Talking to my stepdad
...hell, sure, you can take a twenty-six-footer out on the ocean. Right under the Golden Gate. Sure. But if one of those freighters comes at you, shipping lane or no shipping lane you need to get the hell out there, because a, they can’t see you coming, and b, even if they see you on a collision course, they can’t do anything about it. Biggest risk on the ocean is collision with something. Those guys do the trans-Pacific Race out to Hawaii, solo, they have to train themselves to sleep twenty, thirty minutes at a time, then wake up, look around to see if anything’s coming. Or in foul weather they’re at the tiller fifty, sixty hours at a time, their mental faculties deteriorate, they start hallucinating. That tsunami in Japan? All that shit got washed out to the ocean, it’s still floating around the Pacific. Cargo containers get knocked off the freighters in bad weather, they’ll float, depending how much water gets into them they float a little lower, a little lower, sometimes they’re two feet below the surface of the water, you’re doing ten knots and then blam, collision, twenty minutes till the boat sinks. Throw your safety raft over. So here are these guys. They were going to do the trans-Pacific from Long Beach to Hawaii in a thirty-foot Catalina, you’ve been on one of those, it’s a recreational coastal craft, it’s not an oceangoing vessel, you want to take it out there you have to reinforce things. They did some stuff, they reinforced the sails, it wasn’t enough. Anyway. First day out one of their crew starts vomiting uncontrollably, seasickness or what, he had the seasickness patch, didn’t do him any good, he couldn’t eat. And the dummies, they decide to keep going with one of their prime experienced sailors incapacitated. They keep saying, let’s go another day, see how he’s feeling, we can always turn around tomorrow. The tiller breaks, the rudder breaks, all their hatches are leaking below, there’s actually a line caught under one of the hatches and keeping it open. They hit foul weather and bathtubfuls of salt water get dumped on deck and their fresh water tanks down in the hold, and you know what they didn’t do? Didn’t check the O-rings sealing their water tanks. Their supply’s getting contaminated. The guy is still sick, vomiting blood now, he tore his esophagus vomiting so much, so they radio up the Coast Guard and the Coast Guard says it’s your boat, it’s your call, but we recommend you abandon the boat and we’ll send out a helicopter. They’ve got the usual rescue raft on board, it self-inflates, they have to get on the raft because you can’t have a helicopter coming down on a thirty-foot bucking bronco of a boat. So the idea is you toss it over and then leap on just as the boat’s going under, you can guess how that goes, as soon as it’s over you have two vessels moving at different speeds and directions and they’re going to drift apart. There’s a painter line supposed to secure the raft to the boat, but over it goes and one guy gets on and what do you know, the painter is loose, another mistake, they didn’t check that, so he grabs the line and it tears up his hands down to the meat, he wasn’t wearing gloves, another mistake, now the next guy is swimming over, he’s a water polo player but he can’t get up on the raft, can’t get the hatch open, the hatches are sealed shut and you’re supposed to climb these canvas ladders but they aren’t rigid, he can’t get a foothold in the loops, grabbing and pulling, finally he uses his water polo muscles to leap half out of the water, punches the damn hatch with every ounce of his strength and gets it open, and there’s another failure of education because right on either side of the hatch were a couple of cords saying, pull here to open the hatch, they should have gone over all that in training, they didn’t know…
