Learning to delegate

I DON’T SUPPOSE it often occurs to you, but if you’re the skipper of a sailboat or powerboat, you’re actually the chief executive officer of a small corporation.  Now, the position of CEO calls for many talents, among them great tact, the ability to make quick decisions, and the courage to delegate responsibility to people you know to be your lessers.

Dr. Michael Stadler says in The Psychology of Sailing: “In many respects the situation at sea does not differ in principle from the situation in a prison or cloister. Sociologists have described such living conditions as ‘total institutions.’” That means all activities are carried out in the same living space, with the same objective, under one authority.

As the skipper of a boat at sea, you are that authority, you are the CEO—and thus the target of every gripe and resentment. As skipper, the law requires that you accept full responsibility for what happens on your boat, but you shouldn’t keep to yourself all the difficult tasks that require a high degree of skill, such as steering in bad weather, navigation, docking maneuvers, sail changes, and so on.

It’s smarter, for your good and theirs, to teach and delegate. Offer your crew the opportunity to learn and develop their own skills. Give them responsibility in the day-to-day running of the ship. In this way, you’ll instill a sense of team spirit and the satisfying feeling that they’re making valuable contributions to the welfare of the group. And (not coincidentally) it also keeps them too busy to think about mutiny.

One final thought: A wise skipper checks on the crew’s work without their being aware of it, and intervenes only if need be.
 

Spam invasion

I’M SORRY to say I’ve had to institute word verification in the comments section of this blog.  I don’t get a lot of comments because commenting is already quite difficult. It doesn’t seem like a particularly easy or intuitive operation to carry out; but word verification just adds another unfortunate layer of difficulty and obfuscation.

For some reason, after four or five years of jogging along merrily without problems, this blog has suddenly become inundated with anonymous spam messages, many of them pornographic and none of them helpful to readers.  The idea, usually, is to induce readers to visit their websites.

They are mostly worded very cunningly to get past Blogger’s spam filters, and often full of praise for the high standards of my blog.  I may be flattered but I’m not fooled.

I don’t know why I have been designated as a target.  I don’t allow advertising, and this column attracts only about 18,000 page views a month, a laughable amount if your name is Oprah.

But life is too short to spend valuable beer-drinking time sorting out the wretched spam comments from the genuine articles, so I have taken the drastic step required and placed a check mark in the word verification box on my dashboard.

Today’s Thought

 Authority intoxicates,
And makes mere sots of magistrates;
The fumes of it invade the brain,
And make men giddy, proud, and vain.
— Samuel Butler

Tailpiece

Notice on a thermostat in a hotel room in Kobe, Japan:
“You do not have to get yourself hot in this room. Please control yourself.”
 
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Studying bubbles of air

WEATHER FORECASTING is an inexact science. Forecasters don’t often admit it, but few forecasts are accurate for more than three days ahead. And no wonder.

Weather is just great spheres of air, huge warm and cold bubbles hundreds or thousands of miles across, jostling fiercely against each other, moving up and down. Who knows where they might go next?

If you find yourself at the meeting point of two bubbles (what the experts call a front) you can expect some very interesting weather as they try to beat each other up.

Your barometer measures the atmospheric pressure inside these bubbles. High pressure means a good steady bubble and nice weather. Low pressure signifies a bad boisterous bubble and rotten weather.

So if your barometer is steady, you can expect tomorrow’s weather to be much more like today’s than anything else. If it’s falling, you can expect worse weather. The faster the fall, the sooner it will arrive. If the glass is rising, a good bubble has arrived and fine weather will follow.

You’ll find your barometer just as reliable as a weatherfax once you’ve learnt to interpret it, and a lot cheaper.

Incidentally, it’s the speed of the barometer’s rise or fall that determines how quickly and how drastically the weather will change.

Today’s Thought

To talk of the weather, it’s nothing but folly,

For when it rains on the hill, it shines in the valley.
—Denham, Proverbs

Tailpiece

Patience is most admirable when it’s in the driver behind you, but quite unacceptable when it’s in the driver in front.

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Who were the lost heroes?

MOST SMALL-BOAT CRUISERS have a pretty good selection of heroes to choose from — I mean the heroes reasonably close to our own time who made noteworthy voyages and pioneered the round-the-world routes so well known today, from Slocum via the Hiscocks, the Pardeys, and Moitessier to Hal Roth.

But it often strikes me that we know next to nothing of the sailing heroes of yesteryear; and by that I mean the actual personalities who first dared cross the oceans centuries before modern technology made it so much safer and easier.  Those heroes must have existed. There is always some daredevil in a group of people who will venture farther than the rest and blaze a trail for the herd to follow.

Who, for instance, was the South Sea hero who first navigated from one tiny island to another over the vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean?  Hundreds of years before white men explored the Pacific, the ancient navigators were making regular voyages across the Pacific basin, from Tonga to Tahiti and Hawaii, an area totaling one-third of the earth’s surface. They had no sextants or compasses, only the stars, the planets and an extraordinary understanding of the sea and the weather in all its moods.

Many of their secrets were recorded by Dr. David Lewis, a New-Zealand-born physician and small-boat sailor, in his book, We, the Navigators.

Lewis maintained, for instance, that these Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micronesian navigators could detect the presence of a low island from as far as 35 miles away by a change of patterns in the sea swells.  A boat running downwind toward an island, for example, could expect to feel swells rebounding straight back toward the boat from the land.

One of the Polynesian experts Lewis interviewed explained it this way: “I feel sea hit the canoe—shake him, like move him, go back.”

Now it just so happened that I once found myself in a position to check out this theory for myself. I was in a 30-foot sloop heading toward Ascension Island in the South Atlantic.  My son Kevin and I had no trouble detecting a regular swell running in the same direction as the wind, roughly southeast, but it took us an hour or more of close observation to realize that among the breaking waves a smaller but persistent swell was running almost at right angles to it — presumably the remains of waves generated in the Roaring Forties, hundreds of miles to the south.

But no matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t detect any sign of a reverse swell coming back toward us from Ascension Island.

We stopped looking and started feeling instead, feeling for the sea to hit us from the front and shake us, move us back. We tried to feel while we were sitting, and we tried to feel while we were standing, but we felt nothing. Our little sloop simply lifted her tail, rushed down the face of the swells, settled back gently into the hollow for a moment, and then did it all over again. Whatever magical senses those old navigators possessed were not passed on to us.

We sighted the island later that afternoon, fine on the port bow, and I was much relieved  to know that what I lacked in the ancient ability to detect reverse swells was at least offset by my more modern proficiency with the sextant.

Today’s Thought

Every man has an aptitude born with him.
— Emerson, Essays, First Series: Spiritual Laws

Tailpiece

A developer is somebody who wants to build cabins in the woods.
An environmentalist is someone who already has a cabin there.

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It's the bosuns that float 'em

NO SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION of how metal boats float has ever been satisfactory to me.  I mean, I may not be an expert in hydrodynamic physics, but I’m not stupid. I know how wooden boats float. Wood is lighter than water, right? Naturally it floats. But boats and ships made of steel and aluminum, how to they manage it?

Well, it just so happens that a series of experiments undertaken by European scientists deep inside the mountains of France or Switzerland or somewhere have just discovered that mass is made of Higg’s bisons. Sorry, bosoms. No, bosuns. Yes, bosuns.

Now it also just so happens that water is made of mass, too. I mean, we knew that already but it’s official now.  Water is a mass of droplets, little round squishy fellas, shoving and pushing against each other, and each droplet is filled with Higg’s bosuns.  We have long known, of course, that bosuns have whistles and cats with nine tails but what is really new and exciting is that each Higg’s bosun also has a magnetic head and a magnetic tail.

Now, if you put a steel vessel into water composed of droplets filled with Higg’s bosuns, you get their attention immediately, and each bosun turns his little head toward the vessel just entering his territory.  Now these little fellas are very territorial. They don’t like sharing their space. Conveniently for them, their heads are magnetically positive and their little tail ends are negative, so when they all look up together their combined positive magnetism repels the positively-charged steel vessel. (Like poles repel, remember?)

Now although Higg’s bosuns are pretty powerful for their size, their size is very small.  So they only have enough repelling power to repel the vessel partly out of the water.  But it’s enough for most of our purposes.  At least it’s better than sinking completely.

I’m very thankful to those European scientists. This makes much more sense to me.  It also explains why those cruise ships keep getting into trouble when their generators fail.  They simply can’t generate enough positive magnetism for our jolly little Higg’s bosuns to repel.  The answer, naturally, is to spend a little more money on decent generators, but we’re drifting off the subject here.

Readers often comment on how much they enjoy my occasional forays into the esoteric corners of sailing, and I expect I shall get a lot of praise for today’s column because I am sure there are very many people who, until this moment, have been extremely puzzled about steel’s ability to float when it is shaped like a boat, but not when it is shaped like a flat iron or a bulldozer.

NEXT WEEK:  How Higg’s bosoms (sorry, bisons) turn aluminum into honorary steel for the purposes of magnetic repulsion.

Today’s Thought

If but a beam of sober Reason play,
Lo, Fancy’s fairy frost-work melts away!
­— Samuel Rogers, Pleasures of Memory

Tailpiece

A newspaper in Warrington, England reported a follow-up to a break-in at a local school’s science laboratory.
“The skull, the skeleton’s hand and the guitar have been recovered,” said the Warrington Guardian. “However, the invisible man is still missing.”

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The importance of privacy

ORDINARY, likeable people can become very crabby when they’re locked up in the close confines of a yacht with several others for any length of time.

This is a serious business for any skipper to deal with because privacy on a small yacht is about as attainable as silence on a school bus.

On land, we unconsciously preserve our personal spaces but when we’re sailing we have to put up with constant invasions of our privacy for long periods by people we may not even like.

Nevertheless, the skipper must try to ensure that every crewmember has at least a token amount of space which is his or hers alone, and this fact must be well understood by everybody.

A curtained-off pilot berth, separated from the rest of the thundering herd, is the ultimate fantasy, but rarely available. Even a bunk of your own may not be possible if other crewmembers have to sit on it, too.

In this case, a personal drawer or small private locker must suffice as a place where you can hide your last beer or bar of chocolate from the prying eyes and thieving fingers of the hoi polloi.

Incidentally, psychologists offer the advice that you never sail with more crew than there are individual bunks for. Try telling that to the racers.

Today’s Thought

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms.

— William O. Douglas, Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court

Tailpiece

From a newspaper advertisement in Virginia:

Important Notice — If you are one of the hundreds of parachuting enthusiasts who bought our “Easy Sky Diving” book, please make the following correction:

On Page 8, line 7, the words “state zip code” should have read “pull rip cord.”

 

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Some nautical daffynitions

THOSE OF YOU who acquired your knowledge of sailing from Patrick O’Brian’s splendid Aubrey-Maturin series of historical nautical novels may sometimes wonder what all those technical terms mean.  It is possible, of course, to read O’Brian without knowing the difference between a binnacle and a barnacle, but you will find it makes much more sense and brings much more pleasure if you actually know what he’s talking about.

Toward this end, I have burgled some helpful definitions from a used book I bought for 20 cents in 1953. It’s called Sailing in a Nutshell. It was written by Patrick Boyle and first published by Methuen, London, in 1938.  Amazon.com has now copied it and is selling it for $26.45, which, I think, amply demonstrates the financial advantages of buying your books before Amazon gets its grubby mitts on them.

Anyway, here are a few more or less helpful definitions for you to be going on with:

Capstan — An apparatus for getting up the anchor. It is a round drum with spokes and a man sitting on top playing a fiddle.

Deck— A floor. But in a small boat the deck of the cabin is called the floor and the deck is the roof.*

Barometer — An apparatus for saving you the trouble of going up on deck to see what sort of day it is. A refinement is provided by the barograph, which writes down the weather as soon as it occurs and so saves you the trouble of getting up to look at the barometer.

Truck — A small platform at the top of a mast for the convenience of gulls. Some owners refuse to have them, saying they are not going to have any truck with gulls.

Helmsman — The worried-looking man. Do not speak to him.

Sheets — This is one of the most baffling things about sailing. Sheets are ropes. Sails or not sheets; neither are they made of rope. You will find useful and handy ropes attached to the corners of your sails. These are sheets and the fact should be committed very carefully to memory.

Drawing — What boats do to water. A boat is said to “draw” so many feet of water, meaning that it extends that distance below the surface. Hence the term “draughtsman,” meaning a drawer of water.

Gooseneck — A universal-jointed swivel. The boom is attached to the mast by means of a gooseneck; so is the spinnaker, which also has a boom. It is so called by reason of its resemblance to the neck of the goose that lays the galvanized iron eggs.

Bowsprit — A large wooden shock absorber sticking out over the bows.

Bows — The sharp end. A device for parting the water so that the boat may go through.

Right ascension of the mean sun — The angle, measured eastward in hours and minutes, between an imaginary body traveling at the average velocity of the Sun and the First Point of Aries (i.e. point at which a line drawn from the center of the earth through that of the sun at the vernal equinox intersects the equinoctial, or celestial equator). (Read a second time if necessary.)

* I regret to have to point out that Patrick Boyle got this wrong.  (Well, what do you expect for 20 cents?) What we walk on in the cabin is the deck. What we walk on on the cabintop, side decks, foredeck, and afterdeck is also the deck.  The inside of the cabin roof is the overhead and the sides of the cabin are the ceiling. The floors are what join the timbers in a wooden boat to the keelson.

Today’s Thought

Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession.

— Kingman Brewster, former U.S. Ambassador to Britain

Tailpiece

A word of comfort for those of you having a bleak Monday: The sooner you fall behind, the longer you’ll have to catch up.

 

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A little piece of the USA

IF YOU’RE PLANNING to go foreign from America, most countries you sail to will require you to have a passport. Your boat needs one, too, and the best kind is a documentation certificate from the U.S. Coast Guard.

A U.S.-documented boat has privileges. Under international law, she is a piece of the United States, and therefore not to be trifled with. Documentation affords her the protection of U.S. consular officials anywhere in the world. She also earns the right to fly the special Yacht Ensign in home waters (but, incidentally, not in foreign waters, where Old Glory must be flown).

Federal documentation legally establishes both her ownership and her nationality beyond a doubt. It’s true that plenty of U.S. vessels with nothing more than state registration have sailed around the world, but the recognized and accepted standard (when a boat is big enough) is U.S. Coast Guard documentation. State registration is not legal proof of nationality even though it’s accepted for convenience in America’s neighboring countries.

The minimum volume for documentation is 5 tons net, and for practical purposes in this case the Coast Guard measures net tons as 9/10 of gross tons. That translates to a heavy-displacement vessel of about 25 feet, or a moderate-displacement craft of about 30 feet in length. A Cape Dory 25-footer I once owned just made it for documentation purposes.

If you’re the sort of person who worries about these things, a documented vessel is safer to buy because her certificate must reflect all liens, mortgages, and liabilities against her. And because a vessel’s debts follow  her around the world, not the owner, it’s possible for an unscrupulous seller to saddle you with large unseen and unpaid debts if the boat is not documented. Caveat sailor.

Today’s Thought

The sea finds out everything you did wrong.

— Francis Stokes

Tailpiece

An attractive woman playing bridge with three men felt a foot run up and down her calf.
“If that’s my husband,” she said calmly, “I bid three no trumps. If it’s anyone else, I bid you watch out for my husband.”

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