Issue 11 : Mar/Apr 2000
Before I made my first ocean crossing, I would allow the water to run in the sink while I brushed my teeth. Then, one day in mid-Atlantic, the first time in my life that I had truly been on my own, a tiny, almost invisible pinhole in a stainless-steel tank sucked out all of my fresh water. When realization struck, the image that taunted me was all of that lovely water that I had allowed, unnecessarily, to wash down the drain as I brushed my teeth.
The tale of the lost water is a paradigm, a telling paradigm, of what the land-bound hordes do in their rush down their own drain. The waste of resources is, to an ocean passaging sailor, an anathema, a “Thou Shalt Not” that might well be added as an Eleventh to the familiar Ten.
There was a time, when there were few of us on earth, when a gallon or two down the drain was no big deal. But when the gallon or two is multiplied by billions, waste becomes more than simple wastefulness; it becomes a form of suicide. The sailor in mid ocean knows deep in his soul something that folks on land have forgotten. The sailor knows the resources available to him and just how long they will sustain life.
A small sailboat a thousand miles from land is an exact exemplar of the earth that Man has been given to play with. The limits on your little floating universe are as clear and as crucial as the level of water remaining in your tanks. Not so on land, where remaining resources are imprecisely measured and mostly optimistically viewed, a misperception for which our children and our grandchildren will suffer.
Water is just one of many limited resources. Think of batteries and how carefully the sailor limits their use, and compare this with how recklessly extravagant we are with electrical power on land. And food and supplies and medicines and . . . the list is long. Sailing teaches us how precious our resources are. There are no profligate ocean passagemakers, since they are all long since dead.
There is a good sci-fi film in which trips to the moon are “bus rides” and where the physical problems of life are solved, save one. In the film, most public places are half-filled with ceiling-high piles of garbage bags. It is clear that waste has finally exceeded society’s ability to dispose of it. We are inexcusably wasteful on land with the creation of garbage. The lesson that sailing teaches us concerning garbage is to “create little and store and bury the rest.” To respect the oceans, we have learned not to befoul them. It is a lesson that the landbound must learn, lest mountains of undisposable garbage invade their lives.
Obsolescence is the god of waste. Consider the mountains of computers and the acres of autos we throw away. It’s cheaper to dump and buy new. The implications are much deeper than the waste of nice equipment. Obsolescence, planned and otherwise, leads to the ever more difficult question of disposal. The passage-making sailor learns that simple devices with very long lives are the best way to equip his vessel. Like a hammer that survives its first smashing blow and will then survive the rest, sailors need equipment that resists replacement.
A compass, a sextant, the much-deprecated radio direction-finder, some nylon, some Dacron, and some stainless steel, are all supplies which, when they survive their first use, can go on forever. Thus, by rejecting bells and whistles and reducing needs to a least common denominator, does the sailor avoid waste.
Sailing has not really changed much since the time of the Phoenicians. They required little more than a setting star, some bamboo, and some papyrus. Like the Phoenicians, we modern sailors lay, or should lay, a very light hand on the resources of our world. A bit of wind, a star to steer by, a reassuring sun, and a smidgen of water and power, carefully husbanded, can be the grist of great passages.
Less, in the sailing life, is more. That is the Lesser Gift of Sailing.
Reese has written much but isn’t one to waste words on himself. He tells us, “No sense wasting a tree on ephemera. Here is my bio (and it will fit nicely on a stone):
Reese
Born 1922.
Did lotsa stuff; Wrote lotsa stuff.
Still sailin’.”
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
