, the compass and the north star, because they are either worn out or they create distance. Everyone has a radio on board, it saves lives, and you operate it yourself. You call, we answer. There is no more promise in it than that, and no less.

They describe how urgent things are for you right now, and how close the occasion has already come. They are not a price list and they are not packages. What you book emerges later, out of the conversation.

Honestly, the three levels are above all a self-assessment. They help us judge how much time is left. And they help you admit to yourself where you stand.

The best call is the ordinary one. Whoever calls early has a free choice.

A conversation is always possible, even at short notice. What we will not do is pretend that mental facts can be created in a few days. That would be dishonest. A first intervention shortly before a competition promises no success, whatever anyone else may sell you on that.

What we will do: listen, put it in order, and tell you what realistically helps in the days remaining and what you would do better to leave alone. And then make the occasion into a starting point. For the next races, for the next season, for the development you actually mean.

The mayday is then not the rescue. It is the moment you decided.

The word Mental stands in front of it for exactly that reason. It draws the line deliberately: a call of the soul, not of the sea. On the real channel 16, none of us would ever transmit such a thing.

No. Mental Mayday describes your pressure, not our availability. We are not a crisis service, not a helpline and not a medical practice. If we see that somebody else is needed, we say so and help find the right place.

And a real emergency at sea never runs through us. It runs through channel 16.

Two controls every radio has, and two mental tasks. Volume means turning the inner noise down instead of fighting harder to be louder. Squelch, the noise gate, means filtering out interference until only the clear signal is left. Brooding, other people’s expectations and the talk in the next boat are all noise. Turn down the noise. Find your signal.

Our mascot: a turtle with a captain’s hat and an eye patch. Turtles are considered wise — they stay calm, take a proper look, and then decide. Exactly the stance we train. His name comes from sifr, the Arabic word our zero comes from: the calm point at zero. Made for children, and honestly: the grown-up children think he’s rather sweet too.

No — a plush turtle, our mascot. Nils is the person who turns up for the training.

Ask a racer about the socks from the season they won. Almost everyone on board has some object they will not leave at home; nobody just calls it that. We make it something deliberate instead of something furtive.

In your class everyone sails the same boat. Above a certain level everyone sails at the same speed, and then the head decides. The head is the last boat you can still make faster.

There is more to it: you train once a week, when parents, weather and water all cooperate. Mental training you can do on any other day. That doubles or triples your training time, with nobody having to drive you to the lake.

Almost nobody. That is the point.

No. It is what every world class athlete does anyway. You are just starting earlier.

With four sentences. In my class everyone sails the same boat. The only place I can still get faster is my head. Almost nobody trains that. And it stays with me for life. If you argue like that, you are the best proof that it is worth it.

We talk about your races, your starts, your mistakes. What you feel comes up, but it is a means to an end, not the programme.

Then right now is the moment. Maybe the boat was never the problem.

Only if you want them to. You decide that, nobody else. Not even if your parents are paying, and not even if your club brought us in.

We tell them that we are working. What you tell us belongs to you. If you want your parents or your coach to know something, you tell us what — and then we do exactly that and no more.

There is one single exception, and it applies everywhere: if we get the impression that somebody is in serious danger, we get help. We tell you that too, and we tell you beforehand.

More people do than you think, and hardly any of them say so. It is not a sign of weakness either, it is your body getting ready. You can learn to turn that around.

That is a subject in its own right, and a common one. We work on where your attention goes when you know somebody is watching. And sometimes we talk to the parents too.

Because you want your child to improve, and because we do not achieve that through pressure or through yet more physical training, but through self-regulation. The result is the same: safer, more focused, more capable. Only the route is different.

That is in fact the real value. Calm under pressure, focus, dealing with mistakes: the same technique that steadies your child on the water steadies them in a school test. You are paying for sailing, and your child is learning for life.

There are five reasons. Your child is alone in the boat and makes their own decisions in seconds. They learn to handle the uncontrollable, because wind and weather do not permit a standardised pitch. It demands head and body at the same time. It teaches respect for nature. And it combines individual responsibility with community. Sailing is the only living arena that breathes with the wind and never has the same layout twice.

It is a bundle of competences in real time: tactical like chess, physical like athletics, technical like a craft, scientific like applied physics, social like a small community. What your child learns there, they will learn nowhere else all at once.

For mental methods in the strict sense, yes; those take hold from about ten to twelve. For the foundation, no. Self-efficacy begins on the first day the child holds the tiller.

The approach takes pressure out. A child who has learned to handle a gust experiences it as a task rather than a threat. Capsizing is not failing, it is learning.

We do not demonise the phone. The real competence is the deliberate direction of attention. At the boat your child learns to set their own focus, and that self-steering transfers to how they handle the device. Sailing is analogue deep concentration without a notification.

On the water you cannot simply stop; the boat has to come back to harbour. Persistence becomes something physically experienced rather than something urged.

Especially then. Sailing teaches controlled courage: feeling fear and acting anyway. On the water the consequences are real, but accompanied. Your child learns courage in a place where a mistake is instructive rather than dangerous.

More than you might think. While your child takes on responsibility at the tiller, you practise letting go ashore. You watch the growing happen in real time, which is not the case in many other sports. And sailing parents are a well connected community, one in which life is a little easier to manage. You make the journey possible, and you travel too.

All the better. The gain in performance is the bonus, not the aim. The real gain is a child who trusts themselves.

We arrange that individually, and there are three routes.

The route we prefer is firmly scheduled joint conversations between you, your child and us. They cover goals, the current position, and expressly your own role as well. What your child confides to us on their own stays with them.

The second route is work with you alone. In that case you are the ones being trained, not your child. The subject is your role as shore crew: what you say on the pontoon, what you say in the car after the race, how you handle a bad day without making it bigger. That is a service in its own right, and often the most effective one in the whole system.

The third route is that you sit in on your child’s training. That is possible where it is necessary, with younger children for instance. In our experience it is not the ideal arrangement, because children speak differently in the presence of their parents.

For the effect, not for the access. You will hear what is being worked on and how it is progressing — in the joint conversations, together with your child. What you will not receive are records of what your child has confided to us.

That is not an obstruction, it is the condition for anything happening at all. A sixteen year old who expects the matter to be discussed at home that evening will not tell us the thing that matters. Then you would be paying for a conversation about sail trim.

At your level everyone knows the same adjustments: rake, sail tension, trim, the start line, shifts, laylines, manoeuvres in your sleep. One adjustment stays almost untouched. You know every screw on your boat. When did you last turn the one in your head?

Four typical doors:

• Injury or an enforced break. Your body is out; your head does not have to be. We bring you back stronger.
• A lean spell. Maybe the boat was never the problem.
• The race that counts, whether a championship, a qualifier or an offshore race. So your head is as ready on the big day as your boat.
• Moving up a class. We make sure your head grows with it.

No. This is not an extra block, it is a layer that runs on top of what you are doing anyway.

It works above all where nothing stood before: in winter, on bad-weather days, in the week between two regattas. Your rivals are ashore in winter too. It is decided on the water – but the groundwork for that decision is laid in the months beforehand.

Yes, that is the core of the idea. The mental methods of elite athletes do not belong to squad athletes alone.

Mid season, yes. Just before it, we have to be honest.

If there are still weeks between the first conversation and the start, there is work to be done: on the competition routine, on handling expectation, on the plan for the bad day. If it is only days, nothing can be built. Mental abilities come from repetition, not from insight, and that needs time on the water. Anyone promising you otherwise shortly before the start is selling you hocus-pocus.

We can still talk, and it is still worth it. We sort out what is sensible in the last few days and what you would do better to leave alone. And then we take this competition as the occasion to build it properly for the next ones.

No. Your coach works on the boat and the technique, we work on the head. If you want us to speak to them, we will; otherwise we won’t.

They don’t need to. We name no names and no classes.

We agree the measures together when taking a fix; see A22. In racing you often end up with things like the quality of your starts, consistency across a series, how much a mistake still costs you, and how you are holding up on the third day of racing. Which of those apply to you is decided by your starting point, not by a list.

For performance-minded clubs, mental training is not a luxury, it is a required part of development. Anyone wanting to think and act like a professional cannot leave it out. Without that component, your development programme has a hole in it.

There is a very practical argument on top: it fills the off-season. One training session a week becomes two, without a second date on the water, without a boat shed and without a second coach in the boat.

Your coaches are sailing experts, not psychologists. With anxious or blocked children, the tools are often missing. We supply exactly those, as a complement, not as competition.

Most of them leave out of frustration, fear or a sense of failure, not from lack of talent. A calm, self-efficacious head keeps young sailors in the sport. Less drop-out means a more stable youth section.

Yes, and that is expressly part of what we offer. We do not only train athletes, we help you build a mental structure of your own within the club. Sustained rather than one-off.

Four stages: an evening talk as the shop window, a workshop day or weekend seminar as the centrepiece, ongoing support through the season, and individual work with your talented sailors, arranged through the club. You start where it fits and where the budget allows.

A club with mental development for its young sailors stands out. With parents, with talented sailors, with sponsors.

On the contrary, it takes load off them. The hardest part of youth work is not the manoeuvres, it is the children who no longer want to go out on the water. That is exactly where we come in.

Both, within one arrangement. The club commissions the foundation and gets the thing moving: the evening talk, the workshop, ongoing support for the youth section. That is your contribution and your calling card.

Beyond that there are modules that take individual athletes further. Those also run through you, but they are paid for by the parents or by the athlete. One contractual route, two payers. So you do not have to carry the whole budget in order to begin, and we do not have to administer fifteen separate contracts inside your club.

How far it goes in each case is something you decide together with the families.

You are in exactly the right place. A sailing boat is the most expensive and least comfortable way of travelling very slowly, and that is precisely where the joy lies. We teach you to enjoy the slowness. It is the slowness that leads us to pleasure.

No, it is the high art. Cape Horn, high latitudes, sailing round the world: there, composure is a survival skill. Freedom stands level with the podium, not below it.

Six typical doors:

• New or returning to it. You feel uneasy. Entirely normal.
• Constant stress in harbour manoeuvres. What was a test of the relationship becomes routine.
• Exam nerves. Your head should not be holding you back.
• The step up to something bigger. First passage without a skipper, first night sail.
• After a fright. You came through a storm; now you want the confidence back.
• Responsibility for crew and family. So everyone can rely on you.

And one more thing: for most people, months pass between two trips. That is exactly where the confidence comes from that you arrive with on day one, instead of having to rebuild it on board.

There is a version for every level, German and RYA alike:

1. Day Skipper and the German SBF: getting away from the dock, handling the boat, exam nerves, Hafenkino (the pontoon audience who are not hoping you succeed), fear of letting go.

2. Yachtmaster Coastal and the German SKS: the coast, route planning, first responsibility for a crew.

3. Yachtmaster Offshore and the German SSS: open sea, night passages, crew management, the skipper as the anchor point.

4. Yachtmaster Ocean and the German SHS: the top level, expeditions, courage.

You are in very good company. It is almost never the seamanship, it is the missing accompanied transition. See B19 to B22.

A common case, and one where the calm half often makes the problem worse without meaning to. We then work with both of you, not only with the frightened one. The boundary with couples counselling is set out in G5.

The best moment to work on it beforehand rather than repair it underway. Preparation for confinement, monotony, roles on board, and the question of what happens if the dream feels different from how you imagined it.

The open channel is part of the package. Anyone working with us can reach us underway by messenger, without an appointment and without warning. See E11.

Without a booking it does not work, and not as a matter of principle but because it genuinely would not help. Helping in the middle of a passage assumes we know you: your boat, your crew, your subject, the way you react under pressure. A stranger at the other end can be kind at that moment, but not useful.

What is always available without a booking is the free first session. Including when you are sitting in harbour right now, knowing that things cannot go on like this.

You teach the seamanship yourselves. We add the composure.

Four things: a higher pass rate, because many students fail not on ability but on exam nerves, panic about leaving the berth, or going blank in a manoeuvre. Fewer withdrawals, because anxious customers drop out. A distinguishing feature against the school down the road. And satisfied graduates who recommend you and come back for the next ticket.

No. We start precisely where your ticket ends. At that stage nobody needs further nautical training; they need to transfer what they have learned into practice.

As a module within a course, for instance an evening on exam nerves in your day skipper course. As a separate add-on, particularly the mental harbour manoeuvre training. Or as a joint package. Straightforward to price, without overturning your programme.

The timing is your advantage: you already run theory in winter and have gaps between practical dates. A mental module fills exactly that time – priced clearly, without rebuilding anything.

The mental harbour manoeuvre training and the mental passage preparation. Neither encroaches on anything you already do, and both position your school as innovative, because mental training has barely featured in sailing so far. Whoever offers it first has it to themselves.

In Germany, a good 3,000 coastal skipper tickets are issued each year, and the trend is downwards: in 2013 it was 5,209, by 2022 only 3,306. Very few graduates go on to take charge of a vessel on their own responsibility. Not because they lack the seamanship, but because the training does not deal with the moment of taking on responsibility. You train them for the ticket; we turn the ticket holder into somebody who genuinely takes charge.

We tell them their nautical training is complete. What is missing is not training, it is practice in carrying responsibility. That does not devalue your course, it makes it effective.

Because a crew is more than the sum of its sailors. What you are buying is not the individual head, it is what happens between the heads. A nervous tactician infects the calmest helm; a frantic bow tears up the best tactics.

The shared rhythm. A crew that works well together has a shared resting pulse, and that can be trained like the trim of the boat. A crew wins not with the fastest boat, but with the calmest radio traffic on board.

Yes: three roles, three tasks. The helm and the skipper carry the weight of decision and must not unload it onto the crew. The tactician and the navigator decide on incomplete information and have to let the decision go afterwards instead of dwelling on it. The crew on the sheets and the bow live on timing and trust, and have to stay in the moment instead of already being at the next manoeuvre.

Five occasions:

• Start stress. We can’t get our horsepower onto the start line.
• The mistake that tips the race. One fumble costs us not a boat length but the whole race.
• The newly assembled crew. We are strong individually but not yet a team.
• Conflict on board. It isn’t the wind slowing us down, it’s the mood below deck.
• The big goal on the horizon. We want our heads as well prepared on the big day as the boat.

No. We work on the shared zero point, not on questions of blame. Anyone leaving a session with a list of accusations has been given the opposite of what we do.

One of the trickiest configurations, and we raise it openly at the outset. A session in which everyone says only what the owner wants to hear is time thrown away.

Hybrid, like almost everything we do. Ashore we work on roles, communication and decision paths, because for that a quiet room and a table beat twenty degrees of heel. On board we test whether it holds under pressure. Between and after, the support runs digitally.

Whether we sail with you depends on availability and on what we agree. Format, duration and group size are settled in the first session, because a settled crew of six needs something different from a youth group of twenty.

For every part on board there is a backup. Or two. Your head is a one-off.

Seven headsails, two autopilots, a windvane self-steering gear on top of that, and for every other part a backup for the backup. A hand bearing compass, and in extremis a sextant. And the only thing on board that exists just once is your head. Alone, nobody contradicts you: what the navigator would correct or the bow would report runs through to execution unchecked. On top of that comes sleep deficit, which attacks your judgement first, and does so before you notice it has gone.

Nobody contradicts you. In a crew the navigator corrects the skipper, the bow says the sea is bigger than expected, and somebody notices a frantic tone. Alone, every misjudgement runs through to execution unchecked. You are the decision maker and the check on that decision in one person, and you are that on a sleep deficit.

Then there is the second thing: fear cannot be shared. In a crew, another person’s glance already takes something off its size. Alone, it grows into whatever room you leave it.

Almost every single-handed sailor has developed routines, and most of them work. They are simply self-built, never tested, and usually made for weather you already know. We go through them like a rig check: what carries load, stays. What has merely held so far gets replaced, before it parts under load.

Not about the quantity. About what you do with what is left, yes. Exhaustion attacks your judgement first, and it does so before you notice it has gone. That is why we work with decisions taken in advance: fixed if-then rules for reefing, changing course, turning back, and calling for help. At three in the morning you no longer decide, you execute. In the workbook that is the action plan, and for you it is not one module among others but the heart of the matter.

What we do not do is sleep training. How you break your sleep into short blocks and adapt your rhythm to the passage is something you learn from people who research and teach exactly that. We are the part of the team that makes sure you get the most out of the waking remainder.

Alongside that, the watch routine as a ritual rather than a matter of willpower, and an honest reckoning with what sleep deprivation does beyond a certain point: irritability, tunnel vision, disturbances of perception. Anyone who knows it is coming is less alarmed by it, and does not make a panic decision out of it.

It is a tool, and we make it a better one. What you say to yourself when a manoeuvre goes wrong decides how quickly you are able to act again. Alone, nobody is listening and nobody contradicts you, so your own tone stands unchallenged. That is precisely why we work on it.

Five typical doors:

• The first long passage alone. The first night without a watch change is a different kind of night.
• The solo race or the record attempt. Weeks of load, in which no one day can rescue another.
• The incident that stayed with you. Damage, a capsize, a night you would rather not think about, and since then something else is aboard with you.
• The change you did not choose. Your crewmate has pulled out; the plan has not.
• The calm that has tipped over. You have been sailing alone for years, and being alone has turned into loneliness.

No. We work on what you want to achieve, and being alone is not a symptom. There is a boundary nonetheless, and we name it: if you are not going out onto the water but away from the land, that is a different subject. Then we say so, and we also tell you where to turn.

A fixed sequence that works without a decision. Breathing, one action with your hands, one sentence, and then the next thing that needs doing. Not solving the situation, but the next half hour. We practise that ashore until it holds, and then we test it under conditions in which it does not want to hold.

For you it means the most. Anyone holding a package with us reaches us by messenger, without an appointment. For a single-handed sailor that is the difference between a thought that goes round for three days and one that has been said out loud.

Two things about that, plainly and with no small print. We are not a watch service and not a guarantee of availability; we answer as quickly as an ordinary life allows. And real distress at sea runs through channel 16 and through search and rescue, never through us.

No, and that would be a poor promise to make. What we provide is a voice on the channel when there is none on board. That is exactly what Captain Sifr is for.

The same way you prepare the boat: early, in stages, and with trial runs. We build the routines up in everyday life, test them on short legs, and then scale them to the duration of the passage you have planned. Anyone setting out for six weeks does not practise the six weeks, but the one day that repeats forty times.

An underestimated subject, and one we plan for. Anyone who has been alone for a long time does not come back with the handbrake on, but with their perception turned down low. The reception in harbour, the questions, having to tell the story: that belongs in the preparation, not in the surprise.

We agree the measures together when taking a fix; see A22. Sailing single-handed, you often end up with things like: how long it takes you after a mistake before you are working again, whether you reef when you think of it rather than when it becomes necessary, how you are holding up on the fifth day, and whether you still see anything out there beyond the task in front of you.

Always the same way, and always with a conversation: the free first session. No battle with forms, no diagnostic questionnaire, no obligation.

In it we settle three things. What you want. What you expect. And what the thing actually demands, in time, in practice, in honesty with yourself. We work out where the journey is going for you, and we answer all your questions. And we show you the first tools. Out of all that, an offer follows afterwards, cut to your particular task.

There is no catalogue for you to choose from. There is this conversation.

Four products are fixed:

1. Individual mental training for competitive sailors. One to one on your racing strength: the start under pressure, ticking off mistakes instead of carrying them, staying focused across the whole race. Aligned with your training and regatta calendar.

2. Individual mental training for cruising sailors in the transition, the co-pilot phase between holding the ticket and taking charge of a vessel yourself. Not another navigation course, but the accompanied transfer into practice.

3. Mental harbour manoeuvre training. Mental strength when it counts: the manoeuvre under observation, under pressure, with an audience.

4. Mental passage support, the virtual senior skipper who sails with you digitally. A fallback level you can call on at any time.

Alongside those, the formats for clubs and schools: talk, workshop, support through the season, individual work, course module and parent guidance.

They don’t, and that is deliberate. They are two different things.

The call levels say how urgent it is for you and how close your occasion has come. They are a self-assessment, not a price tag. See C4.

The products say what we work on: the transition into your own responsibility, the harbour manoeuvre, support on a passage. See E2.

And the price comes out of neither of them, but out of what your task demands. See E6.

In short: the call level tells us how much time is left. The product says where we start. The offer we make after the conversation.

All three, mixed. Mental training lends itself unusually well to a hybrid form, because part of the work is a conversation and another part can only happen where things get serious.

• Ashore, in person. Our preferred form wherever the distance allows. For foundations, workshops, crew days, club and school formats.
• Online, by video or telephone. Bridges distance without the work suffering. For preparation, review and ongoing support across a season, this is the normal case anyway.
• On board, sailing with you. For everything that can only be grasped in the moment itself: harbour manoeuvres, leaving the berth, the first night sail, a crew under pressure. On the boat and at competitions we come along subject to personal availability and individual agreement.

A typical programme mixes them: preparation online, a day in person, a day on board, then ongoing support by video and messenger.

We do not tie ourselves to one cruising ground. What makes sense in person, we do in person, and what the distance will not allow, we do digitally, without it getting worse. For dates on board, availability decides, not the postcode.

Travelling time and travel expenses are agreed case by case.

The first session costs nothing. After that we work with package prices to suit your task — the scope, the duration, the kind of support.

You will not find a price list here, and there is a reason for that. A figure without a task tells you nothing. Somebody needing nine months of build-up before a championship books something different from somebody facing their first passage in charge. What you get, you see in the offer after the conversation, in full and with nothing added later.

We work in packages, because effect depends on repetition, and a single session delivers none of that beyond a good feeling.

There are short formats nonetheless: evening talks, workshop days and course modules. Those run through clubs and sailing schools, not as private bookings. Whether something smaller makes sense for you is settled in the first session.

A typical mental training project runs from three to twenty-four months. The rhythm follows the season, not the calendar: closer together before an occasion, quieter in between, and the winter is often the most productive phase of all, because nobody is under pressure for results.

Between appointments the work carries on by messenger. See E11.

Both. What we offer is built bilingually, not as a translation but in parallel. Passage support too runs in whichever language you are thinking in out there.

Before the passage we settle what is on your mind and what we are working on. Underway you are not alone: you reach us whenever your head calls. After the passage we look back over it together.

Anyone holding a package with us has the channel open. Around the clock, by WhatsApp or the messenger of your choice, without an appointment and without warning. You write when your head calls.

And now the honest part. We answer as quickly as an ordinary life allows. That is usually quick and sometimes it is not, because we also sleep, work and go out on the water ourselves. We will not promise you a response time we cannot keep.

If you need a guaranteed response time, on a longer passage for instance, we agree it explicitly and for an additional fee. Then it is in the offer and it holds.

There are no forbidden subjects on the channel. If something takes us to our limit, we tell you, and then we help you find the right place. We are mental trainers, not psychologists, not psychiatrists and not a crisis line. In real distress at sea you call channel 16, not us.

Yes, as one skipper standing by another. You have somebody at the other end who knows the situation you are describing and who thinks it through with you, like an experienced colleague in the next cockpit. That is expressly part of passage support, not only the mental side.

What that does not shift: final responsibility for the navigation and the vessel rests always, under all circumstances and at all times, with the skipper in charge on board. We do not give instructions and cannot give them, because we cannot see what you see. In the end you decide.

Yes, that is the normal case. We are the finishing layer, not competition for nautical training.

After the free first session you receive an offer. If it is accepted, payment is in advance — and with us that is not merely a payment arrangement. Paying up front is part of the decision. Mental training works through regularity, and regularity only holds for somebody who has genuinely committed. Anyone paying in advance has already made that commitment, and that is half the success.

For that reason there is no walking away on impulse with us. That is not a contractual trap, it is part of the method: mental training follows a plan you work through step by step, and impulsive decisions are precisely what we are working on. The decision to stop should not be an impulsive one either. The point at which you calmly examine whether this suits you is the first session — it costs you nothing, commits you to nothing, and takes as long as you need.

And if something does jam later on, we talk about it. We rely on the professionalism and the creativity on both sides to find a solution.

Weather is part of sailing, and we handle it as we would on board: if a session on the water cannot take place, we run an equivalent session instead. On board in harbour, ashore, or digitally if it comes to that. What we do not do is let it lapse, because that regularity is exactly what works.

If an appointment becomes impossible for other reasons, on your side or on ours, it is moved, as far as possibility and availability allow. Nothing is set off against anything, and we do not run deadlines. Anyone who has paid in advance has their sessions, and they will get them.

For appointments we travel to, a twenty-four hour limit applies. Up to then it can be moved and the appointment shifts to a new date. After that we still move the session, but travel costs that can no longer be cancelled fall to the client. If the reason lies with us, we carry them ourselves.

If a trip with costs already committed has to be cancelled altogether, we look for a solution appropriate to the situation. We have no table for that, because no two cases are alike.

Nobody you do not tell yourself. We name no names, no classes and no clubs, not even in passing.

Where a club or a school has commissioned the work, the client learns that work is happening, and nothing else. What is discussed is at the disposal of the person being trained, and nobody else. See A19.

Every client receives a personal mental training workbook. Printed and bound, not a PDF and not an app — handwriting works differently from typing. It sets out what you are practising, and it is where you record what you observe while doing it. It goes out to you before the first session, so that you have something in your hands from the very first meeting.

Yes. The evening talk is the first stage for clubs and schools, and it works just as well at boat shows, for associations and in crew gatherings.

Nils-Peter Hey. A cruising sailor who came to it late and then went full throttle: from motorboat driver with the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) to instructor on cruising yachts. Racing arrived via his son; coaching long before that — as a youth basketball coach. Captain Sifr, the turtle, is a partner and friend on board — especially for the youngest.

Nils went through every stage of sailing and felt the same thing missing at each one: nobody had led him to what matters beyond the navigation. The sea checks up on whatever the training claimed.

As a young Cruising Instructor he watched an anxious sailor break down before her first departure in charge of the boat. He had no tools to help her, and it ended in tears. Channel Zero grew out of the question of how such cases should be handled.

Nautical: Sporthochseeschifferschein, the highest German leisure qualification (broadly equivalent to RYA Yachtmaster Ocean), the long range certificate (LRC, which includes the short range certificate) and the UBI, the German radio certificate for inland waterways, plus RYA Yachtmaster Offshore with commercial endorsement, RYA Cruising Instructor Sail and RYA Navigation Instructor.

Professional: entrepreneur, experienced management trainer, publicly appointed and sworn expert for marketing and business communication, and many years in adult education as director of studies at the Bavarian Academy for Advertising and Marketing and on the board of the Bavarian Academy for Business Communication.

Youth work: a former basketball player, and a coach of youth teams up to regional league level.

Mental training: mental trainer C licence of the German Mental Trainer Academy — September 2026, trained under Michael Draksal at the Deutsche Mentaltrainer-Akademie.

No, and we say so openly. We are sailors, instructors and mental trainers. Where psychotherapy is needed, we refer you on.

The combination. Seamanlike grounding on one side, decades of experience in teaching people something on the other. The speciality is bringing people from the principle to the performance, by way of the soft components.

Because Channel Zero is a channel and not a consulting room. The we means the channel, the figure and the person behind them, and it also means that we hold ourselves to a standard larger than how we happen to feel on the day.

The person who comes when you call is Nils-Peter Hey. That is why this part speaks about him in the third person rather than in the plural. Where it is about one person, anything else would be posturing.

There is preventive work to be done on that: breathing, directing attention, fixed routines of action for the moment things get tight. That is craft, and it helps a great many people.

Recurring panic attacks are something else. Those belong in front of a doctor, and if a panic disorder lies behind them, they belong in treatment. We would then work alongside at most, in parallel with the treatment and by agreement. It cannot be trained away, and anyone offering you that is deceiving you.

We practise the procedure, we do not train away the phobia. In practice that means the sequence, the safety arrangements, the breathing, a clear order of steps, small stages, and the option to stop at any time. For many people that is enough, because the problem is the moment rather than the fear as such.

If there is a pronounced fear of heights or a claustrophobia behind it that restricts you ashore as well, we are not the right address. There are effective therapies for that, and they work better than anything we could offer.

That is what mental training is made for. We go back in steps you set yourself and can stop at any time: first the pontoon, then the boat at the pontoon, then the harbour, then the wider water. No throwing yourself in at the deep end, no proving your courage, no pressure of dates.

There is one boundary. If nightmares, flashbacks or hyperarousal come with it, that is to say signs of trauma, it belongs in treatment rather than training. That is not a refusal, it is the order of things: that first, then us.

There will be no sermon here. But we will say two things plainly.

First: alcohol lowers your reaction time, your judgement and your perception of risk, precisely at the moment you need all three. On board you are responsible, often for other people. That cannot be argued away.

Second: if you notice that you need it in order to be calm, then calm is no longer the subject. At that point it is no longer a case for mental training, it is one for addiction counselling. That exists everywhere, it costs nothing, and the people there do this every day.

Asking the question at all is, incidentally, the hardest part. The rest is easier.

Confinement, tiredness, closeness with nowhere to withdraw to, and decisions under time pressure on top. It is remarkable how many conflicts on board are really conflicts about who is responsible for what: who calls what, who decides, who may disagree and when. That is very good material to work on, and often half the argument disappears once the roles are clear.

We are not couples counsellors, though. If the subject is not the manoeuvre but the relationship, we say so openly instead of treating it out on the water.

You don’t have to. We talk about decisions, procedures and confidence in action. Fear is a word, not the work.

We start with what you want to change, not with what you are supposed to admit. Many people only call it by its name after months; some never do. It makes no difference to the result.

Then we tell you in the first session, not in the tenth.