In AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHIC, one of the many magazines I view online in Apple News +, I read a startling number. Young wandering albatross fly farther than older birds. Studies of juvenile birds have shown that in their first year at sea the average young albatross flies 100,000 miles. Those are nautical miles. The circumference of the Earth at the Equator is 21,600 nautical miles, so it might be said that they fly around the world almost five times in a year; but in the high Southern Latitudes where they actually do fly, the circumference is less than 15,000 nautical miles, so they circumnavigate at least six or seven times. That is more in a year than I have done in a lifetime. I am impressed.
Yesterday I telephoned Pacific Offshore Rigging in San Diego, the men who rigged GANNET’s new mast seven years ago. I am sure there are good riggers on the East Coast, but I don’t know who they are and they may not know who I am. I got Kasey, the owner, who remembered me and GANNET and understands my atypical use of the little boat. This saves a lot of time. Also saving time is that Kasey made a useful suggestion about what furling gear unit I should use to replace the Furlex and agreed to meet me on GANNET the day after I arrive. Excellent. A step forward.
I had the distinct pleasure this morning to receive an interesting email from Jim who has kindly agreed to let me share it with you. I thank him.
You bring up the topic of risk, which shows up from time to time in your writings. I believe you have written about it more when you are considering or discussing sailing, than when you are actually sailing. When sailing, you deal with what is. You could lecture on the topic.
At 72, I have chosen to continue to go to work, part time, at an Air Force base and teach in simulators and classroom. The environment is disciplined on base, with sanitary conditions, distancing and masks specified. But it would be less “Risky” to stay home.
As you have stated, there is a calculation. In fighter pilot terms, the probability of survival is partially the probability of engagement with a threat, and, if that happens, the lethality of that threat. And the number of those engagements. One should try to limit the threat exposures, and engage less-lethal threats. Mitigate the existing threat.
In a Covid world, as you have considered, each part of any trip outside has its own risk. You recently provided a chart with a risk (threat) hierarchy.
Our sailboat is currently in the Florida Keys. (Tavernier) To get to the boat is a fairly safe, but incredibly taxing four day drive, with four hotel rooms. Or 4.5 hours, plus airport time, with about 100 of our closest new friends. Impossible to calculate which would be less lethal, given the variables.
Eddie Raven sings a cute song, “Joe Knows How to Live” that includes the line, roughly, “Life is something you will never live again.” Hate to waste a sailing opportunity. But then, there is a probability there will be an available treatment, and maybe a vaccine, soonish.
Our good health is mitigation. Jack Nicklaus and his wife tested positive in March, at about 80, I noticed.
Another way to view this is, at our age, the addition of Covid may not change the overall calculation very much. Other things may be creeping up on us. As someone said, “Something is going to kill you.” Just not today…
I suppose I think about risk as Jim describes fighter pilots do, but I have never expressed it so succinctly. Probability. Lethality. Number.
Of risk, I have not forgotten the hurricane season which although quiet these past few weeks, started early and is still predicted to be more active than average. With global warming I expect most future seasons will be more active than past averages.
This is from NASA’s Earth Observatory site. Orange shows sea surface temperatures on July 14. Orange is above 27.8C/82.04F which fuels or strengthens tropical storms.
If the endless renovation is finally completed and I move GANNET to Hilton Head and both are almost immediately destroyed by a hurricane, I am going to be unhappy, but will have no one to blame but myself. That’s a known risk.
I thought I had read all of Joseph Conrad, many of his novels and stories more than once, but in looking through THE COMPLETE WORKS OF JOSEPH CONRAD, one of the world’s great bargains at $1.99 for the Kindle Edition, I came across THE END OF THE TETHER which I did not recall and as I read realized I hadn’t before. Maybe there are a few more gems I have overlooked. I hope so. It is a very good short novel about an aging sea captain who lost his wealth through bank failures during a financial panic, but continues on to the end of the tether to try to help his adult daughter. There is a plot twist, so I will not say more.
A quote from the book:
The sea was full of craft of all kind. And of all the ships in sight, near and far, each was provided with a man, the man without whom the finest ship is a dead thing, a floating and purposeless log.
And this not from the book.
One morning two boats left a city in the East.
It was an unusually logical city, governed under the
theories of an American psychologist by a Chinese man educated in England. Nominally a democracy, the government held one-party elections before telling the people what to do. It told them clearly and repeatedly, and it rewarded them when they did what they were told and it punished them when they did not.
The government sponsored a great many campaigns. There were campaigns in favor of birth control, education, short hair for men, higher work productivity, and the wearing of seat belts in automobiles. There were campaigns against littering, drugs, spitting in public, and the use of minor languages. But even logic can lead to absurdity, such as the huge poster in the General Post Office, which commanded: Speak More Mandarin; Less Dialects. Unfortunately for the theories of the American psychologist, this was written in English.
It was not a city given to laughter, particularly at itself, and generally these campaigns resulted in the city being what the government wanted it to be: serious, hard working, prosperous, and dull. It was the cleanest city in the East, and the most characterless.
The city was situated on an island at the mouth of a great strait. The island was roughly diamond shaped, fifteen miles north/south and twenty miles east/west.
One hundred years earlier, the island was the private hunting preserve of a sultan, whose Muslim ancestors had a few centuries still earlier conquered the adjacent peninsula in the name of Allah. Then a young Englishman came to make his fortune in the service of the East India Company, saw the commercial value of the island, and founded a trading post there.
Now three million people lived on the island. Most of them were Chinese. All of them were immigrants or the sons and daughters or grandsons and granddaughters of immigrants. But those now living on the island considered it to be their own and did not welcome new immigrants. They particularly did not welcome refugees arriving by the boatload from other less prosperous and less stable lands, which in that part of the world meant practically everywhere. Such refugees were kept in detention camps until they were sent elsewhere for resettlement. The government declared that it would order its warships to sink boatloads of refugees if other countries refused to accept them.
The gulf from which the refugees appeared lay to the east of the city. To the north a peninsula dangled like an udder from the fertile cow of Asia. To the south and west sat some of the largest islands in the world. Between those islands and the peninsula was the strait.
The city was flat and ugly and had no assets other than its strategic location and the vision and determination of its aging Chinese leader. Because it was on the Equator, its climate was almost intolerable. Probably that is why no one had lived there before the Englishman came
unwittingly to prepare the stage for his country’s most humiliating and decisive defeat.
For only brief periods at dawn and sometimes after sunset was the city pleasant. Most nights and most afternoons were filled with rain. But dawn was often clear and cool and still.
The waters surrounding the city mirrored the pastel purples and lavenders that the early sun brought to the sky. The vast fleet of ships lying off the southern shore of the city was asleep. The skyscrapers in which most of the city’s inhabitants lived and worked were silent. The streets were empty. Shadows were long.
In less than an hour all this would change. As the rising sun burned away the delicate pastels of dawn, the anthill came to life. Small figures moved about the ships and skyscrapers, slowly at first, then more frenetically. Streets filled, then clogged, with cars and busses and bicycles. Lighters and launches and barges rushed from ship to shore. The sky filled with the first drops of moist haze that would by noon coalesce into towering thunderheads.
It was during one of these lovely dawns that two boats left the city. One was a fishing boat; one a sloop. The fishing boat had two men aboard. The sloop only one. The fishing boat left from a wharf crowded with similar boats on the northwest side of the city; the sloop from a marina on the southeast. Under power, both craft headed for the strait, their bows cutting easily through glassy, oily water.
In two days a storm would bring them together.
Not Conrad. Me. The beginning of SHADOWS, but I like to think Conradian.
