Survival Instincts

A late posting – revised 2/17/10, but originally drafted February 9, 2010:

Enroute to Panama: With all of the planning and preparations for our trip, I knew that deriving accurate weather forecasts from the various public sources – NOAA data, open use forecasting models, etc. – was not likely to be an option. While more than a bit familiar with the sources, the models, and with actual forecasting, there were too many other non-delegable responsibilities (like closing hatches prior to passages) for me to try and predict the weather along our intended routes. Happily, there is Susan, a trained meteorologist based in Rhode Island who came well-recommended as a provider of voyaging forecasts for intrepid sailors. She helped us plan our trip down the East Coast, allowing Grace and its crew to avoid nasty weather outside of Cape Hatteras, and here, in the Caribbean, she has been invaluable in allowing us to slip in between several persistent weather patterns – patterns termed “boisterous” by Jimmy Cornell in his classic World Cruising Routes (fifth edition). Yesterday ran true to routine: I called Susan in the morning to give her our coordinates and for her to give me any updated advice from her direction of a week or so ago: “go now; it’s an ideal weather window.” She let me know that things stilled looked great; NE winds going from 10-15 knots to about 20-25 in the evening, and westward-running swells in the 4-8 feet range. She did mention that we might see an occasional 10-12 foot swell. I mentally prepared myself for a long night.

By evening, the winds had begun to pick up, and Grace began to accelerate to 7-8 knots of speed regularly. As she literally surfed down the waves coming from her port stern quarter, the sensation was a bit magical – a few times before (around Hatteras), she’d surf in the 12-14 knot range, throwing up a small rooster tail from her stern. Before turning over the watch to shipmates, and based on Susan’s forecast, we took some time as a boat to discuss the peculiar S-shaped path a sailboat takes when surfing down then climbing up the wave. Unprepared, a boat can take a larger wave on the stern quarter and pivot in the direction of the wave, as the stern is swung down-swell just as the boat begins to accelerate down the swell. In the worst of conditions, the boat can turn broadside to the wave (and, usually, the wind, since waves emanate from steady winds), and the wave can push the boat sideways down the wave, either digging the near side underwater, or tumbling the far side underneath itself. In either case – in the worst case – the boat can roll over sideways just like a toddler might push a toy firetruck over on its side. As we talked, such possibilities were far from my mind; it was a brisk wind, but nothing out of the ordinary, and the seas while nicely moving us to our destination, were modest. Nonetheless, the wind and seas were nothing to sneeze at.

Over the course of the night, as I lay in bed between watches, I could feel the wind freshen; I was up on deck a few times to reduce the amount of sail presented to the wind. We were sailing hard on a broad reach, and the boat was moving briskly, as they say.

At 5:15 am, in a dim light sleep, I heard a crash of water, felt an unexpected lurch of the boat, and a yell of surprise. I’m a light sleeper in the best of times, and on boats, on passages, I catch my REMs when I can. Within seconds, I bolted up the stairs from our cabin, out the door to the cockpit, and saw water already flowing out of the cockpit into the large drain scuppers designed to rapidly evacuate incoming waves. I did not see my brother Stephen, who was on watch.

By the time I arrived to this empty cockpit, we had already reduced our main sail to its smallest possible area – three reefs – and done likewise to our genoa. We were flying along on the smallest of sails, surfing down waves in 20-25 knots, just as Susan has predicted. As it was, we were making a strong 8-9 knots, and surfing into the low double digits. The sea swells had grown to about 8 feet, and in the blackness of the pre-dawn, I could see the tips curling over, a white foam specked with small tiny lights from the bioluminescence. It was dark; the seas were high, and the cockpit was empty.

The next morning, as we all – including Stephen -- safely recounted the events that began to unfold, Jennifer said that she never wants to ever hear the tone of my voice as I screamed Stephen’s name into the wind and night. I had personally checked his life jacket before turning in, and made sure the shackle was locked tight, and secure around a stout pole. How could he have fallen overboard? In the same breath and as I again screamed Stephen’s name, I ran to the back corner of the boat where we keep a man-overboard pole and life preserver. The arrangement works as follows: the preserver is attached to a light that, once upright and floating, is well-lit. The preserver is also attached to a 12’ pole, weighted at the bottom and buoyed at about the 2 foot level, a pole topped with a light and an orange flag. Finding a preserver floating at sea-level– even if lit – is unlikely in 8 foot seas; the brief windows of visibility are too short for a struggling victim. Having the pole is essential, since it’s high enough to see above the cresting swells. Not seeing Stephen, and instinctively recalling the lessons drummed into me by countless man overboard stories and admonitions, I pitched the pole and preserver into the dark sea, and I ran back to the wheel to begin a mentally-well-orchestrated and oft-replayed but rarely executed minuet by which a boat under sail turns to retrieve a man overboard.

We had not yet had such an unexpected trial, and I was focused completely on the task before me. Instinctively, Jennifer had pressed the Man Overboard button on our navigation software, placing a large red dot on the luminous screen in front of me, a priceless bit of latitude and longitude – down to the several feet – indicating a spot very near to where the preserver and pole were launched. Already, as I began to run the boat, I could see two bright lights in the water behind me, rising up and down on the passing swells. I had a target, and more importantly, I had Jennifer, my co-captain, by my side.

Just as the boat began to swing around, Stephen’s voice called out from below: “I’m here. I’m here.”

He had gone below briefly, as we all did from time to time on our solo watches. Just as he was readying to come up, a much-larger-than-usual wave had broken atop our stern quarter, dumping hundreds of gallons of seawater onto the decks and into the cockpit. Jennifer – next on watch – was dozing in the main cabin. It was her startled voice I heard crying out. Even with two good ears, Stephen could never have heard me screaming into the night from below. Total elapsed time from my bunk to deployment of the pole and preserver? At most 10 seconds, probably less.

A wave of relief passed over me and Jennifer – we had everyone on board, and everyone and the boat was safe.

Now we had another situation. With adrenaline running at decade-long highs all around, we all paused a moment to assess the situation; we were all on board; the cockpit was draining nicely, and, ahead of us, two lights, a pole, and a life preserver bobbed uselessly in the warm, windy and jostling Caribbean sea. I briefly considered abandoning them to the elements, but Jennifer’s Atlantic crossing story stared me in the face. “It’s time to practice our man-overboard procedure, gang. Get the boat hook out; we’re going to retrieve the pole, preserver and lights.” The sight of those two lights bobbing in the sea – bright against the black rise and fall of swells – will linger long in my mind: I was surprised to see how bright they were, and how close they appeared – and I was also struck how small they seemed against a horizon-to-horizon stretch of darkness.

I’m glad to report that we recovered the three items rapidly – in less than 5 minutes or so -- assisted by a pair of strong Volvo engines, by Jennifer who was willing and able to stand on the stern platform and hook the trailing yellow polypropylene line with a boat hook (she was safely and securely tied in, of course) as Grace drifted slowly downwind onto the items, and by a captain who has mentally reviewed the possibility of a real man overboard thousands of times in his head, reducing to instinct what he had first read about some thirty years earlier in a different time and a different place in his life.

In reviewing the event the following day, I recalled that my earliest “gut-level“ realization of the seriousness of a man-overboard situation came when I read William Buckley’s several books on sailing. Buckley related in his almost preternatural detached fashion the loss of a shipmate in, I think, Long Island Sound, on an otherwise unremarkable and quiet night sail. The shipmate drowned. Since then, I’ve read dozens of accounts of man overboard procedures, and they all stress the same points. The difference between survival and death in man-overboard accidents is timing and luck. If the person is conscious, and if the person can swim, and if they can find a life preserver or are wearing one, and if the boat’s crew can find the victim, then the odds of survival rise to, oh, maybe 50-50.

More recently, when Jennifer crossed the Atlantic in our boat, the skipper we hired knew to practice man-overboard maneuvers, and, more importantly, knew to practice them at unexpected times. A few days after leaving, he spotted a fisherman’s lost float bobbing in the Atlantic. Immediately he began to scream: “MAN OVERBOARD! MAN OVERBOARD.” In Jennifer’s frequent retelling of the incident, his effort at initiating a real-life, out-of-the blue practice run brought a gasp of initial surprise, then curiosity, and, finally, seriousness of purpose from the unprepared crew. Eventually, on a calm sea, in bright daylight, and after one-too-many efforts to bring the boat alongside the fisherman’s float, the float died. They were too late – and eventually, on a second practice, the crew succeeded. (We still have the float, and she still tells the story – always fresh in my mind)

I spent a few minutes contemplating whether I had overreacted, and whether I should have checked below to see if Stephen was OK, before deploying the pole and preserver. In reality, I never gave it a thought; I acted on pure instinct. More logically, at 8 knots, the boat travels 16,000 meters in an hour, or roughly 250 meters a minute. In 10 seconds, the boat has sailed nearly half the length of a football field – nearly two laps at a community pool. Had Stephen been washed overboard, he would have had a difficult time swimming the 50 yards – that’s why we all wear life preservers AND safety harnesses at night in adverse conditions. So no, I’m sure I did the right thing, and I’m glad we had the chance for a real-life rehearsal.

I’m also glad for books on sailing, which have taught me a lot. I’m glad for Jennifer’s stories, and for acquired instincts. I’m glad for accurate weather forecasts. I’m glad we got a chance to practice a man overboard drill under trying conditions. And I am beyond grateful to the gods above and all that is good in the world that this was only a drill.

Postscript: It's been a bit over a week since this happened; so much else has passed that it seems a dream of sort. It left us each considerably shaken the entire next day, to the point where I was reluctant to have any sail up the following night, even though it was much calmer. I think I -- if not we -- needed a quiet night. Sicne then, we've entered Panama, passed thru the Canal, and now are moored off the Balboa Yacht Club. Cruising is like that: moments of sheer terror and anxiety amid days of quiet and peaceful surroundings. I think it's the variation that draws me to blue-water sailing, that, and the sense of utter self-reliance we blue water sailors face on the ocean. Thanks again to Jennifer for being alongside me that night, and for helping me make sense of the before, during, and after. She's amazing.