There has been a rash of cruising yachts being abandoned not because they had lost their steerage, were actively sinking or were on fire, but because the crew just wasn’t happy. Most had been dealing with weather conditions for which they were totally unprepared.
Take the 53-footer that was CE Category A Ocean-rated, which is the toughest category for yachts, capable of seas up to 23 feet and winds of 41 to 47 knots. The inexperienced crew had been dealing with winds of 40 knots and 10-foot seas. Their reason for sending a mayday? They were sick and tired. And, after all, the yacht was insured. So, who cares?
Another crew departed from a 36-footer in the Atlantic because of “high winds and huge seas” but, once they’d been plucked off by a cruise ship, their yacht survived quite nicely. It was spotted a month later by another cruise ship, which sent crew to look for people and found only a yacht bobbing happily on its own. It eventually drifted ashore on Martha’s Vineyard.
Want more painful examples? Every year, the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers stages an event from Europe to the Caribbean. In all recent years, at least one yacht has been abandoned. Several of these forsaken yachts wound up drifting quite happily into the Caribbean, where they were salvaged. One even floated to the Azores.
The point is that the yachts didn’t fail the crews. The boats remained seaworthy and afloat. It was the crews that failed the yachts.
As a youngster growing up around boats, I was lucky enough to have tough mentors: bluewater skippers who had also endured a world war. Their attitude was: “When the last dock line is cast off, it’s up to you. Be ready to fix anything, and be prepared to handle your boat in a seamanlike way.” They usually shortened the advice to: “You’re on your own, kiddo.”
I’ve pondered this a bit, and I think there are five reasons that skippers and crews are so willing to get off a well-found yacht midocean. Every reason would make my hardy mentors snort with derision.
First, too many skippers and crews are simply unprepared for the toll that wind and seas can inflict. Punching into big seas for days is exhausting. It causes your reasoning to deteriorate. But instead of changing course or lying to a sea anchor until the weather moderates, crews call for help.
Which leads us to the second reason: They have been coddled to believe that help is always there. Whether they get a flat tire on the road and call for service or run out of fuel close to shore where a towboat can bring more, help is there. We are ingrained from childhood that there is always someone to catch us when we stumble.
The third reason? It’s just too damn easy to make the call. With communications that allow us to pick up the phone in a Brazilian rainforest to chat with a friend, one finger on the buttons is all it takes. But once you punch in that mayday or fire off the EPIRB, there’s no going back. You’ve set a network of people in motion, and you can’t call to cancel.
Number four is our rescue services. The U.S. Coast Guard and Royal National Lifeboat Institution in the U.K. are so good that once they’re triggered, you’re likely to be saved. If you were fighting big seas in the desolate Southern Ocean, you wouldn’t have that choice.
Every time the Coast Guard gets a frightened call, they launch planes, ships and helicopters, putting those crews at risk in all conditions, often at night. They notify every vessel in the area, from the Queen Elizabeth II to rusty freighters that change course to help.
These highly trained rescue teams lead us to number five. Too many skippers are totally unprepared to head offshore. Since we have modern electronics that place us within a few feet of our location, skippers often have no knowledge of a seaman’s skills. They carry no paper charts. (What could possibly go wrong with the GPS?) They have no knowledge of navigation and have never put little “x” marks across an ocean chart. Sextant? Nope. Dead reckoning? What’s that?
You can’t drive a car without a license or fly a plane without extensive training, but you can drop the docklines and head across a vast ocean without so much as a basic seamanship course.
My seamanlike mentors taught me that if it can go wrong, it will. Be prepared for everything.
And never leave your yacht until you step up into the liferaft.
Read The Dangers of Derelict Boats ▶
