Many disasters, as you point out, are caused by cumulative errors or risk-taking. No one action or failure to act is the cause, but enough of them add up.

Although crises are often binary situations, they either happen or they don’t, very often they are the result of a series of missteps, none of which by themselves would have been critical.

Sailing taught me to leave nothing to chance, drill all your potential responses to trouble ahead of time, and constantly think to yourself what you would do if X happened unexpectedly. Always have a plan B. None of this is a guarantee against failure, or can predict the unexpected, but they keep the probabilities low.

We make a number of decisions which can be justified but may not be the best. C- decisions. And as C- decisions stack up, each understandable but maybe not the best, each building on the last, an F situation inevitably occurs.

Hiking I could come to a Y which is not on the map. Even though it is the less traveled, I could think that one leg of it seems to lead toward my destination, the other away, and I take it. Turns out that leads to a rather nice campsite a mile in. Not wanting to retrace that mile, I take off cross country to intercept the correct trail. That trail, however, has turned, and I’m going cross-country parallel to it and past where it turned. I go for several miles and intercept nothing. Now I’m lost. I don’t want to walk back the several miles I have just covered, and then the mile back, so I turn 90 degrees, once more knowing I have to intercept the trail somewhere along the way. I intercept a trail, exhausted, not knowing which way to take to find anyone. It’s late, getting dark. I am within radio range of my friends, but we cannot figure out where each other is. A whistle would help, but we didn’t figure we’d need one with the radios.

A fictional situation, but one which describes what can happen. Each decision made some sense, and yet led to a difficult outcome.

The reason people can still do unnecessarily dangerous things for recreation when even a daily commute in city traffic can be life-threatening is because they feel they have control. Human beings are engineered by evolution to handle stress, primitive man was an animal, always under attack by forces he did not fully understand.

But he could always do something about it. He could run, hide, fight, sacrifice to the spirits, or even just wait til things got better, things like disease he could do nothing about, so there was really no point in worrying about them. Death, struggle and pain were so common they were no surprise when they came.

Modern man lives in a much more benign environment. His threats are vague, unidentified, and often trivial by comparison to early Man’s: lawsuits, unemployment, debt, failing to get a promotion, tax troubles. And there is usually nothing you can do to take action and stop these gentle catastrophes. You just have to sit and wait til they catch up with you.

Lack of fear does not mean an absence of danger, it requires the knowledge that you have the ability to do something about it, the resources and skills to fight back. I’ve never been in a jam on a boat where I felt there was nothing I could do to help myself. As long as I had a sword in my hand, the battle was not yet over.

There is one exception. On a particularly windy day, I couldn’t get my kicker started to enter the marina under power. I did not have the confidence I could bring her in to the dock under sail without colliding with another boat causing damage to myself or someone else. And I had a group of helpless passengers watching me deal with a real emergency they were totally unqualified to help with, and expecting me to do something about it. My ego and reputation was under attack, and all I could see was expense, conflict, humiliation, since I knew I did not have the mechanical expertise to diagnose or repair an outboard motor.

As it turned out, I anchored out and pulled the cover on the engine and the problem was easily visible and corrected. The starting lanyard had gotten tangled up on the interior mechanism, and it was a trivial job to undo the knot and put it right. It required absolutely no skill or knowledge to fix it. The kicker came to life on the first pull, but the feeling of dread and unease I felt when threatened with what is really only a minor inconvenience far exceeded the fear I felt during some of my lonely midnight battles with flogging sails.

It was a good thing to know about myself. Fear is more a result of your lack of confidence in dealing with danger than it is a concern over the level of hazard you are in. I know, it doesn’t make any sense from a logical or practical standpoint, but knowing that about yourself makes you stronger and wiser.

Putting oneself in the way of immediate peril is different than fear of cancer or some other distant eventuality.

I think we all recognize this at some level. It’s why we don’t feel fear until death is right on top of us. If we had any sense, we’d be terrified all the time.

And, come to think of it, I’ve felt it in high heat conditions, where there was nowhere to get away from it. Even then, though, one knew one could find some shade and simply wait until night time. Except for once I had plenty of water.

That time was in Northern California when I didn’t carry water when I left my overnight site. That was a dry site and we drank what we had and left. The dog and I had enough to carry, and the map and GPS showed three places along the way where there was water. All three were dry. Along about 3:30 PM we crossed a road which had a wide spot with a fire truck parked in it. I asked those guys for water for the dog, and they gave us a lot. Last time I trusted the goddamned maps.

I do not envy you your sail. I would have crawled first. Or had a lot of experience on the seas, which I will never get. Congratulations on a helluva experience.

It was ten in the morning before we were underway, Steve had left a long list of chores to be done at the last minute, and as a result we wasted hours of daylight and a favorable tide. We motored to the City, turned left toward the Golden Gate, and left again threading the channel between Four Fathom Shoal and the beach. As soon as possible Steve headed offshore for deep water. October is not a good time to go to sea in the northern Pacific. The first of winter’s gales hit us about noon, and in a matter of minutes we went from a lazy rolling swell to a brisk, then a stinging, wind. Just like they tell you in the books, the first bit of weather tells you what gear is adrift. Within minutes the cabin was a shambles, clothing bags and food and equipment boxes were rolling about everywhere, the cat’s litter tray overturned and an open port got hit by a stray sea. Water poured in as if from a fire hose, and I got soaked trying to secure it. As I stood up I tripped on some loose gear and, on the way down, took the decorative antique lantern with me, adding kerosene and glass shards to the general confusion below. It took me an hour to clean up enough to make the cabin safe from injury and fire.

On deck, Steve had secured the engine, hoisted the storm jib, and had rigged the self-steering vane for a southerly course, lashing the rudder amidships. With a 30 knot wind blowing on her starboard quarter, Haiku roared along like a locomotive, alternatively rolling from side to side (although favoring her port to her starboard) and simultaneously pitching in a treacherous following sea with a sickening corkscrew motion. Fortunately, the captain seemed to know what he was doing, and in spite of his lubberly and unseamanlike housekeeping, the boat was well managed. But like even the best of seamen, the skipper had his touch of first-day-out seasickness, and soon went below to try and sleep it off. I was left to the first watch, thanks to my immunity to the mal-de-mer.

As the afternoon wore on the storm increased. Piled higher and higher by the unforgiving nor’wester, the seas grew and grew, following behind and following faster; towering over the boat as if to crush it, then sliding beneath her at the last moment to break with a crash and roar just ahead. The word “billows” kept coming into my mind, from either Melville or The Land of Counterpane, I couldn’t remember which. I could never see why they always used the word “billows”, now it made perfect sense. I had little to do besides contemplate my situation, the small scrap of sail forward and the windvane kept us pointed downwind where we needed to be in this weather. Haiku, a squat ugly duckling of a boat, was thriving under these conditions. She was built for this, and her hull lines and sturdy rig carried the racial memory and experience of the British mariners who had developed this shape and this balance over a thousand years of tragedy and landfall. If her crew exhibited due prudence, she would not let them down. For my part, I realized I had been offshore in small boats before, and I had been out in bad weather before, but I had never been offshore in a small boat in bad weather. The sky and sea turned a monotonous gray and the boat’s course, not quite parallel to the coast, gradually diverged further out to sea. Dark came early in the overcast, and the last sight of land was the lights of Monterey. Soon we were driving off alone into the darkness.

I had hoped the skipper would duck into Monterey Bay for some shelter, perhaps even spend the night there or Santa Cruz. It was not to be, the captain was up, refreshed from his nap, and took the watch. He took a quick fix on the GPS, plotted the position on the chart and layed out our night’s course. I made it a point to look over his work, he seemed to be a fairly competent navigator, so I could sleep with some sense of security. The rest of the equipment was not so reassuring. The radio transmitter was not working, although the receiver was functioning. In this storm, we seemed to be the only non-commercial traffic on the water between San Francisco and Point Concepcion. I turned to my berth, covered with gear, where Fang had settled in the only soft spot left. For a while I thought I would have to fight him for it, but I eventually persuaded him to move, and crawled in, not even bothering to remove my dripping foulies. There was nowhere to put them and I was too tired to worry about it.

I never sleep well the first night in a strange bed, and this time was no exception. Besides the frantic symphony of motion below and the crash and thump of loose cartons and cans and other detritus, the green glare of the GPS screen was right in my face. Outside, the wind howled louder and louder as the night wore on, the jib flapped, the halyards slapped against the mast, and there was the constant sound of waves crashing against the hull and rolling under the keel. The groans and sounds of hull and rig were normal, even reassuring, nothing unusual or unexpected, but I would need some time to get used to this particular boat’s song. At midnight the skipper woke me up; I know I slept because he complained about my snoring, but it couldn’t have been for very long. Still, I was looking forward to getting on deck, the stuffiness and stench below was starting to get to me. I snapped my safety line to the padeye by the hatch and crawled out to the port side of the cockpit. My instructions were simple, steer due south (the skipper had disconnected the wind vane, because the wind was from the north now, and self-steering gear was not effective with the wind directly aft). He also warned me that Fang had installed himself underneath the life raft (it was lashed to the cabin roof) and refused to come out. He wanted to practice deploying the raft, in case it became necessary to do so in an emergency, but to do it would mean crushing the beast between the hatch cover and the raft. In order to remove the raft, it was necessary to slide the hatch out of the way, and the cat was in its path. He was determined not to move and I didn’t think he was likely to feel any differently if the boat were on its side and filling with water, either.

The world outside had changed, it was totally dark, but the sky had cleared, a full moon was overhead and the sky was filled with stars. The mountains of water made their presence known by occulting the stars behind them, and in certain directions, the sea had transformed itself into a bubbling molten silver. The temperature had dropped, and it was further exacerbated by the biting wind and the spray, which was now pretty well constant. I was well protected by my foulies, but my hands and feet were bare and they were soon stiff from cold. The water, as always in the northern Pacific, was deathly cold. It was an arctic desolation, an alien planetary landscape from the edge of the universe, which after all, is exactly what it was. I had seen the sea like this before, but never from a small boat, close enough to the water to reach down and touch it. It was as beautiful as it was terrifying.

Without Iron Mike hooked to the tiller, I had to work now. I sat with my back to the cockpit bench, and with my feet braced on the opposite side, both hands on the tiller and with my eye on the steering compass. After the initial period of learning the boat’s response, the steering settled down and became routine. Most of the time, the tiller was limp and the boat raced downwind, like a living thing. Occasionally, some vagary of wind or wave would bring her head around and some effort was required, either toward or away, to swing the boat properly under the compass card as it locked onto the earth’s magnetic field. The longer I delayed, the harder I had to work, and the more likely I was to overshoot and be forced to correct. Eventually, the brain would master the feedback and the boat’s wake trailed behind in a perfect straight line over the rolling sine waves on the sea. The helmsman’s hands are where the sky and the sea, the sail and the hull meet, the microscopic boundary between the atmosphere and the ocean where the boat travels, with man at its precise center.

Of all of man’s artifacts, a sailboat is most like a living thing; it reacts to the chaotic forces of nature, not only through the hands of its crew, but through the minds and experiences of the thousands of generations of mariners and shipwrights that preceded us. It is their skill and their failures which are embodied into the graceful lines of the hull and sails, as sleek and sensuous as the hips of a beautiful woman…Or as my friend Tom says, “AArgh!, me likes the turn o’ her bilge, matey!”

At daybreak, I volunteered to continue at the helm while the skipper cooked breakfast: coffee, biscuits and gravy. The simple meal was delicious. Shipmates now, we opened up a bit to each other, and gossiped about the night’s events. My trick at the helm had been pretty uneventful, except that we had been pooped once during the night by a rogue wave. A ton of water landed in the cockpit, almost knocking me down, and pouring several hundred gallons through the open companionway hatch. The goddamn cat, of course, slept through it all. The electrics pumped out the yacht’s bilges, but I had a little trouble locating the cockpit drains (they were under two feet of water) to make sure they were not plugged up with debris. My foulies were well buttoned up, but were never designed for hands and knees in hip deep water. It wasn’t til after the water was cleared that I realized how dangerous that can be; the first wave stops you helplessly in the water, unable to maneuver, the boat gets hit full force by the next and capsizes her, the next one sends her to the bottom.

Through the night, the winds had moderated somewhat (or maybe I had just gotten used to them). The seas, on the other hand, were now enormous. They came racing impatiently behind the boat, foaming at their crests, scud and bubbles blowing down their forward faces and their trailing slopes. The color of the seas well offshore is totally indescribable, like dark blue ink poured into a glass of water, all offset by the blinding white of foam and spindrift, and contrasted against a paler, but no less bluer sky. They would momentarily tower over us, but Haiku would lift her skirts and let them slide harmlessly beneath her rump so they could continue their breathless rush to the end of the world. The waves looked as high as a four story building, although the radio assured us that they were but “19 foot seas”. It is a discrepancy which has been documented before, the mariner should be forgiven for a bit of a stretch of the truth. It is as much an optical illusion as it is a sailor’s exaggeration. Later that morning we saw the only other vessel that shared that windswept ocean with us. A huge container ship crossed our bows about a mile ahead of us, I could see an officer on her bridge through binoculars, watching us through his. We waved at each other, and I felt sorry for him, his ship was built to carry cargo, a blunt box with a flat bottom; riding broadside to the seas and with no top hamper to steady her, she rolled sickeningly in a beam sea.

The gale blew all day, but by evening began to moderate. As we expected, it had petered out to nothing by the time we rounded Pt. Concepcion and we changed course to parallel the coast. We secured the jib and fired up the engine and traveled within sight of the coast towards our destination. As if on cue, Fang emerged from his hideout, went below and lost himself in the clutter of the cabin. He spent the whole gale on watch and now he was ready for some serious sleep. The day was cool and crisp, and as we threaded our way through the channel islands we could easily imagine ourselves the only ship on a primeval ocean. The islands rose like monoliths from the sea, some close enough aboard for us to see the colonies of sea lions littering the narrow and cramped beaches, at this distance, tiny maggots crowding the carcass of a dead whale, a monstrous dead whale of stone, the size of a mountain, floating in the deep blue vastness. Every fissure in the rock, highlighted by the long shadows of a setting sun, continued the cetacean illusion. The islands were wrinkled behemoths, without a particle of green fur, brown rocky skins like an elephant seal’s. With nothing but the sea lion colonies to give them scale, it was even difficult to judge their distance and size.

I recalled the last time I had sailed this way, a few months earlier, although then it was night, and we had taken the channel side on the lee of the islands. It had been overcast and dark, the islands invisible, but sensed from our knowledge of the area and the silent witness of the chart. The low cloud layer by coincidence was at the precise level of Anacapa Light, and the sweeping beam from the rotating beacon perfectly illuminated the exact bottom of the cloud layer. It was an unforgettable illusion, truly the Light at the End of the World, a godlike flash as the sword of light sliced over our heads again and again, precisely at the level of the fog bank. But there was no light from our present perspective, just an occasional aid to navigation blinking its coded message. For Haiku’s crew it would mean a sleepless night, we were approaching the crowded waters of southern California, with their heavy commercial and yachting traffic and the threat of collision had to be dealt with by constant vigilance. Steve went below and used the radar, calling out ranges and bearings which I, with my dark-adapted night vision, could verify with binoculars. Navigating by GPS and radar, we approached our destination until daybreak when my shipmate finally begged me to carry on alone for a while so he could get a few hours sleep and make our final approaches alert and refreshed.

I’d been in a lot of storms in the Navy, even some North Atlantic winter gales, but a 500′ ship is a very different perspective than a 28 footer (that picture was of the same type boat I crewed on, San Francisco to San Diego.

I also crewed on one of these, an Express 37, from Long Beach to Santa Cruz. Note the single reef in the main and the storm jib.

Nice job. Thanks.