 |
|
|
ULTIMATE SAFETY
By C. Marin Faure
|
|
April 28, 2004. For some months now I've been following the threads on the Trawler World List, and I've been impressed with the contributions of C. Marin Faure, a Grand Banks 36 owner who lives in the Seattle area but keeps his boat in Bellingham. The thoughts here are taken from a posting to a thread titled "Ultimate Safety." I found them clear and sensible, and asked Marin if they could be added to our web site. He graciously agreed.
--Bob Hale
There was a discussion a while back on whether or not boating was more fun today, and a lot of people, including myself, focused on the role of technology in today's boating. I can't speak for today's commercial fishermen because I don't know many of them. But there seems to be a trend among recreational boaters that "technology will save them."
In other words, if they equip their boat with all the latest gear -- radios, computer-based nav systems, radar, autopilot, fuel polishing systems, multiple battery banks and switching equipment, inverters, generators, satcom, etc., etc., etc. -- all this "stuff" will keep them out of trouble, and more important, will save them when trouble does develop.
I don't take issue with the notion that this gear can make a voyage safer -- it obviously can. What I find a bit disconcerting is how people feel that by simply having it on board, problems that crop up will "automatically" be taken care of by the hardware and software. In a way, it's a responsibility thing. "I paid all this money for all this state-of-art stuff, therefore it will keep me safe."
This attitude is expressed in many ways, at least some of which I'm sure we've all heard:
"I don't have paper charts on my boat anymore; I have SuperNav Version 6.3 on my Dell laptop."
"Swinging a compass is a waste of time. With GPS and a plotter, I can navigate this boat to any place on the globe."
"There's no way I need to worry about an electrical failure on this boat. I've got three house banks and a start bank and a charging system that automatically keeps all the banks at maximum charge."
"I've got a comprehensive alarm system that tells me if anything's going wrong in the engine room. I never have to check down there anymore."
I believe the success of a voyage -- any voyage, 15,000 miles or 25 miles -- is based on the skill, experience, and judgment of the skipper and crew. These elements become more critical as the risk potential of the voyage goes up. So where just about anybody can load up a boat with gizmos and make it safely from Bellingham to Sucia Island -- about a 25-mile run -- this same person could very easily get into deep trouble if he attempts a Seattle to Hawaii run. Or even a west coast of Vancouver Island run. (I put myself in this category, by the way.)
The weather, and the oceans it acts on, care not one whit for how well your boat is equipped. Think about how you feel when you glance down and first notice that the engine's temperature gauge is creeping above the normal mark. It's not a pleasant feeling, even if you have two engines. The problem isn't going to cure itself. There are no buttons we can push on our boats to make the problem go away, no "EasyEngineFix Version 7.5" software on our laptops that's going to make the temperature needle go down.
To put it crudely, it is at this point that the people who are going to stay on top of the water are separated from the people who are going to end up in the water. Put ourselves in this situation on a nice day in Puget Sound or Chesapeake Bay, and our solution is a radio call to Vessel Assist.
Put ourselves in this situation 1,500 miles west of California in deteriorating weather, or 10 miles off a lee shore at night in building winds, and what's the solution now? The only things that will keep the situation under control are Attitude, Common Sense, and Experience. None of these things come in a box from West Marine. The equipment you purchased at West Marine may help you deal with the situation, but its purchase properly belongs under the heading of Common Sense.
So while discussions of "ultimate safety" can be steered into definitions of the kind of boat that will provide this safety, and whether that boat should have one, two, or ten engines, I think the real determination of ultimate safety lies in the heads of the skipper and crew. Enough people have made amazingly long voyages in amazingly crappy boats and gotten there, and enough people have made amazingly disastrous voyages in amazingly well-equipped boats and NOT gotten there to prove that the nature of the boat itself is not the key to a safe voyage. v
|
|
|
|
|
