Social media seamen

Sailors who can’t make decisions should stay inshore, and many do. But there are some who – from the safety of their half-model adorned libraries – criticise the decisions of those who have foundered offshore. We’ve all heard the voices of these social-media seamen, the ‘hollow men, the stuffed men’ – and they are always men (women, in my experience, are above idle gossip) hiding behind their nautical blog names and pouring scorn on souls who’ve fouled up at sea.

Such invertebrates remind me of the ‘nabobs’ so hated by Colonel Kurtz in the film Apocalypse Now. They were the desk-bound CIA chiefs who sent him in to kill communists and who later order his assassination for successfully doing so. Now, in a new book, Yachting Monthly correspondent and ocean sailor, Charlie Doane, gives these godlings a name: Armchair Admirals.

Charlie, with whom I once sailed briefly on the East Coast, is a tall, lean, laconic American sailor-writer, who is a very rare bird indeed in that his prose can switch effectively from protractor to philosophy. Any man who can advise you on how to handle a boat in near hurricane conditions, take a simple sun-sight or list the fundamental kit required for ocean voyaging, is a sailor who can make decisions. Yet, he also pens the line: ‘At sea, in the light and space of a long voyage, you may sometimes become acutely aware of your own mortality, but you will also sometimes feel it expanded into something seemingly infinite.’

Charlie’s book, The Sea Is Not Full, is a sort of Zen and the Art of Ocean-circling Maintenance. In it he describes a nightmarish winter delivery trip from New York in a brand new 42ft GRP catamaran, Be Good Too, bound for the Caribbean. The four-strong crew soon discover that the bilge pumps don’t work, the windows leak, the hatches aren’t man enough to take waves as the boat endures gale force winds and then the bridge deck starts de-laminating. Finally, after the steering fails and they are forced to lie ahull because the helm is jammed into sending the boat round in circles, they call for help 300 miles off Cape Hatteras and are air-lifted off.

Before they had even got back to their respective homes from the helicopter landing pad, cyberspace was alive with the furious Armchair Admirals busily tapping their keyboards to ‘berate’ the four sailors.

They should have repaired the rudder with the sort of machine tools available only from shipyards! They should have removed the rudder! They shouldn’t have been out in the first place…

In his book Charlie gracefully shrugs off all the criticisms and instead refers to French legend Bernard Moitessier’s advice, which, admittedly, the crew of Be Good Too, did not follow: ‘It was important, he felt, not to “crystallise my thinking prematurely” and to get his creative juices flowing he imagined himself chewing on the problem with an old cruising buddy.’ This amounted to letting problem-solving ‘ripen’ rather than bursting out with Eureka-style light bulb moments.

As Charlie says: ‘…Moitessier’s elegant solution to his seriously intractable conundrum required a full and proper gestation period… perhaps if we had slept on the problem Be Good Too would still be sailing today.’

That may well be the case, but come what may, whenever a sailor as sound and honest as Charlie Doane puts pen to paper to warn the rest of us by regaling yarns of misadventure, the Armchair Admirals will be there like the faceless furies they are.

To find out what happened to Be Good Too,

you’ll have to buy the book! (The Sea Is Not Full,

by Charles J. Doane, published by Seapoint Books + Media LLC, £19.63)

The Armchair Admirals will be there, like faceless furies