When the book I’m reading bogs down to a boring grind, or takes a ridiculous turn, or irritates me by revealing the author’s ignorance of a well known fact, I turn to my old friend Jack Aubrey.

Jack’s a bulky fellow (17 stone) and he takes up a lot of space in my bookcase in the form of Patrick of O’Brian novels. Rereading O’Brian’s seafaring stories is a refreshing hiatus from lesser literary fare in the familiar company of Captain Jack Aubrey and his loyal and learned friend, physician and spy Stephen Maturin and other characters woven into Royal Navy adventures in the Napoleonic area.

Besides the elegance of his prose, O’Brian, who died in 2000, was lauded by critics for his mastery of the arcane features of the sailing ships he wrote about. But I have always been more impressed with his understanding of how sailing works, its techniques and nuances, and with what seemed to be an emotional attachment to sailing.

He wrote that during a squall on the sloop Sophie, “Jack let her pay off until the flurry was over, and then, as he began to bring her back, his hands strong on the spokes so he came in contact with the living essence of the sloop: the vibration beneath his palm, something between a sound and a flow came straight up from her rudder, and it joined with the innumerable rhythms, the creak and humming of her hull and rudder.”

Some historians have said the Jack Aubrey character is based on a real naval hero, Admiral Edward Pellew. One connection is that Pellew, besides his success as a warship captain, was known for his swimming ability and willingness to jump off his ship to save a man overboard. In several of the O’Brian books, Aubrey, a strong swimmer, does the same thing.

This is compelling evidence because at the end of the 18th century few sailors knew how to swim and few sea captains were prone to risking their own lives to save one of the hundreds of men in their crews.

With or without a brave, strong-swimming captain, the odds of survival for a sailor falling off a square-rigged ship were abysmal. The quick-stop maneuver we modern day sailors practice was not an option. By the time the clumsy vessel, which might weigh a 1,000 tons or more, could wear ship, tack or heave to, it would be miles away from the lost sailor. Needless to say, safety harnesses, life vests, EPIRBs and AIS locator beacons were not standard jack tar equipment.

Two hundred years after the sailing era O’Brian wrote about, some sailors were no better off. One of them was Eric Tabarly, the tough Frenchman who became a yacht racing rock star and national hero in France after winning singlehanded transatlantic races. Besides his sailing prowess, he was admired for his enduring love for an ancient ketch once owned by his father. The 58-foot Pen Duick was 100 years old in 1998 when Tabarly was knocked off of it and drowned in the Irish Sea.

According to one published account of the accident, Tabarly, at 66, was “super fit and worked on the end of the bowsprit without lifeline or life jacket. As a sailor of the old school, he had said he would prefer an hour in the water to being tied on, so there were no jackstays on Pen Duick.”

Tabarly was sailing the gaff-rigged Pen Duick on a rough night in building seas and wind with a crew of five French sailors. The main was reefed, but it was still too much sail for the conditions and had to be replaced by the storm trysail. Lowering the main brought its heavy gaff down to boom level, where Tabarly was working. The boat took an extreme roll and the gaff swung violently, hitting him in the chest and sending him overboard.

The crew heard a shout, but never saw Tabarly again. They threw a life ring, fired a flare and set about getting the dangerous clutter on deck under control. By the time they could turn the boat, it was so far downwind that it took three hours powering with a tiny engine (that had barely enough horsepower for harbor maneuvering) into 15-foot seas to return to the approximate coordinates where the skipper went overboard.

Twenty-six years later, in the summer of 2024, a sailor fell overboard in circumstances not unlike the Tabarly tragedy. Struggling with crewmates to take a spinnaker down in a storm on a black night, he went over the lifelines when the 41-foot boat lurched. Here’s how the world of safety at sea has changed:

The sailor’s PFD inflated when he hit the water. His AIS locator signaled his position to his boat and others. On the boat, the DSC distress system transmitted an alert to vessels within VHF range. A mayday call alerted the Coast Guard. A boat two miles away received the transmissions and set a course for the AIS position of the overboard sailor. The floating sailor’s strobe light was soon visible. The rescuing boat deployed a Lifesling, circled the sailor and the crew lifted him aboard.

It could be said that technology saved that sailor’s life, and it’s true, but there is more to the new era of safety at sea. It’s the mindset. Sailor’s always wanted to be safe, of course, but now we are concentrating on it, as though we don’t want that marvelous technology to go to waste.

The rescue, described as “textbook perfect” in SAILING’s coverage of it, took place in the Chicago Mackinac race. The majority of the more than 1,000 sailors in that race had completed US Sailing’s safety-at-sea course, as required by the race rules. Everything that happened in that rescue was covered in the course, including the pick-up, which has to be practiced by every crew.

The Mackinac, like the Bermuda race, the Transpac, the Fastnet and other offshore races, has a strictly enforced list of required personal safety equipment. The list gets longer with each new safety gear advance, the most recent being the AIS locator that now has to be tucked into every sailor’s life vest, or carried separately. Boats are required to have the jacklines that were missing on Pen Duick for clipping safety harness tethers.

The invention that triggered the safety mindset was the inflatable life vest. Before they became available, I could count on the fingers of one hand the times I put on a life vest as an adult in decades of offshore sailing. Now I wear one not just when it’s required by race rules, but whenever conditions get a bit sporty.

There was a time when sailors like me thought our sailing skills, our ability to hand, reef and steer, was all we needed to keep safe. 

That time belongs to Jack Aubrey and Eric Tabarly, but we’re past it.