Boat Abandoned en route to Bermuda Washes up on M.V.

[Blue Stocking]

Originally Posted by Cheechako

If there is one thing I've learned over the years...it's to take all those adventure and sailing books with a huge grain of salt...boat building, parachute anchors, drogues, heaving to etc etc... you just have to figure out your own. Most boats used today wont even heave to in real storm conditions.... even though they do so great in coastal seas. The values in those books is just the fact that they make you "think".

Amen,--and Amen, Cheech.

[David_Old_Jersey]

Originally Posted by Cheechako

The values in those books is just the fact that they make you "think".

....and are not a substitute for thinking for self.

But in fairness to Slocum etc - likely even large writing in Crayon won't cure some folks of stupid..........

[Cap Erict3]

Slocum spoke much of reading below while the Spray sailed herself. Slocum was last seen heading out alone..His faith in his boat was such that he possibly slept while sailing to his doom.

Sleep deprivation is the cause of seaworthy craft being abandoned. If you lack the ability to cat nap at the helm, if 20 minutes won't revive you, your mental acuity and self confidence go down the drain.

[CapnBrown]

Well, the call of the wild took him somewhere adventurous! He had an adventure. For him the cost was significantly less than his life and so maybe this will be the start of a long fruitful life on the sea. Maybe now he learned enough to know he has a lot of learning to do... Should he have been out there? Only he can answer that since none of our opinions make a difference. No one really knows what we are supposed to be doing on this ball of dirt mostly covered in water so maybe he's doing it the right way. For those that have seen "rough" seas you know how powerful they can be and what an experience he must have had.

All that said, I'm not that kind of person. I have spent many years sailing coastal waters in varying sized vessels in varying conditions. Some day I'd like to equip my current boat to cross the pond and experience it for myself. Hopefully all these years of learning will have prepared me to stick it out.

However; what I do is what I feel I need to do to be confident of my success. I could be wrong. I could lose my job and spiral out of control in a poor job market, run through all my savings and lose my house and end up under some bridge kicking myself for not having gone for it when life was good. OK, I doubt it would ever come to that but a drunk driver running a light could do much worse soo much faster.

To each his own Captains...

[Sonosailor]

Books leading people to think that they can do it? These people need to understand that the people who failed and drowned didn't write any of them! Just sayin...

[Capt Phil]

Just read this thread from the beginning and I really feel that those detractors are full of it!
Until you have lived through a Force 10 with 30+feet of white water, spindrift off the tops blasting so hard it hurts and no chance of another vessel seeing you and unable to call for help, alone and scared spitless, I don't think you are qualified to judge anything but a squirrel race.
You need to go back not too many years when there were wooden ships and iron men to understand what this guy might have been faced with alone. Don't discount the factor of having someone to share the terror with even if they are totally useless as a crew member.
Cheers... Phil

[DeepFrz]

Originally Posted by Capt Phil

Just read this thread from the beginning and I really feel that those detractors are full of it!
Until you have lived through a Force 10 with 30+feet of white water, spindrift off the tops blasting so hard it hurts and no chance of another vessel seeing you and unable to call for help, alone and scared spitless, I don't think you are qualified to judge anything but a squirrel race.
You need to go back not too many years when there were wooden ships and iron men to understand what this guy might have been faced with alone. Don't discount the factor of having someone to share the terror with even if they are totally useless as a crew member.
Cheers... Phil

++1. I agree completely.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Capt Phil

Just read this thread from the beginning and I really feel that those detractors are full of it!
Until you have lived through a Force 10 with 30+feet of white water, spindrift off the tops blasting so hard it hurts and no chance of another vessel seeing you and unable to call for help, alone and scared spitless, I don't think you are qualified to judge anything but a squirrel race.
You need to go back not too many years when there were wooden ships and iron men to understand what this guy might have been faced with alone. Don't discount the factor of having someone to share the terror with even if they are totally useless as a crew member.
Cheers... Phil

I completely agree with this excellent post.

[Jon Eisberg]

Originally Posted by Capt Phil

Just read this thread from the beginning and I really feel that those detractors are full of it!

Until you have lived through a Force 10 with 30+feet of white water, spindrift off the tops blasting so hard it hurts and no chance of another vessel seeing you and unable to call for help, alone and scared spitless, I don't think you are qualified to judge anything but a squirrel race.

Well, except for the fact that the sailor himself was quite candid about his inexperience, his "contrarian nature" that only emboldened him to undertake this voyage despite advice against doing so from more experienced sailors, and that by his own estimate (lacking any wind instruments aboard), what he likely experienced was Force 8 conditions at most... (discounting the likelihood of such an inexperienced sailor to overestimate the severity of the conditions he was experiencing for the first time, of course )

;-))

I remember referring to the guy's Facebook page in the wake of this incident... Turned out he had performed a 'test' of his anchor in the days prior to his departure from JAX... That apparently remains the FIRST, and ONLY time he ever anchored the boat... ;-)

However, one of the most startling aspects of this incident to me, is that a couple of weeks after RUNNING FREE was abandoned, the cruise ship CELEBRITY SUMMIT encountered her on their return from Bermuda... A boarding party was dispatched to check for anyone aboard, one can only presume after having contacted the CG first... Wouldn't you think the CG would have had some record that the boat had been abandoned by a solo sailor shortly before?



And then, after fetching up on the beach on Martha's Vineyard, authorities STILL remained perplexed about the backstory related to the boat... it was not until a completely random connection was made on someone's freakin' FACEBOOK page, that the owner was eventually identified, and notified...

Damn, with all these abandoned boats floating around out there these days, you'd think DHS would at least maintain an easily accessible database of abandoned boats to refer to, no?

:-)