Even sea-going bumblers deserve a well-funded USCG

A friend called the other day to tell me, in a nonplused sort of way, about a mutual acquaintance who left on an overnight offshore passage in a newly acquired boat-without charts. The chartless sailor had a rudimentary understanding of the boat's GPS unit, and after an overlong, circuitous voyage was able to find what he claimed was his destination. He somehow made it home safely too.

This brought to mind another acquaintance who some years ago set off on a coastwise cruise, programmed his destination into his nifty new GPS system and, apparently believing the GPS was smart enough to navigate around intervening points of land, turned the helm over to the autopilot. Only a warning shouted over VHF radio by a fisherman about to witness a nautical disaster prevented the otherwise inevitable grounding.

Ridiculous vignettes like these suggest there is some sort of aquatic angel out there assigned to save bumbling sailors from themselves. If there is, we should be thankful-not only for the sake of the families of these Rodney Dangerfields of the sailing set, but for the rest of us. We don't need any more images of hapless sailors being rescued at great public expense to fuel perceptions that pleasure boaters are, as a class, incompetent and irresponsible.

The perception is held by some people who should know better. Sebastian Junger in his best seller The Perfect Storm heaped nobility on the professional mariners in his story, while disparaging a yachtsman caught in the monstrous Atlantic storm as a reckless incompetent. The book was presented as objective journalism, but readers surely detected a whiff of contempt for the recreational sailor who abandoned his boat and was saved with his crew in a hair-raising aerial rescue. The impression left was that going to sea on a cruise and getting caught in a storm was irresponsible conduct that endangered the lives of rescuers.

Junger's bogus perception led him astray. If there was dubious seamanship in The Perfect Storm, it was on the part of some of the commercial fisherman portrayed heroically in the book, not yachtsman Ray Leonard. An experienced offshore sailor, Leonard was surviving the storm in his well-found Westsail 32 Satori, though his crew was frightened to a state of near hysteria. He was ordered by the Coast Guard to abandon the boat, and finally did so only under protest. The boat survived the storm in good shape, and Leonard was vindicated.

Few sailors I know resemble the bumblers introduced at the beginning of this column. Most take their seamanship seriously. Skilled and, above all, self-sufficient, they know how to care of themselves at sea. As exemplars, consider the members of the Cruising Club of America. Call them yachtsmen, pleasure sailors or even boaters if you want, they are in fact seafarers in the finest sense of the word, men and women who boldly venture around the watery world, encountering challenging incident aplenty, but rarely anything they can't deal with themselves.

You will find exemplary seamanship too among another class of sailors who go to sea for the fun of it-racing sailors, whose skills are honed by a sport that often puts them in harm's way.

Dismissing pleasure sailors as dilettantes feeds the notion that we are excessive consumers of government rescue services. The truth is that more of these resources are expended on commercial mariners, some of whom get into trouble with shoddy seamanship and shoddy vessels, than on yachtsmen. This is not to say, of course, that recreational mariners don't need outside help sometimes. We do, which brings us to the current state of the U.S. Coast Guard, the agency sailors would love to love if they could get past its periodic manifestations of odd behavior.

A good many of the Coast Guard's imperfections can be explained by the treatment it gets at the hands of the legislative and executive branches of government, which have dumped a complex assortment of tasks on the agency without providing the funding needed to handle its complicated mission. The service we depend on for search and rescue also has responsibility for defense of territorial waters, product testing, border control, drug interdiction, maritime law enforcement, boating safety and more.Yet its 2002 budget falls so pitifully short of adequate funding that it doesn't cover the cost of keeping its existing (largely outmoded and inadequate) fleet in service.

Now the Coast Guard is in line to get more work, an enhanced anti-terrorism role as part of the new Department of Homeland Security. Some optimists I know think this is a good thing, reasoning that moving the service from its none too happy home in the Department of Transportation to the new department will result in better funding and more resources to carry out its multitudinous tasks.

That would be nice, but don't hold your breath. The Homeland Security Department will be about defeating terrorists, and that's where the money is going to go. Rescuing distressed sailors is not likely to be high on the to-do list. As a small cog in an even bigger bureaucratic machine than the Transportation Department, the Coast Guard may have less influence over its priorities than it has now.

There was an ominous clue to the pressure that will be on the Coast Guard under the new setup in comments made in June by Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, who said that because of the service's "changing mission profile," funding for its Deepwater program should be withheld. Deepwater is the Coast Guard's name for its long-planned program to replace the aged ships and aircraft it uses for operations far offshore.

If some of the Coast Guard's problems are found in Congress, so are some strong defenders of its traditional missions. Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young seem ready to fight to protect the Coast Guard's search and rescue role. They have a strong incentive, since both represent Alaska, in whose waters the Coast Guard rescued more than 200 people last year.

Young favors requiring each Coast Guard mission to be given a fixed percentage of the budget to prevent, say, search and rescue money being siphoned off to some other item on the service's laundry list of responsibilities-a good idea, but not likely to fly.

But as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, he has some clout, and he used it recently to block, for the time being at least, the Coast Guard's move into the new Homeland Security Department. It should stay blocked until there are some assurances about its mission outside of its anti-terror tasks.

So what does the Coast Guard think about all of this? Well, that's the good news. In a hearing held by the House Government Reform Committee, a questioner cut directly to the chase and asked Adm. Thomas Collins, commandant of the Coast Guard: Given a choice between rescuing the crew of a sinking sailboat and guarding a river that might be a terrorist target, what would the Coast Guard do?

Said the admiral: "Search and rescue takes priority."

Comforting words, but better write your congressman anyway.