As a sailor, I use a race timer to organise the start, we have a digital version set on the bulkhead and I have a wrist mounted timer to set the five minute countdown. On a start line, the starting crew use a blank firing gun to signal the racers of race events aligned to a series of pennants on the start boat. Depending on fleet racing guidelines, we have a five minute gun with the class pennant raised as the gun sounds.

At four minutes, the gun sounds and a blue pennant is raised, this gives sailors the opportunity to synchronise timers to the gun. I personally count the time every fifteen seconds to the crew so we can position ourselves both in the fleet and on the line. As the one minute gun is sounded the blue pennant is lowered and we should be moving towards the line. My thought process is we should be locked into position at the 1:30 countdown to the start, we should not be messing around with any other maneuvers.

On some blue water races, a ten minute gun is sounded, on start lines going back longer than I would like to remember, we used to start on a ten minute cycle. While the older starts were 10 minutes, this is pretty obsolete now. The Heuer Skipper Reference 73464 Yacht chronograph is a decent race timer, this is a chronograph with a hand wound Valjoux 7734 movement. The 3 o’clock sub-dial is colour coded red, white and blue to accentuate the countdown timer, the 9 o’clock sub-dial is not important for race starts.

Whilst modern yacht racers use digital timers, the 1970s style of the mechanical chronograph is very interesting. I would have to assess whether I would want to wear such a classic timepiece out on the water now when the risk of losing or damaging it is high. Would I love to have a yacht timer? Absolutely, the answer is yes, would I wear it sailing, absolutely not – it is just not worth the risk.