Communicating When It Really Matters | BITE

Communicating isn't just calling for help from outside the boat: it's first about understanding and sharing what's happening inside it. Fifth and final article in our boat safety series: NITS, briefings, debriefs and closing the circle.

Communicating, when it really matters, isn't just about calling for help from outside the boat. It's first of all about understanding and sharing, inside the boat, what's actually happening — because it's hard to explain clearly to the outside something that isn't yet clear among the people on board.

In the fourth article of this series we talked about how emergencies almost always grow out of a chain of threats and errors recognisable in advance. In this final article we close the circle by talking about communication: first the internal kind, which we already touched on in the second article when discussing closed-loop communication, and then the kind directed outward, when you need to call for assistance or raise the alarm.

Ordering information before sending it

When you need to communicate a problem quickly — to someone on board or to someone who can help — a common issue is that information comes out disordered: you start talking while you're still thinking, backtrack, add an urgent detail halfway through a sentence. In a tense moment, this creates confusion exactly when clarity is needed most.

A simple framework we've found useful, borrowed from the maritime and aviation world, is NITS:

N — Nature of the problem: what happened, in one sentence.

I — Intentions: what we're about to do.

T — Time, or urgency: how much time we have, how serious it is.

S — Special instructions or needs: what we need, or what's expected of whoever is listening.

In four sentences, whoever is listening knows what happened, what we're about to do, how urgent it is and what's expected of them. We present it as a framework for quickly ordering information in your own head before speaking, not as a substitute for official radio procedures or the distress calls required by regulation — those remain what they are, and need to be known regardless. NITS is useful in the moments, often more frequent than a real emergency, when something needs to be communicated quickly and clearly: to someone on board, to another crew, to whoever is waiting for us on shore.

Before departure: the briefing

If NITS helps order information at the moment it's needed, the moment where the real foundation for good communication gets built is earlier, when there's no urgency at all: the briefing before departure.

It's not a formality: it's the chance to make explicit the roles, the possible difficulties of the leg ahead, the priorities in case something unexpected happens, and where the safety equipment is and how it works. For the route to Lisbon, with a crew that changes on some legs, this step has become more important for us than on a short crossing with a fixed crew: anyone coming aboard for the first time needs to know, before setting off, not just where the life raft is, but also how communication works on board, who has which tasks, what to do if something goes wrong.

After arrival: the debrief

If the briefing prepares, the debrief takes stock. After a passage, especially a demanding one, it's worth asking together: what worked? What created confusion? What would we change next time?

It's not an exercise in self-criticism or a search for blame: it's simply a way of turning what was experienced into something that can be improved next time. Many of the things we've discussed in this series — distributing roles, closed-loop communication, recognising threats — get refined exactly this way, one debrief after another, more than by reading an article like this one.

Why give a name to practices many already use

Many of the things described in this series, in truth, experienced sailors already do instinctively, without needing an English acronym: a briefing before departure, a proper lookout, a debrief after a difficult passage.

But giving a practice a name, in our view, changes a few things. It gives it more weight in our attention: when something has a name, it becomes easier to recognise as it happens, instead of letting it slip by as just another detail of a day at sea. It makes it recognisable, discussable and transmissible: a shared name lets you describe a practice to others, compare it, teach it. And it favours a kind of standardisation and spread — this is probably how practices born within individual crews in civil aviation and merchant shipping eventually became recognised standards across entire industries.

Back to where we started

The first article of this series opened with a question: are the safety equipment for the voyage to Lisbon enough to describe how safe a crossing really is? Across five articles we've tried to answer by telling the other half of the story — shared skills, decisions under pressure, threats and errors recognised in time, internal and external communication — without ever wanting to downplay the importance of the first half.

Equipment remains essential. Training remains essential too. But safety doesn't live only in a locker, a certification or a checklist on board: it takes shape when people, tools and procedures actually manage to work as a single system.

Conclusion

With this article we close the series, but not the subject: we'll keep telling, as we prepare for the September 10th departure and while under way to Lisbon, how we try to put these ideas into practice — with all the limits of a crew of family and friends, not a professional one, still learning as we go.

Were you already familiar with these concepts? Do you already apply them, perhaps without calling them that, on your own boat or in other contexts? Tell us in the comments which practices help you share information, decisions and responsibility on board.