BoatSense

Mystic Seaport and a Rope Treasure

Any few hours spent at the Mystic Seaport will yield a surprise or two, even if you've been there dozens of times. I've loved the place since I was a kid and the Charles W. Morgan was hard-docked in sand. We went this Black Friday after Thanksgiving, figuring correctly that the crowds would be stuffing the malls and the seaport pathways would be lightly traveled.

A massive eye splice -- wormed, parceled, served, and tarred. When was it made? On what ship did it serve? Doug Logan photos.

It was first aboard the L.A. Dunton, a Gloucester fishing schooner from the era of Rudyard Kipling's Captains Courageous. Her spars were out but she'd been recently recaulked and painted. Then to the Morgan. She was not only afloat but heeling slightly to a brisk northerly that was hinting of the snow to come. Then aboard the Joseph Conrad, the sail training ship whose second incarnation was so well-chronicled by Alan Villiers. Then respects to the Emma C. Berry, to my eye the prettiest gaff sloop of them all. Then, eventually to the Rope Walk.

As we were leaving we looked between the buildings and spotted an amazing rope trove under the roof of an open shed. There were old tarred shrouds and ratlines aplenty, but also some of the most wondrous examples of wormed, parceled, served, and decorated marlinspike work that could be imagined: massive eye-splices, hawser and cable ends, and some items whose purpose I'm ashamed to say I can only guess at. It's off to the old maritime reference books for me, and I'll follow up with anything I find.

BoatSense Talk at the Jamestown Library: Chaos and Seamanship

A cumulonimbus chaos agent near St. Thomas. Doug Logan photo.

We had a discussion about BoatSense (both the book and the idea) recently at the Jamestown Philomenian Library in Rhode Island, with a couple dozen old and new friends, among them shipmates from over the years and former colleagues from Sailing World and Cruising World. Pretty much everyone in the room was an old hand as far as boats are concerned, and there were some serious racing sailors there — one Olympian and at least two others who had won championships at the national or international level.

We focused for a while on one of the themes of the book — chaos. The world that boats operate in, at the intersection of two vast fluids, is by nature chaotic, if only because those two fluids are of very different densities. The intersection is a zone of uncertainty, and each fluid has a profound effect on the other. And they both have profound effects on boats, which then tend to exhibit chaotic tendencies themselves. So, life aboard boats is to a great extent about dealing with mayhem, both natural and man-made — anticipating it, preparing for it, averting it, mitigating it, and learning from it.

Racing sailors, in particular, challenge chaos in a conscious way, tacking and jibing in tight quarters, or keeping a spinnaker up those extra 20 seconds in order to claim room at a turning mark, knowing that the potential for chaos increases with each second of delay, and welcoming the challenge. But all sailors and powerboaters, if they stick with the game long enough, develop an appreciation of the forces that seem to conspire to make their time on the water more challenging. And their relationship to those forces, whether in preparation or response, is defined by the practice of seamanship. 

— DL

Jeremy McGeary to Fiddler's Green

This summer the world of sailing journalism lost one of its best, Jeremy McGeary, an Englishman who came to the U.S. many years ago, already steeped in so much nautical know-how that he could have rested on his laurels and just let the rest of us know what was what. But his mind and his curiosity just kept expanding, and anyone who had a chance to work with him grew richer for the experience, while having a tremendous amount of fun at the same time.

When we were together at the Cruising World and Sailing World offices in Rhode Island, Mac and I would take a walk at most lunchtimes, discussing boat design, the latest gear, the weather, navigation, and, for lack of a better phrase, the Water Rat's Worldview. I learned from him on every single outing. We worked together on reviews, Boat of the Year projects, and Cruising World's first website. (Mac was a wary but perspicacious contributor to that brave new world.) Whenever another editor had to do a deep dive on a particular boat's design, Mac was the go-to. He was a naval architect with a gift for making difficult ratios and equations understandable; he could turn them into concepts to be understood at the seat-of-the-pants level.

For more on Mac, read Darrell Nicholson's tribute, Eight Bells for Jeremy 'Mac' McGeary in Practical Sailor.

Darrell and I barely overlapped at Cruising World before I was seconded by the company to set up a new web project in New York. After that I went to be editor of Practical Sailor while Darrell and Mac worked together in Newport. Then, eventually, Mac went to Good Old Boat, Darrell became editor of Practical Sailor, and Mac ended up doing a lot of test projects for Darrell on the side. The world of sailing journalism is pretty tiny. The loss of a man like Mac is felt right around the compass.

Halyard Tension the Hard Way

From this year's Vineyard Race, a photo of a couple of shipmates grinding in another inch or so of halyard tension on a big genoa that's full and pulling — not an easy task without a boat-slowing luff from the helmsman. But they got it done.