Black Wave: Leaving seamanship in the dark

Captain's library log, January 3, 2011: I am 3/4ths of the way through their book Black Wave (it's remaindered in paperback), and rarely have I cycled from anger to sympathy so quickly. I haven't sailed these waters (although we intend to), but even I know that they are incompletely charted, sometimes inaccurately charted, and that a watch and loads of offing should be maintained at all times. Not just for the reasons of reef avoidance, but because I imagine that storms regularly blow shallowly rooted palm trees into the ocean. Hitting one could ruin your whole day.

January 4, 2011: Ah, a variant on the old saying, "if you can't be a good example, you'll have to be a horrible warning". The gory, god-ridden saga of Black Wave continues, although I am not finding it restful.

There does seem to be a divide between the cruisers/voyagers who rarely have problems (and if they do, they are largely resolved by the skipper and crew without a lot of shouting) and those for whom sailing is lurching from one crisis to another, spewing money and unhappiness like ladled chum into hungry waters.

But a silver lining? Nobody comes to sailing with a lifetime of shoreside competence and rationality only to lose it upon weighing anchor. People lacking in the qualities ocean sailing demands merely transfer that lack from dry land to salt water. I'm not saying that is necessarily the case here; the skipper "grew up on boats" and seems to work the sails and helm properly. But there are many instances where he seems defeated by the boat's engines and balky gensets, electronics, etc. and has to pay others...heavily...to fix them...poorly.

This wouldn't be the first instance of a "1970s sailor", who is well able to work with consummate skill a Windex, the winches, the Whale Gusher and the compass on a 30-foot coastal sailboat, being defeated by the intimate and extensive technical knowledge required to understand, never mind maintain, a much larger, far more tricked-out modern cruiser. I myself am still making that transition, and am concluding that the Luddites were onto something, despite the fact that I am conversant with many technologies and generally don't require help to get past the welcome screen.

So it's possible that Black Wave's boat-show-bought radar wasn't on because it didn't occur to anyone aboard to turn it on...or how, once on, the guard function wasn't activated, or the XTE function on the GPS worked, or even how to run a simple plot that would have revealed a fatal drift into danger.

Maybe they'll be an answer in the last part of the book, but so far, it's comparing their wreck to that of a brigantine 150 years ago that stranded in practically the same spot, a comparison I find specious at best. If that known reef is so goddamned sneaky and barely visible, why run so close and at such a speed, at night? Is this the family version of Rule 62?

January 5, 2011: Still doesn't really explain why no radar, no deck watch, no generous offing.

I finished the book last night. The last section is somewhat better than the first, but it's still more drama than sense.

January 6, 2011: Getting into debates in online forums about this book, which some sailors find "inspirational" in a way I find inexplicable. I am coming to the conclusion that for every Luddite skipper who figures Morse code, signal flags and the ability to tie a sheepshank will see him through (and not all of these people are necessarily old; some are "purists" and/or hopelessly romantic), there are others who see sailing as a big video game with somewhat more sunshine and fresh air.

Tying in the autopilot to the GPS...while convenient...is certainly symptomatic of this, as we see more and more frequently bad accidents from either failing to notice something isn't working, exhibiting too much faith in charts either in error or outdated, and simply failing to look around the boat.

The result? Boats come to rest on the piers built last year that simply aren't noted on that bargain circa 2007 chart collection you traded for a bottle of rum at the last raft-up. Your course is west in the afternoon, and yet the absence of the sun in your face and the old magnetic compass you haven't bothered to swing and which is reporting "90 degrees" goes unnoticed, because the NavNet says "270 W" in large, daylight-visible screen font. And the NavNet cost four grand and is even in "3D", like Avatar, so it must be right...right?

So we are like chimps confronted with common hand-tools and delicious nuts to crack. The old chimps just keep biting, because that used to work when their teeth were better and more numerous. Other chimps waste time and cut themselves using screwdrivers and hacksaw blades. Only the chimps who have used the right-sized rocks are going to figure out that a hammer is a right-sized rock with a lever attached.

The trouble is, of course, that either the old salts or the electronics-addled new sailors might both need rescuing from their lifestyle choices by the competent sailor who understands his tools and the limitations of those tools. If I put an Autohelm and a GPS in your car, and a few actuators, would you leave the driver's seat and have a nap in the back? And yet this is perhaps one answer to what happened to Emerald Jane, the honking big cat destroyed in Black Wave (why does the title imply they were flipped in the ocean? They were crunched on a reef they hit near full speed. "Black wave" of nausea, perhaps, because all this was avoidable.).

I just spent an hour devising a fuel polishing system with my diesel dealer this morning with exactly this in mind. He asked why I was installing a FilterBoss and separately filtered cross-transfer pump and Baja filters at the deck fills, and various other amenities, like running all tank vents to goosenecks high on the cabin, for offshore work. I said that a wise sailor once noted that contaminated fuel caused engine problems One, Two and Three in his experience, and the diesel dealer agreed that he found this all too often, as well. I said that with 50 feet of fuel hose, I could offer "Remedial Raft-ups", do fuel polishing for other cruisers, and thereby barter for the things we needed. He said that given the lack of knowledge with which some cruisers go to sea, ideas like that could pay for the trip!

Back to Black Wave: The book is also sloppily edited and the wife does most of the telling in ways that annoy the sailors in the audience, such as calling stays and shrouds "lines" and repeatedly describing the height of the mast as "eight stories", (should be, of course, "storeys") instead of in feet or metres.

I haven't finished it, but I don't expect to find the words "I should have kept a watch instead of dicking around with the gooseneck" or "I should have hove to/set a sea anchor/noted drift". There's a lot here that's reasonable about family tensions, but the skipper is described as a recovering alcoholic who dewagons on the first part of the trip, and who seems to have difficulty with focusing his concentration.

Perhaps he didn't think about how fast a cat could close with an atoll?

Didn't mean for this to be a book review (but now it is a book review, of the "stay away" variety), but this tragic tale got on my nerves. The story of the 1994 Queen's Birthday weather bomb, by contrast, provided a lot of good survival tips and frankly, a lot less "shallow waters".

January 23, 2011: It's been two weeks of quite cold winter weather. The Boat Show came and went, with lots of nautically themed tumblers for sale and not a lot of safety gear...par for the course. I find myself still pondering Black Wave. This book made me quite annoyed. Like howling in exasperation and chucking it across the room annoyed. I only recommend it to people who enjoy the sight of head-on crashes with drunken driving as the cause. It inspired me to always keep a deck watch...so I can avoid auto-piloted boats in the loosely charted South Pacific who pick sunset as a good time for everyone to go below and watch a movie.

These people lived IN SPITE of what happened to them. I finished this book two weeks ago, and my feelings have hardened even more, and I found the whole "drama" aspect to be written with an eye to securing a movie deal. Also, as an aside, prayer is no substitute for seamanship.

I hope the authors learned something. I did, but it wasn't really a good thing.

The line on the *first* "Great War"

Like many a social sailor, I've long had a fascination for the professionals, whether they be the fighting Jack Tars of the Napoleonic era, or even today's merchant navy personnel, who, like my late father in World War II, seem to once again in many places be facing violence to their ships and their livelihoods.

Having devoured a few shelves of Kent, O'Brien, Forester and that ilk, I feel a particular fondness for books that deal with the over two decades of worldwide struggle between France's revolutionary and subsequently Napoleonic rulership and Britain's tottering establishment in concert with a series of "subsidised" and often defeated allies in Continental Europe. South African-born Canadian journalist Noel Mostert has done a remarkable job with The Line Upon a Wind (sample pages here) in both contextualizing and deepening a story I thought I knew: how the Royal Navy flirted with the odds, mutiny and the incompetence of many senior officers to keep Napoleon from utterly dominating Europe. Mostert, who states that contemporaries referred to the 22-year struggle as "the Great War" (something I didn't know, having always heard that term reserved for World War I), finds much to admire with the British navy, and much to condemn in its brutal discipline, its stale tactics, its sanctioned jealousies and its almost institutional arrogance, particularly after the victory of Trafalgar essentially finished "big ship actions" and proved that the way forward was in smaller, more nimble frigates.

Mostert relates, not entirely without relish, how it took a fairly one-sided thumping from an enemy...the United States...considered not very seriously when considered at all to realize that a fighting spirit, easy access to the grog and the finest collection of sea shanties would not, in fact, beat sailors as good as the British fighting in newer, technically superior ships. Time and again Mostert reminds his readers how much the British success (which was by no means consistent or properly exploited) was bought with men's lives, men who spent literally years at sea without stepping ashore, men who, inevitably, mutinied or deserted, even to the French, to escape lives too miserable for the Admiralty to generally acknowledge, never mind remedy. The connection between the appalling conditions and capricious commands aboard and the high rate of desertion in the Royal Navy was not easily established until, it seems, near the end of the war, and even then, "tradition" held too many official attitudes in thrall to the legacy of the "Articles of War".

Mostert's doorstopper shines light into corners less known: the run-up to war, the rapidly changing economics that fattened merchant pockets as it bankrupted governments, and the chaotic inability of the Jacobins to use their better ships using new tactics...proving, as did Stalin, that killing a large part of your military officer class tends to strangle initiative. His Canadian background comes through with a focus on the "War of 1812" when the lakes I sail on were the scene of a forest-backed arms race to get ever larger warships built on stretches of water without today's locks to move them up or down the chain. "Fleet actions" on Lake Ontario were intense, but brief; neither side could dare alter the balance of power when one hundred soldier in front of the right isolated fort could secure Spain-sized chunks of wilderness, along with varying numbers of native allies or enemies.

Best of all, here, however, is not just the focus on battles and tactics, but the perceptive takes on the personalities that the Royal Navy nurtured, sometimes in spite of itself. Nelson and Napoleon are seen, even after Nelson's almost inevitable death in 1805, as brothers in spirit while enemies in arms, and receive a lot of attention. Less well-known names, however, like Codrington and Hoste, get a full discussion, and their inventiveness and daring became a hallmark of why the British prevailed in this conflict despite, as the author lists, a daunting number of reasons why they should have fallen before old Boney like millions did before them.

This is a great companion piece to Arthur Herman's 2004 brick To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, but simply isn't quite as well written and cannot, due to the far greater time span covered, drill down so exquisitely into the pulp of why Britain with its rotating cast of semi-competent politicians and mad/bad royalty, its dubious financing and alliances and its frequently compromised ships kept the French bottled up in their ports, like furious bottled wasps unable to wield their stingers. Very much recommended.