Well, most of those things are pretty universal experiences, and you can have them anywhere from Port Hardy to the Yucatan, and if you mention them in the company of sailors you will get a chorus of nods and a healthy raft of “That’s nothing! One time, I…” replies. But it turns out there is a whole other subset of things they never told us that are exclusively cold-weather related! That’s boating in a nutshell, isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve seen it all….

New on our list for winter:

- Winter storm forecasts made with the benefit of the expensive new coastal radar are no better than the summer ones made without it

Sliding Hatch

- Snow piled up on deck in front of your sliding hatch will make it difficult to open. Snow, topped by a glaze of frozen rain, will weld you inside your boat like you’ve been sealed up in a space ship about to be shot off on a six month voyage to Mars

- The drip-lip inside your deck-accessible anchor locker that tends to accumulate water in the summer will freeze that hatch shut in a solid block of ice when it snows. If your water tank fill happens to be located in the anchor locker, you will run out of water at just this time

- That doesn’t matter, because the faucet at your slip will be frozen anyway and you’ll have to hike up to the restrooms to fill up your spare water jugs

- Hatches with ice and snow layered atop them shed condensation at approximately 300 times their normal winter rate

Frozen Fender

- Frozen, ice-encrusted fenders banging against the hull in a windstorm are every bit as annoying as squeaky fenders are in the summer

- Marina access streets are not high on the city’s “to be plowed/sanded” list

- Dock carts do not come in an “all wheel drive” version

- Ice in the rigging really does increase the roll period of the boat so that a 20 knot breeze at your slip feels like crossing the Strait on a bad day

- All that long expanse of dock you appreciated in the summer because it kept you away from the hustle and bustle near the ramp has become an impassable wasteland of treacherous ice, snow drifts, and frozen heron crap

- Despite all this, when you finally reach the head of the dock, you will feel like Roald Amundsen and your sense of triumph will outweigh all the hardships

I think I can see the Pole down there

So I was intrigued when I came across the website of the Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup. CREW is a non-profit organization of representatives from the public and private sectors working together to envision and reduce the effects of earthquakes and related hazards. They have put together a number of good resources for understanding the effects and preparing for them; most interesting are the scenario papers discussing the most likely local quake effects from a big-picture perspective. They factor in not just the first-order effects but also many of the likely secondary effects, such as major passes being blocked by landslides, ferry service disruption from terminal damages, and state-wide economic effects from port disruptions.

Unfortunately, like every other source, they either haven’t calculated or haven’t published any detail about Puget Sound tsunami effects or timing. It shows how far our region has to go that even the basic data isn’t available; without it, planning is going to be haphazard at best. So I’m left with my original speculation, which is that there just isn’t much time to react if you live on the water and significant event occurs. The warning time could be so short, and the shaking last so long, that it could prove impossible to get up the dock before it hits. Should we make it that far, there’s no guarantee that the ramp up to the parking lot would still be attached shoreside; the recent remodel here at Shilshole beefed up our docks quite a lot, but they don’t look to me like they were designed for lateral sheer. If the ramp is out, the seawall would be insurmountable in the time available. But, if even after all that we made the parking lot, high ground still requires a 100 meter sprint across train tracks, through brambles, brush, and weed, and finally onto a hillside that might well be coming down to meet us at the same time we headed up it… local landslides are predicted to be extreme.

I’m beginning to think that our best option may be simply to stay with the ship, as it were. While it’s true that a lot of boats are demolished in tsunamis (particularly those in marinas with lots of stuff to bash into; concrete floats, pilings, other boats), it’s equally true that a lot of them stay afloat for quite a while after the waves. Most sailors are familiar with the axiom that one should always step up into a liferaft; maybe it’s also best to step up ashore in the wake of a tsunami. Certainly our hull would fare better beating against other boats and debris than our frail carcasses would. Getting rattled around during the ride would be unquestionably dangerous, but it’s not entirely unlike getting bashed around in heavy weather, which is something we’re reasonably equipped to cope with.

This seems a little unorthodox and runs contrary to every published bit of advice I can find. On the other hand, none of the published advice seems to contemplate the situation faced by boaters here in Puget Sound.

Staying aboard has other virtues as well: you retain all the resources of home. Emergency management people suggest a gallon of water per person per day for three days, but as long as we have the boat, we have about thirty, along with fuel, limited electricity and generation capacity, communications gear, regular and emergency food stuffs, and tough, warm clothing and footwear. In fact, we will have pretty much everything we have now, with the caveat that it may be damaged. But damaged is not missing entirely, as it would be if we abandoned it for high ground. A run for the hills precludes much more than a backpack, if that.

Even if the hull is breached, a dinghy or liferaft to get ashore with plus the ditch bag still probably provides most boaters with a more complete emergency kit than most lubbers will have in their homes. If you’re equipped to deal with sinking off-shore and surviving in a life-raft or on a desert island, you are certainly equipped for sinking right in the marina and living in a parking lot until help can arrive.

What I have realized is that I was looking in the wrong places for answers about preparing for disasters as a liveaboard or cruiser. For one thing, there just aren’t enough of us to make it worth the while of any official or agency to look specifically into the matters that most affect us. But more importantly, this is a lifestyle that requires self-reliance. There is a great community of boaters, most of who will go to great lengths to help one another, but at the end of the day you have to be able to count on yourself, your boat, and your crew in tight spots. If you don’t have the resources or cannot make the decisions yourself when disaster strikes, there is little chance that anyone else can do so for you. That is a lot of responsibility, but it goes hand in hand with the freedom that comes with the lifestyle.

When it comes to earthquakes and tsunamis, then, I need wake up and check my own lifelines, just like the rest of the time. Hunkering down or running for high ground isn’t a decision I can expect anyone else to make for me; I can debate it with others, look for every bit of relevant information I can find, and put some consideration into the options and consequences, but if the moment comes, it’s just as surely my sole decision to make as if I were facing a storm at sea. Unorthodox or not, I’ll have to come to terms with rolling my own dice and taking my own chances if this winter brings the third in the set of Pacific Rim mega-quakes.

When we were in high school, some friends of mine dubbed this sort of illness “The Mongolian Death Flu.” It’s the one where you start to sound like Boris Karloff in “Frankenstein” and fluids begin to emerge from every bodily orifice in prodigious quantities that no earthly box of Kleenex can hope to keep up with. This sort of cold laughs off common medications, reducing NyQuil to a quivering, half-hearted fraction of an hour of relief so shallow that it seems like a hallucination. As you lay prone on the settee waiting for death to take you, hallucinations may be your best form of relief, in fact.

I usually get this once every couple of years but this is the first time it has struck while I have been living aboard. As miserable as it always is, being on the boat has magnified the suffering immensely.

For starters, it’s just not possible to go lay someplace and pass out until you either recover or pass away. As long as there is more than one person aboard, the ineluctable Laws of The Sea dictate that wherever you are, is someplace that eventually they will need to be. So rather than rest in peace, I am forced to slump about the cabin, muttering ungraciously, as my wife finds necessities located in lockers beneath or behind my current berth.

All that hidden storage works against me in other ways, too. Should I need rapid access to medications, toilet paper, or more Kleenex, I am flat out of luck… it’s all stowed with varying degrees of inaccessibility, each little puzzle exacerbated by my diminished mental capacity and badly reduced dexterity.

Dexterity is also in play when it comes to something so simple as moving about the cabin. Balance is a great necessity for graceful movement in an always-moving structure with unpredictable and curving decks, and sinuses clogged to overflowing with green slime badly inhibit proper functioning in the inner ear. As if that weren’t bad enough, all the cold medications add their own flavors of loopy, causing me to crash about wildly during any ambulation requiring more than three steps.

If this were all taking place on one level, that would be one thing, but there are also ladders to be negotiated, lifelines to be crossed, and berths to climb into. I like to think I am pretty flexible for my age, but with every muscle aching and my head pounding, it is now utter agony to clamber out the companionway without first removing (and then replacing; it’s cold out now!) every single hatch board. After doing that, I have to rest in the cockpit (in the cold) for a good five minutes to recover before I dare to attempt to step over the lifelines and onto the dock. And god forbid it’s been raining and made things slick along the way!

Oh, being on the boat like this is not entirely without its advantages. I’m always close to the head, for example, and should I succumb to the attraction of an early exit, I can always throw myself overboard into the sweet, compelling throes of hypothermia. So far, though, the thought of having to negotiate the companionway ladder again to get out there has been keeping me alive.

Aerial view of 2011 Japanese tsunami debris

That massive, unprecedented debris field, driven by ocean currents slower but every bit as implacable as the tsunami wave itself, is now headed inexorably our way. Still fighting to control other after effects, searching for dead, and working to distribute aid to the injured and displaced, Japan has neither the time nor the resources to attempt any cleanup, if such a thing were even possible on such a scale. Spreading out as it comes, the detritus of disaster is forecast to reach our shores between one and three years from now, with lighter, smaller objects arriving first and larger, semi-submerged debris coming later.

While the density won’t be anything like it currently is off the coast of Japan, you have to imagine that a pile of junk that is causing concern for nuclear aircraft carriers and massive freighters is going to pose some increased risk to the recreational boater. Something that is going to put a dent in a freighter prop traveling at speed is going to do a lot worse to the hull, keel, and other hanging parts on the average cruiser.

Enough study has been done on ocean currents and the so-called Pacific Gyre of late to attach a fair degree of confidence to the prediction on the timing of the arrival. Even without all the science, the not uncommon finding of intricately blown Asian glass fishing net floats along our shores is enough to tell you where items lost at sea in the Orient eventually end up. What is less certain is what a debris field of such magnitude and variety will look like once it arrives. There is a lot of research that has gone into what happens with the odd bit of styrofoam that gets tossed into the ocean; none that I am aware of has looked seriously into what happens when a whole intact house goes in the water.

A house adrift

Houses might show up on radar but it seems more likely that by the time it all gets to us, it’s going to be in smaller, and more waterlogged, pieces. In some ways, this is bad news. A semi-submerged dishwasher is harder to spot than a whole roof.

Fortunately, we here in the Pacific Northwest have been well-trained for this coming onslaught by the natural features of our region. If you haven’t had to slalom through a field of massive logs in poor visibility around here, you’ve been staying tied to the dock too much. I don’t know how it is in other parts of the country, but slash and debris are such a regular feature in the waters here that keeping watch out for them often takes precedence over watching out for other vessels; that is to say, we watch out for other vessels while we’re at the helm, but the real concern is crab traps, deadheads, loose nets, and the like.

Still, household items are unusual and may prove more difficult to spot until our eyes are trained. Beyond that, sailing in poor visibility may become much more risky than it ever has been. There have been passages we’ve made at night or in heavy fog where we could count on radar to keep us clear of other vessel traffic, but where we’ve simply had to play the odds when it came to debris… in the inky blackness, there was no spotting logs and we could only hope not to run across any. Those have been reasonable odds in many places at many times in the past here. Starting next year, particularly out along the coast, they may be much worse.

We’re not actually on the boat right now, but we are on the water, and since we’re near Port Townsend we are far more exposed to tsunami damage than is the boat, tucked away far down Puget Sound in Seattle. It was for that reason that the night before, when the first tweet came in about a 7.9 quake in northern Japan, I sat up and took an interest in the developing story. As I watched the news, they upgraded the estimate from 7.9 to 8.4 and then to 8.8. The Pacific Tsunami Warning center almost immediately issued an advisory, then a warning, for Hawaii, but the West Coast and Alaska center’s board remained green even as I headed to bed around midnight. Nonetheless, I took my phone along and set an alarm to wake me just before the first waves were due in Hawaii.

I did so because, as I had watched the terrible pictures coming in from Japan, burning houses floating implacably inland on the debris-strewn waves, I had also been searching for some estimate of historical impacts of cross-Pacific tsunamis and the transit times… and I didn’t find out very much. There have not been very many to study in the modern era. Based on our previous experience, I wasn’t particularly worried, but since they kept upgrading the magnitude, I wasn’t exactly complacent, either. I wanted fair warning if it got upgraded again overnight.

It did, and WCATWC finally issued an advisory for one foot waves at Port Angeles, and my phone chimed, and I got up and got the camera out to see if I could capture any photographic evidence this time around. Almost a half hour after the predicted time of impact, this is as good as I got:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The tide was falling at the same time, and the actual measured impact was only six inches in Port Townsend, and ultimately those waves I saw could have just been the wake of a passing freighter. As with last year’s tsunami, I was distinctly unimpressed.

Despite that, I felt that this time around both the warning centers and the news media got it right; despite the relative accuracy of the predictions, in many respects this represents unexplored realms and the alerts had what I considered to be a respectable degree of excess caution in them… respectable in the sense that it was only clearly excessive in retrospect. The one death and several close calls suffered in California and Oregon hopefully underscore the wisdom of those who evacuated as directed, even though we now know most of them would have been fine.

The more time I spent looking into what is known and unknown about this phenomena the more seriously I came to regard it. One can scoff at the local outcomes of overseas earthquakes for only so long before having to consider the likelihood of such an event much closer to home. Japan’s warning systems and civil protection are the finest in the world when it comes to seismic activity; their infrastructure and population preparedness far exceed our own. Along their coastline, most residents had at least fifteen minutes warning that the waves were coming, and they have been drilled to a far greater degree than our own populace on what to do when they receive such a warning. Still, the death toll promises to be staggering.

In Seattle, it turns out, there would likely be no warning, or none besides the tremor itself. A quake along the Seattle fault could generate a 16 foot tsunami that would be on downtown’s doorstep in two minutes flat. Not only is that not enough time for a warning; it may not be enough time for the shaking to dissipate enough to make your run for the hills… the Sendai quake lasted five minutes. You’d have been under water for three by the time you could start to evacuate. How long can you hold your breath?

Based on what we saw from the Nisqually quake in 2001, most people in the inundation zone (you can check the prediction map here (PDF)) aren’t thinking about evacuating anyway. Video from Pioneer Square, sure to be hard hit, showed crowds milling around watching the facades crumble afterward. Without knowing that the origin of the quake had been the Nisqually fault, far to the south, for all practical purposes they should have been lacing up their shoes and sprinting up Yesler in an impromptu marathon.

If you’re aboard your boat, of course, you’re in even worse shape. I can barely get off my dock in two minutes on a good day, still less if it’s on an elevator ride down as the water is sucked out before the wave. Of course, the two minutes is a worst case scenario for which the odds are essentially unknown, the Seattle fault being a relatively recent discovery and a poorly understood one at that. A more likely scenario, and one that allows more response options, has to do with the Cascadia subduction zone, fifty miles off the Washington coast. That’s neither wine nor roses either, though, since it has potential for much larger (Sendai-size) quakes and more significant wave heights. And despite the yeoman’s work that NOAA, the USGS, and local civil defense authorities have been doing spreading the word about quake and tsunami threats, and despite the proximity of the threat to Puget Sound, there is actually very little information that I could find from any of them on what a Cascadia subduction zone quake might mean in the way of tsunami waves in the Salish Sea.

The few predictions I found about transit times were vague and dealt only with the coast… around thirty minutes. I suppose an hour would be a reasonable minimum guess for locations in the Sound. But what to do in that hour? If you’re anchored out, do you dinghy ashore and run for it, or get underway? If you plan to stick with the boat, conventional wisdom is that deep water (better than 100 fathoms, according to NOAA) is good, and much of Puget Sound is that deep, but it’s unclear that the depth is as protective in what amounts to a narrow channel, or with what could be as much seiche as tsunami. If you plan to seek shelter ashore, where ashore? The inundation maps are based around the Seattle fault data and 16 foot waves, not the 100 foot monsters possible from the Cascadia zone. Of course 100 feet at the coast will be less in Puget Sound, but how much less? What about currents? What impact does the funnel of the Strait of Juan de Fuca have? How much buffer is Whidbey Island? Or does the refraction from those high bluffs spell extra peril in Port Townsend? No official estimates appear to exist.

I suppose the safest answer is just get as high as you can as quick as you can if you’re near-shore, but it’s not that simple… given ten to fifteen minutes, I can get up about forty feet from where I am sitting at this very moment. A half hour, I can be up to 400. But to get up to 400 feet, I have to go down again first; so if it’s going to hit in twenty minutes, I had better take my chances on a lower hill. If I’m underway, I imagine I’ll get as close to the center of the channel as I can and ride it out… we’re so slow that there may be no other plausible options, which I guess at least takes the worrisome guesswork out of survival and places it strictly in the realm of fate.

We have a long way to go, both publicly and privately, before we are even as close to as ready as Japan was, but with chances of a significant event running between 10% and 37% in the current fifty year window (depending on whose predictions you believe), it’s not a trivial matter. I’m trying to do as much as I can personally to be prepared, but it’s a little frustrating to not even have the basis of an official nautical scenario to plan around. Hopefully this spurs a renewed discussion of the issues.

One of the sailboats that had gotten slammed up against the marina breakwater during the Thanksgiving storm had returned to the mooring field, though, despite still having gaping holes in the hull and having been dismasted. I imagine money was tight and the owner had nowhere else to go. He may also have subconsciously had a sort of death-wish for the vessel, too (I know the feeling), though, because I happened to look out the window on Friday to see her stuck in the mud just inshore of the marina.

Vessel Aground

Fortunately, the tide was rising, the mud flats were partly sheltered from wave action by the marina docks, and it just so happens that Port Hadlock Vessel Assist is moored at the dock right next to where it was all happening. They literally just backed straight out of their slip and got a line on her. It wasn’t all a cake walk, though:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And it got even worse as they got out from behind the breakwater and put her on their beam to push her into a temporary slip:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bouncy ride! I ran out of memory on the camera before they got her tucked away, but it took a few goes with the waves on the beam. Nonetheless, once again a very professional, tidy job by Port Hadlock Vessel Assist.

While all this was happening, a yawl that also happened to be over there (with a crew aboard; the grounded yacht was empty and unlivable) raised sail and took off south through the Cut into Oak Bay. The tide was against him and the roller coaster was operating at full speed off Indian Island as the current smashed into the wind, but he swept right down south under sail anyway. It looked like fun. I have often wondered why I don’t see more of the boats out there doing exactly that when the storms blow in; you’re a ten minute sail from safety, no matter how rough it is running in the Cut. I was happy to see someone taking the opportunity this time around. He was back later in the evening when the winds dropped, safe and sound.

A sad sight

It’s often the case with boats that the worst is not immediately apparent, and this has proven true with the November 22/23 snow and wind storm that pounded the North Sound. The day after was grim enough, with boats missing from the mooring field off Port Hadlock, and others smashed up against their neighbors or the marina breakwater. The carnage visible at first light was just the beginning, though. As the day wore on, the bad news piled up.

On the bank below the house, inaccessible at high tide with the waves up, a sixteen or eighteen footer was washed up, tangled in trees and rocks. The hull, at least, seems to be intact.

Cuttyhunk's tender responds

Out past that wreck, evidence began to accumulate that something worse had happened to something larger. A Coast Guard cutter, the Cuttyhunk, showed up and dispatched a tender in toward the marina. An ominous parade of debris marched past toward shore… a section of cabin trunk, an intact hatch, random bits of splintered wood. A float that I had mistaken for a drifting mooring ball turned out to be a scotchman, which in turn was still attached to a section of lifeline… which itself was still attached to a line of stanchions. The sailboat that we had noticed was missing from it’s mooring ball had broken up and sunk completely.

When the waves had died down enough, Vessel Assist ducked out to the outside of the breakwater and got a line on the catamaran that had been bashed up there most of the night. A parade of helpful folks made their way across a narrow, icy plank between the docks and the breakwater and began to salvage items from the boats and debris remaining there.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Across the bay, during the morning we had seen a fishing vessel moored next to a tugboat owned by a family friend drift downwind and finally manage to back into the wind and waves and tie up at the pier again. Today we got the rest of the story, as my stepfather called to tell us that the friend with the tug might need to come by to borrow a ladder… the fishing vessel had torn loose and stove in the tug’s bow (planking that had been painstakingly replaced only a couple years ago). There was three feet of water in the engine room by the time they got down to check on the boat.

Surveying the damage

Today has been about picking up the pieces… literally, in some cases. Vessel Assist was out and busy again after a long day out yesterday, and defying a high tide, folks were down working at getting the eighteen footer on the bank untangled and ready to refloat. The tug steamed north to the boatyard in Port Townsend and is up on blocks tonight, waiting for an insurance surveyor. The final toll is at least one sunk, four or five aground or severely damaged. But this was only the second big storm in a winter that promises to be filled with them.

Smashed boats and docks

It’s an eery thing to watch a boat die by moonlight.

Any time, if you are not accustomed to such things, it is jarring to see any vessel in extremis… the carefully designed lines canted at odd angles, water invading places where no water should be. But by the light of a full moon, further amplified by a frozen dusting of snow glistening from every available surface, it’s particularly surreal.

The winds in Port Townsend, which were forecast to dissipate by the early morning hours, continued to howl down out of the north unabated, raising four to five foot rollers which were marching south in gleaming ranks by 0500, pounding a loose catamaran against the breakwater at Hadlock Marina and dismasting her sometime in the night. Another vessel, a sailboat with her mast removed, had been attended by Vessel Assist only the day before with her decks awash. Pumped dry, she was riding high at sunset last night. This morning, there is no sign of her, just the infrequent gleam in the midst of the breakers that hints of the mooring ball she was resting on.

The weather station in Port Townsend is reporting winds only in the 15-25 knot range, but it’s probably ten knots greater than that here at the exposed south end of the bay.

At dawn, fuller measure of the damage could be taken. The bow section of the starboard hull of the cat had torn off. The mast, which had been rolling around on the cabin top last night, was nowhere to be seen. A smaller runabout which hadn’t been visible in the moonlight had joined her there pinned against the breakwater, itself smashing alternately into the cat and the concrete. Further along, a sloop had its rolled up jib come unfurled and it whipped itself into ribbons in the early morning light. From our angle, it was impossible to tell if it was in the marina or another victim forced up onto the breakwater… either way, the exaggerated roll was sure to be pounding it against whatever it rested next to. In past the marina, a mooring ball appeared in the bay that had not been there before, some random bit of debris still tied to it that I can only hope does not represent the remains of a boat.

In the marina, life didn’t look much better. A schooner near the outboard end had doubled and trebled her lines and stood watch on them most of the night. Nearby, a section of dock had partially torn away and was beginning to roll under water. Someone’s dinghy had torn loose from the davits and was dangling into the waves. The carnage made the single dock box that was swept off and onto shore last week look trivial.

There was one good point to the wind, at least; snow that might otherwise have built up and frozen on masts and rigging was blasted clear well before it could have become a problem.

Under a clear sky, the schooner crew decided they had had enough of being at the bottom of the washing machine and pulled out for a brisk, chilly trip north. As I write this, it’s still too rough for anyone to try to pull off the cat or stabilize the dock. Which brings out another uncomfortable realization of nautical life: sometimes all you can do is watch.

Edit: For some reason, my YouTube embed isn’t sticking here; you can watch a short video of the schooner pulling out here.

I knew instantly what the problem was, as the same candle had looked suspicious to me earlier in the day, and I bolted out of the v-berth, blew it out, and ran back to hit the silence button on the smoke alarm. Then I popped a few vents to air the place out and went back to bed.

The next day, Mandy told me, sounding a little surprised at herself, “I thought the boat was on fire, but it didn’t even scare me. I just rolled over to grab the fire extinguisher to put it out!”

I was very proud of her. There may be some people who routinely react to potential catastrophe with such calm, practical action, but in my experience they are few and far between. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, quite a few of them are sailors.

I am sure there is probably some psychological or scientific rationale for this, or perhaps it’s simply some figment of my imagination, but when I think about it, I attribute the tendency to the general experience that sailors have with catastrophe in all its forms. As with anything, I think you simply get used to it. At first every catastrophe is overwhelming… trying to tack in a narrow channel and have a jib sheet over-ride on the winch? Petrifying. But after it happens a few times, it’s ho-hum, another #@$*# over-ride, time to fix it. The same thing happens with broaches, engine failures, torn sails, parted halyards, stuck anchors, dragging anchors, shorted electronics, broken hatches, and any other number and manner of ill-favored occurrence. These are ordinary catastrophes, and after a time, they all fade into one, so that a fire simply becomes an occasion to roll over and grab a fire extinguisher, flooding simply means it’s time to grab a bucket, and sinking, I imagine, simply means it’s time to step up into the life raft. If sailing can turn my lovely but excitable wife into such a practical creature in only a few years, who knows what powers it might wield over the fullness of time?

None of this is to suggest that the occasional catastrophe isn’t capable of getting the blood flowing, but that is all part of the fun of it. There is something satisfying, the same something I suppose keeps parachutists jumping out of planes and bungee jumpers leaping off bridges (only we get lovely sunsets and dolphins as well), that imparts a tremendous sense of confidence and well-being from knowing that one won’t panic during these episodes.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. – popularly attributed to Edmund Burke

Obion County, Tennessee, is a long way from the water, but very near to the vision that some folks have for the future of our Coast Guard and other maritime rescue agencies. Obion County is where, in case you hadn’t heard, a fully equipped and prepared fire crew responded, then stood by and watched burn to the ground, the house of a county homeowner who had failed to pay the nearby city of South Fulton a subscription fee for fire protection service. Then, the house fully destroyed, pets within it dead, the fire crew calmly cracked open their hoses and put out a patch of fire that had spread into a neighbor’s field… the neighbor, you see, was all paid up.

When I read this I thought immediately of what I wrote earlier this year on the growing trend of agencies billing survivors for the costs of their rescue. This is an insidious development in that trend that I didn’t see coming… because the curious thing is that the homeowner offered to pay any amount to the firefighters for them to put out his house, and they still refused. I suppose they were worried that a commitment made in the heat of the moment might not be honored. Nonetheless, it gave me visions of a helicopter winchman dangling at the end of his cable, credit card machine in hand, waiting for your charge to clear before hoisting you off the deck of your sinking/burning/capsized boat.

Completely apart from the high-level philosophical and socioeconomic debates over moral hazard and the tragedy of the commons, what sort of person could call themselves a firefighter who would stand by well-equipped and prepared and watch a home burn to the ground because they hadn’t been paid first? I don’t personally know any normal, untrained civilians who would so callously hesitate to help in such a situation where they had the ability to do so and the means at hand already provided for.

But maybe that’s because a lot of people I know are sailors, and that’s just how sailors are. I read the auto-biography recently of Harry Grattidge, a commodore for the Cunard Line, who emphasized his first and most important lesson in seamanship as an officer apprentice: “…when you’re in sail you don’t always thing of yourself first. You do your damnedest to help the other fellow if you can.”

I find it interesting that some of the most well-prepared and rugged individualists I know are sailors, and yet that they have more compassion and sense of community than all the chest-thumping, lubberly neanderthals that keep calling for these pay-as-you-go emergency services. I don’t think that is just a coincidence. If you sail, the reality is that you must be personally prepared; there are too many situations in which no one else is going to be able to help, where you must rely on yourself and your boat. But perhaps that also forces us to realize that even that isn’t always enough. Community and cooperation are necessities in any important endeavor. None of us are immune to forces larger than we are individually equipped to deal with, and separately many of us would surely fail. Every man for himself only gets you so far, and community is not a zero-sum game; it results in benefits that are more than the sum of its parts. And maybe that is part of what makes the nautical community what it is. You may curse that jerk who leaves you rolling with his huge wake, but if he starts to founder, or you do, the other will certainly be there to help, no questions asked.

Maybe I’m just too shell-shocked by the sudden availability of news now that we are back from the isolation of sailing, but these and other stories of mindless contention have been enormously depressing to me lately. I suppose it’s always been like this, but it makes me a bit sad to be back; moreso when I see the infection starting to spread to the place where I have so far been able to take refuge, out on the water. Enjoying freedom and independence don’t have to mean every man for himself.