Seamanship

Capsize at Cape Horn

Administrator — Sat, 24 Feb 2018 18:31:50 +0000

Capsize at Cape Horn

Administrator Sat, 02/24/2018 - 18:31

In this reprinted article from SAIL magazine, CCA member Rich Wilson shares the tale of a terrifying capsize at one of the roughest patches on the water.

Read the article here.

Evolving as Skipper or Crew

Administrator — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 00:38:00 +0000

Evolving as Skipper or Crew

Ralph Naranjo

Administrator Sun, 01/28/2018 - 00:38

Seamanship

In the attached article, Ralph Naranjo reviews his development as a sailor.

Opening paragraph:

At some time or another, all offshore veterans settle in their berth and ponder the hull skin that separates their tiny seagoing habitat from the great abyss beneath. Since the human mind is imbued with both a strong sense of survival and inductive reasoning, it’s not surprising that most crews step up and care for their vessels. Nor is it surprising that we continue to see naval architecture and engineering advance and evolve. Sea sense coaxes a skipper to commission a refit, develop survival strategies (including a rational damage-control plan), replace tired rigging, upgrade firefighting gear, and take steps to avoid capsize.

A Perspective on Seamanship

Administrator — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 04:21:58 +0000

A Perspective on Seamanship

Sheila McCurdy

Administrator Thu, 01/25/2018 - 04:21

Seamanship

Planning

Seamanship is usually described as a litany of skills and knowledge of boat handling, navigation, deck work, and systems maintenance. The combined crew should be able to cover all of it. Ideally the boat is in better shape at the end of the trip than the beginning.

I would add that good seamanship should include the ability to assess, address, and anticipate. The best offshore sailors use sight, smell, hearing, and feel to monitor what is going on below, on deck and in the wider environment for whatever may come next. Experience lets the crew member distinguish the significant concerns from normal variations. In a perfect world, every issue would be caught before it becomes a problem or emergency. Let’s snap back to reality—it’s not going to happen that way. Good sailors train themselves by running through “what-ifs” as an exercise on watch:

What if an incoming call alarm sounds from the DSC VHF radio? What if my watchmate seems uncharacteristically slow to respond? What if I hear a pump cycling? What if the chart plotter fails? What if I smell something pungent and slightly acrid? What if we had to launch the life raft and get the stuff that goes with it? One can mentally practice the first three to five appropriate steps to take in each of these cases and so many more. The steps include the activating the response team, establishing on-board and outside communications and utilizing tactical boat handling or changes in procedure.

All passages begin and end with land. Visitors need to be prepared to abide by local environmental and harbor regulations, as well as immigration, customs and border protection laws. Before heading out, give crews the heads up on passport and visa requirements for all countries on the itinerary. Research the vessel clearance requirements well before setting out and plan accordingly. Review all the ship's documents and have official contact information for clearing out of Bermuda and into the U.S., Canada, or farther afield.

A return trip from Bermuda to a U.S. port of four to five days is within a pretty reliable weather window with today's forecast abilities. (Attend the weather briefing at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club.) While most boats head straight home after several days of fun on this most hospitable island group, it’s possible to arrange to leave a boat in Bermuda for an extended period—normally up to 90 days—provided someone is designated to look after her. This may be a better option than forcing a departure into risky weather or with short-handed crew just to meet a deadline.

Sailing at sea is most rewarding. The adventure should be satisfying, not one of confusion, mistakes, oversights, and damage. After sailing over 100,000 miles offshore, my favorite passages have humorous, rather than harrowing, sea stories. It’s a goal worth pursuing for you, your crewmates, and those waiting for you ashore.

Maybe I’ll see you out there.

Evacuation from S/V Denali

Administrator — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 04:21:58 +0000

Evacuation from S/V Denali

John Rousmaniere

Administrator Thu, 01/25/2018 - 04:21

Seamanship

Narratives

By John Rousmaniere, A Berth to Bermuda (2006) © John Rousmaniere

One of the most striking boats in the Bermuda Race fleet in the late 1980s was a ketch-rigged 44-footer with her mainmast perched so far forward that she was unable to set a jib, and with a crew so tall they looked like members of a championship basketball team. She was named Denali because her owner, Larry Huntington, and his sons Matthew, Stewart, and Christopher (who often sailed together), had climbed the Alaskan mountain.

As Larry Huntington was going through Denali’s medical kit before the 1988 race, he debated whether he should renew the prescription for the antibiotic Methoxin until his wife, Caroline, told him that if the drug was ever needed but not on board, he would never be able to live with himself. Several weeks later, Denali was 250 miles from the finish when 23-year-old Matthew Huntington complained of nausea and began vomiting. A first-aid book indicated it might be appendicitis. Consulting the schedule for the race’s required rotating single-sideband radio watch, and also the list of doctors sailing in the race, Huntington found Dr. Peter Stovell on board Kittiwake. Stovell diagnosed appendicitis and instructed Larry to inject his son with the Methoxin every four hours. Stovell also urged that Matthew be hospitalized as soon as possible.

The options for evacuation were limited. Denali would need over a day to sail to Bermuda. An aerial pickup was a remote possibility. Even if it were safe for someone with abdominal distress, Denali would not be within the maximum 100-mile helicopter range from Bermuda until after dark.

That left evacuation by boat. When Huntington called the largest race entry standing radio watch, the 70-footer Karyatis, to request a radio relay to shore, her owner, Christos Kritikos, did not hesitate to offer to drop out of the race and carry Matthew to Bermuda. Kritikos joined a long roster of Bermuda Race skippers who offered assistance to vessels in trouble, usually by forwarding a message or by standing by a disabled boat until the arrival of a tow. Among them were Shorty Trimingham, Pierre du Pont, Huey Long (who interrupted Ondine’s record run for 16 minutes in 1976), and Emanuel Greene, whose Circe stood by a dismasted boat in the 1976 race for nine hours, 55 minutes. The race committee deducted assisting vessels’ times on station from their elapsed times (Circe ended up second in Class F), but in the case of the generous Christos Kritikos there would be no elapsed time because he was dropping out of the race entirely.

At 0100 Denali’s well-padded bow nudged alongside Karyatis’ after quarter, and Matthew stepped aboard with his brother Stewart. By the time Denali tied up at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club marina late in the following afternoon, Matthew had been operated on and was ready to head out and risk much more than his abdomen on a motorbike.

Carleton Mitchell

Administrator — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 04:21:58 +0000

Carleton Mitchell

John Rousmaniere

Administrator Thu, 01/25/2018 - 04:21

Seamanship

By John Rousmaniere, A Berth to Bermuda © John Rousmaniere

The 38-foot yawl Finisterre was finishing high up in almost every race she sailed in the 1950s. But what she is remembered for is her Bermuda Race performance: three races, three overall victories. In the vast firmament of sailing records, the polestar is this tubby little yawl commanded by this gifted sailor, writer, and photographer. It is hard enough to win one Bermuda Race, but two in a row? Dick Nye of Carina had an explanation: “For one thing, she’s got everything. And he sails the hell out of her.”

You need a good boat, a skilled crew, and a perfect organization. Above all, you must push very, very hard. Mitchell liked to quote a Bahamian saying about the weather, “You eats what the cook serves.” In other words, you do your best in the conditions at hand. “My theory was that the time to get everything right is before you leave the dock,” he once said. “And then, once you leave the dock, to be able to drive the hell out of the boat and never have to worry about something carrying away. And if anything did let go on you, the spares were on board with the know-how to put it back together.”

With her 11’3” beam on a waterline of just 27’6” – a bulbous shape in the 1950s -- “the fat little monster,” as Mitchell sometimes called her -- Finisterre had immense room as well as the initial stability and inertia needed to carry sail in conditions when other boats are reefed down. In her first race, as she was beating into a hard blow in the company of 50-footers, one of Mitchell’s crew, an amiable Bahamian named Bobby Symonette, mused, “I wonder how the little boats are doing tonight.” He had forgotten that he was in the smallest boat in the fleet. With such heft, sailing in a calm is a problem, but as Olin Stephens has admiringly commented, “her skipper and her crew maintained an almost magical degree of concentration to keep her moving in light airs.” His crew of eight included some of the best racing sailors of that time, looked after by a full-time cook (Mitch, as he was known, had faith in creature comforts).

Long before Loran and GPS made navigation routine, Mitchell also insisted on carrying at least two skilled celestial navigators besides himself so a sight could always be taken when the overcast cleared momentarily. Once, Finisterre got lost near Bermuda and the third navigator stepped in. “We didn't know where the hell we were,” Mitch told me recently. “Then with Bunny Rigg holding me, I took a moon sight and we came out right at Northeast Breaker. It was an easy sight.” It may have been easy for him, but tell an experienced navigator that an owner near the reefs bet the farm on one of the trickiest sights there is, with the moon racing across the sky so fast that an error of a fraction of degree or second can be fatal, and the response is a stunned, respectful silence.

There is more to Carleton Mitchell than his life as a great racing skipper. For every mile Finisterre raced, he estimates that she cruised at least 10, making good on the promise of her name that she could thrive in that place where (as Thomas Fleming Day called it) people could “get a smell of the sea and forget for the time being that there is such a thing as God’s green earth in the universe.” Mitchell’s writing on this subject was no less luminous. This is the man who wrote, “To desire nothing beyond what you have is surely happiness. Aboard a boat, it is frequently possible to achieve just that: That is why sailing is a way of life, one of the finest of lives.” After winning the 1956 Bermuda Race, she cruised to the Med and back. After winning in 1958, she did no racing at all until 1960, when she won again. Soon she retired from racing so her owner could cruise full-time. After selling Finisterre, he took another bold step and in 1968 bought one of the first smaller trawler yachts. As he cruised in this floating home (called Sans Terre), he wrote articles that brought this new approach to boating to the public’s attention.

A prophet, a racer, and a cruiser, Mitch also was one of our best boating writers and photographers, with seven books and hundreds of articles to his credit. As a young sailor who read everything, I so identified the name “Carleton Mitchell” with writing and photography that when I heard that someone also named “Carleton Mitchell” won the 1956 Bermuda Race, I asked my father if the two men were related. When he explained that they were one and the same, I thought to myself, “Well, gee – I guess this fellow can sail pretty well, too!”

Mitch began pursuing boats and words soon after taking his first youthful sail in an uncle’s racing sloop off New Orleans. He kept a scrapbook in which he pasted pictures of boats and wrote captions, and when he was 12 he answered an inquiry about his plans for a career by announcing, “I want to sail and write about it.” That dream survived college in Ohio and mundane jobs in the Depression (for a while, he sold women’s underwear at Macy’s in Manhattan). It even survived a wretched experience in a leaky old ketch that almost sank in the Gulf Stream. When the ketch staggering into the Bahamas, he began his lifelong love affair with the Islands.

He found jobs as a photographer in Nassau and in the wartime navy’s photography department. After the war, he bought one of John Alden’s old Malabars, renamed her Carib, and sailed south to the West Indies. His book Islands to Windward introduced the Caribbean’s charms to sailing Americans long before the first bareboat fleets arrived. Moving to a 58-foot Rhodes centerboard yawl he named Caribbee, he won a race to England and wrote a wonderful book. Illustrated with some of his best photographs, Passage East is the story of a challenging voyage with meditations on the fascinating, elusive relationship between the sea and sailors. One of the best reveries in sailing literature is Mitch’s ruminations about “the somewhat fantastic nature of ocean racing”:

“Here we are, nine men, driving a fragile complex of wood, metal, and cloth through driving rain and building sea, a thousand miles from the nearest harbor; no one to see or admire or applaud; no one to help if our temerity ends in disaster. . . . Our attitude is not even wholly based on the competitive aspect of racing. It is that we all feel there is just one way to do things, one standard, one code, and we live up to it for our own satisfaction. We are driven by our own compulsions, each personal and secret, so nebulous we probably could not express them to our mates if we tried. But in our own way, we are about as dedicated as it is possible for men to be.”

Woman or man, cruiser or racer, who can find fault with that?

Carleton Mitchell was 42 when he wrote that paean to adventure. He was still pursuing his watery compulsions half a century later as he cruised with his wife, Ruth, in his powerboats on the Mediterranean or from his South Florida home to his beloved islands. He celebrated his eighty-ninth birthday by sailing in Finisterre, which after years of decline in the Caribbean had found a good owner who kept her in Venice, Italy, and took her out on the Adriatic. An accident called a halt to such pleasures, but in August 2005, he told a friend who had called to wish him a happy ninety-fifth burthday, Mitch announced that he was looking for another new boat – a simple, old-fashioned, one-deck houseboat on which he could get around in his wheelchair. It was just like Carleton Mitchell to want to get back to the water in something beamy and comfortable

Formula for Disaster

Administrator — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 22:16:01 +0000

Formula for Disaster

John Rousmaniere

Administrator Thu, 08/10/2017 - 22:16

Seamanship

From The Annapolis Book of Seamanship

Study of the 1979 Fastnet storm and other calamitous evens reveals repeated patterns of human behavior in catastrophe that can be summarized (in my words) as the Formula for Disaster. The Formula consists of seven factors that appear time and again in major emergencies. Often only three or four of them are at play, but there are some catastrophes where all seven can be found. (These factors can be found in disasters on land as well.)

Factor 1. A rushed, ill-considered departure is first on the list because it turns up in almost every bad accident. While the demands of jobs, families, and racing schedules often dictate when we go out on the water, none of these imperatives bears any relation to the schedule that counts the most in good seamanship. That schedule is nature's cycle of tide and wind.

Factor 2. The route is dangerous because it passes through predictably risky waters.

Factor 3. The route has no alternative where the crew can "bail out." Many crews have got into serious trouble because they set courses far from intermediate harbors of refuge.

Factor 4. The crew is unprepared. Poor crew preparation can take several forms. Sailors may not be prepared for seasickness, or they come aboard exhausted. If they lack good foul-weather gear and warm clothes, they’re candidates for hypothermia. Some people do not have the basic sailing skills and experience to handle themselves and the boat. They may not have a safety harness or PFD (the skipper should have already told them to bring them.)

Factor 5. The boat is unprepared. Major damage can occur because the crew, when preparing the boat, did not have a worst-case state of mind. The results can be dangerous. To cite a few simple examples, when charts are missing, boats can't find refuge; when flashlights don't have batteries, nobody on deck can see at night; when knives are dull, lines can't be cut; when life jackets are waterlogged, they won't provide buoyancy; when the boat's batteries aren't tied down, they may capsize and leak noxious acid into the bilge and force the crew on deck.

Factor 6. The crew panics after an injury. A shipmate's injury or illness always threatens to distract the crew from good seamanship. In order to get the injured person to assistance, people may make well-meaning but poor decisions that put the boat and her whole crew at risk — like sailing toward a lee shore in a gale or abandoning ship even though the boat is floating. Even when the injury or illness is treated competently on board, crew discipline can break down.

Factor 7. Leadership is poor. Vague, weak leadership can cause low morale and lead to mistakes. Poor leadership often results from an excess of testosterone. Macho skippers unable to admit their personal limitations may lose the respect of their crews. A skipper who does not wear a life jacket or safety harness in rough weather sets a poor example, and one who does not assign a clear line of authority may cause a leadership vacuum. A good skipper knows when to defer to the judgments of more talented people and also whom to appoint in a chain of command.

To put this another way, bad things can happen when leadership is weak or confused, and when critical thinking is not employed

A Seamanship Ethos

Administrator — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 22:58:24 +0000

A Seamanship Ethos

John Rousmaniere

Administrator Wed, 06/21/2017 - 22:58

Seamanship

Adapted from the foreword to the 4th edition, The Annapolis Book of Seamanship,

“The art of sailing, maneuvering, and preserving a ship or a boat in all positions and under all reasonable circumstances.” This classic definition of “seamanship” has guided the preparation of this book for 30 years through four editions. Much has changed in boats, sails, and electronics, but with the addition of these words, “and some unreasonable circumstances, too,” that definition is as valid and essential today as it was in 1983.

Our concern as a community is what we sailors should know and should do as we engage with boats and the craft of handling them ably and safely.

For all the technology of sailing, for all its theories and skills and high-tech equipment, for all its dreams of glory, what sustains this sport that is much more than a sport – this pastime – alive is the depth of feeling that men and women sailors feel share the water and for boats. Rear Admiral Robert W. McNitt wrote in his history of sailing at the U.S. Naval Academy that for all the time he had spent in naval vessels, the true meaning of the sea – and the source of his passion for it – first became clear to him in a sailboat race, when he as a young ensign raced to Bermuda. “Like human attachments, this romance cannot be taught or forced,” he affirmed. “It comes gently during a midwatch in the soft warm moonlight of the Gulf Stream, in the crashing roar of a sudden squall, and in the dawn of a new day at sea. It comes most easily and naturally under sail.”

The fact that you’re reading this website indicates that you don’t have to be told about the lure of wind, water, and boats

The fact that you’re reading this website indicates that you don’t have to be told about the lure of wind, water, and boats. You may, like me, have a vivid memory of stepping into a boat for the first time. In my case it was at the age of eight at a summer camp on the Kennebec River in Maine. Perhaps you, also like me, were enchanted and also a little dismayed by how strange it all seemed, with the unfamiliar equipment and the strange language (what, exactly, is the difference between a “jib” and a “jibe,” between “leeway” and a “leeboard”?).

As I began to love that strangeness and the challenges that came with boats and the water, I realized that I wasn’t alone. My father was a lifelong sailor. The beatific look on his face when he took the helm in any boat indicates how much he adored all this, with the joys and the challenges all rolled into the one magnetic, enchanting object that is the boat. That intense, spiritual commitment was shared by a friend and sometime competitor of my dad’s, Cornelius Shields. Corny Shields came later to sailing than I did, and his conversion occurred when he was handed the tiller. “It didn’t take 20 seconds before I was hit by a welling-up of emotion so strong it’s almost indescribable. It was like a theater curtain going up. Suddenly, I was tremendously happy. . . . Never, before or since, has anything opened up to me so spectacularly.” The man was totally transformed.

We are all familiar with these feelings, aren’t we? The first sail, the first voyage, the first grasp of the tiller – such moments mean so much more than learning a racing tactic or how to trim a spinnaker. Nicholas Hayes, the author of Saving Sailing, has described a day in a typical Chicago to Mackinac Race as “a day of transcendence and transformation; sailors will tell you that every person who starts this race will finish as someone new.”

Seamanship is an attitude, an ethos, and a quest that guides us, if we are willing – sometimes pulling, sometimes pushing – in the right direction.

Joseph Conrad, the finest of all sailing writers, and himself an experienced seaman, called the community of sailors “our fellowship in the craft and the mystery of the sea.” We all know what that “mystery” is: it’s the entrancing, even addictive experience behind my father’s smile and Corny Shields’ exuberance. E.B. White put his finger on that mystery when he wrote, “I cannot not sail.” As for the “craft” that Conrad referred to – that is seamanship. It’s an ever expanding set of skills, and much more. Seamanship is an attitude, an ethos, and a quest that guides us, if we are willing – sometimes pulling, sometimes pushing – in the right direction. Seamanship is both a technical discipline that you will never stop mastering, and a caring, alert, cautious, and even slightly anxious state of mind we must never cease developing and improving.

Long ago a pioneer cruising sailor, Richard T. McMullen, compared the mixed joys and discomforts of sailing a boat with picking roses off a thorny bush. There is the occasional bloody finger, yes indeed there is. Our calling as sailors is to attempt to master, and continue to preach, the skills and attitudes of seamanship that help identify those thorns and avoid them – in other words to be a sailor who is better, safer, and also happier because we know the thorns are there, alongside the roses.

We are never safe at sea, whether we are professionals or amateurs

After a series of accidents in 2011 and 2012, a sailor asked this question in Scuttlebutt, a sailors’ blog: “How does the average sailor get enough experience to be safe at sea?” In reply, CCA member Brad Avery, Director of the Orange Coast College Sailing and Seamanship Program in Newport Beach, Cal., said that the premise that there can be “enough” experience is mistaken. “We are never safe at sea, whether we are professionals or amateurs. We are always one bad decision away from disaster. My goal is to sail error-free on each cruise or race, but I know this is impossible to achieve. The quest for a voyage free of mistakes goes on. Time on the water, training, humility, and constant vigilance are the keys to being ‘safer.’”

Brad concluded with these wise words: “Knowing you’re never safe also helps.”

Thoughts like this run throughout maritime history. Joseph Conrad expressed the idea a little differently: “A seaman laboring under an undue sense of security becomes at once worth hardly half his salt.” Herman Melville in Moby-Dick observed that the good mariner “feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties.” This applies to racers and to cruisers alike. The best racing sailors I know are deeply concerned about seamanship and safety. “Safety and performance are not mutually exclusive,” says an able racing sailor with whom I have sailed many miles, Howard Lapsley.

Let me end by repeating the wish I extended 30 years ago on the first page of the first edition of The Annapolis Book of Seamanship: “May your days and nights afloat be as happy and interesting as mine have been, and may you never make the mistake of believing that you know all there is about sailing. Nobody knows it all. Nobody can know it all, but here (I hope) you will learn at least a little.”