Status Updates From Fastnet, Force 10: The Dead...

The gravity of these stories is undeniably powerful, but it makes reading some of the funnier phrasing ("fatal pooping,"..."Cottage cheese became a lethal weapon") like trying not to laugh in church.

One-third said that entry of water was a problem; 11 percent said that the amount of water in the boat affected the decisions that were made. Serious injuries occurred below in 5% of the boats, almost all of them during rollovers. Eleven percent of the respondents experienced at least one instance of safety harness failure. Twelve life rafts were washed overboard, and of the fifteen that were used, five capsized.

Conservatively assuming that only half of those boats—thirty-eight—were actually rolled over entirely, one-eighth of the entire Fastnet fleet still experienced the catastrophe of a complete capsize.

Also, having been bailing the boat for a long time, we would probably have been too exhausted to cope with another knockdown.

I also feel it is worth mentioning the terrific feeling of security once we were in the life raft, and I’m sure that the psychological boost gained from this enabled us to keep going for a few minutes longer—very valuable moments in my case.

Possibly in an effort to avoid sensationalism or just a result of the number of boats and crew and the similarities between them, Rousmaniere describes deaths and losses of crew mechanically. It's much easier to remember the names of boats that hit the worst conditions than what they were or who may have been lost when we get to the final chapter. Given how much dry technical description he used, it's disappointing

“If we still value the qualities of daring, comradeship, and endurance in our national life we should cherish the sports which foster them with the risks they carry. The lessons of Fastnet should be studied calmly and applied sensibly but in the knowledge that they can never expel danger from yachting and the conviction that it will be a sad and bad day when this seafaring people declines the challenge of the ocean.”

“...I feel a little like Noah. I knew that the flood was coming, and I had a boat ready that would get me through it."

At any other time, Ted Turner’s glorying in his boat, his first-place trophy, and himself might have been interpreted as a successful athlete’s boyish pride, but in the context of the Fastnet race tragedies it was widely viewed as insensitive and callous.

Hunt slowly crawled up the ladder and into the hands of Nanna’s crew. Finally secure, he looked down and, to his horror, saw that David Crisp, halfway up the ladder, was still attached to the life raft by the tether of his safety harness. The life raft jerked away from the ship, the tether tightened and pulled Crisp down into the water, and he, Bill LeFevre, and the raft were swept under the ship’s stern.

Ferris was the next to try to escape from the sea. He unhooked his safety harness from the life raft and lunged, half swimming, for the bottom rungs of the ladder, but he failed. Either missing the rungs or smashed by the rolling coaster, or both, Hal Ferris was swept away. His crew last saw him fifty yards away.

But Bob Robie, the man who would not go on deck without wearing his harness, was lost. Perhaps his tether broke, or the object to which he had been secured pulled out...When Ariadne righted herself, those on deck frantically searched for him. Robie soon appeared fifty yards away on the crest of a wave. He waved, they waved back, he dropped into the trough, and he was never seen again.

...no single storm tactic was a guarantee against disaster. Hilaire Belloc once wrote, “The sea drives truth into a man like salt.” The truth here is that there are occasions when men can do little or nothing to help themselves."

I realized, however, that the ship [Maitenes] was in imminent danger of being fatally pooped, and after considering the situation from every point of view, I concluded that I was not justified in taking further risks.

"The occurrence of these was, as we say, occasional but not unusual and they were responsible for the number of poopings which we experienced. Turning to this phenomenon for a moment, let us confess that we could not, of course, hold our heading of 20 degrees...maximum swing was more like 360 degrees to 45 degrees...The poopings occurred when we were close to the 45 degree heading, with a breaking sea closing."

...25 percent of the entire 303-boat Fastnet race fleet capsized entirely—the equivalent of one-quarter of all cars in the Indianapolis 500 crashing. In the accounts of the handful of previous capsizings of individual boats...the crews were extremely lucky to have survived. That the calamity occurred to so many boats in a single twenty-hour period is mind-numbing evidence of extraordinary conditions.

...unable to move; he had been in the water for eight hours. The same helicopter, Sea King-597, had also picked up three survivors from Grimalkin from their life raft. Bartlett recovered quickly, and the five men were able to walk off the helicopter when it reached Culdrose. The pilot told Simon Fleming that, having seen the remains of their life raft, he was surprised that any of Trophy’s eight men had survived.

Almost immediately, the raft was blown back upright and the men clambered back aboard. The raft capsized several times more within the next few minutes.

On the fifth capsize, incredibly, the life raft split apart, the two inflated rings detaching from each other. Morningtown’s running lights were still within sight, but the ketch was far beyond reach in the black gale.

a dogma propounded by Thomas Fleming Day, the founder of American ocean racing. . . . "[A seaman] knows well enough that the sea never destroys purposely and malignantly. He knows that it never has or will murder a vessel; that every vessel that goes down commits suicide.”

Before the start of the Fastnet, he had twice put his boat and crew through man-overboard drills, but on that dark night he was out of sight of Cavale within moments. On board Cavale were one of his sons and a cousin.

(The wine was never found.) After dinner, I went aft into the owner’s cabin, shed my four layers of clothes, and climbed into the cocoonlike bunk to snuggle under a blanket against the blue canvas lee cloth.

“All right, boys, we’re over now. Let her sink.” (Uttered within two miles of one of Britain’s largest commercial ports, this jest has since been assigned the aura of gospel instruction by the few true masochists who sail.)

...
American yachts have won eight of the twenty-eight Fastnet races.

The endless paragraphs of X/Y meteorological data reminds me why not every reader is seduced by these books, but Rousmaniere does have a sense for poignant imagery:

A one-hundred-and-fifty-pound man generates a force of more than three thousand pounds when he is thrown twelve feet. The safety harnesses and jackwires withstood those loads, but the men themselves took a fearful beating.

This Beaufort Scale description never fails to give me chills:

“Very high waves with long overhanging crests. The resulting foam in great patches is blown in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind. On the whole the surface of the sea takes a white appearance. The tumbling of the sea becomes heavy and shocklike. Visibility affected.”
...
"Force 10 is to force 8 what stomach cancer is to gallstones."

The photos included with this book are perfectly situated to maximize their impact on the reading (rather than burying them in the middle of the book for color and quality printing), as effective as any illustration at augmenting the reader's imagination.

"The virtues of the discomfort of an ocean-racing yacht—wet clothes, lack of sleep, bunk sharing, and the constant pressure to outrace frequently invisible competitors—are difficult to explain yet addictive. For the men and women who keep returning to the Fastnet...the lure is not the hope of winning trophies. Perhaps...a means of rediscovering some lost part of their primitive nature, unsullied by civilized life."

Could anything else drive home how small the margin for error is in these situations:

"Now it is generally conceded that as uncomfortable as the boat may be, she is the safest refuge until she goes under. In other words, “Don’t get into a life raft until you have to step up.”"

More than one-third of the boats were knocked over until their masts paralleled the water. One-fourth were capsized entirely, many rolling over through a circle. Even the larger boats—among them former prime minister Edward Heath’s Morning Cloud and Ted Turner’s Tenacious—were battered. Many boats were damaged and some crews were badly injured.