Sailing Magazine

FULL AND BY
By Bill Schanen

View The Full and By Library »

Current Issue

There is something about a boat, no matter how insignificant or pleasure-oriented the vessel, that brings out the Bligh in so many. I suppose it’s the allure of power. We learn from childhood on that the captain’s word is law. Few of us get to be president for life of a third-world country. But you can buy a boat and claim the same omnipotence.

July 2007

Bligh-Queeg syndrome still the downfall of many a sailor

Martinets thrive in a moist environment. Tyrants flourish on boats.

History and literature have given us innumerable examples, a legion of sailing despots, including some whose very names are synonymous with waterborne dictatorship, the likes of Capt. Bligh, Capt. Queeg and Capt. Dicko.

Capt. Dicko? He’s a living, breathing sailor of our times, but there’s reason to believe he may belong in the company of those prototypical seagoing slave drivers. More about him later.

Those of us who sail, of course, don’t have to read Mutiny on the Bounty or The Caine Mutiny to know about tyrannical captains. We’ve seen them first hand.

There is something about a boat, no matter how insignificant or pleasure-oriented the vessel, that brings out the Bligh in so many. I suppose it’s the allure of power. We learn from childhood on that the captain’s word is law. Few of us get to be president for life of a third-world country. But you can buy a boat and claim the same omnipotence.

We’re steeped in the autocracy of the ship’s captain. When the ancients decided that directing the operation of a vessel was a task that demanded vesting more power in a single person than almost any boss on land would have, the die was cast. If the first sailboats had been run by committees, we might not have to put up with modern-day sailors corrupted by the power of captaincy.

I have friends who lost dear friends on a shared bareboat charter when the one designated as skipper began treating the others as though they were British seamen recently delivered by the press gang.

I know of marriages that foundered after the couple took up sailing and became captain and crew and the former foolishly believed his word really was law.

Only in sailing is there a sweatshirt designed for verbally battered crew persons featuring a legend that admonishes, “Don’t yell at me!”

There is less of this than some might think in sailboat racing. Successful racing skippers know yelling is counterproductive—it chases away good sailors. Who wants to crew for a screamer? Still, I’ve run into my share of poster boys for Bligh-Queeg syndrome on the race course.

One was a sail salesman whose job took him racing on customers’ boats. The idea was that he would show the crew how to get the most out of his company’s products. The boat would do well in the race and he would win the undying gratitude, not to mention the business, of the owner. His problem was, once aboard, he morphed from hail-fellow salesman to wannabe skipper and promptly claimed the captain’s prerogative to mercilessly hector and humiliate the crew. Talk about counterproductive. Crewmembers would book root canals or trips to their mother-in-law’s house when they heard he was coming aboard again.

Which brings us to Capt. Dicko, a man who has a reputation as one of the true hard cases of contemporary sailing. Some folks in the know about the America’s Cup blame his Bligh-Queeg tendencies for one of the most spectacular collapses in modern Cup history.

Dicko is the nickname of Chris Dickson. Acknowledged as one of the world’s best professional sailors since he debuted in America’s Cup racing as the boy wonder helmsman for New Zealand in the challenger series at Freemantle in 1987, Dickson was CEO, skipper, chief helmsman and all-around taskmaster for the BMW Oracle America’s Cup campaign.

Oracle was the great American hope in the 2007 America’s Cup. Not that there were many Americans aboard; there weren’t. But the thick wallet of American software magnate Larry Ellison was behind the campaign, which was nominally sponsored by the Golden Gate Yacht Club of San Francisco. Even Americans put off by a European-produced Cup competition featuring teams lacking defined national identity found some solace in Oracle, which not only had a U.S. connection but, according to the conventional wisdom, a good chance of winning.

Ellison did his part, spending $300 million over the course of his two challenges. For a while it seemed like money well spent—Oracle dominated the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger competition leading up to the semi-finals. Then, to the astonishment of almost everyone, Oracle sunk like a rock, losing 5-1 to the Luna Rossa syndicate. Not just a loss, it was a humiliation. Oracle trailed at every mark in the six races. This gold-plated, technologically dazzling effort was eliminated from America’s Cup competition before the inexperienced, small-budget Spanish team.

What went wrong? There may be a clue in the fact that Ellison gave Dicko the hook for the last race, replacing him with a little known Danish helmsman. No one suggested there was a mutiny, but more than a few observers opined that the crew might not have gone the extra mile for a captain who employed the lash as liberally as Dickson did.

An anonymous former America’s Cup sailor told the Scuttlebutt Web newsletter, “While Dickson may be respected, he is hardly loved by his employees. When he goes one way, they go the other, so it is hard to imagine them digging deep for someone so disliked.”

Or as Paul Cayard, who was once a mate of Dickson’s in the Oracle operation, put it with polished political correctness, “His personality and style of leadership are not conducive to garnering unconditional support.”

Since Ellison did not invite me aboard Oracle as the 18th man, I haven’t had the pleasure of sailing under Capt. Dicko. But I’m told he was not so much a yeller aboard the boat, but as one observer put it, more “a brooding presence.” I do know that people in the sailing world who had friends aboard Oracle worried for their futures when something went wrong on the boat (judging from the results, a frequent occurrence) knowing that someone would face the legendary wrath of Capt. Dicko.

I wonder when ship’s captains are going to figure out that willingness to employ the cat o’ nine tails doesn’t guarantee success. Navy men have told me they had commanders like Queeg, inflated with power but small enough, like Herman Wouk’s infamous World War II character, to browbeat underlings over something as insignificant as missing strawberries, and they were losers. And look at poor Bligh. He was one of the finest seamen of his era, but is remembered as just an SOB.

On the other hand, it is well documented that the man who is enshrined in history as perhaps the most heroic ship’s captain of them all, Horatio Nelson, eschewed flogging and treated his shipmates with kindness. “Men adored him,” one sailor wrote, “and in fighting under him every man thought himself sure of success.”

Capt. Dicko might profitably spend his newly acquired leisure time reading a biography of
Lord Nelson.

800.895.2596

View the Archives »