In search of pleasure on a (sometimes) cruel sea

I thought we’d be safe. After all, the little girl was bundled securely in a proper child’s PFD with a flotation collar big enough to be a pillow. What’s more, the breeze was light, the water was calm, the beach was only a few hundred yards away and the boat was seaworthy. Even so, we managed to get into trouble.

The trouble I’m referring to is a reprimand from a reader over the cover of the June issue of SAILING, which featured a delightful photo of a young couple sailing with evident joy with their daughter and dog in a Crosby Fat Cat on a halcyon day on the coast of Maine. We have learned from previous scourgings by safety-minded readers to avoid publishing pictures of children sailing without life preservers. In this case, the child was suitably protected, so we thought, naively, there would be no problem. The problem turned out to be the parents, who weren’t wearing PFDs, which resulted in a letter to the editor admonishing that this was risky conduct on the cold water of Maine.

The letter writer will get no argument from me. I will gladly stipulate that everyone on the boat, including the dog, would have been safer wearing flotation gear. And I’m glad there are people out there who feel strongly enough about it to evangelize about sailing safety.

I’ll have to say, though, that the battle to create a risk-free universe is unwinnable. I read that a number of people are killed each year by falling coconuts. Adults should be capable of making the decision themselves of whether to wear a helmet when walking under palm trees—and whether to wear PFDs when sailing.

Some recent events in competitive sailing, however, have raised questions about the safety decisions made by sailors. In May, a man was killed in the Block Island Race. The bowman on the 66-foot Blue Yankee was injured and knocked overboard while making a spinnaker change at night in a squall. He was unable to stay afloat, even with the help of a crewman who jumped in after him. In the chorus of lament that followed the tragedy, many said he might have survived if he had been wearing an automatic inflatable PFD.

A few weeks later, four sailors fell into the sea from three boats in the Newport-Bermuda Race. They were brought back on board, but many asked, why weren’t they wearing safety harnesses while working on deck in vicious seas?

The loss of Blue Yankee’s 34-year-old Jamie Boeckel was particularly affecting to racing sailors who knew him because he was the quintessential pro, the boat’s professional captain, a bowman of surpassing skill and experience, a veritable prince of the foredeck. The sea, alas, respects no such elite status. As John Rousmaniere wrote in his haunting book After the Storm, in storms at sea “no one is privileged, no one is invulnerable.”

In the book, Rousmaniere retells some notable storm stories from philosophical, scientific and spiritual perspectives. He finds that these mostly tragic events had a profound human impact beyond grieving and loss. Lives were changed, the course of history altered in at least small ways by what Joseph Conrad called the “unfathomable cruelty” of the sea. One of Rousmaniere’s characters, a lucky survivor of an 18th century storm off Newfoundland, was transformed from an unrepentant carouser into the author of what might be Christendom’s best known hymn. The hymn writer, one John Newton, is the “wretch like me” in “Amazing Grace.”

Rousmaniere could have been a character in his own book—in that his life was changed by an ocean storm, the Force 10 monster that ravaged the fleet in the 1979 Fastnet Race. The boat he sailed on finished the race virtually unscathed. But if he experienced a touch of survivors’ euphoria on entering the harbor at Plymouth, England, it disappeared when he saw on a wharf “a crowd of agitated, grim-faced women and men (who) stared out to sea,” where five boats had sunk and 15 sailors died.

The experience led Rousmaniere to write Fastnet Force 10, an eloquent precursor of today’s spate of popular disaster-adventure books about storms, mountain climbing and polar exploration. Even more than enduring the storm in the Irish Sea, it was the interviewing of survivors and piecing together the stories of the lost sailors that affected him. “It was a turning point; it changed my life,” he now says. He felt no fear during the Fastnet tempest, but months later found himself getting “very jumpy” on a ferry rolling in the swells on the way to Block Island. It took a while to get over what he describes as his personal chaos following the Fastnet. He rediscovered religion, entered a seminary and earned a divinity degree. And he became a passionate advocate of practicing the principles of safety at sea.

The sea, though no less cruel than when Conrad made his grim observation, is surely a safer place today than it was when the storms Rousmaniere writes about in his new book occurred. Some happened decades ago, some centuries ago, and none of the human participants had the benefit of the electronic navigation devices we now take for granted. Clueless as to where they were, captains drove ships onto reefs and lee shores. Passengers and crew died in the surf, their bodies washing onto beaches like so much flotsam.

Moreover, today’s yachtsmen may generally be better seamen than those old sailors. You can fault the Bermuda Race sailors for failing to don harnesses and clip on, but their recovery in just minutes by each of three boats from which they fell, using the quick-stop maneuver offshore racers are required to practice, was seamanship of the highest order. It is worth noting too that not a single sailor was lost in the recently completed Volvo race, though this sprint around the world in 60-foot monohulls exposed scores of men and women to peril that would be horrifying to the risk-averse.

On a less optimistic note, it sometimes seems sailors are fated to make the same fatal mistakes over and over. The loss of Jamie Boeckel is reminiscent of one of the great tragedies of American yacht racing, the drowning of Robert Ames and his two sons in a race across the Atlantic in 1935, to which Rousmaniere devotes a chapter.

Like Blue Yankee’s bowman 67 years later, Ames was wearing no safety harness or life jacket when he was washed overboard by a wave. As in the modern tragedy, a crewman dove into the sea to save him, only with sadder consequences. The crewman, one of Ames’ sons, drowned, as did another son who tried to rescue the pair with dinghy.

Thomas Fleming Day, the legendary editor of Rudder magazine wrote long ago, “The danger of the sea for generations has been preached by the ignorant.” If that was a reckless statement, he at least meant well by exhorting Americans to learn to sail and enjoy the sea. That’s why we go there, of course—for enjoyment. But there is no joy in the events recounted in After the Storm or in contemporary sea tragedies. That may be the best safety-at-sea lesson of them all.