The survival of the sailing fittest is in the hands of the safety police

For those of you who slept through much of high school and may have missed the science lectures, Charles Darwin is credited with the concept loosely termed “Survival of the Fittest.”

Darwin believed in natural selection, writing that in the struggle for survival, the fittest creatures will win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

This theory, which I remembered hazily from an excruciating science class, came to mind recently after two incidents. And I’ve now come to believe that we, the human race, are doing our best to prove Mr. Darwin wrong.

I think we are encouraging the survival of the unfittest. I’d like to propose a Caswellian theory: Unnatural Selection. But I jump ahead of myself.

I’d dropped by a nearby boat dealership to see my British friend, James, recently, and was told he was aboard a 46-foot yacht in the water. I found him there, standing in the main cabin, surrounded by pieces of paper on the sole.

I watched, intrigued, as he peeled off little stickers and then plastered them around the cabin. On closer look, I discovered they were warning labels.

But these weren’t just warning labels: they were warnings of the most banal things. Next to the electric cooktop was a label: “Warning—Surface May Be Hot.” Next to a locker door was another label: “Warning—Do Not Pinch Your Fingers.”

As I started to say something caustic, James gave me a withering look and said, “Don’t even start. Don’t go there. I’m not in the mood.” It was clear that whatever he was doing was making him very cranky.

So I sat and watched as he exhausted several pages of warning labels, turning the once elegant cabin into a yellow-blotched array of stickers.

It seems that one of the yachts they sold had a serious interior fire. It was one of those chain-of-circumstances situations that I have to admit could have happened to anyone. During a storm, the shore power on the dock had gone out while the owner was heating up something on the electric stove.

Things distracted him and he forgot about turning off the stove. With the power still off, he eventually left the boat but not before he put some papers on the cooktop. Naturally, the power came on later, the stove heated up, the papers caught fire, and the interior was torched. Now he was suing the dealership and the boatbuilder for not warning him that the stove might be hot.

Happily, a clear-thinking judge tossed the case out saying it was no one’s fault except the damn fool owner, but that was after the dealership and the builder had spent a lot of money on lawyers, depositions and the like. They won, but it had been a Pyrrhic victory at great cost.

Their lawyer, while pocketing his check, suggested they get some advice from a New York attorney who specialized in product liability. James brought him to Florida, showed him their boats, and he practically swooned at the legal liabilities he found there. The lawyer then pointed out that while warning labels didn’t automatically prevent lawsuits, they would go a long ways toward that goal.

And so James and the lawyer had spent several days examining each boat microscopically for dangers, written up the warnings into stickers, and James was now wallpapering the boat with the labels.

If you look around your boat, you can imagine the labels you need: “Do Not Put Your Fingers in the Halyard Winch,” “Do Not Poke Your Toes in the Anchor Windlass,” “Do Not Stand Under Boom while Releasing Topping Lift,” “Do Not Fall Overboard,” “Do Not Drink Stove Alcohol,” and those are only the obvious ones.

To be really safe, you need a label on your bosun’s knife, “Do Not Cut Thyself,” be wary of the dreaded can opener, and stand back when someone opens a champagne bottle. The list is endless.

I’m not going to belabor the woman who sued McDonald’s for burns suffered when she spilled their coffee in her lap, but we do seem to have developed a litigious mentality that not only blames everyone else for our mistakes, but expects to be remunerated for them as well.

I’m not sure what happened to personal responsibility, but it seems to have vanished. “It wasn’t my fault” is the new answer to everything. We are encouraging a generation of unfit.

A week after the sticker incident, a sadly misguided Maryland Democrat (for you voters, it’s Catherine Pugh) proposed House Bill 140 that would require every individual aboard any boat on Maryland waters to wear a life jacket.

The bill also prohibited an individual from operating a boat if anyone was not wearing a PFD, on first penalty of a $500 fine and second offense of $1,000 and up to a year in prison. The current law, by the way, requires children (less than 7 years old or under 50 pounds) to wear PFDs on boats less than 21 feet.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources, which would have been tasked to enforce the rule, immediately asked for $5.1 million to hire 40 police officers, buy 20 police boats and 40 vehicles. Your tax dollars at work.

I’m happy to report that, as SAILING goes to press, House Bill 140 is nearly history. The proposal created a groundswell of public outrage that makes the Boston Tea Party look like a casual difference of opinion. Boat U.S. submitted testimony on behalf of 34,000 Maryland boat owners, and hundreds of angry boaters lined up to testify.

To be fair, Delegate Pugh was acting in misguided but good faith after a Baltimore water taxi capsize killed four people, but forcing everyone to wear life jackets is absurd.

This was, once again, an assault on personal responsibility. If you look at other boats, you’ll see that some people wear life jackets and some don’t. It’s their decision, based on their own preferences, their own fears and their own sensibilities.

If you are in conditions that make you nervous, you’re going to wear a life jacket whether Maryland mandates it or not. It’s time to reclaim personal responsibility, whether it’s about wearing a life jacket or leaning on a hot stove.

I just hope that, 100 years from now, they aren’t teaching Caswell’s Theory of Unfit Survival.