Keeping a lookout is easier said than done

It was the kind of night that makes you want to change your bumper sticker to read, “I’d Rather Not be Sailing.”

The wind was 25 knots on the nose. The rain was incessant. Along with copious spray, it came with enough force to defeat our supposedly bulletproof foul weather gear. The waves were steep rather than long. A direct hit would bring the boat staggering to a near stop, as though it had collided with a brick wall. Intermittent fog reduced visibility from marginal to nonexistent.

In spite of motion so exaggerated it could throw a body out of a berth (I opted to snooze on the cabin sole), down below was the place to be. It was warm and dry, and you could watch the radar screen for boats and any thunderstorms embedded in the nasty weather system. Even so, at least one of our crew of three was always in the cockpit, hunkered down behind the cabin bulkhead, watching the wheel twirl as the autopilot did its demanding work—and getting up every few minutes to look ahead.

Truth be told, in those conditions, with the glare from our running lights and steaming light bouncing back from the saturated atmosphere, we probably wouldn’t have seen another boat if it was 50 feet off our bow. But we looked, because keeping a lookout is what seafarers are supposed to do. Some call it a law of the sea.

A law of the sea, and of other jurisdictions. Three Russians, the captain, lookout and another crewmember of an oil tanker, were arrested in August under warrants issued by a United States district court. They were accused of running down, sinking and abandoning the 100-foot trawler Starbound off the coast of Massachusetts, and charged with manslaughter. Three of the fishing boat’s crew lost their lives.

The case has some similarities to the sinking of the Linda E. When I first wrote about it here, it was a mystery. When the wreck was found under 320 feet of water on the bottom of Lake Michigan, it yielded evidence that the fishing vessel had been run down by an oil tanker. Like the East Coast ramming, three fishermen were lost. Also like it, the tanker did not stop.

The similarities end there. There were no arrests in the Linda E. sinking. No one was held accountable, unless you consider the negotiated suspension of one crewman’s mariner’s license a fit punishment. This absence of justice, understandably, has left commercial fishermen and a good many kindred spirits in the recreational boating community outraged.

Controversy over the issue of keeping a proper lookout at sea, of course, is not uncommon. Lately some of it points a finger at sailors for failing to maintain a seamanlike lookout. This is somewhat ironic in that sailboats have too often been the victims of the lookout negligence of large ships.

Nevertheless, singlehanded sailors, particularly those who race in very fast boats like the Open 60, are increasingly targets of criticism from safety-minded folks. These adventure sailors do not—cannot—watch where they’re going. Their boats career blindly over the oceans, sometimes at speeds in excess of 20 knots. Keep in mind, these are busy people. Every waking moment—and there are precious few sleeping moments—is spent communicating to satisfy sponsor obligations, parsing weather information, setting and trimming sails, fixing things that break, climbing the mast to sort out a problem or even, as in the gory case of a competitor in the last Around Alone Race, performing self-surgery. Keeping a lookout, much less a proper one, is not an option.

On my personal list of safety-at-sea worries, being run down by Ellen MacArthur or one of her solo sailor brethren ranks somewhere below colliding with a giant squid. The singlehanded menace may sound scary, but the oceans are large and the chance of a collision minuscule.

Sailing blindly in shipping lanes or coastal waters is another story. Presumably singlehanders do take a look around in those areas.

Crewed sailboats can be a concern too. Consider the case of Team Adventure, the 110-foot catamaran skippered by Cam Lewis. His attempt to break the west-to-east transatlantic record was stopped dead in its tracks by a collision 110 miles south of Cape Sable, Nova Scotia. Lewis reported that Team Adventure was sailing at 28 knots under mainsail, staysail and quad gennaker in fog so thick the top of the mast could not be seen when the boat hit an object and severely damaged one of the hulls. Lewis reported a crewmember saw something in the water that looked like a section of an overturned white boat with a red waterline stripe.

This somewhat hair-raising story begs the question: Is it safe (for other mariners) for a vessel—sailboat, tanker, motoryacht, whatever—to be speeding through the fog at 28 knots?

I guess the answer depends on whether any other boats are likely to be in the area. In the Southern Ocean, Team Adventure sailing at any speed would be a threat to no one but the brave souls on board. Within 110 miles of the coast of Nova Scotia might be different.

There were some signs that civilization was relatively near. The catamaran hit a number of small objects before the big collision. In his report, Lewis asked why there was “so much junk in the ocean here,” and answered: “Swirling currents, Gulf Stream eddies, Labrador currents and millions of people tossing their garbage into the sea close by.”

One thing is certain, keeping a physical lookout when traveling at 28 knots through pea soup fog would be a waste of time. A radar watch, on the other hand, which would “see” other vessels (floating on the surface, not submerged) would be mandatory.

Any discussion of a safety threat posed by singlehanded sailors or those trying to break speed records is theoretical. There are no facts to indicate a problem. I’m sure some unseeing singlehanders somewhere have bumped into other boats, but there have been no collisions involving the racers and aspiring record-breakers being criticized for being cavalier about watching out.

Besides, it takes two boats to make a collision. If the crew of one is watching, it matters less that the other one isn’t. The best reason to keep a good lookout is self-defense.

After our miserable passage, a friend told me about another boat caught in the same weather on the same night. With the autopilot steering, everyone went below, closed the companionway hatch and slept.

Which is why we stay on deck.