One of the most useful, and most annoying things aboard a cruising yacht is the SSB. We did not have an SSB transmitter for our trip from the States, but we did have a receiver for getting the weather and listening to the radio. I had sailed from Florida to the Azores on a 65’ boat, and caught the disease of ‘getting the weather’.
Getting the weather becomes an addiction. I estimate that I spent at least an hour a day trying to figure out what to expect next. I still cannot walk past a barometer without tapping it. Which is weird, because we have a pretty slow boat, so the chances we can avoid bad weather are pretty slim.
There are many ways you can get a warning of the weather to come. You can listen to voice forecasts, get the weather faxes, listen to the nets, or more traditionally look at the barometer and the sky. There are also a couple of guys who will give you predictions from shore and radio them to you. The ultimate is to have your predictions made by a shore based expert for a fee and emailed to you. These people in the last two categories give you advice and expect you to follow it. This is called weather routing.
The most famous of these guys is Herb from Southbound II, who routes the procession of boats across the Atlantic. I still remember it five years later: about 2pm on 12359. I listened in awe as he moved the fleet along the edge of the North Atlantic High, occasionally helping them run away from a nasty storm cell. I was on a boat that did 10kn, and I felt confident that we could outrun almost anything.
Now onto our boat. We average 4.5kn, or about 100nm per day. We don’t motor if there is no wind. I look back on our used charts and look at the tracks. It was very rare that we deviated from the shortest route. The only weather we would bother trying to run from on Bluey would be a named storm.
There were some exceptions: we tried to cross the doldrums at right angles. From Florida to the Virgin Islands we went East then South to avoid the trades. The weather reports we were receiving played a part in these decisions, because we knew where the ITCZ was, and the latitude the trades could be expected for the next few days. Someone told us, normally the US Coast Guard, and they were pretty well always right. I liked the weather that the nets gave.
But then there is the checking-in thing. On some nets you have to check in. These are normally run by Americans, in a very structured, orderly fashion, oozing responsibility. You hear of every stolen dinghy or mugging within a thousand miles. And if you don’t radio in at a certain time for a couple of days in a row, they notify someone to come looking for you.
To me this seems unnecessary. Any boat that has an SSB probably has a serviceable EPIRB or three, designed to float. What is the point in causing widespread anxiety if your radio is busted? But it just feels like a responsible thing to do. Then light dawns- we are reaching for another technological security blanket.
Most cruisers do this all the time, and I do it too. I think my logic goes something like this. Man has walked on the moon using technology. Dirk Pitt, James Bond and Inspector Gadget all overcome insurmountable obstacles using these amazing gadgets. Commercial ships have all these things, so a professional mariner should have these procedures too. I always take a professional approach to what I do, be it flying, diving or my work. It must be irresponsible not to have all this stuff and use it! I think I am particularly susceptible because I started cruising in the US, the nadir of equipment-intensive voyaging. And I can’t criticise anyone doing something if it makes them feel safer on passage. You can feel pretty small out there.
The sad thing, though, is that sailing has become less safe, not more, and at the same time there are more rescues. This is due in part to the nature of the boats venturing offshore, but also to the idea that you can buy gear to compensate for inexperience.
We are also becoming more risk-averse.
In both the USA and here in Australia it is perceived as irresponsible to take risks. The reasons given normally include cost of healthcare for accident victims, and rescue efforts, to the public purse. Sometimes they go further and ban activities, secure in the knowledge that another tragic death has been averted. 'If it saves just one life...'.
What is harder to quantify is the cost of this same attitude to society. Business requires risk takers. Financial success requires taking then managing risk (I hear). Australia has a long list of people who took risks and succeeded, and became national heroes. Why do we condemn this attitude in our sailors, and call them foolhardy? Next time we consider risk, perhaps we should consider driving down a road at speed, with nothing separating us from certain death than oncoming drivers not crossing a painted line.
My sailing heroes are the likes of Moitessier, the Roths, Graham, and all the other sailors who took off and just kept going, sailing good sound boats with a minimum of equipment and not a CO2 life raft to be found between them. They did their own weather routing. People are almost always the weakest link. I would venture that they were no more foolhardy than someone in a brand new ‘modern’ cruising boat with all the gear in the world.