Category: Adversity

When bad things happen, we post them here

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Should you have to pay for rescue?

So I was watching CNN the other day and they were running a story about some folks in Spartanburg, South Carolina who experienced a small kitchen fire, and decided to fight it themselves because of a previous CNN story reporting on a neighboring jurisdiction in Cherokee County which had passed a law that would allow the local fire department to bill the insurer of victims to recoup the costs of fighting the fire. The law, as I am given to understand it, is not particularly onerous and doesn’t affect uninsured victims in the least (which, at least in Washington, would seem to make it unconstitutional), but the news being the news and people being people, that apparently wasn’t communicated effectively. Nor was the fact that the law didn’t affect the town in which these folks lived. The message that got through was “If the fire department shows up, you’re getting a bill.”

Of course they then had the local fire chief on, explaining that had some neighbors not called when they saw the incident developing, the whole house might have burnt to the ground due to extension through the attic, and the gentleman inside with the garden hose would likely have died in that event.

I bring all this up on a sailing blog for a couple of reasons. The story about American sailor Keith Carver, ship-wrecked in BC this past month, has illustrated how the foolhardy or inexperienced sometimes get themselves into places where they require rescue through bad decisions. This isn’t news; if you trace the web of events leading to any rescue scenario, you’ll likely find a trail of bad decisions along the way, and it is really only in the degree of badness that any distinction can be made between experienced and inexperienced sailors.

But the fact that some obviously bad decisions are sometimes involved has lead to a movement of sorts leading to laws of the sort that Cherokee County passed (and since repealed) seeking to compensate rescuers for coming out and saving the damn fools that made those decisions. This is more common in wilderness than urban rescue, but with many jurisdictions both urban and rural scratching for funds with their tax bases hard hit by the recession, it’s an attractive trend. New Hampshire’s Fish and Game Department has billed survivors of rescue attempts regularly for the past three years, while eight other states have laws on the books allowing such billing but only do so sporadically.

What has surprised me is the degree to which many sailors support this concept and even advocate its adoption by the Coast Guard. A case involving a German crew rescued two years ago from a dis-masted vessel in the Gulf Stream off the Atlantic Coast resulted in a firestorm of debate on some sailing boards over the rescue of people who put themselves in harm’s way or mis-judged the severity of their situations in calling for aid.

This surprises me for a number of reasons. First, that the concept has a chilling effect has been long posited by serious rescue organizations, who are generally forthright and clear in telling people that they should call freely and early if they are in any doubt as to their situation. People who do search and rescue for a living don’t expect victims to be thinking clearly; they would rather you allow them to make the decision whether or not rescue is necessary. Introducing pay-as-you-go rescue will result in more deaths, and paradoxically, more danger for rescuers, who won’t get calls early enough to effect easy rescues, but instead will hear from victims only when the situation finally becomes desperate. This is not a unanimous view, of course, but my own observation has been that people who are full-time professionals are more likely to hold it than, say, a game warden who gets roped into the role.

Second, it betrays a tremendously simplistic view of how bad things happen at sea. I was surprised more sailors weren’t aware of the so-called decision funnels that generally lead to a disaster. It’s human, perhaps, to latch on to information that seems obvious from an armchair after the fact and say “I would have done this differently!” but most disasters result from a slow accumulation of minor decisions, few of which seem serious or controversial in isolation, but each of which restricts subsequent options, eventually funneling the victim toward danger. Some environmental impairment of cognitive function is also a common factor; you can see things there in your comfy armchair which might not be so obvious on a pitching, slippery deck in the dead of night.

The flip side of this is that, should the chain of events be interrupted early in the process, it can appear that the call for help was frivolous or needless. If you call for a tow with a dead engine in calm conditions it can look a little histrionic; should the wind pick up, a freighter bear down on you, or the tide shift you toward a rocky shore, you can bet that whoever comes out to get you will be wishing you had called when it was still calm and easy to resolve the situation. Discouraging people from making those calls is simply going to make things more dangerous and more expensive in the long run.

Third, we (sailors) already have pretty robust and time-tested traditions for dealing with these situations. When lives are in danger, anyone capable, consistent with the safety of their own crew and vessel, is obliged by law and custom to render assistance. To deal with the possibility of frivolous calls for assistance, salvage law provides for the compensation of the rescuer in situations where the rescued vessel is not, in fact, lost. The intricacies of Admiralty Law on these points is far beyond me, but the principles are clear and historic: aid is rendered when asked for without expectation of compensation. Compensation may, however, arise from property recovered in the course of rendering that aid… an implicit hedge against those who might cry wolf.

Of course, it is still frustrating for tax-payers to see their money going toward saving people in foreseeably avoidable situations. Last week, a kite-surfer near Tacoma had to be rescued by firefighters when the wind died, stranding him far from shore. The wind being what it is, one has to wonder why this possibility, and making contingencies for it, didn’t enter the surfer’s mind ahead of time.

Even more frustrating are those situations in which the contingency plan seems to be calling emergency services. The advent of reliable modern communication equipment has lead some adventurers to skimp on safety gear and training and rely on a cellphone and rescue service helicopters in case the going gets tough. Local author Jon Krakauer in his book “Eiger Dreams” describes just how seductive this can be when he describes a rough day ice-climbing in France. There, rescue bills seem more common, but so does insurance covering them… making it less “rescue” than “retrieval,” more on par with our Vessel Assist subscriptions than with emergency services.

Personally I am a fan of the existing maritime rescue system, flaws and all. I don’t think the Coast Guard or other emergency services should be in the business of sending out bills; I think it creates negative incentives all the way around, both within those agencies and among those who might need their help. The price of bailing out the occasional idiot (a group among which I unreservedly include myself; perhaps that’s a bias!) is something that we should collectively agree to bear, because any of us may be the idiot (or be worried about being seen as the idiot) next time. The thing about emergencies is that, by definition, you don’t see them coming, even if someone else does. I suppose there is some perfect person out there that is better than all the rest of us and would never get caught unaware; for everyone else, it seems to me we should chip in without enmity until our time comes.

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From near-death to jail

I have often wondered, in passing, what happens if you wreck and are rescued in a foreign country before clearing customs. Now I know: you get arrested.

This story has already been making the rounds on nautical websites here in the Pacific Northwest, on Three Sheets among others. So far, though, all that has been covered has been the fantastic survival story of Keith Carver, a 56 year old American sailor from Tucson who was shipwrecked on the coast (sort of; we’ll get to that in a minute) of Vancouver Island a week ago and rescued by chance by a passing helicopter ferrying a physician between remote communities on the West Coast. Carver survived the five days since he had come ashore by eating lichen.

How he came to be washed ashore near the northern tip of the island in the first place is as fascinating as his survival thereafter. With a friend, Carver had come to Washington in mid-February to purchase a 40 foot cement sailboat, intent on sailing it down the coast to Mexico. The plan itself gives an indication of the likely outcome to those familiar with weather along the northwest coast in the winter. And indeed, after a few days clear sailing out the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the pair were caught off-shore in a storm they claim blew them well up into Canadian waters. During the course of the storm, Carver’s friend broke his arm, and they put in at Tahsis to get him medical attention. A good samaritan drove the friend to Campbell River for help. Carver, apparently not having had enough, put back out on his own, only to run into another storm system a day later, which seems to have pushed him even further north.

His vessel disintegrating around him, he decided to make for Port Alice, but never got there… 20 kilometres from the village, he abandoned his boat and barely made it ashore, with no communications or survival equipment. He planned to walk in the rest of the way, no great feat across 20 klicks of Arizona desert, perhaps, but near madness to anyone looking at a topographic map of the area and familiar with the dense, swampy forests of the region.

Only good luck and sharp eyes of helicopter pilot Wayne Goodrich saved Carver, who ended up in the hospital at Port McNeill, from which he was released today, and promptly arrested by the RCMP on suspicion of entering the country illegally.

Well, no kidding.

“We have reason to question his admissibility and that’s why we’ve detained him. It’s got nothing to do with him being shipwrecked,” says Corporal Derek Lagan, which is a bit like saying “We arrested the guy for shooting the victim. It’s got nothing to do with him pulling the trigger.”

As I said, I have sometimes wondered idly what might happen if one were forced off-course or wrecked or otherwise found oneself in need of assistance before formally clearing in to the country… speculation encouraged by a particularly annoying evening spent dealing with US Customs merely for being a couple hours late due to mechanical difficulties. I shudder to think what might happen if we had been adrift, or god forbid, put ashore, anywhere other than a designated port of entry during regulation hours.

Despite that experience, however, I suspect that rescued sailors generally receive a more amicable welcome than Carver, and there is probably some contingency for clearing in even if you hadn’t intended to enter but were compelled by emergency or force of nature. I suspect that in this case, the RCMP finds something fishy in Carver’s story or background, because when I first heard it, I thought it was a little fishy, too.

Now, I don’t want to discount the sorts of strange things that the ocean can do or the seemingly odd decisions that any of us might make under stress or in exigent circumstances. But having covered some of the same ground this past summer, a few things seemed odd right off the bat.

Tahsis, for instance, is not someplace that one simply stops off if they happen to find themselves in need of assistance off the coast of Vancouver Island. Tahsis lies at the head of a substantially long fjord; you have to work at getting to Tahsis, and either of the two ways you might get there require passing other settlements or manned Canadian Coast Guard light stations along the way. If you had injured crew, you could get them help hours sooner ducking in at Esperanza (itself a long way from the coast) or the Nootka Light right on the coast.

Carver also managed to get a long way north for someone trying to get to Mexico. We had to work pretty hard last summer to cover that same territory, going the opposite direction. No doubt the wind was behind him, but he still had to have been making pretty good time to go all that distance. And why not run back in to closer ports once it all started? A day’s sail south from Tahsis has you closer to Tofino and other sheltered anchorages in Clayoquot Sound… if you’re getting hammered and pushed off course why wouldn’t you duck in there, or even back to Tahsis, a familiar port, instead of heading for Port Alice? At the very least, you might heave to and at least try not to get blown that much further from where you were headed originally. (Edit 07MAR10: More intrepid investigators than myself have dredged up weather records for the period in question and, in the words of this Seattle PI article, found “…nearly ideal sailing conditions on the day he claimed he was shipwrecked.” Of course, one man’s ideal sailing conditions are another man’s small craft advisory; still, it casts more doubt on the idea that he was blown uncontrollably so far north)

Speaking of which, Port Alice is up a lengthy fjord itself, past another Coast Guard light station, and a much closer village at Winter Harbour. Carver may have been shipwrecked, but contrary to the headlines, it wasn’t exactly “on the coast.” (Edit: I see now in the second article that other sources are saying he was found some 30 klicks from Kyuquot, which is on the coast; it’s unclear how this reconciles with Carver’s statement that he was within 20K of Port Alice)

I don’t wish to be too judgmental, or suggest that anything untoward was happening. All those decisions, individually, can be explained away through desperation, other difficulties left un-detailed in the news articles, inexperience, or excessive stress and fatigue. I’ve made enough terrible decisions myself to not be too quick to condemn those made by others. It’s very different when you are out there in the middle of it, after all.

What I will say is that I can see how all those things taken together might rouse some suspicions in the mind of your average Mounty, however, perhaps sufficient to justify holding Mr. Carver on some readily available immigration charges long enough to dig a little deeper into his and his friend’s journey. At least, I like to think that is the motivation, even as I hope that Carver himself is no more than he appears, an unlucky sailor who ran into a string of difficult circumstances and escaped by the skin of his teeth.

Either way, I am anxious to hear the rest of the story on this episode. I’m sure it will be equally fascinating. And I hope I am not shipwrecked before clearing Customs anytime soon!

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The Great Tsunami of 2010

Actually, it’s early in the year to make a proclamation of that sort, so I may be tempting fate a bit… there could certainly be an actual Great Tsunami at some point later in the year in which case I’ll probably regret my sarcasm here. Let’s hope not, for reasons other than the potential wounding of my pride that might occur.

As you can see, our tsunami experience here in the Pacific Northwest wasn’t all that great, a state of affairs apparently shared around most of the Pacific Rim. Nine foot waves in Japan? Didn’t happen. Flooding in Hawaii? Not that anyone could tell (despite CNN’s somewhat breathless live coverage).

The great waves break on shore
Tsunami!

We got the National Weather Service Tsunami Alert fairly early in the day and quickly looked up the predicted impact at the place we are housesitting near Port Townsend: 1/4′ wave. Port Angeles was to have it even worse: a half-foot monster wall of water impacting at around 1544 local time.

Hawaii was to be hit an hour before us, so we watched CNN anxiously for some idea what to expect. As it happened, what we saw there was a pretty good predictor for what we would experience here: some minor tidal anomalies, nothing you would notice if you weren’t already looking for it.

We had to look pretty hard, but we think we may actually have seen some evidence of the surge when it came in. The wind was blowing pretty hard out of the south yesterday, and the bay here is well-sheltered from southerly winds. Consequently, the water out front was pretty well dead flat for most of the morning, with occasional wind ruffles, even as two or three foot breakers crashed in up around Port Townsend itself. But at about 1550, we saw a weird back-pattern of interference in the otherwise calm water… the cross-hatch you may just be able to make out in the photo above. Those tiny, one or two inch waves refracted off the shoreline are what we believe the great wall of water sent blasting north from the Chilean coast amounted to when it got here to Washington.

As underwhelming as the event was, it still struck me as pretty amazing. Small though they may be, any evidence whatsoever of a climactic event that happened closer to the Antarctic than to us is pretty incredible. Of course, we can’t prove that was what those are, but there was nothing else out there yesterday which might have generated them, and it was certainly not a phenomena of the wind.

Although I have enjoyed making fun of the predictions and the outcomes from the tsunami all around the North Pacific, I believe that the various prediction centers certainly did the right thing, and the degree of response to the threat was appropriate. The evacuations were prudent and seemed to go smoothly, and I sincerely hope that the lack of any dramatic outcome does not lull anyone into a false sense of security. Rather, it seemed to me that this served as a valuable exercise of the warning systems and a validation of the plans and procedures that have been put into place to deal with the potential for real disaster from these natural phenomena. I know that I will have no hesitation in running for the hills (or heading for deep water, should I be on the boat and in a position to do so) if one of these alerts were triggered again.

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Decadent Living

My timing of the tides and currents through the San Juans en route to Seattle proved to be masterful and heroic in scale… yet deficient in one particular: Spieden Channel.

I’d worked out our trip from Sidney to Seattle precisely accounting for the tides and currents at Sidney, through Haro Straight, down San Juan Channel, and into Admiralty Inlet, taking into consideration the behaviors of Rosario Strait and Deception Pass just in case conditions militated our entrance into one of those two bodies instead. I felt confident that we actually would get to Seattle that day, late, to be sure, a long day, a very long day, no doubt, but entirely possible. At the very least, we would make it across the Strait of Juan de Fuca for a short overnight stop in Port Townsend before making the last leg quickly the following morning.

But I forgot about Spieden Channel.

I didn’t really forget about it, of course, I just discounted it. We’ve been through there a few times, and it’s always been sedate. We were just lucky. Today, after a fast crossing of Haro Strait from Sidney, seeing the water boiling up in front of us though the channel was sheltered from the shrill northern wind, I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. Too late, I pulled out my copy of Coast Pilot 7 and looked up Spieden Channel. “The meeting of the flood currents, which flow E from Haro Strait and W from San Juan Channel, cause heavy tide rips and eddies. This channel is not recommended for sailing craft.”

Oops.

So we slogged our way through it at about a knot, getting in to the Customs dock at Friday Harbor almost two hours later than I had planned, throwing the entire rest of my carefully honed schedule into disarray. Sailing is like that.

So, we decided to stop and get a burger and a slip for the night.

We’ve been living pretty decadently this trip, mostly because we can; it’s the off-season, and all the yacht clubs with which our own has reciprocal moorage agreements have guest slips standing empty, just waiting for us. So in Silva Bay, Sidney, and now here in Friday Harbor, we’ve indulged in the luxury of a solid tie-up, where in the summer we’d be lucky for a spot to anchor within dinghy range. Of course, in the summer we wouldn’t be madly in love with AC space heaters that require shore power, either. Still, it feels very decadent to just stop here for the night and go out on the town, when we had expected a hard day of sailing still ahead of us.

In fact, I haven’t even unlashed the anchor from its perch on the bow pulpit this trip. We’ve either found free moorage (well, everywhere but Vancouver) or an open buoy at a state or provincial park. I don’t really mind anchoring, but I won’t pretend that it isn’t easier and more certain to tie up at a dock or mooring ball.

Strangely, the prospect of being back in our own slip at our home marina doesn’t have quite the same allure. Maybe it’s the knowledge that the trip will be over and work will again loom at that point. Still, if we make it back there without dropping the anchor anywhere in between (which seems likely at this point) it will mark a first for us… we’ve never taken a trip before where we didn’t anchor out somewhere. Decadent, indeed.

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A Day of Rest

That’s what today was supposed to be, at least. And certainly, I’m going to hit the bunk right after writing this, because tomorrow’s busy schedule calls for an early departure and promises a day of, shall we say, interesting, sailing and navigating from start to finish.

To start, we will have to pick our way in the pre-dawn murk through the moored field of derelicts to get out of Silva Bay, where we are spending the evening at Pages Marina and Resort. We’ll thread the needle passing Tugboat Rock, which seemed narrow enough even in the light of day as we came in this afternoon. Then, there is the Strait of Georgia, a vast and tempestuous body of water that has been blown back and forth by gales to a fever pitch this week. The forecast looks promising for good sailing weather in the morning, and by “good” I mean a small craft advisory and rain. That is genuine improvement, and will help make our crossing to Vancouver a speedy one.

There, we will have to brave the gauntlet of Royal Canadian Navy vessels guarding the city during the Games. I could hear them, 20 miles distant today as I rocketed up Trincomali Channel in a following wind, hailing and stopping every small craft in their vicinity. What terrors will Navy Warship 710 hold for us tomorrow? Hard to say.

After that, we have the relatively pedestrian difficulty of tying up at the False Creek Harbour Authority docks in high winds. May the gods shine favorably upon our electrical needs and also assign unto us a windward slip! I’ll worry about getting out of it later!

Then, there is the madcap dash through Vancouver, picking up tickets, locating buses, transferring to other buses, finally, hopefully, ending up on our assigned transport to Whistler, which will bear us on a three hour trip during which we can take our first breath of the day (and, hopefully, eat something).

We’ve been lucky so far, luckier than I deserve, getting to this point from Seattle in three days time. Mandy got done early Tuesday, we got out of Shilshole sooner than I hoped, and the corresponding ebb current took us north to Everett in good time. I managed to avoid the two massive dredges camped in the channel right outside the marina and we managed to get some sleep, despite their all-night operations. Worse than the dredges were their attendant tugs, flitting in and out to dump loads of sludge out in the harbor. They took pity on first-time visitor me, though, and didn’t blast us with wake nor prop wash as they tended their massive charges.

When I woke in the morning the deck was white with frost, and the dredges were still going at it, though now at a respectful distance. It was dark and I pulled out with Mandy still sleeping below. The auto-pilot was still sleeping as well, unfortunately, so I hand-steered until the sun came up, and when Mandy came up to stand her first watch, the auto-pilot magically recovered.

We hit Deception Pass right on time, slid through without even a lurch, and found good sailing wind in Rosario Strait, which bore us up as far as Blind Bay without pause. The next morning, we skipped across to Sidney in light winds and cleared customs without a snag. We moored in Montague Harbour promising ourselves that since we were on time, and since Saturday would be so long, today, Friday, would be a short day, a quick skip up to Silva Bay, then a day of rest.

Which it more or less was, except that rounding Gray’s Peninsula coming out, I put us up on a rock.

If I were the sort of person to easily let such things go, it might not have been so bad; we were on rising tide, our engine was running, and a nearby BC Hydro crew boat (the same, in fact, that I had been angling uncomfortably in-shore to let past us… still, I swear that shoal comes out further south than it shows on either of our charts!) took a halyard and tipped us to allow us to reverse off. All told, probably took no more than five minutes. I’m sure the leading edge of the keel looks a mess, but otherwise, no damage found to hull, keelbolts, or running gear.

Nonetheless, it put a pall over the day and leaves me feeling rather incompetent to do something like crossing the Strait of Georgia tomorrow. Sailing seems to be that way, for me; as soon as I start feeling comfortable doing it, something happens to take that away. It goes right back to childhood. Learning on my cousins’ Hobie cats, no sooner did I feel comfortable flying a hull without adult supervision, my cousin Craig and I flipped on the Columbia and drifted downstream in the chilly waters a mile or two before anyone noticed, unable to right it due to water in one of the hulls.

I’ve been told that people go aground sailing, but it’s always seemed a bad practice to me, and I am one of those guys you see rounding buoys meant to guide much larger vessels even when the chart shows plenty of clearance inside. It unnerves me that I can take such precautions and yet still get caught out. It’s extraordinarily humbling, and for me, at least, causes questions about whether or not I am capable of living this sort of lifestyle. After all, most folks just ground their boats, not their homes.

Still, I will shake it off and go out tomorrow, just as I kept going this afternoon. There are worse things that can happen, even on a day of rest, as we found when we docked here at Pages and the wharfinger told us of the tragedy that had happened today at the Olympic Luge track, the event we are supposed to see tomorrow. We may or may not see it. I may or may not be much of a sailor. But none of it seems to matter very much compared to what happened to that young man representing his country today.

Rest in peace, Nodar Kumaritashvili.

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Christmas travel as sailing analog

So I’ve been missing sailing in between being busy and not having the weather for it, and with Christmas now intruding on our time (yes, yes, I’m a veritable Scrooge, I know) I didn’t figure we’d be getting in any sea time for a couple of months.  But it turns out that the Christmas travel season may well prove to be a good stand-in for a good, brisk winter sail.

Our destination this year was Phoenix, where the family had agreed during balmier days earlier in the year to gather at my sister’s place to celebrate the holidays.  It seemed like a good idea at the time; after a few months of drizzly, miserable Pacific Northwest fall and winter, the perpetual sunshine of central Arizona seemed a soothing balm, even if palm trees aren’t exactly a substitute for a nice, plump Douglas Fir in the living room.  It turns out, however, that Phoenix is gripped in a wet, frigid winter of its own, and the lows here have been lower than those in Seattle, even though Seattle itself is unseasonably cold.  It turns out the combination of cold and the deprivations of holiday travel are a lot like off-season sailing.

It started with the flight down.  The unpredictability of arrival times is a staple of the sailing life, dependent as we are on wind and tide.  Airplanes generally do better, but this time out, we found ourselves spending an extra hour in the air, courtesy of a nasty thunderstorm parked over Sky Harbor just around the time we were supposed to be landing.  Even better, we spent the time orbiting the periphery of the storm, with lightning flashing out the windows, rain spattering the windows, and Mandy slowly turning green beside me as the plane bounced around in the unsettled air.  I started getting flashbacks… it was just like crossing the Strait of Juan de Fuca!

She managed to keep her lunch down, but the misery was eerily similar to certain sailing experiences we have had.  Maybe the whole sailing experience need not actually involve sailing!  This was an exciting thought, though I admit I had difficulty concentrating while trying to pry her fingernails out of my arm after touchdown.  After all, the better parts of sailing are frequently when the actual sailing bit is finished.  Basking about the anchorage in the sunshine, drinking wine at sunset in the cockpit… or even just drifting once the wind dies in the vast, scenic spaces.  These are usually the foundations of our fondest memories, and the idea that one might build upon them without the actual strain and penury of boat ownership was a novel concept to contemplate.

The possibilities were further impressed upon me when I went to shave the first morning after our arrival.  As is often the case aboard, where shaving is a less-than-frequent occurrence, it developed that I had forgotten to pack any shaving cream.  And so, just as if I were aboard Insegrevious, I was forced to improvise a lather out of what soap happened to be available.  In this particular case, it was my grandmother’s “Berry Breeze” hand soap, which filled the role admirably, although I smelled faintly of strawberries for the rest of the day.

Navigation, too, has been a replicable challenge.  Though the signage is somewhat better, the vast, open desert proves as constant as the waves on the ocean, undulating slopes of cactus receding into the distance in every direction, with no particular clues as to which way is north.  And if you do figure out what direction you need to head in order to reach your destination, you are thwarted instantly by the oppressive Phoenix traffic, just as the Sunday exodus of cruise liners and cargo ships parading up Puget Sound can force one into undesirable tacks for extended periods.

Have I found the perfect replacement for cold, expensive, off-season sailing?  Well, probably not.  For one thing, the sun came out today and it almost hit sixty degrees.  That’s just too warm… I nearly broke a sweat.  For another, it’s not nearly expensive enough.  Airline tickets just can’t compete with shredded sails and shorted-out marine electronics.  Still, it may be something I have to experiment with for a few years to rule out entirely.  You can’t just form a solid opinion in one trip.  Maybe Arizona in the winter isn’t a bad replacement for Puget Sound cruising!

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No Room at the Inn

I think I might have mentioned here before that Mandy and I have, through what luck I do not know, tickets to the Vancouver Winter Olympics coming up here in only a couple of months.  Specifically, we’re going to the luge, an event to which neither of us have any particular connection, and which doesn’t present itself as an ideal spectator sport, considering that the sleds and their riders pass through a very limited field of view on the track at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour.  But I’ve always like watching the luge events and the bids were correspondingly low for the tickets, so that’s what we got, and the point isn’t really so much the event itself as, hey, we’re going to the Olympics!

As anyone else with tickets, or ticket aspirations, already knows, getting the tickets is the smaller part of the battle to attend the games.  The larger part is accomodations.  Vancouver will be filled to the point of bursting with athletes, officials, spectators, and their families.

If you didn’t already know you were going, if you are among those who only got your tickets in the most recent lottery and have been beaten to the punch by everyone who got lucky a little bit earlier, you have a real challenge working out some place to stay at this point (disclaimer: I am not one of those people; we found out that we got our tickets months ago and I have only my own procrastination to blame and deserve no sympathy in this matter).  This is the case even before you might try to take minor details such as budgets and travel dates into account… places to stay are just hard to find up there this February.

I knew that this would be the case, of course, as it has been at nearly every modern Olympic games, but I also figured we had an ace up our sleeve: accomodations that float.  Vancouver has vast amounts of waterfront loaded with marinas and at least one pretty decent anchorage right in the middle of town.  And how many other ticket-holders also happen to have boats?

Not that many, it seems, but enough to make things troublesome, perhaps.

Finding a reasonable slip at a marina is our first choice.  We only plan to be in town about four or five days, making it a pretty affordable option if we can find an opening, even with inflated rates.  We’ve had some oddly schizophrenic responses to our inquiries of availability, however.  Some marinas we call cluck mildly, as if they are bored by silly, slow Americans calling so late in the day and tell us they have been booked up for months… don’t we know the Olympics are on, eh?  Others don’t seem to realize the games are happening at all… it’s business as usual, the off-season, and regulars are probably going to be in their slips, there’s probably no room but leave your number and they’ll get back to you.  We have a couple of vague, “Yeah, we think we have something open, let me call you back” answers hanging out there, but no one has actually called back.  I can’t figure out if they are in the second group and don’t care about the money to be made, or if they are in the first, and don’t want to waste time on anyone not booking up for the full two weeks.

Because there is that second group, I still have some hopes of getting a slip, but I’m focusing more now on Plan B, anchoring out.  Here, however, there is also some uncertainty.  False Creek, the primary anchorage in downtown Vancouver, nicely protected and at the center of the city, also happens to be hosting on its shores the Olympic Village, where the athletes will stay.  Needless to say, in the wake of Munich and Atlanta, this creates a security concern, and the latest word is that the Creek will be blocked off at the Cambie Street Bridge to all vessel traffic.  That still leaves quite a lot of usable anchorage, but not the copious amounts I had recalled from prior visits.  Also, the security situation there leaves the question of whether all traffic or anchorage may be prohibited as of some later date up in the air.

All this uncertainty has left me scheming and coming up with alternatives to such extent that I am now fully capable of getting down as far as “Plan F” without scratching uncomfortably for risky or unlikely alternatives.  Still, I’m holding out some hope for Plans A (a slip in False Creek), B (anchoring in False Creek), or D (a slip in North Vancouver).  Don’t ask what happened to Plan C.

While this degree of confusion over the final plans would normally leave me something of a nervous wreck, I am actually having a little fun this time around.  It has forced me to look harder and see that there really are a lot of options.  Having to work through them and consider how we can still get to our event and have a berth to sleep in the same night is giving me additional confidence that the whole trip is going to be exciting and memorable.

Of course, it could get a little too exciting; we have two notoriously rough straits to cross at a dodgy time of year.  But I trust too that I have built enough time into our plans to make the crossings during what weather windows may be available.  Even if not, if we somehow get stuck in the Gulf Islands somewhere, if it’s cold and blowing crazy, at least we’ll have tried it… and anyway, I can probably scalp the tickets for twice what I paid for them!

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Better Laid Plans

One of the things I hope that I am increasingly getting used to is the need for the prudent mariner to occasionally make dramatic and substantial deviations from plans in order to accomodate changing conditions or reduce unforeseen risk.  This is sometimes difficult to distinguish from the need to run calculated risks, which also seems to be part and parcel to the seagoing lifestyle.  Some of the recent news coming out with respect to the decisions made by Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama in light of warnings given to avoid the Somali coast by a wider margin just prior to the attack in which he was taken hostage highlight this aspect; crew blame him for avoiding the one and a half day detour, while other captains point out the trade-off between the detour and time and fuel costs.  There is probably some rational, unemotional, economic “right” answer to what should have been done there but it was clearly a calculated risk.

The thing about calculated risks, as that incident aptly illustrates, is that sometimes the risk bites you.  It seems to me that the trick is to keep calculating along the way, and to realize when the equation changes so that the risk you thought was reasonable becomes unreasonable, you can change course.  Sometimes it’s a big course change.  Such is our need with the mass of Arctic air moving into the region here colliding with our scheduled haul-out next week.

With everyone’s favorite northwest weather guru, Cliff Mass, predicting dire cold (particularly along the Strait of Juan de Fuca), we are throwing in the towel on the hull-painting haul-out we had scheduled for this week.  Rain we had planned for, seasonal cold we could deal with, but the cold snap that is coming down is just going to be too much.  The calculated risks have changed.  With the average lows this time of year bumping along at a mild 40 degrees, we figured we could tarp up and keep the hull warm enough for the paint to dry, but with forecasts looking at mid-twenties overnight, and winds that promise to take a basic tarp-tent and shred it, we don’t foresee being able to rig anything that will allow us to paint and get back in the water in the time frame we had planned.

The forecast isn’t entirely out of the blue but I’ve held my course maybe a bit longer than I should have.  When you get amped up and prepared for a big project, when you are feeling prepared and in control, it’s not easy to accept that conditions have changed, and you find that you want to roll the dice… hope for milder temperatures, imagine that you can rig a solution at the last moment.  It’s easier, psychologically, to amend your best laid plans than to throw them all away.

But the risk versus reward doesn’t always pencil out once you lay the psychology aside.  I have all the paint and materials ready, and they aren’t going anywhere… the money in those is invested, so to speak, and assuming I use them wisely it’s not a waste.  But the instant the hoist starts going with the straps beneath the hull, I’ve also accrued the haul and yard costs.  Those are only worthwhile if we can actually get the work done.  If it doesn’t get done, we can still save the paint, but we have to pay for another haul-out again in the spring.  If we actually try to paint and it turns into gelled muck on the hull, then not only do we have to pay for another haul-out, but for more materials.  In short, the costs are high.  Even a moderate chance of failure probably isn’t worth taking.

Of course, this isn’t one of those situations where life and limb are at risk; the dangers, such as they are, are entirely economic.  But for exactly that reason it’s an easier case study than the more emotional situations mariners not infrequently find themselves in where they must weigh risk against reward.  It’s instructive to me that I am feeling the same pressures with this as I sometimes do when deciding to make or abort a passage… an instinct to just get it over with, a feeling that putting it off is shirking, a hope that maybe the weather won’t be so bad after all.  But just as with those passage-making decisions, none of those feelings really count… they’re just feelings.  There is no real need to get it over with, there isn’t any duty being avoided, the weather will do what it wants regardless of our hopes or fears.  Objectively, the numbers look better if we wait.

So wait we probably will.  And I hope what I take away from it is a more dispassionate approach to other sailing decisions, an awareness that sometimes, the best laid plans must change.

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Baby, it’s cold outside

And getting colder yet, just in time for our scheduled haul-out next week.  The good news is the sunshine; it’s going to be dry enough for painting.  The bad news is the cold; the paint we are planning on applying has a minimum ambient application temperature of 40 degrees Fahrenheit.  The forecast, admittedly long-range at this point, calls for highs around 38 degrees.

There were always risks with scheduling a haul-out at this time of year, and temperature was one of them.  Partly for that reason, I scheduled an extra lay-day this time around, figuring that if it were raining, I would have better odds of a dry window, or if it were cold, I could still get in two coats even with a 12-hour dry time.  But that was always counting on our typical cloud blanket keeping things over the freezing mark for relatively long stretches of time.  Now, I’m scrambling to come up with alternatives if the forecast happens to be correct.  A few tarps, a generator, some bright work lights, maybe a space heater… it could work!

As with all things weather-related in the Pacific Northwest, in the end we’ll just have to wait and see.  It could still pour rain; or, we could plunge well below freezing for days at a time.  One catastrophe I actually find myself getting excited about, though, is the tantalizing and frightening prospect of snow. We’re supposed to have a relatively warm and mild El Nino year here I am told, with little chance for the massive snowstorms we experienced last year.  But as I look at the two week forecast, I see the telltale flakes prominently displayed around the middle of next week.  Maybe it’s a little perverse considering that this is a trip where I am actually trying to get things done, and spending money in that pursuit which may be wasted if the weather turns south, but there are few enough sailors around here who get the experience of sailing in the snow.  I’m sort of hoping to be one of them!

Don’t tell my crew!

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It never ends

I suppose it’s safe to assume that most other nautically-minded folks are also occupied today catching the “Deadliest Catch” marathon on Discovery Channel today.  Since we happen to have access to a TV we are soaking it in while we have the chance.  It’s a beautiful day out on Port Townsend and the wind has finally calmed down and we’re envious of all the sails we see sprouting out on the water, gleaming in the sunshine.  But the boat is still at Shilshole right now, and we’re here, so watching a bunch of guys hauling crab in crappy weather and a bunch of holiday-goers out sailing around in nice weather is as close as we are getting.

One of the reasons we enjoy watching the show is seeing how the crab boat crews deal with the various nautical and mechanical problems that crop up.  We can relate; boats are subject to problems regardless of their location, purpose, or design, and if we don’t have quite the same scale to deal with, we see an echo of our own troubles in many of their episodes.

This particularly struck me earlier today, when an episode came on showcasing first an engine failure aboard one of the boats in high winds, close to shore (a nightmare problem many of us face on occasion; variations on this theme have hit us a number of times) and then a variety of mechanical and hydraulic problems aboard another boat keeping them pinned in port at the height of the season.  In the middle of the repairs on this second boat, we get a scene of the captain smacking his head on the receipt of yet another dram of bad news and saying, “There’s got to be an end to this somewhere!”

The bad news is, no, there really isn’t!  That’s just boating, as far as I can tell, and it never ends.  This week, Marty and Deborah got their first opportunity to take their new Island Packet 38 out in a dream trip on the Sea of Cortez.  The first night out, they ran into bilge pump and holding tank problems that forced them to abort and head back in for repairs.

Mandy and I could certainly commiserate.  Our first “big” trip (to the San Juans, a distance that seems laughably short now) aboard Insegrevious ended about 400 yards from our slip when our transmission cable snapped.  We had to delay the trip for a month; it was a little crushing, considering all the planning and preparation we had put into that week of vacation time.

Since then, we’ve had other vacations cut short, plans aborted, and hopes dashed, and every time it seems to get a little easier.  I like to think we’re getting used to the reality of boating, which is, as Marty and Deborah have encountered in the most literal way, shit happens.  It doesn’t ever end, it’s just part of the deal.  But it’s all that crappy stuff that makes the better moments stand out as much as they do, and ultimately keeps us going out sailing.

And maybe that’s another reason to be watching “Dangerous Catch” today… whatever happens to us, it all seems like fun compared to the blizzards and forty foot seas those guys are working in.