Sail with New Freebooters

A year ago, Dutch courts put Laura Dekker under the control of child care services while they assessed her physical and mental fitness for the risks involved in her proposed multi-stage 2-year singlehanded voyage around the world.

I think they got it about right. In the intervening period, Laura has undertaken training that would have been necessary at any age. She has learned first aid aimed at solo adventurers, including being able to suture her own wounds, and she should have a better idea of how to identify the effects of sleep deprivation and how to cope with them.

She has also changed to a larger boat. Quite a few people have sailed the oceans in 26-footers, but it’s slow going and there’s less room for all the stuff that doesn’t change size as the boat gets bigger – nav and comms equipment, autopilots, food and water… Her choice of a 38-foot ketch keeps sails to a manageable size, and offers a proven storm rig.

The Dutch child psychologist pronounced her well able to handle the rigours of solo sailing for extended periods, which does not surprise me. I am not a professional psychologist, but I’ve had my share of personal trauma and have watched several people of all ages undergoing experiences that seriously challenge their abilty to handle events that damage their world. Three committed suicide, but with very different effects on the people they left behind. This is not a statistically valid sample, but it makes me favour the view that age does not improve a person’s ability to handle psychological challenges – if anything, the reverse is true. It is more about a person’s ability to remain calm and rational, and to be flexible. (I count myself odd in this respect, flapping about minor things but doing fine when it really matters).

However, there is a real risk at any age that a person has been persuaded into something they are afraid to back out of. Donald Crowhurst was a mature adult when he set out in Teignmouth Electron.

If I were the parent of a prospective teenage circumnavigator, I would not be offended if the authorities sent someone to check that I wasn’t the driving force behind the venture. I know the Americans did this in Abby Sunderland’s case, and I imagine Dick Dekker has suffered a grilling or two, but I don’t know whether the Australian authorities had a go at Jessica Watson’s parents.

If you have what it takes, age seems unlikely to make a difference. I believe it is better to assess whether the prospective adventurer and his/her support team have done their homework. What do you think?

New technologies often lead to developments that weren’t foreseen in their early days. One that is becoming more and more common with the growth of the Internet and mobile phone networks is  ‘community-sourcing’, where groups with a common interest pool information for the common good in much the same way as Open Source programmers do for software.

Each project of this kind needs people with the necessary technical and management skills, access to the necessary funds, and the drive to sell the idea. Teamsurv appears to be well-provided with all three. It’s a community-sourced project whose goal is to provide freely-available detailed depth and position information for the shallow waters frequented by yachstmen, divers, fishermen, workboat operators – in fact, any recreational or commercial user of shallow inshore waters. Volunteers use either a software application running on their onboard PC or a hardware data logger, attached to their GPS and echo sounder.

Teamsurv’s ultimate goal is to cover any location in the world where they can find volunteers. Even now, you are welcome to submit data from anywhere, but Teamsurv are testing their system for manipulating the data (correcting for the height of the tide at the time of logging, as well as a few more subtle things) on the following four trial areas:

• UK South coast, Poole to Chichester
• UK East coast, Thames Estuary to the Wash
• France: Brittany coast including Golfe du Morbihan
• Lithuania: Curonian Lagoon, Klaipeda and adjacent coastline

One consequence of this is that the associated website is in three laguages – English, French and Lithuanian – which makes it pretty unusual.

If you sail or motor (or if your rowing boat carries a GPS and echo sounder, for that matter), why not volunteer? Once you’ve set up your PC application, or borrowed one of their hardware data loggers, all you have to do is upload the data when you get home or when you next manage to access a wi-fi point.

For details, and an interesting blog, see the teamsurv website

TeamSurv’s research is being part-funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (grant agreement no. 247998) and aims to demonstrate that the more accurate positioning made possible by the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) may permit community-sourced depth sounder information to be used as a low cost source of survey data, with comparable quality to traditional survey techniques.

I’m not going to repeat all  the hype that surrounded Jessica’s return. It was to be expected, and she handled it very well. Her sponsors will be pleased, and she has shown that she’s  not just (!) a very competent solo ocean sailor.

Here’s to a long and successful public and private life for Jessica!

It sounds to me as if the Dutch courts have more sense than I would expect to be shown by UK or US courts. I’ve just been reading Laura Dekker’s blog about her preparations to sail alone around the world, starting this summer. Most of it is about her new 38 foot Jeanneau GinFizz ketch, which sounds much more suitable for the trip than the Hurley 800 she orginally proposed to use – but there are one or two asides about the court whose ward she became after all the fracas last year.

It sounds as if they recognise that she is a sea gypsy, born on board a boat down in New Zealand waters, and not just a nutty teenybopper with access to the kind of money required to buy and equip a boat suitable for a round-the-world voyage. They have let her continue to live with her divorced father, and tried to be constructive by insisting that she take a first aid course.

However, they don’t seem to have realised that the outfit that they recommended normally runs ordinary first aid courses, intended for uninjured people who need to take care of injured third parties. Iedereen EHBO had to design a special course for her, presumably on the lines of the courses given to Vendée Globe skippers. It would be interesting to know how much it covered.  Was it just first aid, or did it go as far as teaching her how to stitch her own wounds and give herself injections?

Laura’s route plan is a world cruise with plenty of stops, including some long ones where her support team will join her and overhaul the boat. This is not a mad dash to beat a speed record, so I feel quite happy to support the venture.

I’m sorry I’ll miss most of the 21st century. It could be interesting. I’m enjoying the headlong growth in conectivity and bandwidth – which is spreading to the mobile phone networks in parallel with the Internet -  but transport is changing, too. We’re already seeing serious attempts at producing electric cars, but it’s bulk transport by sea that looks ready for real changes:

• Fast power boats only exist as toys for the ostentatious and wealthy, and for the world’s navies. In fact, some superyachts look like warships, too.
• Bulk carriers are now cruising at around 10 knots because that halves the cost of operating them. If speed is essential, distributors ship by air.
• There are various experimental vessels that use wind power to reduce costs even further. Maybe the time will come when engineless bulk carriers are towed out to sea where they continue their voyages under wind power…
• The absolute record for a round the world voyage is now held by Franck Cammas in the big trimaran Groupama, at just over 48 days and an average speed through the water of about 24 knots.  He carried no payload, but there’s no reason why a bigger vessel couldn’t do so.
• The successor to  l’Hydroptère is intended as an ocean-going vessel. What speeds can we expect from her?

I’ll be watching with interest.