Why I'm collecting other people's disasters

Years ago I wrote about a book that saved my life — not with a lifejacket or a flare, but with a single paragraph I'd read five years earlier and forgotten I knew, until the boat started doing something I didn't understand and the paragraph came back on its own. I've thought about that a lot since. The knowledge that matters at sea is almost never acquired at the moment you need it. It's stored, quietly, long before — and then, if you're lucky, it surfaces.

That's really why I started keeping a logbook of documented sailing emergencies. Not to frighten anyone. The opposite. Every entry is a paragraph someone might carry for five years and never need — until the one afternoon they do.

Here's one I can't stop thinking about. A 60-foot yacht, four aboard, 170 miles south of Block Island. No storm. No collision. A propeller-shaft seal — the sort of fitting that gets a glance once a season if it's lucky — quietly gave way, and the boat began filling faster than the crew could stay ahead of it. A Coast Guard aircraft dropped a pump to buy time; a cutter diverted and took all four off. They survived. But sit with what nearly sank them: not the sea they were watching for, but a fitting below the waterline they'd stopped thinking about.

That's the pattern, over and over. The thing that gets you is rarely the dramatic thing. It's the boring thing you'd filed under "fine." A through-hull. A worn gland. A gas bottle. A rudder gland working loose after an orca leaves the rudder spinning. The drama is downstream; the cause is mundane and, almost always, was knowable.

So I collect them. Each one gets logged the same way: what happened, where, to whom, what the conditions were, what the sources say — and then the part I actually care about, the lesson stated as seamanship rather than a scolding, with a link to the procedure it points to. Names come off unless there's consent. It isn't about the people. It's about the paragraph they'd want you to carry.

My late friend and co-author Zvi Dor-Ner used to say that the sea doesn't test you when you're ready — it tests you when it feels like it. You can't schedule competence for the moment you need it. You can only build it in advance and trust it to surface. That's what "seawise" means to me: not a badge you're handed, but a state you keep moving toward, one stored paragraph at a time.

If any of this is useful to you, the whole thing is open and free to read. Go through a few entries before your next passage. Find the one boring fitting on your own boat you've stopped thinking about. And check it.