The boredom in offshore sailing

By fabio@lapossibilitadiunisola.com | June 24, 2018 | Comments 8 comments

People have always a lot of questions about sailing. The most frequently asked I believe is the one that tries to shine a light on why one spends a long while out of touch, traveling slowly through a deserted place aboard an uncomfortable vessel.

The question comes in many forms, and I think the following blunt example is a good one: Don’t you get bored out there in the ocean?

Sooner or later everyone who seems to enjoy longer offshore sailing becomes the recipient of this inquiry, as the use of this uneconomical and obsolete form of transportation puzzles the majority of non-sailors.

The question throws me a little off every time, but I have been asked it often enough that I developed a set of responses.

At first I try to describe the experience of crossing an expanse of water by exalting the fact that the ocean is never really the same and every wave that comes and go, every cloud in the sky, lightning, fish jumping or bird gliding is a gift of an ever changing earth.

If that does not do the job, there are some iconic examples I throw in to illustrate the attractive of ocean sailing, i.e. how spectacular and inspiring is to witness the darkest nights unveiling our vast universe, or the poetic and astounding reflection of the moon on the black sea, images that invoke the feeling of being in connection with nature, a nurturing experience that grants access to a sense of cosmic fulfillment.

Then I surrender and admit that yes, it’s pretty boring out there.

SAILING IS BORING

There is nothing to do, you are too far away from the coast to check Facebook or Twitter, shuffle around shows and movies, you can’t really call anybody as it’s way too expensive, you can’t buy anything nor read the latest news on your favorite topics, or any topic, and the beauty of the environment can and will get shadowed by its monotony.

I can sympathize with non-sailors’ bewilderment, as I recognize it’s a behavior so very hard to understand. Why would anybody undergo this deliberate exposure to boredom?

Well, one reason could be the sense of accomplishment. If the voyager wants to reach the intended destination which sits across a long stretch of water – conventionally sailing a boat from point A to point B – the boredom of standing watch hour after hour, day after day, week after week becomes a necessity.

The goal itself must be so rewarding that the atrocity of the experience surrenders to its intrinsic reward, otherwise soon enough something more entertaining will take over. Flying is also a more convenient way to achieve the same result.
This may explain the motivation of a certain type of goal-oriented sailor that value the discovering of a new place, but it does tell nothing about who truly enjoys being out there for an extended period of time in solitary confinement.

This second type of sailor may respond better to the argument that sailing is so good that every minute is totally worth it. During an ocean passage there is very little actual sailing happening, with the main tasks consisting in watching the boat doing its job. It is more or less like driving a car with cruise control on a straight highway with no traffic.

The experience and the work to sail a boat change with weather conditions. Storms and other natural fluctuations give a momentary burst of adrenaline and actions, sails gets changed or furled or reefed, to an otherwise monotonous overall experience. Even in the case of the crazy sailor who seek to sail in year long stormy places like the Southern Ocean, a situation of normalization takes place and the stormy weather turn into the only reality, dull and repetitive.

French ocean voyager Bernard Moitessier once wrote; “I hate storms, but calms undermine my spirits”. Not very many people can claim to be more at home on a boat in the ocean than the French sailor, who once, out of disgust for celebrity and maybe society itself, did an extra half a lap around the globe after pulling out of the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race he was winning. But even Moitessier, apparently, was challenged by boredom at sea.

Single-handed sailors might get the full deal, but other crew member don’t necessary become source of relief, as soon as the days pass, the arguments and stories become trite and superfluous to the point that silence becomes preferable.

Early existentialist Søren Kierkegaard pointed out a while ago how company is not alone sufficient to contain boredom:

“Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse.” Either/Or, 1843

In a sense, offshore sailing becomes a perverse activity as the seafarer would deem a passage successful when there is as little intervention as possible. Uneventful becomes the highest grade allowed for judging an ocean passage. For exciting and action packed sailing one should look into afternoon sails in a busy bay or taking part in a club race.

Another objection to the fact that sailing is not so boring in the end, is that on a sailboat there is always a job to do, either because every activity is difficult and takes longer – every task has to be accomplished while simultaneously hold onto something – or because things tend to break quite regularly. Even when no immediate action is required there is a lot of preventative maintenance and routine checks to keep you entertained and busy.

But boredom still gets you in this scenario, you don’t feel like working all the time as it’s true in many different settings in life. Checking and tightening that bolt again, or making sure that valve does not leak soon becomes very tedious. Procrastination finds its prominent role even in the middle of the ocean, and having nothing better to do does not seem to act as motivation to keep you busy.

There is not need to cross an ocean to embrace such experience. A 48 hours passage can be dull and uneventful enough to provide some serious boredom and challenges.

During many miles at sea, the mind focuses obsessively on the destination even when there are still miles to cover, or indulges in considering past events, problems, ideas, injustices, hatred, remorse a collection of forgotten episodes of life that come back in wave trains. Self-examination becomes unavoidable and open the doors to some very uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.

American author Robert M. Pirsig who struggled with mental health throughout his life, had tried sailing crossing the Atlantic twice on his Westsail 32, and leaving behind a brief and exemplary short essay written for Esquire in 1977.

As one lives on the surface of the empty ocean day after day after day after day and sees it sometimes huge and dangerous, sometimes relaxed and dull, but always, in each day and week, endless in every direction, a certain understanding of one’s self begins slowly to break through, reflected from the sea, or perhaps derived from it. “Cruising Blues and Their Cure”

BOREDOM IS GOOD

I understand this is a blog about sailing, and that maybe a long dissertation about boredom may not be of general interest. Going a little deeper in exploring the relationship between time and boredom may help in the end to underline the totally boring character of offshore sailing, and why it makes it so good and sought after, at least by a small group of dedicated people.

I am also tired to give fake answers about starry skies, moonlights and ever changing waves, and I am myself looking for a better explanation.

My biggest surprise when I set to write this post, is that there is a ton of material online about boredom, some coming from the most brilliant minds that had ever stepped on this planet.

Contrary to common sense, boredom is also hip, boredom is cool. The wishy-washy entertainment and news publishers make boredom look not boring at all, worth to win a click by a bored audience. Apparently among the benefits of boredom I found that enhances creativity, promotes pro-social behavior, and changes of behavior in general.

But the greatest help in understanding boredom’s realist and mechanics comes from extremely boring people, philosophers and authors in general, people who spent a lot of their time escaping boredom and pondering about stuff.

Martin Heidegger is probably the author who dedicated most pages to the topic. Trying to summarize (and banalize) the German philosopher’s conception of boredom it would sound a bit like: I am bored, therefore I exist.

He makes the example of waiting for a train: In doing nothing on the platform, without distractions saving from the passing of time, boredom becomes so evident that acquires almost physical substance. What in reality is happening is that we are experiencing time itself, which for some reason we are not equipped to understand or dominate. It is also curious that in his native language the word for boredom, Langweile, literally means “ a long while”.

Without boring you too much, Heidegger strongly believed that boredom was the perfect way of access to “the essence of human time”, which access could lead to “waking up to ourselves”.

Luckily commuters who use trains often learn how to cope with this sensation and become better and better in absorbing its impact. However most of it is in reality just cheating. A book, newspaper, the smartphone, mp3 players and such, all avoid rather acclimate us to the feeling, contributing to strengthen the allergy to boredom. All this Heideggerian “waking up to yourself” is rejected completely by contemporary commuters.

For the severe moralist Bertrand Russell, the more we escape this fear the more difficult is to develop a character. The British philosopher, who also did some prison time, considers boredom something that toughen you up:

“A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.” Bertrand Russell

In this inability to withstand the attack of boredom, he sees the danger of excitement, of consumption of objects and experiences that make people more and more desensitized and also exhausted, as the search to increasingly intense forms of excitement is never ending.

Raw time doesn’t bode well for people, and at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it, or better said by it’s avoidance. It is also the case of being busy no-matter-what, which is incredibly easily exploited. This was the opinion of home-schooled French mathematician Blaise Pascal who famously wrote in his Pensées:

“All of humanity’s problem stem from man’s inability to sit quiet in a room alone”

Despite all our efforts boredom will find a way in. It will make binge watching TV shows tiring and dull, reading another page difficult, going out for a beer with friends the same old story. We can escape boredom only to a point.

Russian-born Nobel Prize Josef Brodsky dedicated a whole commencement address at Darmouth College to the topic of boredom, in which he encourages to embrace it, go through it, to hit the bottom with it, instead of making the research for alternatives a full-time expensive activity.

“[boredom] is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life- the lesson of your utter insignificance” Listening to boredom, 1995

Academics tell us it is important to deal with boredom, but its consequences are dire and unpleasant. Boredom deprives us of basic emotions like fear, joy, anger, delivering an internal landscape of vast platitude and deafening silence. We resort in looking outside for a stimulus, something to grip on to be carried away to a more pleasant, less empty reality, even watching season two of Westworld becomes entertaining, while in reality it’s a dreadfully useless show.

This is the power of boredom. It’s a reset, a cleanse, an update of meaning bestowed upon us by the meaningless time.The deprivation of stimuli forces the mind to stay awash in the passing of time, it gives us back control on our own mind, which can be consciously directed, instead of followed unintentionally to the next source of excitement.

SAILING IS GOOD

Sailing is seen as an escape from the monotony of the rat race, and while novelty and excitement will improve mood and lookout on life in the short term, soon an even graver monotony and inescapable boredom will creep in.

Paradoxically the biggest lessons I got from offshore sailing came from its boring parts.

When I am removed from the media pipeline, the joys and miseries of human contact, and I’m confronted with the indifference of nature I have little that shelters me from face-to-face encounters with boredom. The day and what to do with it is my responsibility, so it’s where to direct my mind. Control is still an option, it becomes the only option.

Matt Rutherford which I interviewed for Psychology of Sailing, described his attitude during his solo Round the Americas when he spent 309 days non stop at sea. He said that during the exploit he consciously tried to be in a sort of middle zone, a mental state that would not bring him too high in the joy realm, or too low in the upset pit:

I got bored out of my mind crossing the Atlantic at one point during both trips. You don’t want yourself go in a certain place mentally. You don’t want to be in extreme joy because if you do you can open up the doorway to extreme depression. If you go in one direction then the pendulum will swing both ways. I was trying to stop the pendulum staying in the middle. It’s a bit of a blasé attitude you accept that whatever happen happens. You have to be very accepting, accept when things break without being too upset, and be thankful when something good happens. Matt Rutherford

Offshore sailors go through the troubles of hard work, organizational hassles and costly preparation to experience days of unobstructed contact with time, almost impossible to replicate in other settings where a minimum of involvement with Society is required.

Many who love this activity feel at ease in that setting, and they look forward to it. The ocean is a space that cuts off from both what it had been and what it will be, where monotony becomes a resource, and where time is abundant, eternal, infinite. It’s a great opportunity to learn how to deal with time, rather than fill it in.

RESOURCES:

Martin Heidegger:

Heidegger, M., (1983)The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,
http://janslaby.com/downloads/slaby_heideggerboredom.pdf
https://philosophynow.org/issues/65/Bored_With_Time

Kierkegaard:

Kierkegaard (1843), S., Either/Or,
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/14/kierkegaard-boredom-idleness-either-or/

Bertrand Russell

Russell, B.,(1930) The Conquest of Happiness, 1930,

The burden of things

By fabio@lapossibilitadiunisola.com | June 3, 2018 | Comments 7 comments

It is refit time aboard Tranquility and things can get messy.

The already meager living space is occupied by lumber, sheets of bendy foam, painting products, stowed mainsail, furling jib and staysail, parts waiting for repair, extra supplies for the long term stay in the boatyard and many assorted items that has not yet received an approval for discarding nor a destination of use. Normality, if such a condition existed, is gone.

We congratulated ourselves when we originally moved aboard after downsizing of most of our belongings, but we feel like the process is never ending. Over time we acquired more stuff, hardly disposing of any decrepit or unimportant object, we collected trinkets and memorabilia, hoarded parts and materials that floated our way, in few cases not figuratively. All this lays above the regular household items, clothing to survive the four seasons and the always useful boat gear, composed of an arcane list of safety gear, aids to navigation and fun toys.

This collection moves around on the surfaces of the boat when we are pursuing a specific object, like sandbars in an estuary. There, where the tide meets the stream, stuff gets shuffled continuously to the point of requiring periodical management, raking and repacking. There has been several attempts in compiling maps and indexes of this less than a 150sq ft of interior space, all kept at bay by the revolutionary forces of Change, that always challenge the established order.

Tentative sketch of a future comprehensive map. Mañana, as we learned, means “not today” in these lands.

To date, despite the best intentions, no ultimate map exists, although we never lost faith that one day we would have a more or less accurate blueprint of the storage onboard.

I have always desired to possess some of the useful skills that obsessive compulsive people are champions at, but instead I grew up with NGDD, also called Not Giving a Damn Disorder which makes my cleaning efforts look rather pathetical and confused. This is also probably why it’s going to take a weekend to deeply clean and reorganize a 29 ft boat, another punch in the stomach to my productivity and self worth.

Kate’s traveling to Panama City and I am taking advantage of one less body on the boat to explode the interior and hopefully repack it in a way that makes sense. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. It is indeed due, so my bruised ego has to shut up and roll with it.

Many parts and specific tools which use has been postponed for long become now essential to complete the task at hand. Excavation begins, tote bags aggregating protective ziplock bags filled with objects sorted by some thematic criteria spread around like a slow and unstoppable honey spill.

Putting them back in the same way they came out seems totally out of my grasp. The more difficult to reach the object the more anxiety and adrenaline fog my reasoning, bringing confusion and shock to my procedural memory already impaired by NGDD and making less likely for the pieces to go back in the same rational order.

I do it one step at the time, inefficiently, but without stopping.

How many knives do we really need? Out of the 6, 1 knife got discarded, 2 donated.

I guess this is the curse of modern life: acquiring things that we may or may not use that then become a permanent claustrophobic presence, because, you know, you’ll never know…

There is great hype about topics such decluttering, simple living, minimalism, downsizing. It may be an alert, that speaks to the worst side of the consumerist mentality, or viral talk targeted to who has the time and money to deal with the problem.

The need to acquire stuff is a familiar yet still deceiving part of us, which has been engraved in our brains through indiscriminate, pervasive and undisclosed psychological manipulation techniques for more than a 100 years, since Edward L. Bernays adopted his uncle’s (Sigmud Freud) discoveries to serve the wealthy and powerful.

Appealing in a veiled way to human irrational drives like sexuality, fear, vanity, insecurities, selfishness, Bernays invented Propaganda and its good face in society, the industry of Public Relations.

We’ve been studied and manipulated for so many years that it’s not surprising how resisting the call of consumerism seem an hopeless battle. This conditioning survives even when you remove many of the advertisement sources sailing away on a small boat.

Grown up measuring our worth by the objects we purchase, we still fall for the idea that if we do not buy things we are worthless. Not only that, if we don’t buy things then the economy suffers and consequently jobs, and the large scale system we are embedded in.

So apparently we are between a rock and a hard place.

Tranquility is helpful in the quest to escape the one-dimensional man trap. With the finite and scarce space available we have to make choices, pick the important. Every subtraction is difficult, every addition must be purposeful. It’s a lot to ask to a brain used to pick from brimming shelves, using irrational hunches that expose us to the work of the engineers of attention.

Mankind have long believed that material objects contain spirits, possess some kind of supernatural quality that speaks to us, to the point that we can have a relationship with them, a conversation, intense staring and appreciation. Some objects truly give us joy.

In Japan there is a ceremony known as the Festival of Broken Needles (Hari-Kuyō) where women commemorate their worn-out needles and pins and bury them. Irrational but powerful forces bond us to objects and despite people profiting from this intimate relationship we can still choose the meaningful and useful over the superfluous. Which is easier said than done.

But let’s focus for one second here. I know this in front of me is a collection of bad decisions. My bad.

I can still donate it, recycle it, or toss it. Will you?

Visiting the Island of Self

By fabio@lapossibilitadiunisola.com | May 1, 2018 | Comments 10 comments

I just finish reading Silence by Thich Nhat Hanh. Kate introduced me to the author through the book True Love that she brought with her onboard. We sometimes read the book together and we got into the habit of using some of its formulas during every day difficulties, or when we want to acknowledge something good. We learned to call each other “Dear One” and few of the passages were also read as vows during our marriage in front of family and friends.

I enjoyed Silence, Thich Nhat Hanh writes in a very simple and direct way and provides precious stories from which he draws lessons, little examples and suggestions that help in every day life. It also contains a powerful message.

Despite what society tells us, solitude and silence are good for us.

Even on our boat, anchored in a peaceful lagoon and isolated by most of the noise and banter of society, we are constantly seeking distraction or entertainment. When we are not working or doing chores we read, listen to podcasts, watch movies and TV series or stare at our phones. We pretend we are learning, or that we are keeping up to date with cultural novelties and world news. In reality we are filling up our minds with other people’s words, and we have no space left to listen to ourselves.

We lost the ability to be in silence and just witness the moment in front of us. We feel boredom, that nothing special or nothing interesting is happening, and that instead every moment has to be exciting, riveting, full of awe. A ray might leap in the air few yards from our boat and we don’t see it because we are reading about the White House Correspondents Dinner.

It’s very difficult to pick what’s most important when we have an infinite menu of options and the result is that we rarely just stop and appreciate the moment because there is something new to try. Doing nothing is still labeled to be uneconomical or a luxury, but being distracted by entertainment is instead advertised to us from many outlets.

Even for us who voluntarily remove ourselves from most of the stimuli and obligations of everyday life, it is hard to accept that sitting and do nothing but breathe is part of human nature.

We can make yourself busy only to a certain point on a boat, then we run out of options. We can’t easily go to the movies, meet people in bars, join a yoga class, but we can still avoid the present moment thanks to technology like smartphones, computers and bluetooth speakers.

The book explains how to accept and embrace the moments of silence, to look for them during the day, to come back to yourself many times a day, so you don’t forget the steps that leads to your inner space. This concept of sacred inner space particularly strikes my chord. Thich Nhat Hanh writes about what the Buddha calls “the island of self”: A space within ourselves that is nourishing and calming, where we seek refuge and comfort.

If when things go well we take care of this island within ourselves, then when problems arise, it will be a well suited harbor to deal with our struggles or to simply rest and recover. It is important to regularly visit this inner space and deal with the things that live there, or else, in the time of need we will find it is an unfamiliar place and we will not feel at ease. We would have nowhere to go and will direct our attention outward, eager for a distraction from our problems

I visited many islands in the physical world we call Earth. Living on a boat and knowing how to sail help to visit these far away places. Most of them, despite the difference in size and landscape are characterized by what visitors call with irony “island time”, the perception that thing happens at a different pace, sometimes with different mindset.

The more a community is remote and isolated, the more it creates and transmits a unique culture and character. People coming from the mainland are attracted and repulsed by this atmosphere, they like to bathe in it for holiday time, but then they run back to the comforts and strict schedules of their lives.

Isolation has an important role in the scientific theory of evolution. Divergent evolution and speciation happen when a reproductive barrier like a geographical division separates a small group from the main population. Change and mutations happen at a faster pace in isolated communities, and this creates the emergence of diversity or even bring to the creation of a new species. Isolation favors evolution and enhance individual characteristic that are diluted in larger population. Individuals and their unique expression matter a lot more and can drastically change the World.

If we learn to sit and be still and enjoy being here, we can listen to the change that we want to see in ourselves and in the world. We can become authentic, find our own words, inhabit our psyche.

I am already trying out some of the suggestions from the book in my everyday life, and try to share them with Kate too. We soon instituted the silence moment, when podcasts or music are not allowed and phones are put away.

We already noticed that we engage in more meaningful conversations that have nothing to do with immediate concerns or schedules when we are embraced by silence. Also we accept and encourage moments of solitude, silence, practicing the most important skill needed to live together on board: staying out of the way.

Kate and I both need personal space and that can only be achieved by paying attention to each other. Knowing that the consequences of our actions will influence the other is the first thing to reduce our negative impact on the peace of mind of the people who surround us.

When we visit the Island of Self we are making space inside and around us, and every little extra space is gold on our tiny sailboat.

The imperfect sailor

By fabio@lapossibilitadiunisola.com | December 5, 2014 | Comments 5 comments

It took me a trip inland and a guided tour of a famous landmark to have an insight of how imperfection and errors are an important part of human beings’ nature. Not that I was unaware of that, but the power of insights lays in making a meaningful reality of what is known and obvious. Also, that same day, November 30, the impossible happened, as a yacht equipped with the latest navigation technologies and manned by highly trained crew ran aground on a remote but charted reef in the Indian Ocean during the Volvo Ocean Race.

But let’s move back to what originated that insight. I spent Thanksgiving holidays with Kate and her family in their hometown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I have a particular affinity for this city, that goes over my love for Kate and her family. Once known as the land of coal mines and steel mills, today the City thrives on prestigious educational and medical institutions and sport enthusiasm (Let’s go Pens!). The hilly terrain of Pittsburgh makes for spread-out neighborhoods and offers wonderful vistas of the downtown skyline, the confluence of the three river that built the city (Monongahela and the Allegheny forms the Ohio River), the steel bridges and the industrial archeology. These exposed bones give Pittsburgh a rugged appearance, but its core is made of precious and sophisticated knowledge and history. And hey, it’s ketchup country!

Vista from cousin Jeff''s home — Vista from cousin Jeff”s home

The Cathedral of Learning (or “Cathy” for Pitt students) is an historical landmark of Pittsburgh and its unusual and catchy name pushed me to ask Kate to take me there. The building is part of the University of Pittsburgh campus, and is used for educational purposes. It’s a tall splinter of stone raised in the middle of shorter buildings, like a long finger showing the vertical path of improvement that education and knowledge can lead to.

Inside the building, the Nationality Rooms, “rooms that show the good things immigrants brought to America”, function as regular university classrooms, and they can also be visited as an attraction. The rooms were designed to represent the culture of various ethnic groups of the region and were realized by fine artists. During Christmas time they are also decorated following the tradition of each country.

We took a guided tour of the rooms as the perfect tourists would do following the leader and the group for almost all the 29 rooms. The tour guide interpreted the marvelous artworks and told stories and curiosities. In the Hungarian Room, he challenged us to find a small imperfection in one of the panels of the ceiling. One of the birds of the several identical ones depicted was missing white dots on its wing. He explained this flaw as “a deliberate act” of the artist to underline that only God is perfect. Trying to reach perfection would be a sin and a chance to attract bad luck.

I have heard that story before, applied to different cultures. It doesn’t matter if the story is about Navajo rugs, Chinese floors, Japanese gates or Hungarian ceilings, people attribute the imperfection in an otherwise masterpiece work of art to the intention of the artist. I couldn’t find any academic study or ethnographic account that report this cross-cultural phenomenon but the role of imperfection in human life is well known. The Wabi-Sabi aestethic from Japan for instance consider transience and imperfection as part of life, and so the chipped bowl and rough surfaces of artifacts are seen as ideals of beauty.

Wether it is a documented fact or an urban legend, a marketing tool or a good excuse, the story of “deliberate imperfection” suddenly made me feel good, because I constantly face my imperfections as a sailor and boat guy and I need solace when it gets rough on me. I didn’t grow up sailing, and I was 27 the first time I put my feet on a sailboat, nonetheless I made some headway in making this my profession, with lots of mistakes and impeferction of course, but also through professional training and practice. What we are asked as skippers and crew is to be perfect, or at least to try, because errors can be very expensive on a sailboat, and also very dangerous, even fatal.

To help us in this job navigation technology has improved dramatically in the last 30 years, as well as the cartography of the oceans. Electronics and instruments have become more and more important aboard new yachts. Also professional sailors have to comply with ever more complex and strict standards through training and study, which include non-electronical navigation (as dead reckoning and astro-navigation), in case something goes wrong with electronics onboard.

Despite all this, Team Vesta Wind hit a reef in Cargados Carajos archipelago while sailing at 19 knots of speed, with no consequences for the crew but leaving behind a totally disabled 6 million dollar yacht and abandoning the race. The instruments were functioning and the skipper, Chris Nicholson accepts “ultimate responsibility” for the errors that lead to the accident. Human errors made by some of the most competent sailors in the world. Unfortunately being less than perfect can cost you the victory in a race like the Volvo.

Self-confidence and augmented reality can play against us when we don’t pay attention to warnings and we assume everything is ok. When we set sail aboard Tranquility for our first voyage we were far away from having the perfect boat or the perfect conditions. We had the only option of sailing the North Atlantic during winter time, and we did it with the maximum attention. Being conscious of that made us more alert and careful, we know we were imperfect sailors on an imperfect boat and we behaved accordingly. Recognizing imperfection in our lifes is an act of honesty, not an excuse to stop improving. It allows us to learn, forgive and move on.

Thanks to The Library of the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah, GA for giving me a beautiful and quiet place to write this post.

Sailing and reality

By fabio@lapossibilitadiunisola.com | September 1, 2013 | Comments 0 Comment

Sailing is not an escape but a return to and a confrontation of a reality from which modern civilization is itself an escape. For centuries, man suffered from the reality of an earth that was too dark or too hot or too cold for his comfort, and to escape this he invented complex systems of lighting, heating and air conditioning. Sailing rejects these and returns to the old realities of dark and heat and cold. Modern civilization has found radio, TV, movies, nightclubs and a huge variety of mechanized entertainment to titillate our senses and help us escape from the apparent boredom of the earth and the sun and wind and stars. Sailing returns to these ancient realities.

Cruising blues and their cure – Robert M. Pirsig

Sailing and stress

By fabiobrunazzi | July 5, 2012 | Comments 2 comments

“Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.”

Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind

Stress is not a disease you can cure or eliminate, it is a condition we all experience. In sailing, the amount of stress you can experience can drastically build up to a distress situation and the risks and outcomes of such situation can be dramatic. Sailors are well trained and used to cope with potentially stressful situations and their panic threshold is higher than the average person. Sailors and crew, however, are not immune to the dangerous effects of high level of stress exposure.

The ocean is a wild environment that doesn’t forgive errors and forces sailors and crew into extreme conditions. Facing the ocean requires preparation, training and a strong dose of confidence in your ability to cope with the unexpected. While we can control our training, the safety standards and the maintenance of the boat, our rigging and sail trimming, we can’t control the waves, the wind, the tide, equipment failures, medical emergencies and many other variables that can transform sailing into a constant source of stress and danger.

Stress is our reaction to pressure. It is the name given to the experience we have as we physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually respond to life’s tension. We need stress because it has many positive benefits, keeping up the attention level and the reactions of our body. When engaged in a situation where the ability to control and perform are crucial we benefit from the physiological responses of stress. In fact we usually don’t consider unimportant events stressful.

Stress is also a process that occurs when there is an imbalance between environmental demands and response capabilities of the organism, and when the environmental stimuli are likely to tax or exceed one’s personal coping capacities. The ability to endure stressful situations and to accomplish tasks is influenced by individual variables; training and perceived self-efficacy varies from person to person. Crew under stress or experiencing psychological health issues are operating at reduced capacity and can put both the boat and her passengers in danger.

Events that cause stress are called stressors. Events also don’t always come one at a time and don’t leave because another one arrives. Stressors add up. The cumulative effect of minor stressors can be a major distress if they all happen too close together. Too much stress can take its toll on people and their ability to organize. Too much stress leads to distress and often produces a combination of worry, nervousness and fear, emotions that if not controlled effect a sailor’s ability to perform.

Here are some of the effects of the stress:

Difficulty making decisions
Forgetfulness
Constant worrying
Carelessness
Hiding from responsibilities

Stress can be better described as a recursive relationship between environmental demands, social and organizational resources and the individual’s appraisal of that relationship. If you feel the resources are not enough to cope with the problems this evaluation will affect the performance. Sailing requires a huge amount of resources, from the personal ones of the sailor’s to the organizational ones that depend on the owner and the management. In fact the environment that surrounds a crew at work is not limited solely to the natural setting and the boat. The social and organizational environment around the boat can be a source of stress as well or more than a severe gale. Expectations from the others, socio-political and family events, the organizational culture can turn into a hostile and uncontrolled source of stress. We tend to focus on stressors like cataclysms or severe weather conditions but one of the greatest sources of stress is daily hassles that may cause tension, irritation or frustration. Things such as broken equipment, livelihood worries, prolonged isolation or lack of privacy, all these repetitive daily hassles become chronic strains, persistent, difficult and demanding situations where a stressor that we are normally able to handle can turn the situation into a real danger.

Here are some suggestions to keep the level of stress reasonable.

Safety first: all the safety systems are set and operative and crew is trained to use them
Spaces and equipment are kept up and enable the full control of the boat by crew
Prevent crowding – enough privacy when needed, enough social interaction when wanted;
Seek guidance – talk with somebody trustworthy
Prevent overtiring with adequate levels of rest
The livelihood is assured and the work is rewarded
Be real – organization’s goals and tasks should be realistic and achievable

The life of a sailor is very demanding and can be extraordinarily stressful – but we can be better prepared for the inevitable challenges of life at sea by learning how to navigate stress itself, as it can help us perform at our best. The way to safeguard against stress-related symptoms and dangers is build strategies to become more resilient – by increasing the ability to prepare for, recover from and adjust to life in the face of stress, adversity, trauma or tragedy. To build resilience requires personal resources but it’s not only an individual work; it involves families, colleagues, community, and professional counselor when necessary, because the stress management is based on the support of healthy relationships to share in a positive way the amount of stress that life at sea requires.

SAILING IS BORING

BOREDOM IS GOOD

SAILING IS GOOD

RESOURCES:

Cruising blues and their cure – Robert M. Pirsig

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