Confessions of a Long-Distance Sailor | Hacker News Reader

Confessions of a Long-Distance Sailor

arachnoid.com

172 pointsAntiRush65 comments

Also in this genre: Moxie Marlinspike (yes, that[1] Moxie Marlinspike)'s documentary about anarchist yacht-squatting, "Hold Fast" (2007) https://vimeo.com/15351476

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike

Seems unlikely for there to be two different Moxies Marlinspike in any case, but appreciate your confirmation. Indeed his Wikipedia page didn’t need a disambiguation section.

That was a nice video, huge balls on all four in doing this...

I was reminded of this book today when I read some comments here about the popularity of “sailing log” manuscripts.

This one is written by Paul Lutus, of Apple Writer fame.

https://arachnoid.com/administration/index.html

Paul has come up on HN a lot recently. I didn't recognize the domain and didn't immediately realize this was him.

It sounds like he's had a heck of an interesting life.

Loved the book as well!

I've always wished the program was called Lutus Notes.

That connection makes it even more interesting

lutusp here on HN

Maybe HN will like this, 100 Rabbits.

https://100r.co/site/home.html

It is a mix of sailing, low tech, art.

They also have a "sailing log" book, "Busy Doing Nothing".

https://100r.co/site/busy_doing_nothing.html

I read this many years ago, it is fantastic. The tale is very matter-of-fact, but interspersed with hard-hitting extremely personal bits. It's a great read.

The boat itself is an odd duck, a Pacific Seacraft double-ender, which was only built for a few years. Somewhat similar to the very popular Westsail 32. Many cruising sailors recommend the smallest boat that will do for you. A larger boat is more comfortable, sure, but expenses do not scale up geometrically in boats. A 60 foot boat is not twice as expensive as a 30 foot, it's more like 4 times more expensive.

Other commenters have noted other similar books (Tania Aebi, Joshua Slocum). The Pardeys, Lin and Larry, have many books on this lifestyle as well. All are very good.

I bought a 25ft boat. Wish I got a 17ft trailer sailer! I know I will want a bigger boat, but I seriously recommend going a small as possible, dinghy or dayboat, then a small trailer boat, then when you are sure you are going to cross oceans go bigger. Joshua Slocums Spray was only 36'9. Robin Knox-Johnsons Suhaily is only 32 foot! Both went round the world single handed, the second one non-stop and before freeze-dried food!

Single-handed sailing definitely limits your boat size. You have to be able to set and retrieve sails, anchors, etc., and you can't always depend on mechanical assist. Things break at the worst times.

Even couples and small families have to work within those limits somewhat, as during any long passage one person will be on watch, not two or three.

In my spare time I message people of means to fund a 100ft carbon maxi sailing campaign to break ocean records at the major offshore events around the globe.(www.msailing.org)

I call it my moonshot, something I spend a few hours on a month, and you'd be amazed how many people actually politely decline.

I wish more people knew the joy and the rawness of the ocean.

There are worse ways to spend a few hours a month than trying to talk rich people into funding an absurdly fast sailboat

I'll bite. How does Gitana 18 and the general continued technological progress in the Ultim class fall short? If you had something to contribute, couldn't you just get involved in one of these projects?

That's like asking "why are you starting your own project. Couldn't you just contribute to an existing OSS project?"

Some people need to do it themselves.

its a monohull.

Is the intention to use/charter "Skorpios" which you use on the site or are you proposing a full new program from the ground up?

new build, just images and renders for reference. most people have no context of what the latest large monohull builds are/have been.

also i think i only have an image of Raven.

Sailboats in space. That's the ticket.

Vale Evi Nemeth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi_Nemeth

Indeed. An excellent sailor, an excellent prof, and an excellent woman.

Joshua Slocum (February 20, 1844[1] – on or shortly after November 14, 1909) was the first person to sail single-handedly around the world. He was a Nova Scotian-born ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Slocum

And Sir Robin Knox-Johnston[1] was the first person to sail single-handedly around the world _non-stop_.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Knox-Johnston

And Chay Blythe was the first to do it the wrong way around (westabout).

Including the bit where he built his own boat in India with his brother to sail back to the UK, his brother didn't go, so he sailed it alone. Then he tried to get a company to sponsor a new boat for the round-the-world race and nobody did, so he took his homemade boat.

Entered the Southern Ocean at roughly a third of the way around, took damage and lost all his water supplies, and had to do the rest of the race by rationing his beer cans. 1960s battery and valve radio technology failed somewhere in the Indian Ocean and he could receive but not transmit, and had to send a status update by throwing a message in a bottle to a passing ship.

There's a related link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Crowhurst who entered the Golden Globe race without the proper equipment, backed himself into a corner, planned to cheat to save his home, and didn't survive it.

I have a DVD somewhere about Donald Crowhurst's "attempts." I felt sorry for the poor guy, but he really should have just admitted that it was beyond him and given up.

The book is worth a read - lots of misadventures and musings.

Oh boy, this reminded me of The Boy Who Sailed Around the World Alone by Robin Lee Graham, which I randomly found and read in my school's library when I was 12 or 13. Still remember it 40+ yrs later.

I too loved this book, though my copy is titled _Dove_ - one of my all time favorites. My dad, who gave me the book, knew Robin during his own solo sailing days, and figured I could relate to a lot of what he wrote about. Sadly I never got a chance to meet him myself though.

There is something wonderfully old-internet about finding a complete 3,5year solo circumnavigation memoir sitting on a plain HTML site

He is a pre-internet guy, used to live in a cabin he built in the mountains, which he ran a long electricity cable to, and kept his backup floppy disks in a fireproof cannister as a guard against forest fires, in the early Apple days when he wrote columns for magazines and programmed Apple Writer.

Always wanted to do this but enjoying land-lubber life a bit too much at the moment. I'd like to think I've built most of the skills (sailing, electronics, mechanics, sewing, rigging, drinking amicably with strangers, radio, cooking, botany, etc.) but am yet to find a wife who's OK with sailing life: maybe just go anyway?

Just go. Maybe you'll meet her in the journey.

This. Fortune favors the bold.

Tania Aelbi wrote a good one of her trip.

I’m working towards a solo circumnavigation myself. Love reading about the stories of others.

Right on, where are you based out of and what kind of boat? Cheers from wa state

Reminds me of Tom Neale's "An Island to Oneself" - https://harpercollins.com.au/products/9781775492979

An amazing book - well worth a read - I found a first edition years ago, and hadn't expected it to become quite so valuable.

Luckily you can read the entire book on his daughters site, or at least you could in the past.

Unrelated but similarly enjoyable is: Shrimpy: A Record Round-the-World Voyage - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Acton

There was, a few years ago, a nascent blog and a project by a lone sailor to make some sort of daring, record-breaking solo trek from, like, SF bay to Hawai‘i. This gentleman had christened his extraordinarily tiny craft “Chubby Girl” perhaps ironically, and also named his blog after it, “Chubby Girl Cruising”.

Now for some reason apart from my proclivities as a landlubber hetero guy, I was intrigued enough to follow the blog’s progress as he prepared Chubby Girl and set sail. Sadly, he was nearly immediately turned back, by weather, mechanical failure, or some such.

I was disappointed and, while he apparently took down his blog right away, I continued to poke around to find out if he’d try again soon.

But the terrible reality of the Internet and search engines being what they are, the search term "chubby girl cruising" never again turned up any results relating to sailing or the ocean, and trust me, you don’t want to try it, even with SafeSearch engaged…

Wil Spaul. He's in his mid 70s now and probably won't be trying again. AFAIK you can purchase chubby girl from him - it's still at the Berkeley marine center

A different but equally interesting book about extreme sailing (solo race around the world in the 1960's):

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6055.A_Voyage_for_Madmen

I can't remember when I read this journal, but I credit it with being one major influence in a decision to do something similar. I spent my 20's living aboard and sailing up and down the east coast and wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

Thank you very much! I appreciate the free book, and I love reading about sailing.

piracy is a lot less charming than i imagined it to be. they weren't even singing...

A few years ago I was part of a national-level rescue chain, the chain that starts with a phonecall and snakes it way up through different first responders. The group I worked with were at pretty much the far end of the chain. I am all for people doing great things, but for every great-thing-doing long distance sailor there are a hundred rich idiots. 50ish, got rich, bought a boat and is out on the open ocean ... and something goes wrong.

Fall off your motorcycle and you need a ride to the hospital, maybe an ambulance. Fall off your horse or a cliff and you need some burly volunteers with good knees and strong backs to haul you to the nearest road. A little more extreme, say you are stuck up a big cliff, and you might get a 90-second ride in a small helicopter to the nearest road.

But when anything goes wrong out at sea, from a broken mast to a broken arm, you are in for the deluxe package. It starts with ships in the area diverting towards your position. Then a fixed-wing airplane the size of a small airliner launches to put eyes on you and coordinate the next bit: the granddaddy helicopter, the all-weather one with a winch, night vision, two pilots, two SAR techs, maybe three turbines and four or more blades the length of a bus. Think you are low-carbon because you are using a sail? Don't ask how many tons of fuel are spent keeping that helo in the air. (They often have to make multiple fuel stops during ocean rescues).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_MH-60_Jayhawk https://www.airbus.com/en/products-services/helicopters/mili... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EADS_HC-144_Ocean_Sentry https://www.canada.ca/en/air-force/services/aircraft/cc-295....

My point: Don't romanticize the sea to the point that rich idiots start playing around out there. Always take it seriously and do not ever expect help. Always have backup plans for your backup plans.

Buy the EPIRB BEFORE you buy the boat. Buy the expensive one.

At least when Harrison Ford got rich he started buying and crashing light aircraft. He knew to crash on a golf course so the doctors didn't need to walk very far. (Not a joke. That happened.)

https://golf.com/travel/penmar-golf-course-venice-california...

Seems like a good role for a drone rescue ship that targets the EPIRB location.

Unfortunately drone companies have a habit of pivoting into defence before realising their initial civil intentions.

And how fast is this drone ship? I bet slower than the helicopter. And how do you get people onboard? A drone with a robotic arm? Will it be like the claw game, but with wounded people being clawed up?

Claw "game" (scam) machines have deliberately-weak grasps, designed to drop the item they've grabbed whenever the arm is jolted — and then it's jolted at least once, usually twice, in the process of bringing it to the output bin. They are designed to drop their packages, so that people will feed in more money.

I'm not saying a drone with a claw arm would be the right design. But if it turned out that that was the right design, it would be designed not to drop its "packages", as opposed to the claw machines where dropping the package is the intended result.

> And how do you get people onboard? A drone with a robotic arm?

Nets. Nets are how you get people on board in basically all emergency scenarios.

Not that drone rescue ships seem like a particularly good idea, mind you.

No, they use harnesses or baskets. And there’s a rescue swimmer to make it less likely that you die.

https://youtu.be/1B1dnSf6rPk is one example but there are plenty videos of these guys (heroes).

For rescuing small numbers of people from a helicopter, yes. If you have a large number of people in the water, and you are rescuing from a surface vessel, you would likely deploy netting (at the very least as backup)

I think you're forgetting that this is a drone boat, so it wouldn't have anybody onboard.

Even the longest ranged helicopters are WELL short of "middle of the ocean" range. The longest top out around 600 miles, and that's straight line, not out and back, and certainly not with any loiter time in the middle.

The Navy has helicopters that can do in-flight refueling. If an aircraft carrier is close enough it might be called upon (1).

But if not, this is what they do:

> the plane’s crew dropping a bundle of medical gear into the water near the ship, and then four pararescuemen from the 131st Rescue Squadron jumping out themselves. Once in the water, they swam to the Franz, boarding it and treating the fisherman.

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/air-national-guard-parachute...

(1) https://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=88E4...

In 1934 the airship USS Macon could carry five Sparrowhawk biplanes, and its commander wanted to convince the navy that it was a capable search and scouting vehicle because it had so much longer flying range than any aircraft of the time, it could float over the ocean and refuel and dispatch the biplanes to spread out and cover lots of area quickly.

USS Houston was carrying President Roosevelt from Panama to Hawaii on a secret route, and the airship commander launched an unauthorised scouting mission to search for his ship, found it, and dropped a bundle of current newspapers and magazines for him.

Ya, there are way more options. A few helos can refuel in-air, but more common is refueling from ships (landing or hovering) and oil rigs. Then there are a whole bunch of helicopters on navy ships that will rescue people if asked.

There are also parachute SAR techs. They will jump out of fixed-wing aircraft with ranges of 1000s of miles. They cannot get you home, but might keep you alive. (Brave people, jumping into situations where they know rescue could be days away.)

Helos on navy ships are the drop-dead last resort because, after them, there is nobody else to call. If they go down, the next wave of help will be days away.

> He knew to crash on a golf course so the doctors didn't need to walk very far. (Not a joke. That happened.)

The link only mentions that he crashed on the golf course, not why he chose it. (Well, other than "can't make it to the airport, golf course is best alternative"). Personally, I suspect "it's got open stretches of flat land with no trees or buildings" was more of a consideration than "doctors are often found there". :-)

I lived a block away from where he crashed. It’s immediately next to the Santa Monica airport. I saw his mangled plane after the crash. Yes, I suspect he picked the Penmar golf course because it was a safe option, but it’s also under the flight path of the airport.

Something I've read on HN once, and that nailed it for me: in the middle of the Pacific you are further away from any possible rescue than if you were on the ISS.

To bring it back around to software, Jack Ganssle, author of several books, articles and seminars on embedded systems programming is the only person I know of who's had an EPIRB triggered three times.

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