Ninety percent of interesting

Ironically, this book arrived by truck and then by foot.

Note to regular readers: This blog post/book review has been cross-posted to my "nautical books blog" Volumes of Salt.  I feel the subject matter, particularly in light of the effect of world shipping on little affluent yachties crossing shipping lanes because it's fun to be on a boat, may be of interest to sailors...and, or course, those readers who are also sailors.

To the average, non-mariner citizen, how the shelves at their local Walmart (or slightly less proletarian vendors) are stocked is of little interest. There's underpaid people in the front and presumably tractor-trailer docks at the back, the denizens of which labour in obscurity to bring consumers their discount-priced crap.

Rose George begs to differ: In "Ninety Percent of Everything", she gives (to me, anyway) a compelling recap of the "invisible" industry of global shipping, which has been revolutionized both by the internationalization of shipboard labour and ownership, and the related decline of national merchant navies, and the near-total acceptance of the container as the "base unit" of world shipping.

It's getting crowded out there.

In her engaging book, George, a British journalist with a number of non-fiction books to her credit, takes passage on M.V. Mærsk Kendal, a fairly representative sort of modern container ship, 300 metres long and 40 metres across, and capable of carrying 6,200 TEUs or about 3,100 of the more commonly seen (when noticed at all) 40-foot standard shipping containers.

Rose recounts how world commerce got here, and how the shipping container, after much industry resistence and vast investment to alter the world's harbours, became the de facto standard for the transshipment of manufactured goods. While raw materials, grains and liquids are shipped in different types of ships, and while container ships are not, in terms of the world's shipping fleet, particularly numerous, they are often the most noticeable, and, unlike tankers or bulk carriers, those containers can and do fall off. George relates that while only 6,000 out of 100,000 vessels of the world's merchant fleet are container ships, there's no point in building them small as their economies of scale dictate that the price of moving a container's contents (already ridiculously tiny) is reflected directly in how much of it can be hauled in one go.

The diesel engine of M/V Emma Mærsk:You know that when your engine requires sets of stairs, it's pretty big.

Speaking of economy, shipping is the greenest way per capita to get goods halfway around the planet. Having said that, however, the capita of shipping is so large, and the typical low-grade fuel they burn so dirty, that it's estimated that just 15 of the largest ships emit soot to rival all the world's cars.

And it's prettier, too, even if its cylinders aren't the size of bachelor apartments

Eager to concretize George's data in terms I could appreciate, I ran some figures for M.V. Emma Maersk's monster house-sized Wartsila Sulzer RTA96-C diesel engine when compared to my own wee diesel. Now, to be fair, I run standard diesel of the rather clarified, low-sulphur type used in cars and trucks, whereas most ships, including most cruise ships,  burn a tarry substance known as bunker fuel.

Guess which one is more polluting?

Emma Maersk's most economical fuel consumption is 1,660 gallons of heavy fuel oil per hour. Let's say that the distinction between "Imperial" or "U.S." gallons doesn't really matter here. That's 0.260 lbs/hp/hour, according to the manufacturer. My Beta 60, by contrast, burns 4 litres/hr at 2,000 rpm. So pushing Maersk around combusts roughly 0.5 gal or  1.86 L of fuel per second, whereas Alchemy is more like 1 mL/sec.

Oh, buoy, that's a lot of soot.

What bollocks, of course: Alchemy is a 16 tonne, 12 metre sailboat fit to carry perhaps four souls and two tonnes of fuel, water and provisions. Not to mention that Alchemy's diesel is an auxiliary, and, unlike that of a container ship, is not required to run for weeks at a stretch. All of which is true, but the reason that ships use low-grade fuel of high polluting potential is the same reason they hire (when they hire) crew out of the developing world: it's cheaper to do things that way. And price, like most human commerce, is the break point of doing shipping at all.

Speaking of the developing world, George spends a lot of time discussing the blend of opportunity and plight facing the most numerous members of world shipping crews, the Filipinos. She notes it's a blend, because, just as the women of the Philipinnes seem to have self-exported themselves to the Wests in the form of nannies, nurses and caregivers, that country's men are found as the lower ranks of shipping crews virtually everywhere. The lower ranks only, for the most part, due to the relatively low grade of what George calls "marine academies" in their homeland, and in the fact that shipping seems to be somewhat socially stratified, with white Westerners at the captain level, and Indians in the engine rooms, with a smattering of Ukrainians and Eastern Europeans in the middle ranks. George doesn't question this much, except to note that there isn't much mixing among the crew.

Whether this is due to hierarchy or culture isn't clear, although if you are going to be ripped off, it's usually the lower crew who get, unsurprisingly, the dirty end of the stick. That's why there are still missions to seafarers: instead of shore leave, there are merely 24-hour turnarounds in semi-automated container-handling ports; the old sailorly lifestyle of going a-whoring and a-boozing in port for a week is largely history, according to George: the life of today's seaman is too tiring and rushed to go on shoreside toots, and never mind the cost of even getting out of vast ports miles from the fun of a city. So the missions fill the gap and provide small necessities and a respite from the ripoff artists that still plague the seaman's world once off the gangway.

"Nearly everything is transported by sea. Sometimes on trains I play a numbers game. The game is to reckon how many clothes and possessions and how much food has been transported by ship. The beads around the woman’s neck; the man's iPhone. Her Sri Lankan-made skirt and blouse; his printed-in-China book. I can always go wider, deeper and in any direction. The fabric of the seats. The rolling stock. The fuel powering the train. The conductor’s uniform; the coffee in my cup; the fruit in my bag. Definitely this fruit, so frequently shipped in refrigerated containers that it has been given its own temperature. Two degrees Celsius is 'chill’, but 13 degrees is 'banana’." -Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything.

George, partially due to the language barriers of the multi-ethnic crew, spends a lot of time with M.V. Kendal's Captain Glenn, a man, in the book's setting of 2012, at the end of a 40-plus-year career as a professional mariner. He's proud of his ship and his service, but his perceptions of what the old world of "break bulk/general cargo" shipping was like before the advent of container ports would have been recognizable to my father, a merchant seaman in the 1940s and early 1950s, whereas today's strictly run (the captain is told from head office to increase or reduce speed to meet distant schedules, for instance) operation is more like an assembly line in a giant's Lego factory. The contrast of a man on the verge of retirement demonstrating to the uncomprehending author his mastery of the sextant, while at the same time acknowledging that his fellow sailors are treated "like the scum of the earth" is perhaps a telling marker of the degree and rapidity of how the shipping industry has changed.

George also discusses the shell game of merchant vessel ownership and the dubious practice of "foreign flagging" in ship registration. The practice of, say, "flagging" a ship owned by Greeks through various offshore shell companies, and yet flagged to various countries such as Panama and Liberia (or Mongolia!) avoids pesky safety rules and inspections of, shall we say, more developed countries. So much of the world's fleet is undersupervised and underregulated, or so George indicates, and this is because these torturous paper games are designed to save shipowners money. But it has real-life consequences when ships in bad repair wreck and spill toxic contents, or when (as George notes in another chapter), ships are hijacked for ransoms that may never get paid, and their cheap labour crews are left to rot and sometimes die.

The absurdity of the practice of flags of convenience in the modern world is unlikely to be altered, however: there's simply too much money in the scam. It does, however, lead to paradoxically odd situations, such as last month where the U.S.'s ancient Jones Act of 1920 meant that there aren't really enough American-flagged ships left in American waters to transport road salt from Maine to Boston.

The "E-class" containship M/V Emma Mærsk: There are seven others just like her plying the oceans, and bigger ones on the drawing boards of global shipping. Photo (c) Mike Cunningham

Despite these ongoing industry issues, there's no sign that the world's shipping fleet is slowing down: the next largest container ships in the world, bigger than the E-Class, are already being built in Korea. The world has a seemingly inexhaustible hunger for slightly cheaper crap from somewhere else, and that hunger will make the ships that carry them bigger. Cleaner, safer and more humanely crewed may have to wait.

Venus envy: Not big enough!

Ninety Percent of Everything was a good and informative read, and provides a start contrast to another classic on merchant shipping I read a few years ago, John McPhee's Looking for a Ship. While written a mere 23 years ago, McPhee's story of one of the last American-crewed and registered general cargo ships reads like Conrad penned it. George's book isn't nearly as well-written...McPhee remains a master of making difficult subjects a pleasure to delve into...and has some digressive passages some readers may find a touch disjointed, but it is still an excellent introduction to a vast and global enterprise without which we would soon starve in rags.

And I for one, can't wait for containers to have AIS beacons.

Bonus link: the Elly Maersk set to a hypnotic beat.

Bonus link: The front fell off.

A prayer for the amateur diesel maintainer

This is a Vivian three-cylinder diesel. No, I've never heard of it, either, but it needs some service.

O mighty Neptune/Poseidon/Aquaman:

 

Give unto me, your faithful servant, correctly sourced spares aplenty should thy diesel prove to have been built on a Monday or Friday, and give unto me credit aplenty in diverse realms to purchase such spares in harbours of dubious repute; lo, even though they be made by unionized Europeans!

 

Give also unto me the courage to attempt, heeding those applicable scriptural passages from Sts. Gerr, Calder and Compton, a host of minor repairs when thy diesel knocketh, overheateth or emitteth the black, white or grey smokes of the inferno, and through such brazen signs and portents let me diagnose thereby thy auxiliary's ailments. Leadeth me to measurements Imperial or metric, but provideth me with tools for both, for my vessel is Canadian-registered, and I bear the doubled yoke thereby.

Let me lay down with stainless hose clamps aplenty; let my spares locker runneth over with fasteners of all kinds, even those parts of surpassing obscurity and dubious utility. May I always have a flashlight to hand, and picker-uppers with which to pick up that which falleth, and a song of praise that thy bilges bringeth forth the lost sheep of my greasy fingers.

Let me suffereth not the wayward courier; keep from me the services of incompetent "experts", sent by the Arch-Lubber himself, who render upon thy auxiliary more harm than good and chargeth me sorely, and greatly oppresseth the rum budget. And let me swear less, but not yet, not yet!

May my Racors runneth ever clearly with clean fuel; may I understand more fully what is a "banjo washer", and, having such understanding, may I replace thy auxiliary's injectors, should this come to pass, in sincere hopes of the restoration of serene function and full shaft output, and in the rock-like confidence that thy vessel may once again churn the seas in both calms and cats' paws.

May thy exhaust be sufficiently cooled and riseth from the waterlift without falling back, for 'tis said the oils and the waters maketh a poor milkshake.

May thy pumps always lift,  may thy lines need no bleeding, and may thy starter cables remain uncorroded, to thine greater glory and in hopes of reaching the alloted anchorage before sunset. 

Amen.

Oh, look...it's Canadian.

 

The opposite of right

I don't expect the basis of this post to persist, so "enjoy" it while it lasts.

This little gem was found on the Canadian Yachting Facebook page. Scroll down to the "Feb. 26" entry. Props to fellow Ontario sailor Scott B. and anything-sailing.com for spotting it.

Spot the problem: It's not the missing sea boots, nor the suspicious-looking angle of heel.

Now, in most of life's challenges, there's not only a right and a wrong answer, but a range of right and wrong. Putting out a fire with your hands is only right in the sense that it is arguably better to have burnt hands than to die in an explosion made inevitable if you don't put the fire out with your hands, for instance. This is clearly a hard choice. Might be better to just head for the lift raft. But is there time?

In the context of the sea, recreational sailors face the same challenges as professional mariners who receive mandatory education on how to deal with dangerous situations aboard ships. We learn the same techniques and attempt to master similar methods of evaluation through education, and through the development of the awareness necessary to stay safe at sea.

Such education iss mandatory in such countries as Portugal, where the Portuguese Navy is the coast guard and the entire coast is more or less a rough and potentially dangerous lee shore. In North America, we have either "nothing" or feeble, low-bar certifications like the Canadian PCOC, which exposes the new boater to about enough instructional rigour to manage a figure-8 on a mill pond in a Torqeedo-powered Zodiac.

The conscientious recreational boater, perhaps being informed by circumstance of his or her knowledge deficits by the indifferent elements, or possessing insufficient comprehension about how a boat actually works, has a few options. In Canada, there is Canadian Power and Sail Squadrons, a longstanding and largely volunteer-run organization that has a noble mission statement:

To increase awareness and knowledge of safe boating by educating and training members and the general public, by fostering fellowship among members, and by establishing partnerships and alliances with organizations and agencies interested in boating.-CPS mission statement.

And good on them for that. I took with veteran cruisers Ken and Lynn (it's where we all actually met) the 12-week Boating Course in 1999, about four months after I bought Valiente and after an episode of pure and expensive ignorance persuaded me that I had a serious shortfall in knowing how to work my new-to-me boat. The course was not particularly easy, and all of us felt, after a longish exam at the end, that we had earned our then-freshly introduced PCOC certifications, and that we now had some sort of theoretical foundation to our actions and decisions on the water. I have found their standards have declined in this regard in the intervening years, along with the ease with which a PCOC can be obtained.

Nonetheless, I went on, as did my wife, to take other CPS courses, such as Radio Operation, Coastal Pilotage, Basic Marine First Aid and a few others, like Celestial Navigation. There haven't been many long and cold Toronto haulout seasons during which I haven't taken some sort of education that has been intended into increasing my seamanship and general on-board competence. I leave it to Neptune and other sailors to judge how that's panned out.

I've often spoken here about recognizing risks at sea. We learn to evaluate risk through experience, but in many situations, the acquisition of "risky experience" can damage the boat, or injure or even kill the crew. So we take courses to explore risks and safety at sea in a methodical and cosseted fashion, in the hopes that "the right or at least the best answer" will occur to us should the worst case or the riskiest choice manifest on a boat on which we are crewing or which is under our command.

The way individual minds are put together, and the level of one's susceptability to panic or fear will, of course, play a role in whether the training one takes in a warm classroom on shore will serve a frozen crew in a damaging gale. There's clearly limits to education. But (and we are now returning to the gloriously bad bit of advertising above), one of those limits should not be, in my view, promoting an organization's boater education courses with the opposite of what is the correct use of a safety device and technique.

None of whom are now alive, but hey.

The contemplative cabin boy pictured above on what may be a Nonsuch would find just about enough deflection in that lifeline to drown were the improperly deployed tether he's sporting to be used for real. Not only is that the wrong way to rig a tether, it's a way to rig a tether that would most likely kill the user. Were you to lash a baby seat with jute twine to the outside of a car windshield in order to demonstrate the efficacy of your in-dash airbags during a head-on collision, a similar level of utility would be on show.

TETHERS DON'T WORK THAT WAY. THEY WORK THIS WAY.

And that's why I now take RYA courses, despite my current inability to actually pass the things, instead of CPS. There's simply a higher grade of care and professionalism at work. All the good intentions in the world (and CPS is full of people with good intentions) can't make me forgive or forget that this educational organization approved and presumably paid for that advertisement to go live. If they are careless about this, which must have passed in front of many sailorly eyes, how much confidence can one have in the quality of their educational courses?

As an aside, I could let the Christopher Columbus quote pass, even though I and some others consider him a bloodthirsty slaver, but not a tether used in exactly the wrong way, even in a clearly faked-up, fair-weather photo shoot.

Wonder where I learned that? Probably when the ocean tried to kill me and only a properly rigged tether stopped it so I could live to rant another day.

Another murder in Paradise: some preventative thoughts

Roger Pratt, whose cruising ended abruptly in St. Lucia.

I hesitated to complete this post, although it's been six weeks since I started it. But it would be Pollyannaish of us to fail to acknowledge that, in addition to the hazards of nature, there's the potential for trouble when one anchors in Paradise. The fact is that many tropical locales are not safe for foreigners and that in some cases the more active sort of resistance to unwelcome boarders can get you killed. I'm not talking about pirates off Somalia, however: I'm talking about being boarded underway or at anchor in some of the most cruiser-dense waters of the world. And, for the record, I won't get into a gun debate here: that's rarely an option for non-Americans out of their own waters. Nor will I specify whether I use Captain Slocum's alarm.

Pictured above is Roger Pratt, murdered by vicious thieves in January off the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. The more I read about him and his wife, the more typical a cruising couple they seemed: retired professionals in their early 60s, mucking about at no great rate in the Caribbean.  Before the blog of their boat Magnetic Attraction was removed, the Pratts' entries were benign, the record of an engaged couple enjoying the various islands and people they'd visited, and exhibiting a capable degree of seamanship.

Could've been anyone. It's not common to get killed on one's boat, but it's hard to determine if it's getting more common to have that boat robbed. Data is incomplete, or hard to collate, or is stale or anecdotal. I sense that many cruisers are fatalistic on this score, however. Others seem to feel that the onus is on the cruiser to keep alert and to appear, if not poor, than not visibly rich. Don't venture too far. Don't carry money. Dress down, et cetera. And, most importantly,  stay informed and keep current about "bad areas" and avoid them. Of course, this doesn't help if a previously good area turns bad because some locals decide to rob your boat, with a little machete work if the owners are aboard and raise objections.

Frequently seen in groups.

Of course, nowhere is truly safe and everything is relative. I've been burgled here in Toronto. I've also got into some fairly serious physical altercations, although those are now far in the past. I consider myself reasonably prepared to throw a punch or worse, particularly if my family is also threatened. But I'm no spring chicken anymore, and on passage we would not be, despite bringing our "home" with us, really on home turf.

You can see the cruise ships from here. Photo (c) Giles Ashford

Be aware that you are guests and are intrinsically privileged

A sometimes unconsidered fact of life is that when a Westerner affluent enough to have the time and gear necessary to cruise a sailboat shows up in a place where poverty is general; or even a place where the employees of luxury hotels on the beachfront live in shantytowns out of sight behind the property line, it's a sort of taunting. Sometimes, when I am experiencing frustrations with the pace of renovation aboard our yacht, I have to think "if your biggest worry is a unco-operative yacht, you may be approaching one per center territory, Chuckles". Upon such sober reflection, my day tends to improve and the clean drinking water becomes extra-tasty.

Nonetheless, I can never excuse the violence, or the sheer opportunism of seeing a boat as a floating target of looting, but I can sometimes understand how knocking off a cruiser would seem like a good career move to a person with no prospects. And just as clearly, a lot of cash-flush tourists from the rich part of the planet don't appear to comprehend the nature of poverty, to the point where they don't grasp how staying in a fake slum is grossly insulting. Such folk probably see the planet as one big service industry and there's little else to say except they'd better hope that Soylent Green isn't a documentary.

The net effect, however, among the cruising community is to simply cross entire countries or even regions off their "need to visit" lists. In the Caribbean, for instance, cruisers in the planning stages or even actively on passage have nearly instantaneous means of notifying each other, and of keeping a close eye (perhaps a closer eye than the usually lax or underfunded local police) on where the crime is happening.


The effect of crimes against cruisers on local commerce in these places can be immediate and devastating. It can have a big impact on the local politics, as well. Frequently, there is little industry or agricultural production on some islands: tourism, for good or ill, is the lifeblood of the place.

Stock image of a Trinidad boat yard, a favourite place to haul for its economy and (mostly) hurricane-free climate.

Yacht tourism, which can involve things like chandleries, provisioners and repair shops, or even full-service boatyards, can provide decent jobs to locals that don't involve wearing little white jackets and handling trays. So there is a dichotomy: on islands where the relationship is understood, thieves can be swiftly caught and (by our First World standards) harshly punished. Other places seem unmotivated to either prevent or to solve crimes, maybe because the poverty is so entrenched.

Take the same precautions as you would at home, because you are at home

We can only make our own choices based on recent information: it's clear that in some cases there's often a spate of robberies done in a semi-organized fashion; other times, a fisherman sees a hatch carelessly left open and decides to improve his material circumstances. In still other cases, boats are robbed while the crew sleeps, and if you've ever slept on a sailboat, that is a pretty amazing level of stealthiness!

We can make our own precautions by sturdy locks, lights and radios left on to suggest occupancy, the retrieving of tenders/dinghies on deck so they can't just be cut free of the boat, and the lifting up and locking of all boarding ladders. This is pretty basic stuff, I think, but you have to go to the people actually living aboard, in this case seasoned co-skippers Ken and Lynn of Silverheels III, to get the real scoop. Others have said much the same thing, but perhaps more holistically: it's been a long time since 'a party line' described a telephone installation, but what is a non-DSC VHF call except an all-points broadcast that is easily overheard? The low acceptance of MMSIs and digital selective calling among cruisers is a mystery to me: if you know you are going to hear from a fellow boater, the VHF will, in effect, "ring" and you can move to a working channel without announcing it on Channel 16. Sure, you can still be heard, but you are harder to find right away...and you're not supposed to babble on VHF anyway. Keep it brief and keep your plans to leave the boat unattended to yourself.

Possessing a certain charm, but she'll never be mistaken for a new Jeanneau Sun Odyssey DS...thank Poseidon

Being a less compliant or obvious target is part of the safety regime; another is being less attractive. I subscribe to the theory that "magpie mind" is an actual attribute of the average thief's thought processes. By this, I mean a compulsion toward shiny objects. I may have mentioned in the past an old bike courier's trick I called "courier grime": cover the expensive frame in filthy band decals or leftie sentiments, and pat baby oil on whatever's still visible. Grind a little brown chalk and blow it randomly on the frame: voila: fake rust! Getting drunk and wielding house paint works, too.

At the recent Toronto boat show, I tried to explain to a marine paint salesdrone how any hull paint I wanted to purchase and apply must be 100% about durability...not only did I not care whether it looked particularly good in a strong light, I actively did not want the typical high-gloss look of the typical fibreglass yacht. In fact, I want Alchemy to appear to be coated in flat and industrial paints, suggesting, we hope, that there is nothing of shiny value is or could possibly be aboard. Protective colouration, so to speak.

An idea of dubious merit?

It may become necessary in certain popular cruiser locales to go old-school and to keep an anchor watch. Now, I've only overnighted one night in the Caribbean, and that as crew, so no expert, I. But I would certainly consider it for reasons of both security and for the more usual reasons of sheer unfamiliarity with holding of the ground, oncoming weather, shifting winds and so on.

The night has eyes! Photo (c) S/V Andante

But it seems logical to me, even in the context of dealing with perhaps young, drunk and/or desperate boat thieves, that approaching a boat with a clearly awake watchstander would be not a first choice.

Let's make it even simpler: An anchor watch in a fairly full anchorage could be organized via a cruisers' net to cover only every fourth or fifth boat, assuming the boats anchored are in some sort of rough array. One boat with one alert pair of eyes and ears and a handheld VHF on a pre-arranged channel  can realistically "patrol" a number of surrounding vessel. You see a panga coming in at 2 AM and slowingdown? Hit them with the spotlight. You see a boarding? Light up your boat, hit the PA and key the hailer and radio.

Every night, the "watch boat" switches based on a schedule not broadcast over the cruiser net. If the cost of avoiding a possibly violent break-in was having to stay up four hours a night once a week, I would be happy to be of service.

A few nights (there's no sense that these crimes happen often in broad daylight) of that would really discourage all but the most desperate of thieves, I would think. Others may consider it impractical or insufficient a discouragement. I think if it is insufficient, I wouldn't want to be in that portion of Paradise. Too many serpents.

Bumps in the nightwatch

Nobody said global trade was going to be painless

Under the list of "problems facing the cruiser that are unlikely to go away soon" are paperwork and visa issues, the question of when it is worth it to bribe officials, and how to protect oneself, one's crew and one's boat from the debris floating in the sea. To date, I've run aground inside a buoyed channel with supposedly sufficient depth, I've run aground on a sand bar where I should've known better, and I've hit large branches and sucked plastic into the motor. I've also reported, several times now, the position and surmised course of floating picnic tables, shipping pallets, tree limbs and trunks to the Coast Guard. If there's garbage in the water big enough to sink a boat locally, there's likely worse at sea, if (one hopes) far more dispersed.

I've covered off in a largish post last fall the topic of strainers and the sealife and smaller debris that can hamper them. But this is more about steel and timber and tsunami debris that can do more than go bump in the nightwatch. Sure, most of it either sinks to the bottom or washes (and is plundered in the time-honoured traditon) ashore, but thanks to the sheer volume of world shipping, it's a non-trivial amount of junk afloat. While it's been said that if you worried about everything that could kill you at sea, you'd never cast off, it's part of seamanlike prudence, I think, to consider whether an unlikely event is worthy of planning for or of instituting a Plan B (beyond a life raft, which would be Plan A, I suppose).

Self-containered?

Apart from some practical steps to keep the water out (would you bother to fother?), what would be a reasonable game plan for dealing with a sea with roaming, hard to spot nautical hazards? Questions like this aren't theoretical for us: it's part of the reason we chose steel over fibreglass, and we've already had some useful, if unwelcome, confirmation that steel can take blunt-force impacts more successfully than can many other boat hull materials. Dunno about super-duper Kevlar or carbon-fibre boats, but that's not us nor likely to be us.

By the way, I encourage all sailors planning on going out of sight of land to watch the above two videos. The comments section, unusually in my experience of YouTube's offerings, has interesting and lively suggestions on keeping afloat after a hull breach.

This topic arises because the seas aren't getting any emptier of the now-universal containerized cargo vessel. Numbering around 10,000, this vast fleet of slab-sided sea trucks plies the oceans in calculated courses designed to minimize diesel usage and therefore cost. The crews, whatever their seamanship, are generally not well-paid nor numerous. As we read in Ninety Percent of Everything, an intriguing treatise (and a book I will be reviewing shortly) by Rose George on the "invisible" shipping industry, we often don't even know how much or of what nature is inside those containers, each of which is about the size  of Alchemy, and potentially much heavier. 

“When MSC Napoli grounded off a Devon beach in January 2007, its burst boxes of motorbikes, shampoo, and diapers attracted looters and treasure hunters. It was also a rare opportunity to compare what was declared on container manifests with actual contents. In 20 percent of the containers, the contents and weights were wrong.”--Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything

Mate Johnny C. and myself share a awestruck fascination for bad weather as expressed in isobars squeezed tighter than a chilled gymnast's backside. You can argue whether the terrible oceanic weather of late is the fault of humankind all you want, but don't let it interrupt your bailing.

And this was before the last six.

Regardless of the human toll on property and infrastructure, those who can read these sort of synoptic charts can imagine (or recall in some cases) what these weather systems can do in the open ocean.

An imperfect storm.

One known and anticipated effect of bad weather in the more high-traffic parts of the sea is damage to those contain ships, which tend to lose, predictably, containers.  At over five hundred containers in the sea, it can be assumed that many sank more or less immediately, but nonetheless some continue to float for significant periods of time, to the point where they become known hazards to shipping.

Cigarettes: now in seafood flavour!

Of course, some are more or less safely beached, but considering their sometimes-hazardous cargo, safety is relative. It's clear that more bad weather has the potential, and maybe the probability, of increasing the number of containers in the sea, or conversely, the amout of debris that's supposed to be affixed to the shore cut loose into the open ocean.

This is better than hitting something awash below the WL, but it would be a different story in a 0300 h gale. Photo (c) Ocean Navigator

And while the loss of multiple containers doesn't happen every day, it happens frequently enough to make one wonder about what sort of watchstanding would protect against hitting voyage-wrecking debris, or if there are technological solutions worth the bother. Radar, forward-looking sonar or some sort of electronic beacon or tag on the containers themselves hold promise of varying degrees. It's not so much a matter of whether the tech exists; it does, but given that criminals are already exploiting the technology of container tracking, would a conscientious, budget-minded shipper not prefer to stick with the old paper manifests or their proprietary, closed cargo accounting?

While the ability to get some sort of lat/lon data or other directional signal from an awash, overboard container at sea would be very handy on the nightwatch, I don't know how that would help you if you ran into a fleet of large logs. "Keep a good watch" has its limits! But the Russian timber ship video, which for some reason will not embed here, got me thinking of an interesting possibility that is already in play in Russia.

My understanding is that in Russia, the cops can be corrupt and the insurance companies can be very weaselly in order to avoid paying out on claims. So the habit of continuously recording via a small camera every second of driving from the viewpoint through the windscreen has become common. I believe you can record several hours of driving on a tiny device; afterwards, the old files are "re-recorded" with more current ones. As I understand it, the process stops and starts with the car. Or with the douchebag powerboater.

I can easily see this rather simple technology adapted for the cruising sailboat. In fact, my friend Alex in Portugal gets a plug here for his extensive and innovative use of Go Pro cameras to record his racing crew's performances.

One can easily imagine a "watch cam" that records the last 24 hours of sailing automatically. It could be mounted three metres up the mast, for instance. Or even at the spreaders or the mast top for such useful functions as "spot the poorly charted and greatly expanded since Captain Cook" reef. It needn't be expensive or technically complex.

Oh, look, a situation ahead demanding caution. Glad it was spotted it from a 15 metre height-of-eye. Photo (c) Brian Steiler

If the boat hits (or is hit) by debris or derelict cargo/containers, the incident would be captured. That's handy for insurance claims, if not exactly peace of mind. "Yes, Maersk (or other major shipping line) representatives, it was one of your poorly secured 20-tonne boxes of dollar-store crap that stove in our bow...here's the video and please note the logo on the side!" Or even the side of the ship.

This is the container ship MOL Comfort just prior to splitting fully in half. I find the name a little ironic.

Now, I already have a "rear-view bumper cam" so that I can safely dock portside from my pilothouse's starboard helm: it's a simple way to make sure I'm close enough for the crew to jump off with a line. This is simply that sort of deal with waterproofing and a MP3-grade recorder, a 12 VDC supply and some sort of a switch or timer.

And it's probably not beyond possibility to envision a time when a drone aircraft can be launched from a boat to view (in visible or infrared or perhaps even a limited form of radar) the seas ahead for possible debris intersections.

Of course, by "probably not beyond possibility", I mean "is already being done on a regular basis". Whether one considers it necessary or prudent to use such technologies aboard, and whether such technologies will work in heavy weather at night at sea, remain probably as much a matter of opinion as of investment. The odds are low, of course, because the oceans are very big and empty.

Not as much, however, as they used to be.

Breaking the ice

That cockpit scupper icicle may date from 2013.

Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York...oh, if only the "sun of York" (the original name of Toronto) was up to the job of thawing, there might be less wintry discontent on the boat maintenance front.

While it's become common knowledge that this winter in North America has been severe, it's even more common to make jokes about the shortness of human memory concerning weather. It's been only moderately snowy, if my own memory serves, but a feature of our "now with added climate change" weather of the last quarter-century has been prolonged periods of thaws or at least a day or two of 10C weather every two weeks, enough to cut well into the accumulated snowpack (a term usually reserved for ski country).

The snow is a good 30-40 cm. deep all over the boat. The wind has eroded the snowbank over the coaming only a bit. On the port side, it's well over the tops of the primaries. At least the "boom brake" seems to have stayed put.

Not so this year. We are 45 days into 2014 without, I believe, a single moment of thaw. Even the Great Lakes are showing the effects in near-record-breaking levels of ice cover. The results in terms of getting up ladders and into boats are extra layers of clothing and difficulty. The day before yesterday (not pictured), I spent time shovelling off Alchemy and admiring the layer-cake effect of ice, packed snow, loose snow, powdery snow, and some sort of very sticky snow from the decks and the pilothouse roof.  I couldn't find the wooden brace I use to secure the foot of the ladder as it was beneath a drift. The interior in full daylight had a dim blue, igloo-like glow from the thick layers of snow above every hatch. I cleaned out all the portlights as I don't want the inevitable, if tardy, thawing process to seep meltwater into the interior.

My impression that we've had a lot of easterly weather this winter seems to be correct.

Yesterday's labours involved hauling the Honda 2000 genset on a bike trailer to Valiente's winter yard, some 4 NM (yes, I am starved of boaty thoughts) east of our house. For reasons obscure to me as a taxpayer, there seems to be slightly more road work being done over the winter than in the summer, when it is presumably more fuel-efficient to melt tar. So the roads are dirty, broken-up and car-stuffed. The irate drivers and I, so rarely in common cause, can agree that the roads in Toronto are getting worse, not better. I look forward to not travelling them for a few years.

That was not either loose snow or a conveniently dislodged big chunk of ice. It was a frosty amalgam of nasty.

So after a few miles of lightly salted mist and pothole massage, plus pushing the bike between unshovelled inter-boat pathways, I got the power cord out, the Honda purring (it is a most reliable and eager beast if maintained) and a blazing 10 amps of current charging my neglected house bank. It was time for a look around. The decks were deep with snow over ice and were unpleasant to navigate; nonetheless, I went forward to retrieve a ridiculously long strip of Someone Else's Failed Tarp from the lashings of my Portabote. There was evidence of damage like that as far as I could see, but my calculated risk of leaving the mast up and not tarping this year seems to have worked out. We've had several episodes of 40 to 50 knot gales this winter, and sometimes it's best just to not tarp rather than to risk getting a hole or rip from chafing, at which point the whole frame and tarp can tear up pretty quickly.

That's been my experience, anyway.

Not pink lemonade, but a chunk of water from the mast atop a substrate of antifreeze. Very Canadian.

The bilges were, despite the sloshing of much full-strength antifreeze, somewhat crusty with ice. But there was no sign of water aside from the usual one expects with a keel-stepped mast. I cleared away the 30 cm of snow from the Nicrovent fan in the head, which immediately began to flutter and spin under the cloud-occluded afternoon sun of York. With some luck, when this ice does begin to melt, some of the moisture will be sucked out of the boat.

It only looks like the boat of a clumsy cocaine smuggler.

Snowy ingress was more evident at the companionway. There's a teak vent in the upper dropboard, and the whole setup is not exactly weather-tight. Clearly. Had I not been in a rush to haul out in order to meet both work obligations and my preparations for my Brittany sailing school trip, I perhaps would have rigged up some sort of tarp for this area. I've done it before, and it's reduced the drifting.

Well, the charger's still working.

I was able to get about 2.5 hours of charging on the batteries, and they are still well short of fully charged, but it was better than the previous regime of "Nothing". It's a bit late now to take them off the boat even if I can do so in a friend's car, so I'll return again in the next spell of less-atrocious weather to lay on a few more hours of charge. Frankly, it was -7C aboard and I was getting seriously chilly reading about boat electrical systems in the dim recesses of Valiente's rimed saloon.

I realize now that we've had a historically typical winter, and that most of the winters during which I've got a lot of work done have been unusually warm (or rather, warm enough in which to do outside work or unheated inside work) and sufficiently dry in that the snow that happened went away for days at a time. Not this year. A dropboard makes a lousy shovel. May your fair winds be frost-free.

How to avoid casting a pawl

Winches. If you think they are expensive, wait until you have to get spares for old ones.

I had reason recently to relate a winch-servicing trick that I thought I had cleverly invented; alas, it's been done by every fourth sailor since the invention of the things. Still, I'll expand on it as it's an area of boat maintenance that is rarely ignored by the racer, but to judge from the appalling screeching one hears on some peoples' boats, is occasionally neglected by cruisers of the recreational ilk. That subject is winches.

Typically, I "service" all of our boats' winches every two seasons. This involves partial or full disassembly of the winch bodies, cleaning, lubrication, replacement of worn parts if needed, tightening of the winch bases, the occasional sealing of the winch base mounts, and reassembly.

Exceptions are made if the winch is showing signs of dirt or binding or if I've just been using them a lot, or if, say, I pick up a pair in need of rehabbing. The requirement for service is dependent on intensity of use, climate, and, realistically, free time. If I raced 20 times in a season with plenty of short tacks and people bigger than myself doing the grinding, winch servicing of the primaries two or three times in a season would not be considered excessive.

Warning: It's never on a neutral background, nor is it this clean or this tastefully lit. I find a bright headlamp can help on a cloudy day.

Find a corrugated cardboard box big enough to hold your winch and your two hands. Something from a grocery store is ideal and free. If you are anticipating doing the entirety of the winches several times a year, such as might be the case in a race boat, I would suggest a small plastic basin with a set of inserts featuring each deck-mounted winch's mounting base diameter in a series of firm plastic sheets. Nothing that can't be cut with an Exacto knife should be needed. For mast or boom-mounted winches, a one-time use cardboard box with the requisite hole in the side, perhaps secured with gaffer tape, a bungee or a lashing, works well for me.

One wishes as a skipper to avoid casting a pawl over the proceedings.

Here's the drill for coaming-mounted or deck-mounted primaries, secondaries and halyard winches:

Cut a circle in the box bottom the same diameter as the winch base.

Cut down the height of the box to slightly higher than the height of the winch.

Place the box over the winch and remove the hex bolt(s). When you lift off the winch drum, you are far less likely to scream when the little pawls and pawl springs pop off, because they will fall into the box and not over the toerail and into the sea.

UPDATE 14.01.23: Skilled boat fixer Gary Daggett writes: I have used that [the boxing the winch method] before and I add a little bit to it. I have a couple strong magnets and I use some painters' tape to attach them to the inside of the box so that I can just stick the clips and loose parts to it that will stick. For the pawls and other little pieces that don't stick to the magnet I run some tape sticky side up and just stick the parts to the tape so they don't slide or roll around. I do much of my work on the water so keeping them parts on the boat are really important as you pointed out.

Thanks for the tips, Gary. Interested readers in the greater Chicago area (and this is a rare endorsement from this blog) should consider Gary to help them service, fix, restore or modify their boats.

Service and reassemble as per your winch manufacturer's guidance. Don't be discouraged if your winch is no longer made or is elderly: there are many old winch resources on line in which exploded diagrams and even spares can be found. There's also a fair bit of interchangeability in parts: when I lost overboard a pawl spring for one of Valiente's extinct Barlow 26 primaries several years ago, I found that the equivalent Lewmar pawl spring worked perfectly. But, as this instructive piece from the blog of S/V White Pepper indicates, a well-built winch can come back from a state of neglect and should outlast its owner.

As for my initial, unboxed winch servicing adventures, all I needed was a ridiculous amount of cash for one tiny bit of spring.

And yes, it was exactly this sort of sad and surprisingly expensive event that prompted me to develop this "pro-tip".

Show boating, 2014

If one wheel is good, two must be better. I sense this setup is less about steering and more about creating a path to the stern on the centerline

Given the sheer volume of things I have yet to install on Alchemy, I don't really need to buy stuff at the Boat Show. But I have never failed to get comped tickets (I wouldn't otherwise go as I have a thing against paying for the privilege of shopping), and I usually get to speak with fabricators or technical types who can help me figure out things. I did so again to my profit (at least in terms of knowledge) this year. Besides, I collect my usual tranche of smallest-room reading in the form of marine supply catalogues. My idea of fun may be different than yours.

Chines: Cool, then not cool, are once again cool.

 As I've noticed in recent years, there are fewer and more similar production sailboats and more powerboats. I find this baffling given the price of fuel, and, according to the staff of the chandlery where Mrs. Alchemy was working, the significantly fewer show attendees this year; they said visitors were down about 25%. Not that there weren't attractions: the Pardeys were across the aisle from my wife, who was selling stuff at Genco. Having seen the famous no-frills sailing couple in the flesh, I now know why they were happy in small full-keelers...they are very compact people.

Blonde salesperson optional.

 I won't bore you with my crotchety dislike of modern production boats in terms of safety at sea. Nor will I dwell upon the likelihood of certain condoesque designs killing their owners through the miracle of convenience. I have to accept that the audience for such current vessels have different, sometimes significantly so, priorities than we do, and are not likely to be going far from home on their tiny-travellered (if that's a real word), high-sided, bow-thrustered show boats. Fair enough.

I have not read Cruising World in many years. I already know what a boat ad looks like.

I did like, however, the 40 footer Blue Jacket, which I presume is also named Blue Jacket. In many ways not readily apparent, I think, it was more boat than usually seen at an inland boat show.

Clearly, they are proud of their boat design.

This design by the former Tartan executive and designer Tim Jackett was for me the most, or perhaps only, compelling one I stepped aboard. The Blue Jacket marque is some sort of subsidiary of Island Packet Yachts, and their sturdy designs have found favour for many years in the cruising community. This design is a bit of a contrast to that in that it's clearly a bit of a rocket, more BMW than Buick.

That's certainly a Tartanesque price tag.

I found the boat better organized for offshore and, at under 12 and a half feet in beam, pretty lean for a modern boat. But the sail area is generous, the boat isn't overweight, and so a lively ride is likely. Blue Jacket is clearly a cruiser, but just as clearly, there's less of the IP and more of the J-Boat in Mr. Jackett's lines.

I wish winch sizes were standarized. They are not. I feel like carrying calipers.

Simple stuff, like adequate handholds and locking floor panels so often missing on other production boats, were on this design. I didn't get a picture of it, but the 4/0 battery cabling I found under a settee was overkill, even for me, with only a trio of Group 27 batteries making up the house bank (or at least, the parts I saw).

Cabin-top travellers and mid-boom sheeting seem endemic these days

 Now, while I couldn't afford this boat, or would not, I suspect, find it suitable to my purposes, I can see where designs of this type, with its cleverness, like a saloon-spanning folding table (latched with a seized pin) and (interestingly) no bow thruster, would appeal to an adult sailor actually wanting to leave land behind. Let's face it, that's not many people in the final tally. Most people are island-hoppers in the sub- or actual tropics, and are rarely, if ever, spending more than a day or so on passage. So performance, in terms of knocking off a hour before you can mix sundowners, or in terms of "fun, fast sailing", commands a premium. Well-built performance? That'll cost extra.

Apparently, my auto-iris and auto-shutter aren't top-shelf.

 Which brings me to a pet peeve.

Polished to "baby's backside" standards

Here's a representative production boat, a Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 44 DS. Goes for $300K.

Note the smooth hull. The hydrodynamically shaped saildrive. Ooh, slippery!

Would not a folding or feathering prop make sense here?

 The glorious turn of the bilges! Oh, that's dead sexy.

It's French via Brazil.

 This thing should glide in water when the winds are down to angel's fart speeds, right?

I will call my bow-thruster "Lumpy"

But wait...what's this?

I would hesitate to put something this half-assed and draggy on Alchemy, and raw speed is way down my list of must-haves.

 Why, it's our old friend Mr. Bow-thruster, without which no modern skipper is apparently able to dock. Perhaps if one's pleasure barge wasn't 14 feet wide...but I digress. This is, to me, fairly appalling proof that the dollars required to make a smooth hull, and then to drill and glass in a "bowthruster tunnel" as was once the case, are too much when the prospect of gluing a cheapo tab would save a few more dollars. Sure, you can make the argument that a) bow thrusters break and it's easier to service them this way, and b) it's easier to make a mold that already has a semi-circular bite out of the bow. I'm sure that's true. But I'm equally sure it's a decision driven not by designers, or sailors, but by accountants and marketers. It looks foul to me. It looks like a hack, or a patch to mend damage until the real fix can be made. But no: This is deliberate.

I have no idea how this sort of kludge would be accounted for in club racing ratings.

A friend who's read this commented that he liked the Polish-built Delphia 40.3. In my rush to cast aspersions on the more popular production marques, I'd forgotten that I'd been aboard this boat briefly and found it more to my liking and generally less ticky-tacky than some others. So it wasn't just the pricy Blue Jacket I liked. The Delphia looked better able to handle its home European waters, and so it should have, if those RCD Category A certifications mean anything.

Drifting away from the nasty sailboat area, and in the end, I bought one of these: Alchemy's mast returns in the spring, and I need a proper DSC-capable base VHF for the pilothouse. While we plan on getting a Vesper unit as the "main" AIS, a receive-only backup (along with a GPS onboard, which I've used in my SH 850 handheld) right at the radio could be useful and prudent. Combined with a RAM3 extension mic to the outside helm (which will, I anticipate, be fairly sparse on the electronics otherwise), we should have our VHF needs well covered. I haven't even discussed the loudhailer.

About as close as he's gotten to swabbing the decks.

 Lastly, my 12-year-old Lucas was with me, and was generally unimpressed, save for his curious attraction to the steam mop display. There will be plenty of opportunity for that offshore, kid!