Have little black boxes sucked the pleasure out of sailing?

I stopped into my local camera store a few days ago to pick up some supplies and, when I asked the kid behind the counter for a few rolls of film, he looked at me blankly. “Film?” he said. “For what?”
Now it was my turn to look blank. “You know,” I said, “to take some photos.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said shaking his head. “We don’t carry that stuff anymore.”
And you know what? It didn’t really surprise me. I looked around the store and everything was digital. Even the little point-and-shoot cameras are digital. George Eastman must be spinning in his grave.

I am, of course, the last to embrace the digital camera. It took a long time for me to be dragged, kicking and screaming, from my manual typewriter to an electric one and it would have been easier for me to jog up Everest than learn how to use a computer.

But I’ve bought a good digital camera and I’ve adapted to it pretty well. I was thinking about my camera store incident and I realized that the digital camera has done one thing: It’s turned me into a sloppy photographer.

I hesitate to say “in the old days,” so let’s say back in the days of film, when you put a roll of film in a camera and shot it, you never really knew what you were going to get back. Of course, I used a fancy light meter and learned when the built-in camera meter was fooling me about white sails or water glare, but peeking into that box of slides was always an edgy moment. I’ll admit that more than once I’ve looked in at 36 slides that were completely blank or completely black. Not good.

Nevertheless, that was part of the package. Photography wasn’t just fun: it was fun because it was a challenge. You had to know what you were doing.

But with the digital camera, all the constraints are off. First, I don’t have to worry about the cost of film and processing because, hey, it’s all digital. And my new digital camera holds something like 478 pictures before I download it (at no cost) to my laptop.

So instead of worrying about the light, I can just bang off a few pictures, review them on the little screen, and correct my settings. Those “test” shots are just thrown away later because, hey, it doesn’t cost anything.
When I think about how the great photographers like Ansel Adams used to spend hours setting up for a single exposure and then more long hours developing an impeccable image in the darkroom, this new digital regime saddens me. Today’s photographer can bang off 478 pictures, download them, and print them in quite glorious color on a $99 printer—all before lunch.

Sure, the pictures are good but there’s no pleasure, no excitement, no challenge. Give a monkey a good digital camera, and he can paper the walls of his cage with great photos. The satisfaction of learning how to do something well is gone, the mystique of knowledge acquired from experience is absent. Taking a picture means nothing anymore because everyone can do it.

So what does all this have to do with sailing, you ask? Has Caswell finally gone off his nut and is just ranting about film?

This whole do-it-easier-but-with-no-elan way of living is also infiltrating our boating world. C’mon now, be honest. When was the last time that you actually took a pencil and drew a course on a paper chart?

Aha! I knew it. You don’t even have any paper charts, except for that chartbook given by someone at your launching party. Like digital cameras, it’s just too easy today, with beautiful color chartplotters and GPS and all the things that take away some of the little pleasures of sailing.

Really, what fun is it to watch a tiny marker creep across the screen of your chartplotter? Believe me, there’s a satisfaction to ducking below and making a little “x” on that penciled line every hour or so.

Go ahead, use your GPS to get your position, but plot it out and use your brain to actually process the information. If you’re a little to one side of the pencil line, perhaps there’s a tidal set so you need to head a bit higher or lower to reach your destination. Sure, you could just use the off-track feature on your GPS that would tell you in those cold and uninteresting digital numbers that you’re a quarter-mile off the direct line to your next waypoint. It might even point an arrow in the appropriate direction for those who are completely inept.

Watching a digital print-out of your course sucks the essence out of sailing, which is all about wind and water and currents and your relationship to them. If you really want a black box to do your thinking for you, then maybe it’s time for a powerboat. You can turn on the air conditioning, set the autopilot, and watch CSI reruns on your flat-screen television. In fact, since you don’t care about your surroundings, why leave the dock, anyway?

But it’s not too late for you to break away from our digitally cossetted world, though. I speak heresy, of course, but what if you didn’t even turn on the electronics? You’d actually be forced to think about where you were going and how you should best get there. And that might just be fun, too.

Besides, what would you do if some chip suddenly went zap and all those pretty screens went blank? You’d be the dodo bird that walked so long it couldn’t use it’s wings to fly: you won’t have a clue how to dead reckon your way back home.

OK, I admit it. I’m often as slovenly as the rest of you. When I finish this column, I’m going to download some digital pictures and I probably won’t even miss the crackly feel of film or the bright yellow Kodak boxes.

But I’ll tell you this: the next time I head offshore, there will be a proper paper chart on the nav table with a penciled line on it. I may fudge a bit by checking the GPS rather than dead reckoning my position from the speedo but, if everything goes blank, I know I’ll be home before most of you.