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.