Cutting the electronic umbilical cord

Ed note: Although Chris Caswell is safe and sound in southeast Florida, the effects of Hurricane Wilma have left him powerless to file his column this month. Please enjoy this previously published column.

Item: I am lounging in my cockpit at Catalina Island on a pleasant morning, doing what I do best, which of course, is nothing. I notice a man rowing toward shore in his dinghy, which again, is certainly nothing unusual except that he has a peculiar crablike style.

I study him with curiosity and realize after a moment that he is obviously disabled, since his back is hunched and he has trouble working the oar with his right hand. I am embarrassed for initially scorning him as a clumsy oarsman. He is obviously doing his best to overcome his handicap and enjoy boating.

Rowing closer, I hear that he is also mumbling to himself, but I assume that it is encouragement to his bad arm. As he draws abeam, however, I realize that he is on a cellular telephone, which he has jammed between his shoulder and his ear, thus accounting for the hunched back and poor oarsmanship, not to mention his continuous chatter.

Item: Friends relate the story of an afternoon sail aboard a racer-cruiser with two families, when they suddenly realize that one youngster is missing. When he doesn’t respond to their calls, his mother becomes frantic and races below to see if he has fallen overboard. What she finds, however, is her son tucked in the aft cabin engrossed in his laptop computer. What he is doing, it turns out, is playing a sailing computer game while the real thing is going on outside.

Item: It is a tense moment in a handicap race between a pair of 40-footers, with one carefully covering the other tack for tack. When the leeward boat is unable to shake free of the bad air, one crewmember goes below and returns with a cellphone. Dialing a number, he tells the crew to get ready for a quick tack.

Aboard the covering boat, the skipper suddenly reaches down to his belt and looks at his pager to see who is calling him. The leeward boat slams a tack during his momentary inattention and breaks loose, while mayhem reigns on the other boat as the skipper drops his pager and tries to recover his focus.

What have we come to when we can’t get away from our electronic umbilical cords? Sailing used to be a sport where you left your cares and concerns along with the docklines. You could spend the day enjoying a fresh breeze, warm sunshine, the challenge of using nature to move your boat and, most of all, the freedom from all that gritty reality on shore.

You didn’t feel guilty about simply staring off at the horizon or watching the clouds drift past, and you could go all day without wondering how much longer your cellphone battery would last. You didn’t prefer an electronic sailing computer game to the real thing on deck. And you could somehow make it from your anchored boat to shore without needing to tell someone what you were doing every inch of the way.

C’mon, folks. When I first started sailing, ship-to-shore radiotelephones were devices the size of a breadbox, and the technology allowed at least one side—and often both sides—of the conversation to be overheard by anyone with a radio. Listening to marital squabbles or descriptions of bizarre medical problems was a good reason for leaving the radio off for much of the time. And you know what? We never missed being out of touch. In fact, that was part of the joy of sailing: Once out there, you were by yourself and “They” couldn’t reach you.

Today, it seems as though we can’t leave the mooring without having our cellphone, our e-mail, access to the Internet, and at least one pager to let us know if we’ve somehow missed a message on one of the other devices. I’ve made my peace with modern marine electronics, although I still think that too much reliance is placed on black boxes such as GPS that can fail when you most need them. But do we really need to chitchat constantly? What happened to the pleasure of silence?

I can imagine what old Nathanael Herreshoff would have thought (and said!) about these electronic abominations. His son, L. Francis Herreshoff, once commented that “It’s a good thing the old man died before yachts made of veneering and manned with gigolo yacht jockies appeared.” L. Francis also noted that, “The cabin of a small yacht is a truly wonderful thing; not only will it shelter you from the tempest, but from the other troubles of life; it is a safe retreat.”

But only if you don’t have a cellphone ringing constantly.

Sure, I know that these phones provide a link that can be useful in an emergency and, yes, there have been a lot of people rescued when their VHF radio failed them and the cellphone brought help. But modern man has somehow managed to survive for decades without having to call home to report that the weather is fine, wish you were here. Or to order a pizza to be waiting at the dock. Or to check on the stock market.

Wordsworth had no idea that his line, “The world is too much with us,” would so accurately foretell this modern age. Our leisure time is dwindling, Monday morning is always too close. Yet some sailors insist on ruining a lovely sail with mindless electronic chatter.

When you go sailing, turn off your work. In fact, turn off your mind. Just enjoy the simple pleasures of wind, water and sun. You’ll find that you really need nothing more.

Item: It is dusk in a quiet anchorage when, breaking the stillness in the afterglow, comes the ringing of a cellphone. It is in the cockpit of a nearby yacht, whose owners have somehow managed to reach shore without it. After an endless number of rings, it stops. Moments later, it starts again, and this pattern repeats itself for half an hour as some fool on the other end of the line refuses to believe that a cellphone can actually go unanswered. From another boat in the anchorage, a dinghy crosses to the offending yacht.

I’m pleased to tell you two things: first, they did not throw the cellphone in the water because that would be pollution and, who knows, it might ring underwater anyway. Second, when they removed the battery, they didn’t throw that in the water either, for the same ecological reason. But they did retire back to their yacht with the battery, and we enjoyed an evening of silence after that.

And, yes, I know who did it, but I ain’t tellin’.