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 like to think I honor this more in the breach than in the observance, and on joining a fellow transient here in Friday Harbor in greeting a 42 foot Catalina that was just coming in, I was gently but reasonably chastised by the other gentleman on the dock, a fellow with a laid-back attitude but considerable sailing experience. Seeing the Catalina skidding out of line with the slip it was coming into, I offered to take the bowline with the intention of moving forward and hauling the bow around as the boat powered in, which seemed the likely course of action. The other fellow shook his head and said, “I prefer to wait for them to tell me what they would like,” thereby setting off a micro-debate in my head.

His position was, of course, quite proper, certainly reflecting the “book” approach to docking courtesy, or in fact almost any nautical matter. The captain runs the boat, no question. My fellow helper had misread my intent slightly, I think; I wasn’t actually going to haul away, just move into position, but no matter… what he assumed was something that in fact happens frequently. It also made me realize that in other circumstances I am more aggressive than the recommended policy would dictate. In the event, the skipper decided to back off and go around again, a decision I will never scoff at, so we stood around and chatted idly about docking while waiting for his return.

As it happened, I might have been more sensitive to the matter, because my own approach into the marina here a couple days ago was in fact blown by a well-meaning bystander, who pushed off my bow without my direction, and who then misheard or misunderstood my requests that he haul in on the bow line before we were blown away. I had to go around again, too… frustrating work on what was a much windier day than today.

Still, I am not sure that I entirely agree that just waiting for the skipper’s direction is always the thing to do. For one thing, it’s been my experience that a captain who knows what he is doing and what he wants his line handlers to do will be loud and up front in telegraphing his instructions. If you’re left standing there with a slack line in your hands for more than ten seconds, you are not likely to receive any decisive direction from the bridge thereafter, and in my view, it’s time to start providing the sort of assistance that is really needed, which is usually action of some sort. If you’re only going to be a spectator, you may as well stay off the finger dock and out of the way. I’ve never been inclined to simply hang around waiting for unforthcoming direction while things are going sideways, even if it isn’t my boat; right, wrong, I’m going to do something, not just stand there with a limp line in my hands. And yeah, I get how sometimes doing nothing is better than something. But something that we both agreed on today was that we could indeed have brought the boat in on the first pass. Today it didn’t much matter, but sometimes the first chance is the only one you get.

It’s arrogant to assume that one knows better than the skipper how to land a boat, but it’s also a situation that you see time and again. Goodness knows my own docking skills leave much to be desired. I have had my bacon saved innumerable times by more experienced hands helping from dockside, and on more than one occasion have followed their directions rather than giving any to them, and they’ve brought me in successfully. When it’s obvious the skipper coming in is inexperienced or uncertain, I don’t have a problem taking steps to get them in the rest of the way without their explicit direction. And there are also those times where it is clear that everyone is of a mind about the proceeding, and it’s more imposition to make them state the obvious than simply to do it. Maybe it’s still “wrong” but it’s also the most commonly done thing, and maybe sometimes the safest.

The rub, of course, is knowing when those times are and when you are stepping on someone’s toes or messing up well-laid plans. I suppose that’s simply a job for experience to determine. The more I am out sailing, and perhaps the longer I live life, the less inclined I am to put faith in blind rules and the more I ascribe to exercising judgement instead. Taking responsibility for a bad call every once in a while may be a necessary part of the package. In my view, it’s still better than standing by when someone may need help that they don’t quite know how to ask for.

In making my judgement, though, I’ll confess I had some inside information on the vessel today that my companion on the dock lacked: though there was a completely different crew aboard, the boat was the very same one that anchored too close aboard us in Ganges two weeks ago and tangled her bow roller in our lifelines around midnight. She’s a charter boat and the skippers aren’t likely to be familiar with her handling or have a great deal of experience docking her.

But this skipper came around again and slid her in nicely on the second try with hardly a push necessary from on the dock. I did push, though; one fender was set too high for the notoriously low docks at Friday Harbor and I kept the hull from scraping without being so told. I also made fast the stern line after I took it and she stopped moving. I suppose those were both transgressions. I check or adjust my docklines after anyone else helps me with them, I expect any other competent skipper can do the same… I don’t need to stand around and make him come down and do it himself the first time, as was apparently the other fellow’s policy. Of course, I’m happy to do as I’m told, but if not told to, I’m still capable of exercising my own brain muscle slightly and doing something.

I guess what it boils down to is that I agree with and respect the sentiment of waiting for the skipper’s direction, and I will certainly follow any that is given. But I don’t think it’s necessary or desirable to allow hesitant, uncertain, or frightened skippers to flail around without taking a more proactive role if one is able. Communication is golden in these situations. Many of them simply aren’t confident enough to tell you what they want, and my thing lately has been to just ask… “Where do you want me?”; and to follow with more leading questions if I don’t get an answer… “I’ll haul in on the bow while you power forward, okay?”

Miss Manners I ain’t; but bringing them in, I can do.

On Mooring, Port Hadlock

I believe I have mentioned previously that my idea of a good night on board involves a lot of scope on the anchor rode and plenty of swinging room. It turns out that “lots” and “plenty” are variables with a wide range of possible values depending on the person assigning them. Most of the cruising literature talks blithely of scopes of 7:1 or 10:1 (the “1” in the ratio representing the depth at which that anchor is being set; I’ll leave it to others to explain the geometry and physics behind the “more is better” philosophy), assuming what I can only imagine are Caribbean-like conditions of moderate tides, steady winds, 15 foot depths, and plenty of space. Here in the Pacific Northwest, 3:1 may be about the norm, and 4:1 luxurious. The water is deep, tidal range is great, anchorages are few and boats are many. In a lot of places, you wouldn’t have sufficient swinging room on 10:1 even if you were by yourself (and happened to have 600 feet of rode bent on).

I bring this up again because of a number of debates I uncovered while researching anchoring etiquette. I was looking into it because of an ambiguity in the otherwise fairly standard code of “first come, first served, dragging party resets.” The ambiguity has to do with unoccupied moorings. They aren’t often mentioned in the mix, but they are increasingly a prominent feature in popular anchorages, and there seems to be little consensus on how to deal with them. Everyone agrees, in the main, that they should generally be kept clear of, as moored boats will swing differently than anchored boats, and that it’s a bad idea to tie up to one yourself, as the owner may return at midnight, and anyway you don’t know the quality of the anchor.

My question arose when we anchored in Mark Bay, near Nanaimo, which can be crowded, and where we ended up on the edge of the anchorage a bit close to someone’s pieced-together permanent mooring. There are a number of these through the bay, and increasingly through many of the popular anchorages in the Gulf Islands; Telegraph Harbour is littered with them, and Silva Bay is absolutely choked. We re-anchored a little further away, but not knowing what size boat was typically tied to the thing, it was hard to judge an adequate distance.

So I was wondering what my obligations were and started searching a bit, and uncovered a raging debate that touches the topic. Apparently I am supposed to be boycotting Nanaimo entirely because they are exploring a permitting process for Mark Bay (this is separate from the anti-development Nanaimo boycott; that seems like a lot of boycotts for a town that size), similar to the False Creek system; people see it as an affront to freedom and our anchoring liberties, and in some sense at least I am with them on that; on the other hand, the thrust of the argument suggests that moorings be respected as the “first boat” and that if the original tenant returned, I should re-anchor. It’s easy to see how that custom turns out like Silva Bay, where you simply don’t anchor. The “Boycott Nanaimo” crowd sees this as a secondary concern to keeping government out of the anchoring process; their opponents think the derelicts, out-of-code permanent moorings, and floating homes are impactful enough to be worthy of regulation.

It’s a worthy debate, and not just a Pacific Northwestern question, of course, but in the midst of all the finger-pointing and recriminations I found very little practical advice in how to honorably approach anchoring in crowded mooring fields. Some discussion amongst British cruisers suggests giving them little respect, even to the extent that one might pick up an unoccupied mooring (quite a no-no here in the States); amongst East Coast cruisers, where in many municipalities private moorings are costly and hard to come by, they seem to be treated almost as reverently as a home ashore. Beth Leonard, in “The Cruiser’s Handbook,” suggests you avoid anchoring near them, but if you must, you needn’t leave if the owner returns, implicitly suggesting that despite the ball, the second boat is always the second boat. That seems, at least, to be common sense to me… without an actual boat there, no one anchoring anywhere nearby has an opportunity to judge size and swing, and it seems unfair to hold them to any particular degree of keeping clear without that information.

So that’s my perspective on the matter at the moment, but I would love to hear other opinions… not so much on the broader question of anchoring rights and use, but rather on the etiquette and protocol of anchoring near moorings in typically crowded areas.

The ideal stern tie

So I mentioned previously that one of the koans my cruising Zen master, Sturt Bay, gave me was about stern-ties. Also called shore-ties, this common Pacific Northwest practice involves dropping one’s anchor in the desired water depth off-shore, then backing down on it toward the shoreline and running a second line to a convenient anchoring point on shore. Like the venerable Med-moor, this allows more boats to fit into limited space than would otherwise be possible. It is used to allow anchorage in tight spots otherwise unsuitable due to limited swinging space, such as notches, or along steep depth gradients where only a narrow shelf of anchoring depth is available very close to the shoreline. It is also, as I mentioned, simply the polite thing to do in popular anchorages. Many a tree along the Pacific Northwest shore has a groove in the bark from shore-tie lines (dead trees preferred; otherwise, you’ll inadvertently start contributing to the clear-cutting endemic to the region) and some particularly popular anchorages feature rings set along the walls for this purpose.

After my stern-tie fiasco in Sturt Bay, it became clear that we needed to work out some other method for setting things up in contrary winds. We’ve been running shore-ties for several years now but for whatever reason all our previous experiences had been in relatively benign conditions. So, faced with the new challenge, I put some thought into it and was ready when we got to Prideaux Haven in a nasty cross-wind. I would send Mandy ashore with the line while I jockeyed the helm and got the anchor set; I could back against it and keep enough slack in the line for her to loop around a tree and bring back.

In the event, this did not prove to be much easier, and required about forty-five minutes and several trips between ship and shore to accomplish. Prideaux Haven is a popular, usually crowded anchorage, but it wasn’t busy on this day and by the end of it I felt vaguely stupid for having gone through such exertions (although having no doubt served the admirable purpose of having entertained the rest of the anchorage for an extended period) to save space when there was swinging room available all over the cove.

So when we picked up and moved to Walsh Cove, another Provincial Marine Park slightly north of Prideaux Haven, I breathed a sigh of relief that it seemed relatively empty. I could pick a nice, empty patch near the middle, slop out a kingly 4:1 scope, and dangle in the winds to my heart’s content, inhibiting no one and saving vast amount of exertion and frustration.

That was around noon. By late afternoon, the place started to fill up. I thought anxiously about good citizenship and stern-ties, but I had set fairly deep, and the closest likely candidate was a small islet with nothing substantial growing on it to tie to. At that, it was further away than I could reach; our designated shore-tie line is about a quarter the recommended length (most people say 600′ is good). Still, that very position put us pretty well clear of where others might drop the hook… I thought.

It didn’t take long before someone came in and got a little too close. After fending off one another, they decided to set a stern-tie ashore, and I thought nothing more about it.

A couple hours later, the currents and wind got a little odd, and I heard an accented “Excuse me!” through our companionway, and it sounded like whoever said it was standing in the cockpit. I got up, and there were our neighbors again, with our stern swinging dangerously close to their anchor rode.

The rule may be that he who anchors first has the right of way, but I was already feeling like the stupid American, so when they offered to lend a hand getting the line ashore and finding a way to secure it, I jumped on the offer. I paid out enough rode to get our stern closer and the intrepid yachtsman from S/V Effervescence rowed the line in and found a piece of scrub sturdy enough to hold it. We were still too far out to loop it back again (which would allow us to take off without rowing ashore again to untie it) but although thoroughly embarrassed by my continued bad manners, I felt better with it out there.

“Everyone will sleep better this way,” one of the men from Effervescence called across in a strong Quebecois accent.

But, in fact, I had an unsettling dream that a small tugboat worked in behind me and cut the line during the night, sending us spinning around through the anchorage. So much for a good sleep! I was forced to stay an extra day, laying around napping, to recover from the ordeal. Such is the life of a sailor.

The first time I came to Sturt Bay, it was toward the end of a blustery day that had culminated in a tacking duel of sorts between ourselves and another sailboat bound for, as it turned out, the same tiny destination. That shouldn’t have been any surprise, because there are few places to duck out of the north end of Malaspina Strait for the night. Sturt Bay represents about seventy-five percent of those places.

The race wasn’t formal, and from the other boat’s perspective, probably didn’t even exist, but it’s a natural thing to start to measure your progress against others on the same path and I shouted gleefully when I saw them ‘give’ by turning into the wind and furling their sails well short of the destination. Our rails buried in foaming green water, we actually gained on them after they started motoring. My first Sturt Bay Zen lesson: sailboats are meant to sail. When it gets rough, you’re probably not gaining anything by dropping sail and relying on your engine. They had a rougher, slower ride on what already had to have been a difficult day.

When we actually ducked into the bay, I was doubly glad we had beat them there. Deep at the mouth, the available anchorage area for small craft toward the head is woefully tight, hemmed in by drying shoals on both sides, with relatively small shelves of solid mud holding ground around the periphery. On a windy day, when one is looking to put a lot of scope out, there may only be swinging room for a couple of boats. We were number one; the anchor was down and set by the time the other sailboat nosed in, and he shuffled around forlornly a bit before going in and tying up at the Texada Boat Club docks (also a fine choice; but not free).

I congratulated myself on ‘winning’ the race and picking up the prime anchoring spot, immensely self-satisfied. Only later did I realize what a jerk I had been. By setting a stern tie to shore, there would have been plenty of room for both of us and more boats besides, should they come in. I had rushed in, slopped out a lot of scope, and monopolized a precious anchorage in a storm. I imagine mariners have been hung for less.

Second Sturt Bay Zen lesson: don’t be a jerk, help other boats fit in.

So, this year, when I once again found myself entering Sturt Bay at the end of the day (thankfully in much more benign conditions) I was both gratified to find it almost empty again, and determined to do my part to keep it open for any later arrivals. And just as we were setting the hook toward the head of the cove, a powerboat came in behind us, the owner standing on the foredeck and looking around speculatively.

“I’ve never been in here before,” he yelled across.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m going to set a shore tie, you’ll have plenty of room to drop right there!”

Once the anchor was set I hauled out my stern tie line and put the raft over the side. I made the line fast to a stern cleat and started rowing for shore. I rowed. And rowed. And rowed. It wasn’t that far… but the wind, if not threatening, was still brisk enough to swing the stern of the boat out toward the center of the bay, and not in the direction I was hauling the line. Turning a big boat with a lot of windage broad on to the wind with oar power alone, I found, wasn’t all that easy. Maddeningly, I could pull it around and get within ten feet or so of shore just before the next gust came up to turn the boat back around, and force me to start rowing like mad again just to hold in place.

The power boater made a few runs at setting his own anchor and eventually gave up and headed for the Boat Club docks. I hope he was just unhappy with how he set and wasn’t fed up with waiting around for me. I gave up, eventually, and rowed myself and my spaghetti coil of line back to Insegrevious.

Third Sturt Bay Zen lesson: good intentions are meaningless without some abilities to back them up.

I have thought up a half-dozen ways I might have accomplished what I was planning on, if only I had thought about it and talked it through first with my wife. It’s hard to come up with and implement that stuff on the spur of the moment, though, particularly if you are not very experienced cruisers. If there’s anything else that Sturt Bay has taught me, it’s that we’re an awfully long way from that sort of Zen focus I can only admire in others.

We’re passing by there a couple more times on this trip, though. Who knows what I might learn?

As far as she travels and as often as she performs, I imagine she still gets opening night jitters, and that’s something I can relate to in an otherwise unrelatable experience. I’ve had opening night jitters for the last three days as we have beat our way northward through the San Juans and Gulf Islands.

The sailing has been fine, excellent even; just as last year, sunshine seems to be triggered by our departure from the Puget Sound region, and it’s provided the perfect counter-balance to the chilly but moderate northerly breezes we’ve had, enough to account for short-sleeves at the helm all day long. Beating past the Adventuress as she makes sail, drifting softly up San Juan Channel as vics of geese pass overhead… these are the memories that Pacific Northwest sailing are built on.

But while the sailing has all come naturally and without any great effort, the anchoring has been something else entirely. I suppose it’s only to be expected; I’ve been sailing pretty regularly this year, since February, and in sometimes challenging conditions that keep the skills familiar. Until last night, though, I hadn’t let go the anchor in nearly a year, and it’s taking some effort to get through the jitters.

Mind you, the conditions have been pretty close to ideal… we’ve been in well-charted anchorages with firm and proven holding, the waters are sheltered, the winds have been calm. Other than what can only be called a normal level of summer-time congestion with other tenants, it just doesn’t get any better for putting down the hook.

But in my mind, I can’t seem to place it where I want it, and when I do, I’m not satisfied with the set, and when I am, the scope is wrong, and we’re too close to another boat, or a rock, or shore, or some other unspecified obstruction. I can only peer around nervously, certain that everyone else is staring at my ineptitude, worried that someone nearby is going to yell out those dreaded words, “Hey! You’re way too close here!” And I’ll have to pull it up by hand, since we don’t have a winch, and go through the whole routine again, probably with just as unfavorable results.

None of this, of course, has actually happened, and objectively I doubt that anyone bats an eye at my antics… only half the other craft that come in even bother to back down on their ground tackle, and while my scope might seem embarrassingly generous by Pacific Northwest standards, the swinging room left between boats has been just about average for these anchorages. It’s mostly in my own jittery, over-cautious mind that these factors all measure up to varying levels of deficiency. And in a few days, with a few more anchorages behind me and no particular traumas to point to from them, I’ll probably be dropping and picking up the hook with as little conscious thought as I ever have. Anchoring is more art than science, every boat is a bit different, and every situation has a number of factors that are assessed as much on a subconscious as conscious level. So it can be expected that it might take a while to get in the flow of it all again.

Still, I doubt I will sleep well tonight, and if the wind picks up I’ll have my head out the hatch every ten minutes, anxiously comparing positions. Another part of my conversation with the tugboat owner will no doubt come back to me in that moment; as we stood there on the deck with the cladding planks torn up, he pointed down next to a worn oval, nearly an inch deep, in the original planking of the turn-of-the-century tug. “That’s where the controls for the winch were,” he said, and I thought with awe on the generations of workers that must have stood there to wear that groove in the solid decking, working the controls as they eased some great vessel in or out of its berth, or took up barges in haul. When I think about in now, though, what I think is, “Boy, I wish I had a winch.”

Image courtesy Tim Zim, licensed under Creative Commons.

Gawande makes the distinction between a lack of knowledge that results in failures (“inexperienced”) and a lack of application of existing knowledge to the same end (“inept”). His examples are primarily medical in nature, which will give you a sinking feeling the next time you go to the hospital for anything, but the application is broader. His point is that even vastly experienced and knowledgeable experts in various fields make routine, predictable errors of omission even when they know better. I think most of us know sailors, or have read biographies of those, who have fallen into that category.

His solution, as you might guess from the title of the book, is as old as the hills: use checklists so that you don’t forget to do the things you know.

My observation about sailors and checklists is that we tend to fall into one of three categories:

• Doesn’t approve of any sort of regimentation, don’t like ‘em, won’t make ‘em, won’t use ‘em. Docks at full throttle and doesn’t look back.
• Thinks they are a great idea, promptly sits down and creates a number of valuable and helpful lists, then fails to use them. Provides great entertainment for spectators with yells, hand gestures, and wild grabs between wheel and dock lines when coming in.
• Understands checklists intuitively, makes extraordinarily brief yet practical lists, uses them religiously. You don’t notice them coming in; they just sort of appear in the slip.

I fall firmly into the middle category. I think checklists are great, I make them up every time I find that I have forgotten something dumb and obvious, and then after using them for a while as a sort of learning tool, promptly stop referring to them. Until the next time I forget something.

I suspect that, like dieting and exercise, checklist use is more about lifestyle change than the faddish adoption of a cool checklist technique. While changing your lifestyle is a whole separate subject, I think I am ready to get on board with changing mine to move closer to the third category.

This fits in with a broader topic that deserves, and will get, its own dedicated post at some point, risk.

Gawande’s point, however, is that in complex circumstances, even the most highly trained and experienced people routinely forget or disregard sometimes obvious critical steps. These are things that many of us just call “stupid mistakes.” I am forever kicking myself for making these; doing something that I knew, on reflection, I should not have done, or failing to take some precaution that I otherwise might have done as a matter of course.

The thing about checklists is that they are inconvenient. For those ninety times out of a hundred that you would have gotten through just on memory or by winging it, they just slow you down, encumber your time and enjoyment. That is where the risk factor comes in; risk is not simply how likely a bad thing is to happen, but the combination of the likelihood of its happening with the severity of the outcome. The inconvenience of the list can’t be weighed against just all those sunny days on which the pre-departure checklist is an unwelcome nuisance before leaving the dock, but also against that one hairy time the wind comes up and the engine quits and oh boy, did you make sure the anchor is shackled to the rode and ready to drop and did you unstow the boat hook to fend off from that expensive-looking cabin cruiser across the way? But of course, most of us consider this a little too late, and complacency is convenient most of the time.

On this subject, Laurence Shick’s article “Personal Minimums: Making Good Decisions When You Aren’t Thinking Straight” is a great read. As with Gawande’s book, it traces much of its inspiration to aeronautics, where checklists are, as I intimated they should be, a way of life. I suspect it’s not a coincidence that both men hit on this example.

Gawande goes on to emphasize that the use of checklists in aviation is not simply a cultural fluke, but a specific response to evolving complexity. Further, he goes some way toward exploring the aviation community’s efforts and success with avoiding the inconvenience problem. I think that’s probably key to adopting checklists in sailing as well.

He identifies three key points in checklist development that makes them successful:

• Only items likely to be forgotten are included
• Information must be presented in “…a simple, usable, and systematic form”
• Constant refinement

The last may be the most important point. You can’t expect to get it right on the first go; giving up when the first draft is inconvenient or unhelpful is never going to get you anywhere. Instead, modifying the list to fit in better with the circumstances of its use, gradually improving it as deficiencies are noted, will eventually result in a useful, usable document.

And that may be what I have been missing. In my disappointment, or complacency, I tend to just start over, often at a bad time. And without having stuck to it long enough to develop a culture of checklist discipline, it’s all too easy to abandon them.

There are many other excellent observations in the book, and I have almost entirely skipped over some of the most important, so if it’s something you are interested in, I would highly recommend giving it a quick read. At 209 pages, it’s not exactly War and Peace; even if you haven’t previously considered the applicability of checklists in your own sailing routine, it’s not going to take you too much time to check it out and at least decide to implement them or not with a little more information in hand.

Let’s see, what’s that last step on my new “Publish Blog Post” checklist? Ah, yes, that’s right, “Click on Publish button.”

Ballard Locks by kun0me

It’s spring, and boaters new and old are again facing the prospect of passing through the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks to get from freshwater moorages on Lake Union and Lake Washington to the saltwater cruising grounds of Puget Sound. A recent trip through with some friends reminded me how glad I am not to have to pass the locks every time we go out, but also made me a little nostalgic.

Well-meaning boating guides and magazines put out the same articles every year on how to transit the locks, all covering basically the same information: have at least two fifty foot lines aboard, fender up on both sides, watch the currents, don’t cast off until instructed. It’s good information, but it doesn’t calm the nerves, and the locks still provide plenty of opportunity to look really dumb in front of a large audience.

I’ve been there, and I’ve looked pretty dumb sometimes, so I thought I would tell you what I learned that the guidebooks never mentioned.

• Be there when no one else is; weekdays and early hours. The locks run 24/7 but overnight the staffing is low and commercial vessels (which have priority over you) are more likely to be there, which can make for long waits. But if you get up before the tourists and other recreational boaters, you can get through quickly and without an audience. This is good for early, confidence-building trips.
• Pay attention before you get there. The gentleman’s rule is first come, first served, and on days when only the small locks are available for recreational vessels this can result in a long wait. Be polite and keep track of your place in line. Be patient when others fail to do so… as much as we might prefer otherwise, few of our vessels are currently equipped with torpedos, so there’s not much you can do about it anyway.
• You can tie up at the concrete piers on the freshwater side or at the wooden breakwaters near the rail bridge if you’re waiting. Be ready to fend off the breakwaters or you’ll have to clean a lot of sticky creosote off your hull or fenders. If you’re a sailor approaching from the Sound, you have another factor to consider: whether or not the Burlington Northern rail bridge is up (or the tide low enough that you can clear it; a tide gauge on the southern breakwater can help you calculate clearance). It’s permissible to jump the line if the bridge is up so that you can wait on the eastern side, but when the locks actually open, hold back and don’t enter until the boats there before you have done so. Hand signals and a little yelling as you pass them on the way in helps keep the situation clear to everyone.
• If there’s no room to tie up, you may have to circle or hover in the current. Stay out of the traffic lanes as you do so; every moment you delay a vessel exiting the locks is a moment longer before you can go in.
• Watch the lights. Signal lights on either end will tell you when to hold or proceed and which lock to enter. There are also loud hailers toward the end of the concrete piers, but they can be very difficult to hear.
• Put a crewmember on the bow. Further from the engine noise, they’re more likely to hear instructions, and without the stick in the way, they can see hand signals from the attendants atop the walls more clearly. I like to have the crewperson mirror the hand signals and repeat any instructions they hear, both to confirm to the attendants that the message was received, and to relay the information back along to whoever is at the helm.
• If you’re directed into the large locks, as the guides all say, larger vessels enter first. You will continue to have to pay careful attention as subsequent vessels may be directed to almost any position as the attendants try to build a secure jigsaw puzzle from many different shapes and sizes of boats. Just as in the small locks, the rule is to double your lines back to your own vessel. If someone comes in outboard of you, you’ll have to take their lines and pass them back after going around something solid aboard your vessel. It’s your job to make sure the leads are all fair and they can clear off of you quickly when given the okay by the attendants to do so.

As you enter, the attendant will usually give additional instructions… which boat to tie up with in the large lock, or what bollard to catch in the small locks. The bollards are all numbered in the small lock, and the attendants are amazingly good at estimating how to position the lines for your length. If it’s a slow day, they may well take the lines with boat hooks and slip them on themselves, saving much trouble and potential embarrassment. You can use the same trick if you have a boat hook handy; loop the bight of the line over the end of the hook and reach out and drop it on the bollard, keeping both ends led back to cleats aboard.

Attendants may also reach out and snag your vessel directly with boat hooks or toss down messenger lines to help pull you into place. Be prepared to go with the flow if this happens, and enjoy… it’s much easier than doing it all yourself.

Most commonly (and common-sensically) you’ll be told to catch your stern line first, but not always; again, it’s vital to pay attention to instructions… but also be ready to ignore them if necessary. Literal adherence to sometimes confused shouting from above can get you into as much trouble as failing to heed it. We’ve wound up sideways in the small lock due to contradictory instructions from attendants at the bow and stern.

You may have noticed that the common thread to all these observations has been pay attention. I can’t emphasize that enough. Every time I’ve gotten in trouble in the locks or seen someone else get in trouble, it’s been because someone wasn’t paying attention. Watch the attendants but don’t over-focus. You’re still the one driving the boat.

Finally, have fun! Once that last line is secured, grab a seat near the rail and have a chat with your neighbor. As we all know, by and large boaters are just great folks to be around. Some of the best parts of the trip are the impromptu conversations in the locks. I mentioned at the start of this post that going through the locks is a prime opportunity to look like an idiot in front of a large audience. The flip side to that is that it’s also an opportunity to look like a pro to a lot of tourists and fellow boaters alike. One of my most cherished memories of years going back and forth through the locks is of a crowded summer day coming back into Lake Union through the large locks. As one of the smaller vessels coming in that day, and one of the last, the attendants directed us into a very tight slot deeply nested in the middle of the crowd already there. Heart in mouth, I fought the currents, jockeyed the rudder, and slid right up to our neighbor with inches to spare. After taking our lines, the other skipper looked up and nodded at me. “You made that look easy,” he said.

Every time you hit the locks, you have an opportunity to make it look easy to someone. Go impress them!

So since Tim Flanagan at Navagear and Captain Richard Rodriguez at Bitter End have both posted recently on their choices for wearable emergency strobes for their PFDs I thought I would throw my own selections into the ring. I come to the conversation to find Rodriguez swearing by the AquaSpec AQ98 and Flanagan currently using an old ACR Firefly 2 but wavering between the AQ98 and the ACR Hemilight 2 for an upgrade.

I think both are in the minority among local sailors in wearing a strobe at all, at least from my extremely unofficial observations around the Sound, but it’s a minority that Mandy and I are also happy to be a part of. We both have ACR Firefly Plus lights velcroed to our lifevests at the shoulder, together with a plastic rescue whistle tucked in and tied off to the lanyard. Mandy, not coming from that peculiarly male tradition of pocket-knife ownership, and facing the same problem as female sailors everywhere, a lack of pockets, also has a small Gerber Paraframe tethered to hers… although I will probably replace it soon, having discovered that Gerbers are a bit crap when it comes to nautical knives.

We’re in another minority in wearing plain old fashioned life vests instead of inflatable PFDs (you were probably having some trouble visualizing how we strapped a bulky ol’ Firefly Plus to the shoulder of an inflatable harness, weren’t you?) but we’re happy to belong to that as well. They’re bulky, they’re ugly, they’re uncool, but there is absolutely zero chance that they will go in the water and fail to float.

That simplicity and reliability was also a factor in selecting the Firefly Plus. They’re not SOLAS or even USCG rated, so I don’t mean to imply the construction is superior. But they aren’t just a strobe light; the other end of the unit is a plain old flashlight. Hands-free lighting on deck is important for sailors and like most, we have headlamps on board for that purpose, but we find that it’s easier to use our shoulder-mounted Fireflies. They are already with us, won’t get knocked off, and are easily switched on and off (too easy, sometimes; if they have a failing it is the potential to be turned on accidentally). I don’t think we have pulled our headlamps out of the locker in years.

Because we use them so regularly, we never have to wonder if the battery has gone dead or if the light has broken. They take standard AA batteries you can find anywhere in the world and we always know they are ready to go in an emergency.

I’m not blind to the appeal or advantage of inflatable vests or micro-strobes. The freedom of movement and light weight can be safety features in and of themselves, allowing safer and easier movement on pitching decks or in restricted cabins. Some people are also more likely to wear the devices in the first place if they are less obtrusive, and none of this stuff does you any good if you don’t wear it.

In our particular circumstances, I like the trade-offs, though. Neither of us mind wearing the gear, and the peace of mind that comes from knowing for certain that it will all work when we need it is worth whatever small inconvenience it may introduce.

So that is my reasoning and our personal safety gear. What’s on your PFD?

(Edit 3/25/10 – Grammatical corrections)

Of course they then had the local fire chief on, explaining that had some neighbors not called when they saw the incident developing, the whole house might have burnt to the ground due to extension through the attic, and the gentleman inside with the garden hose would likely have died in that event.

I bring all this up on a sailing blog for a couple of reasons. The story about American sailor Keith Carver, ship-wrecked in BC this past month, has illustrated how the foolhardy or inexperienced sometimes get themselves into places where they require rescue through bad decisions. This isn’t news; if you trace the web of events leading to any rescue scenario, you’ll likely find a trail of bad decisions along the way, and it is really only in the degree of badness that any distinction can be made between experienced and inexperienced sailors.

But the fact that some obviously bad decisions are sometimes involved has lead to a movement of sorts leading to laws of the sort that Cherokee County passed (and since repealed) seeking to compensate rescuers for coming out and saving the damn fools that made those decisions. This is more common in wilderness than urban rescue, but with many jurisdictions both urban and rural scratching for funds with their tax bases hard hit by the recession, it’s an attractive trend. New Hampshire’s Fish and Game Department has billed survivors of rescue attempts regularly for the past three years, while eight other states have laws on the books allowing such billing but only do so sporadically.

What has surprised me is the degree to which many sailors support this concept and even advocate its adoption by the Coast Guard. A case involving a German crew rescued two years ago from a dis-masted vessel in the Gulf Stream off the Atlantic Coast resulted in a firestorm of debate on some sailing boards over the rescue of people who put themselves in harm’s way or mis-judged the severity of their situations in calling for aid.

This surprises me for a number of reasons. First, that the concept has a chilling effect has been long posited by serious rescue organizations, who are generally forthright and clear in telling people that they should call freely and early if they are in any doubt as to their situation. People who do search and rescue for a living don’t expect victims to be thinking clearly; they would rather you allow them to make the decision whether or not rescue is necessary. Introducing pay-as-you-go rescue will result in more deaths, and paradoxically, more danger for rescuers, who won’t get calls early enough to effect easy rescues, but instead will hear from victims only when the situation finally becomes desperate. This is not a unanimous view, of course, but my own observation has been that people who are full-time professionals are more likely to hold it than, say, a game warden who gets roped into the role.

Second, it betrays a tremendously simplistic view of how bad things happen at sea. I was surprised more sailors weren’t aware of the so-called decision funnels that generally lead to a disaster. It’s human, perhaps, to latch on to information that seems obvious from an armchair after the fact and say “I would have done this differently!” but most disasters result from a slow accumulation of minor decisions, few of which seem serious or controversial in isolation, but each of which restricts subsequent options, eventually funneling the victim toward danger. Some environmental impairment of cognitive function is also a common factor; you can see things there in your comfy armchair which might not be so obvious on a pitching, slippery deck in the dead of night.

The flip side of this is that, should the chain of events be interrupted early in the process, it can appear that the call for help was frivolous or needless. If you call for a tow with a dead engine in calm conditions it can look a little histrionic; should the wind pick up, a freighter bear down on you, or the tide shift you toward a rocky shore, you can bet that whoever comes out to get you will be wishing you had called when it was still calm and easy to resolve the situation. Discouraging people from making those calls is simply going to make things more dangerous and more expensive in the long run.

Third, we (sailors) already have pretty robust and time-tested traditions for dealing with these situations. When lives are in danger, anyone capable, consistent with the safety of their own crew and vessel, is obliged by law and custom to render assistance. To deal with the possibility of frivolous calls for assistance, salvage law provides for the compensation of the rescuer in situations where the rescued vessel is not, in fact, lost. The intricacies of Admiralty Law on these points is far beyond me, but the principles are clear and historic: aid is rendered when asked for without expectation of compensation. Compensation may, however, arise from property recovered in the course of rendering that aid… an implicit hedge against those who might cry wolf.

Of course, it is still frustrating for tax-payers to see their money going toward saving people in foreseeably avoidable situations. Last week, a kite-surfer near Tacoma had to be rescued by firefighters when the wind died, stranding him far from shore. The wind being what it is, one has to wonder why this possibility, and making contingencies for it, didn’t enter the surfer’s mind ahead of time.

Even more frustrating are those situations in which the contingency plan seems to be calling emergency services. The advent of reliable modern communication equipment has lead some adventurers to skimp on safety gear and training and rely on a cellphone and rescue service helicopters in case the going gets tough. Local author Jon Krakauer in his book “Eiger Dreams” describes just how seductive this can be when he describes a rough day ice-climbing in France. There, rescue bills seem more common, but so does insurance covering them… making it less “rescue” than “retrieval,” more on par with our Vessel Assist subscriptions than with emergency services.

Personally I am a fan of the existing maritime rescue system, flaws and all. I don’t think the Coast Guard or other emergency services should be in the business of sending out bills; I think it creates negative incentives all the way around, both within those agencies and among those who might need their help. The price of bailing out the occasional idiot (a group among which I unreservedly include myself; perhaps that’s a bias!) is something that we should collectively agree to bear, because any of us may be the idiot (or be worried about being seen as the idiot) next time. The thing about emergencies is that, by definition, you don’t see them coming, even if someone else does. I suppose there is some perfect person out there that is better than all the rest of us and would never get caught unaware; for everyone else, it seems to me we should chip in without enmity until our time comes.