A Voyage For Mad Men
I finished reading A Voyage For Mad Men by Peter Nichols. I liked the book so much, that I wanted to share a few words about it.
The book tells the story of the first single handed, non-stop around the world sailors in 1968. The newspaper Sunday Times announced a price for the first one to finish and the fastest circumnavigation and called it the Golden Globe Race.
There were 9 men who started the trips with very skill levels, equipment, and motivations. The book introduces the different sailors, starting with their background and goes over how they prepared for the trip. It lays out which choices the different men made when it came to their boats. Later it becomes apparent which of those paid off and which ended with regret, but I won't spoil anything here - as I said, the book is good and I recommend to give it a read.
A fascinating aspect about sailing in 1968 is that it actually was much closer to how it had been a for the last few hundred years than how it is now. The two biggest differences to sailing today were GPS (by far, because it directly impacts how certain you can be about your position, even in very bad conditions) and the internet (for staying in touch with the rest of the world). It's fascinating how much technological progress was achieved in the last 50 years.
What I enjoyed most were descriptions that pointed to a realization that I had multiple often during my bike travels. It's the fact that at the very core of an experience there is no substitute for experiencing it yourself. Here is a quote where this stood out for me particularly well:
Waves or seas ‘unlike anything I’d ever seen’ is an inadequate last-resort description, yet one frequently employed by hardened seamen in extreme conditions. Seasoned sailors come to know that their own impressions of great waves at sea, even when measured by eye against the known height of an object, such as the mast of one’s boat, tend to be exaggerated by as much as 100 per cent. More than 100 years of oceanographic studies, and now wave height measurements taken from satellite-sensitive GPS transponders on weather buoys, have shown that waves of 30 feet or higher are the rare product of unusually powerful winter storms in the high North Atlantic or the high latitudes of the Pacific. But even knowing this, what experienced sailors might rationally understand of the reality of waves at sea is driven from their minds and replaced by subjective terror. Fifteen-foot waves beneath a dark sky, driven by a shrieking wind, look terrible enough – great grey-green impersonal mountains with the density of concrete looming high overhead, and always more coming without pause or end. Being tossed about on them like flotsam removes every last vestige of a physical sense of security, so that the observer easily believes he or she may soon die in this nameless place far out at sea, far from shore and safety and loved ones. It is this dam-bursting of a lifetime of shored-up fears, reducing one to the most fearful childlike state, that makes the awful sea look at least twice as terrible as it really is.
The photographs sailors take of the great waves that impress them so at the height of a storm, are always later disappointing in their inability to convey what such a scene ‘felt like’. Ironically, the impossible and wholly unrealistic computer-generated waves and conditions depicted in a film like The Perfect Storm do in fact provide very accurate impressions of what it looks like far out at sea in a terrible storm. It is their excessive exaggeration that mirrors the subjective impression of the human observer. Yet the movie feels safe. It comes without the horrifying realisation that this is real, there’s no way out, nothing in all the world will save you now but luck. This is what turns big waves into the vertiginous forms and shapes found only in nightmares.
That quote I believe, lead me to spending an hour on youtube watching big waves crashig into big ships. It's unbelievable how much force the ocean has. Pretty scary, but also fascinating. I get more and more excited about my upcomming sailing trip. Life is so rich!