Month: October 2013

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Sea Stories

Having spent quite a lot of my time around sailors lately, I’ve found myself exposed to a greater proportion of sea stories than the ordinary man-on-the-street experiences in the average year.

I’m undergoing treatment and the doctors think I’ll pull through it all right, but it’s left me thinking about the sea story genre in general, and the construction and delivery of sea stories in particular. There are good and bad sea stories, and good and bad deliveries thereof, and as with any genre, the bad ones seem to be in the majority (thus the cause of my condition, no doubt).

In the interests of furthering the cause of good sea stories, I am going to share my thoughts on the matter and hope that two or three people listen earnestly and adopt some of my proposed standards before they try to tell me one more time about that once when the dog couldn’t make it ashore and peed in the dinghy instead.

That’s not a sea story, in my book. That’s just cruising; hardship is commonplace. You were in a storm, and there were big waves? Big deal; fear and water go hand-in-hand, too. I don’t mind if you tell me, but I’ve been scared and wet a lot of times too and it doesn’t interest me all that much anymore.

You hit a whale? Now we’re on the right track. But if you just hit a whale, and went below, and everything was fine, and the whale waved at you and swam off okay, that’s not much of a sea story to me, either. It’s novel, sure, and I’m sure it was exciting if you were there, but it’s nothing that’s going to keep anyone on the edge of their seat.

Sea stories have to either be tense or funny. But the best of them are both.

What makes a good sea story for me is the humorous or casual portrayal of a deadly situation. Death isn’t funny to a lot of folks, I understand that. But in two of the most amazing hurricane stories I have ever heard told, the hurricane was just a bit player in the incident, barely worthy of a walk-on mention, quickly lost in the background of an even more exciting incident.

But this resonates with other sailors because being able to laugh at such danger is what helps us to face it.

This is good news for a lot of potential sea storytellers, because it means that folks who don’t have the presence or timbre to keep a crowd hanging on the edge of a cliff in casual conversation can at least shoot for funny as a qualifying factor. Not everyone can pull off spooky or tense, but I have confidence that most people can learn to be some sort of funny. Self-deprecating often works in the absence of anything else.

The other necessary qualification, of course, is to have some sea stories to tell. It’s not adequate to have only a handful; you’ll become repetitive and be that guy who is always trying to find a way to work his one decent story awkwardly into the current topic of conversation. I have approximately one good sea story and I’ve learned, no matter what, it’s generally best to just keep my mouth shut, even when I think that it might be pertinent to the theme at hand.

What you need is a vast catalog of stories, which will seem like a bottomless well to your listeners, which you can segue smoothly into regardless of what the subject of current discussion might be. Tendrils from any single one of your stories might themselves have enough depth and detail to spend an evening sharing them. If you can shift from a story about shopping for shoes in Venezuela to surviving a tsunami off the coast of New Zealand to your initiation into a tribe of cannibals in Indonesia in the course of a ten minute conversation, then you have exactly the catalog of which I speak. If you just have that one time when you were in the Philippines when the volcano exploded, that could be exciting or funny, sure, but you’re going to get to the end of it, and then what? Real sea story tellers always have more, or at least give you a sense they have more, just over the horizon.

The best sea stories open modestly as a small anecdote when, for example, someone happens to mention a minor issue they have addressed recently with their head and you recall something similar that happened to you once in Brazil, and your solution was like theirs, only involved uncontacted native tribes, drug smugglers, and a hurricane of some sort. You open and close with the head itself, of course; the other involved parties, as fascinating as they might seem to the layman, will be mentioned only in passing, as between seaman, who understand that a really nasty head glitch is ten times the trouble of even the most vicious drug smuggler.

The best way to acquire such a catalog of stories, from my observations, is to be poor, or have been poor at some point while out on your voyages. Rich sailors have weather and docking accidents and fouled anchors just like everyone else, but there just seems to be something about living dirt cheap and close to the locals that provokes a series of rollicking yarns. This is why Tristan Jones managed to produce a veritable library of books about his experiences, and why Fatty Goodlander can pack a conference room full and keep them spellbound for a two-hour stretch.

But the rest, I’m afraid, is just luck. Woe unto the sailor who circumnavigates without serious life-threatening experiences occurring to him or her.

Of course, this subtle method of working your sea story into an appropriate opening in the flow of conversation is not the only way to tell it. There are those few individuals who, through charisma and technique, are able to bound into a room, nod to the largest man, wink at the prettiest woman, and in the ensuing silence bellow, “SO there I was… off the coast of Borneo in a typhoon on a raft made of toothpicks lashed together with second-hand Chinese dental floss….”

But that talent is rare and unless your confidence abounds, you’re better off trying the first technique instead. The same goes for the sea chanty, a likewise venerable tradition of sea storytelling, but one best limited to the rare sailor with some semblance of musicality.

There is some debate over whether or not good sea stories should be true or not. In my view, you have no business telling a sea story if you’re not willing to embellish it a bit. They’re called “sea STORIES”, after all, not “sea documentaries”, or “sea affidavits.” No one really needs to know if you’ve polished it up a bit along the way. Half the fun for your listeners is trying to figure out if you made up the part about the gigantic python, anyway.

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Mario Vittone on the illusion of experience

Sobering.

That’s the only adequate word I can come up with to describe Mario Vittone’s presentation at the Museum of History and Industry on the 2012 sinking of the HMS Bounty replica off the coast of North Carolina. The title of the presentation was “The Illusion of Experience” and it is that illusion, for any thinking sailor, that is so sobering: ultimately, Vittone is talking less about the Bounty than about us, and the difficulty of seeing through the veil of what we call experience into the reality of the dangers that any day on the water may entail.

“Nobody on the crew is terribly unlike you or me,” Vittone said. The failures aboard Bounty, in his view, were failures inherent to human nature, not to intentional neglect or outright indifference. To Vittone, the mechanisms of the actual sinking had become beside the point (although he clearly had explored them in as much detail as anyone who cannot visit Bounty’s cold grave at 2400 fathoms ever can); instead, the tragedy encompassed every other problem, every other tragedy at sea that he had heard or read about in his 22 years of experience as a highly decorated Coast Guard rescue swimmer.

It’s Vittone’s assertion that all tragedies at sea (with the exception of some medical evacuations) begin with decisions made on the dock, before a line is ever let go. On the Bounty, it was the cumulative impact of a host of decisions, some made years previously, that culminated in what might have been the one last fatal one of slipping the hawsers and heading out at all with a Category 2 hurricane on the horizon.

His talk explored the roots of those decisions more than the consequences. In both his presentation and his series of articles on gcaptain covering the joint NTSB/Coast Guard hearings on the incident, he focused on the thinking behind those decisions and explored the rationalizations that the decision-makers used at each stage to convince themselves that what to all objective appearances was a dangerously rash voyage was, in fact, business as usual.

Vittone originally used the phrase “illusion of experience” as a reference to someone who knew a very little bit about hull maintenance teaching someone who knew absolutely nothing; in relative terms, that little bit of knowledge must have looked like a lot of experience to someone completely new to the business. But he has taken the concept further, suggesting that even someone who had a great depth of experience (such as Captain Robin Walbridge) but who came by it only narrowly (e.g., aboard a small handful of vessels; or primarily one, such as was the case with Walbridge) might undergo the same illusion.

This scenario should ring a loud bell for many small-craft sailors.

Vittone’s insights mesh with those of other authors who have explored this mystery in detail, including Laurence Gonzales (“Deep Survival”) and Atul Gawande (“The Checklist Manifesto”). Gawande’s characterizations of the condition that Vittone describes might be to call those in its grip “inept.” In Gawande’s world, ineptitude is a failure to apply existing knowledge to prevent catastrophe. Captain Walbridge had all the knowledge at hand to make a decision to stay in port or seek other shelter; he simply failed to apply it to the conditions he was facing.

But Vittone’s take is more insidious; he might argue that Walbridge did apply his knowledge to the situation; and, unfortunately, among those things which he thought he knew was that he had been in difficult, marginal conditions with Bounty previously and successfully sailed her through them. That knowledge may have helped inform his decision to put out in conditions, and in a vessel, that objectively were an extraordinary risk.

In this, Vittone seems to join Gonzales in suggesting that, in fact, experience can be one of the most hazardous contributors to tragedy… something that Gonzales calls “The Sandpile Effect,” in which positive experiences in marginal conditions sublimate the risks so that they appear, subjectively, acceptable, even normal. After each such experience, the margins become stretched further and further.

In fact, Vittone said, what scared him the most about the Bounty incident was that they had almost made it… if the pumps had been working, there was a good chance the ship might have made port. And, having succeeded once more at one further extension of his storm experience, Walbridge might have stretched his luck even further the next time, and more people might have died.

If this has a familiar feeling to it, it’s because it’s just an extension of what most of us are pleased to call simply “experience.” We learn we can do things successfully by having done them; we expand the horizon of the possible by measuring what we have succeeded at and extending our ambitions out a bit further. This “crawl, walk, run” model is the basis for training programs of every sort, from day-sailing instruction to master’s endorsements. The thought that it can, itself, become a dangerously subversive pattern of thought is profoundly disturbing. “Experience is being fooled by someone who’s gotten away with the same mistake longer than you have,” said Vittone.

Vittone makes it clear that none of these revelations are new, and indeed, that they are nearly universal. He spent some time explicitly relating the phenomena that Walbridge underwent with that of NASA administrators responsible for the decisions to launch Challenger and, later, Columbia in the face of objective data that suggested caution. (Anyone interested in the Challenger disaster and in the sort of rationalization and normalization of risk that Vittone is highlighting here owes it to themselves to read Richard Feynman’s appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the accident.)

If this is in fact simply human nature at work, then none of us are, by definition, immune to it. In fact, those who believe that they are (“that could never happen to me; I would never make such bad decisions”) may be the most susceptible. If it can happen to genuine rocket scientists, what hope do the rest of us have for avoiding it?

Vittone’s suggestion is that we all stay a little bit afraid… to provide “a fair estimation of the account of peril” in our decision-making process. And he says that one of the best ways of achieving that is to entertain doubts; your own, and those of your crew. Or, as Gonzales advises more succinctly, “Be humble.”

At the end of the day, you’ll have to make a decision, and it may be right or wrong. But it is likely to be better if it is informed by not just experience, but a diversity of experience.

And this is where Gawande’s prescriptions can be useful; they provide a systematized method for objectively assessing decisions even in the face of extreme emotion or pressure… a method that can be designed and evaluated at leisure in the safety and with the resources of the experience of others easily at hand.

Again, these recommendations are not new. But they are not broadly encouraged in the sailing community today either. Our experiences have been that they are unnecessary to our successful return. But that experience may be just another illusion.