[Dar Es Salaam - Phuket] Day 26 -- Limits

The morning of the twentysixth day started with some light rain. The wind had turned slightly and we shifted sails. All seemed rather normal. On a long boat trip like this, though, limits may be reached suddenly and a normal day turns out to sudden insights. That day, it was three.

Sometimes, it seems strange to me, how much more there is to someone you've already known for years, someone you've experienced so much with. But you have to reach certain limits first to be able to look beyond them and discover what was unknown until then. I had an argument with my brother. It was nothing serious, the topic rather secondary about carelessness versus thoughtfulness. The way I am, I tend to push confrontation while my brother rather tries to avoid it. We reached a limit and with the conversation, we eventually reached beyond it. It was about minor discomforts that seem to occur infrequently. They lay in different approaches, in general know to the other, but in detail never as clear as they become now. It is the many details that make up a person and it is those details you need to know when you finally want to get to know someone and be able to show understanding and tolerance. With a little conversation, I felt we had once more extended the limits of our friendship. A boat on the open water is the perfect surroundings to push limits, sometimes with bad results, sometimes, like in this case with a quite good outcome.

The boat was not able to push its limits. It just had them and the squall that hit us around midday would show it. With plenty of rain and winds of 25 to 30 knots it was more than some of the boat could take. A cleaf was ripped out of the deck under the pressure of the mizzen sail. The steering was barely able to hold the boat on course and if only a little off into the wind it was hard to get back to where we wanted to go, even with full rudder angle. The swell had grown and the wind built a cobbly sea that pushed the boat from one side to the other.

First thing to go was a bottle of wine, shattering on the floor and erasing today's celebrations of whatever. Second thing to go was the fridge, actually just its door, as we had fixed that little household fridge quite well, but had no means of holding its door in place. It swung open, switching some mains and thus temporarily killing some instruments like wind meter and GPS and throwing the fridge's contents all over the cockpit house floor. Putting everything back in and closing the door lasted for about two minutes. Some permanent solution was required, fast. I went searching and finally found a rubber band to fix the door with while still allowing access to the fridge. Noone wanted to always unknot a line before getting a sip of cool water. That done I restarted the instruments. The autopilot, though, wouldn't turn on anymore. Unsure if the rain had killed it or if it had just finally failed completely, I connected the remote control that showed the pilots main unit still working and controllable with the remote.

The squall didn't even last long. Twenty minutes after its start the wind was back to normal and the rain had transformed to a light drizzle soon to stop. My brother had steered manually and was now feeling the cold creeping through his body. He'd been sitting in wind and rain with merely shorts and was soaked to the bone. Any stronger winds or sea, he commented, he wouldn't want to experience in this boat. We'd found the limits.

Lastly, I found my own limits. The limits in dealing with a person's flaws. During the last week, frequent disagreements with the captain on my behalf could be solved sometimes, mostly by fools play, but mostly not. In a closed environment of a boat there is many more considerations to a decision of how to deal with a person than anywhere else I know. The harmony and atmosphere on the boat are constantly at risk, especially during open confrontation. For that reason, a boat has a captain whose word counts. I did never like authority, though, and I am a quite straight-forward kind of guy, making it hard to hold back thoughts that bother me. I am not the person to avoid arguments, but in this environment, sometimes that's best.

I was glad to have my brother agree on most of my own judgement. It created a kind of conspiracy, but made it possible to keep me from confronting the captain with my opinions and thoughts. Doing so would have ment open criticism, thus questioning the captains abilities. In more strict ship's environments that situation had a name: mutiny. I wasn't aiming at anything like that and wanted to let the captain be captain. He was most experienced at sea and certain disagreement didn't mean I knew really so much better. What actually bothered me was the time we'd loose due to some of the captains decisions and a certain panic of his we had to bear in several situations. The captain frequently decided on impulse, emotionally and shortsighted, peeking out of the cabin for a second and giving order to adjust the course, change a sail or the like. Some more seconds would, in most cases, show that the situation the captain reacted to was most temporary, but it was almost never possible to convince him of that. What I look for in a good captain is the ability to plan and organize, call it foresight. This is what our captain lacked and that bothered me more every single day aboard the ship, the emotions summing up and the desire to escape or change the situation growing stronger by the hour, the only relief being the secret adjustments my brother and I made while the captain wasn't watching or the infrequent successful tries to convince the captain of a better option than his choice had been.

Worst though, and that seemed unchangable, was the captain's panics. With minor issues such as shifting a sail, the captain would panic if it wasn't done in two seconds, an impossible time on the boat we were on. He'd start screaming, letting go of things, moving unplanned, short, paniced, with no apparent reason or urge. No complex situation was planned beforehand. When finally in the situation, everything out of the captain's sight or control or anything otherwise uncertain to him cause panic, screaming and irrational behaviour. In the end, I found that plain dangerous, myself being a person believing that keeping a cool head proves most important in complex situations where one needs to react quickly, but, most importantly, correctly.

I had found my limit in dealing with that part of the captain. I did actually like the captain very much, but when it came to disagreement I felt helpless in the environment I was in. None of the mechanism I used at land were appropriate here. Finally, I would go to the foreship to calm down and remind myself of the actual situation. There was no decision of the captain's ever, that put the boat at risk, there was no decision of his that put us at risk. Mainly it was about time, about saving some days. I believed the journey could have been two or three days shorter until now, with a little more organization, foresight and diesel used. But what was it about shortening this journey when I actually had all the time in the world right now. The one and only reason was my brother Tommi, awaiting our arrival back in Thailand. He had limited time and that put pressure and limits on my time. Still, the captain was the captain and there was not much I could do than keeping the peace and pushing my limits.

captains log:
0600 light rain, shift sails to port, take off Genoa
wind SW 4-8kn
1200 N0°56 E79°39
get hit by squall, 25kn wind, rain
1630 start E
rip a cleaf of mizzen-down-haul out of the deck
horrible night with squalls + rain
break 1 bottle of wine from Charles
1800 auto-pilot breaks down, only tele-command work