The Rule of Three

The little blue and white Cessna lifts off gently into the air, rising toward the little puffs of clouds. It's a beautiful day with just a bit of wind and it's my first cross country solo flight. On my lap sits my knee board, charts marked with my route and notes about radio channels to use at the airports I have to stop at clamped in its jaws. My hands, although sweaty from nerves, hold the wheel lightly but firmly, remembering my flight instructor's warning about feeling the plane's responses instead of man-handling it. I'm heading to Ohio from a small town south of Pittsburgh and I'm a bundle of mixed emotions - excited that I made it this far, worried that I might fail this test and let my instructor (who also happens to be my husband) down, and flat out scared to death of being this far away from familiar territory. I fall into a rhythm, though, checking my waypoints and listening to the thrum of the engine, wary of any hiccups. After half an hour or so, I glance down at the chart for my next waypoint, glance up, and there right in front of me is a large set of interconnected radio antennas that extend to a height above my flight path. I'm headed right for the support wires. Wanting to panic, wanting look at the chart and see where I went wrong, wanting to figure out where the hell I was, I instead look for traffic in all directions and turn the plane smoothly to avoid the antennas, hearing in my head my instructor's voice, "Always fly the plane first. If you get into trouble remember that - fly the plane first." I turned off to a section of empty fields, stabilized my flight and then studied the chart. Under the Rule of Three, this would be number one.

So what does this have to do with a sailing blog? There are a lot of similarities between flying and sailing, and I'm not referring to the oft-cited bit about the sail being like an airplane wing. I'm referring to crew and cockpit management. I'm referring to inexperience, and I'm referring to fear. In the Facebook group Women Who Sail that I belong to, I hear the stories over and over again, those of some nightmarish docking attempt, or a passage gone bad. While flying speeds leave you less time to deal with issues that come up, sailing emergencies require the same type of response. You must be trained to respond automatically, to quickly assess the issues at hand and to choose the appropriate response to yield the result of safety. Since many sailors are relatively new, like I was in the cross country trip described above, they are frequently lacking those response skills. Fear abounds. The trick, whether flying or sailing, is to follow the Rule of Three.

Major problems almost always begin as a progression of small events that, coupled together, begin the downward spiral of loss of control. Stop the progression, and you most likely will stop the event. Any irregularity that makes you uncomfortable, that makes you stop and take notice, should be considered one of the three. On past flights, we've had an instrument go out. No big deal as there are usually backups, but we still chalk it up as an event. Not too long after the instrument failure there might be some unexpected weather showing. Second event. Shortly after that you might develop a headache. Event three. At this point we always find a place to land. Three strikes you're out. On a slow-moving sailboat, there might not be any place to "land" nearby, but you can find an open piece of water and heave-to. Or if the event in question happens while trying to dock, you can leave the harbor and anchor for a bit, or heave-to, giving yourself time to take a break and regroup. If you're leaving for a long passage and the three happen early in the trip, you have the option of turning around and going back, waiting for another weather window.

The success of the Rule of Three depends very heavily on you being situationally aware, and in addition to inattention, it can be hijacked by pride and, more often, by a pressing adherence to a schedule. It can be very humbling to abort a docking maneuver with a dock lined with fellow sailors. You can also be pressured into doing something you're not comfortable with because the daughter you haven't seen for a year is waiting at the airport for you to pick her up. You must make a commitment at the onset to follow the Rule of Three. All crew members must agree to it, and no one may challenge a crew's assessment of an event as being one of the three. If anyone is unhappy, it affects the whole crew.

Clearly there are some catastrophic events that happen that are completely out of our control. Take the anchored sailboat that was slammed into at Elliot Key in Biscayne Bay a few years ago - drunk boater in a very fast-moving boat and zero chance of avoiding the accident. In those cases, just as in a flying emergency, remember to always sail the boat first. There's a tendency to freeze, to panic, but get control of the boat first before you stop to assess the situation. Those catastrophic events are clearly another level of discomfort, but committing to follow the Rule of Three is a sure-fire way to maximize your safety and comfort.

I did safely return to my home airport that day. My instructor was pleased, and I had chalked up a learning experience that would also help me in my sailing adventures. The Rule of Three is an easy piece of safety equipment to add to your boat. So the next time you hear in your thoughts...

Stop. Regroup. And arrive happily and safely.

An honest comment

Email from a reader:

I Have tried to leave comments a few times but the new CAPTCHA keeps going
on and on and on (honestly,  I gave up after 10 iterations!)

Here was my comment on "Honestly"

Not sure I totally agree with you on the safety comparison between driving
and living/cruising on boats.  Yes, there were many times I feared for our
safety (why or why does it have to be mostly in the dark of the night?),
but was almost never for our lives (maybe once,  briefly, off the Northern
California coast...).  Rather,  it was for the safety of Pelagia (equipment
breaking, anchor/rode letting go, engine dying with no wind, hitting hard
things, etc,etc). Certainly, this worry happened a lot more than I care to
admit, but not for our own personal safety.   Now driving, that's a
different thing - -  stats are pretty clear on that being worse (as long as
watercraft such as PWC, wake boats, etc are not in the comparison) .

Regards,
David


David,

Sorry you are having trouble with the CAPTCHA on the blog. The best part of it (besides keeping kids and grand kids aware of were we are) is comments.

I suspect you are correct about the safety stats. We had the same kinds of stats on flying and they were true, as long as they were massaged correctly. But my experience of the reality was different. Everyone I knew drove. Maybe half the people I knew flew. One person I knew, the son of a friend, was killed driving. My personal list of friends who died flying ended up at 12. Some of those were, I admit, living in the high risk end of the flying life, airshows specifically. But several died just doing the charter / flight training / personal flying thing that pilots do.

I was also a motorcycle guy, with more than 250,000 accumulated over the years. I knew a bunch of riders as well. No one I knew personally was killed riding. Set that against the dozen I knew lost to flying. Statistics are statistics, but they are only statistics. Elaborate averages that have little effect on personal experience.

Which is, perhaps, the main point. There have been a number of times in the last couple of years that I just didn't feel safe on the boat. Part of that is weather, particularly thunder storms and the associated lightning. Even on the lake being exposed with a big metal stick poking into the air as the storms rolled overhead was no fun. Out in open water add big swell, a long way to shore, and the fact that boats seem to break often and in the worst ways.

Another aspect is, when I took risks flying, riding, or driving, they were my choice. The risks that come with this life are often outside of my control. The weather blows up unexpectedly and we are not in a place to hide. Something on the boat breaks at a place and time that changes an easy day into a threatening one. I was, and remain, a risk taker. But I prefer to choose when and where those risks are taken. And it doesn't work that way on a boat.

In the end it is my perception that this life has more risk in it than the one I left. That isn't a show stopper, I like living this way. But it is an unexpected perception that runs counter to pretty much everything I had read or heard from "the cruising world".

Take care.
Tj

Slick as a whistle

Before we first started out cruising, while we were still on Lake Carlyle in Illinois, we bought a set of headsets more commonly known as "marriage savers". We bought them because once we had the dodger installed we were having trouble either seeing or hearing each other and communication about docking and anchoring was becoming unmanageable. No one in an anchorage or on the dock wants to hear you shouting to each other. We bought the Simultalk 24g headsets because the radio pack was small and light, the clarity was purportedly excellent, they were full duplex so you didn't step on each other and the headsets were light and easy to wear. I can't tell you how helpful they were in learning how to anchor down the ICW, in working though foggy areas with one of us on the bow and the other on the helm, in docking in tricky wind and current situations and, surprisingly, while emptying the holding tank so we could know when to rinse, when to pump without screaming out the porthole.

Fast forward two years. We began having trouble with the headsets about six months ago. The wires from the headset unit to the radio unit are not very robust and we began having static when we moved around. This is a sailboat, remember, so we move around a lot. Also, the plug seemed not to seat well after awhile and so it wouldn't transmit at all or one could talk and the other could hear but not transmit. It became such a huge issue that we realized we had to do something about it, but we couldn't afford new ones at the moment. Hand signals, you say? Can't do it on Kintala because we have a manual windlass. When Tim is working the windlass he is kneeling down and is visually below the level of the dinghy on the deck. I can't see him at all from the helm. With the dodger and the 42 feet factor and the wind and the engine, I can't hear him at all either. We had an immediate need for a solution.

We decided to try something totally new, something we had never seen anyone else do. We have an assortment of safety whistles on board, two of which are the Storm safety whistles from a friend of ours' company that we keep in the ditch bag and at the helm. Two are USCG safety whistles that are tied onto our life jackets, and two are the USCG safety whistles that are the flat plastic type like these >>>>>>



They are easy to wear all day, tuck into our shirts, can be heard through the dodger, around the dinghy and over the wind and engine noise. After a few days of using them we've come up with a reliable signal system and, except for the rare time like the night before last when we had to up anchor and move in the middle of the night, they work really, really well as communicator devices. I'm incredibly grateful to have had the headsets in the first year of cruising because we simply didn't have the experience to gracefully carry out docking and anchoring maneuvers without talking extensively about them first. Now that we have almost two years of it under our belt, though, we mostly anticipate what the other person is requiring and it goes pretty smoothly. So if you happen to be anchored somewhere and we come in to join you, here's what our signals mean.

1 short blow: forward easy
2 short blows: neutral
3 short blows: reverse
4 short blows: anchor is on or off the bottom
1 long blow: forward and to port
2 long blows: forward and to starboard
and of course the universal 5 long blows for danger or stop

We've been using this system now for a couple months and it's working very well for us. In addition we find that having them on all the time is helpful. When you're below using the head on Kintala you can't hear someone in the cockpit even yelling, so if the person driving needs help we use the whistles. You can hear them fine even as far forward as the V-berth.

In defense of Simultalk, I haven't contacted them yet to report the problem and see if there's anything to do to fix them. My guess is that they are long out of warranty and we're just moving on, but I admit to being disappointed that they didn't last more than 18 months. If I'm able to contact them and they respond I'll be sure to post an update. In the meantime, anchoring and docking will be slick as a whistle.