Boats that don’t float

Amid all the media circus around the sinking of the Costa Concordia I have maintained that the whole story is yet to be told.  Its hard to explain the actions of the hapless Captain Schettino but probably even harder to find out from this distance what really happened and what he really did.  If you’re up for close to 15 minutes of maritime narration, this video makes it all a lot clearer.

Final hour of the Costa Concordia

Reconstruction of the Costa Concordia Tragedy, Narration by John Konrad from gCaptain.com on Vimeo.

The cruise line is clearly hanging the captain out to dry.  What is less clear is how much of the blame should fall on the captain and how much on the cruise line itself.  While the media initially presented the situation as black and white my instinct was that there were likely many shades of gray involved.  Clearly the captain was grandstanding and he got too close to the island - - - THIS TIME.  Somewhere I read another account of an earlier close pass by the same island, maybe in August if memory serves so this activity was not completely unusual and may very well have been routine and therefore known to his employer.  Known to or perhaps even tacitly condoned by his employer. 

The video refers to Schettino’s claim that he was navigating by sight.  That was likely the initiating error in this incident, if you discount the grandstanding that likely was the overarching problem.  Accidents at sea tend to result from an early error of judgment that compounds and eventually leaves the protagonist with no options, or in this case on the rocks.   When you look at the chart in the video you will see that a path slightly further to the east – probably as little as 50 feet further to the east – would have allowed the boat to continue untouched.  Initiating the turn seconds earlier would have accomplished that but judging that exact distance by eye at night would have been extremely difficult.

What is also evident in the video is that immediately after the incident the captain took exactly the correct actions to mitigate further damage and to protect the lives of his passengers.  The boat did not end up grounded in shallow water by accident – that was a very deliberate action that likely saved hundreds of lives.  These cruise boats are a floating abomination.  They are about as seaworthy as a can of tomato soup.  With close to a 200 foot hole ripped in the side of the floating apartment it would have laid over on its side, trapped most of its passengers inside and promptly gone to the bottom.  Lifeboats are unlikely to be any use when one of these behemoths tips over – the boats on the downward side will get crushed and the boats on the high side can’t be launched because they are lying against the floating apartment. 

The only question about the captain remaining in my mind is what the hell he did after the grounding.  He was in shallow water and obviously his life was in no immediate danger.  His actions after the rock strike indicate the ability to think under pressure so the suggestion that he abandoned ship early out of panic doesn’t seem logical to me.  People do funny things under pressure but I don’t think we’ve heard the whole story on this one yet. 

And now for some late breaking news:  Winston Churchill, enjoying his retirement on a Mediterranean cruise operated by an Italian line is reputed to have been asked “Why an Italian cruise line?”  To which he is reputed to have responded:

“There are three things I like about an Italian cruise line – first, the service is excellent, second the food is extraordinary and third, in the event of an emergency, there is none of that messy nonsense about women and children first.”

Oh dear!!

You’ll have to excuse the image quality.  All of these were taken through the glass because there’s no way I’m going out there just to take a few pictures.  There’s a big winter storm buffeting the Island today.  The radio keeps going on about how cold it is but its really not that cold – maybe –6 or so for a low and up to close to zero during the day. 

The forecast says we’ll have this crap until Saturday and then it will be back to lows above zero and highs in the 8 to 10 range.  Yesterday I offered our diver a ride to the airport.  I hope he doesn’t claim it.  If he does it will be because the Malahat is too awful to drive over.  We would take the boat to the customs dock at Van Isle and he would then take a 5 minute cab ride from there to the airport.  I’m sure once we got away from the dock we’d be just fine but it really isn’t a very nice day to go anywhere.  As we discovered on the weekend, we will need to bring our lines inside while we are travelling because if they are left outside its like trying to tie knots in tree twigs.

Mayday

There’s a sad collection of derelict vessels anchored in pretty well every harbour.  Some are worse than others – Brentwood Bay for instance has a particularly bad reputation as a last resting place of uncared for boats.  Saturday night when we pulled into the yacht club in Tsehum Harbour I recognized some of the derelicts that were there last year but this one in particular looked worse than I remembered it looking.

Sunday morning I said to Marilyn “I think that boat is sinking – it looks even worse than it did last night.”  Then I snapped a couple of pictures of it, we talked about hulks in general for a few minutes and both of us promptly forgot the conversation.  Until about an hour later. 

We could hear the Victoria Coast Guard trying to raise “Gypsy Wind”.  She sounded a little frustrated, like they often do when a vessel repeatedly hails them but doesn’t respond when they answer.  A while later we could hear Gypsy Wind hailing the Coast Guard and just about at the point where I thought maybe I should relay for them, they finally heard the Coast Guard response.  As soon as they said they wanted to report a vessel sinking in Tsehum Harbour I made sure I followed them up the dial when they moved off channel 16.  Sure enough they were reporting the same boat I had taken pictures of that morning. 

The woman at the Coast Guard was a little annoyed with Gypsy Wind for not responding to her so she first had to chastise him for his radio use.  Then she was clearly reluctant to accept his claim that the boat was actually sinking.  At one point she asked him “have you observed this vessel in the past?”  To which he responded “only a couple of times a day for the last 3 years.”  At that point she seemed to accept his assessment of the situation and moved on to the rote questions “GPS location?” “Any environmental contamination?” Etc.  Maybe we should have reported it but in hindsight my 2 observations in 24 hours likely wouldn’t have convinced her that it actually was going down.

We’ll be back at the club next Saturday – I’m curious to see if the boat is gone.

You can frame this

On the northern pipeline, our Prime Minister being interviewed by Peter Mansbridge:

It's one thing in terms of whether Canadians, you know, want jobs, to what degree Canadians want environmental protection. These are all valid questions.

But just because certain people in the United States would like to see Canada be one giant national park for the northern half of North America, I don't think that's part of what our review process is all about.

Amen.

Italian night at the yacht club

We need to get back in the social whirl of the “club” so we bought tickets to their Italian night and tonight we’re tied up at the reciprocal dock at SNSYC.  Its actually a lot more convenient for us to come to the club by boat than it is by car.  It takes about the same length of time – maybe 2 hours on the water and at least 1-1/2 hours by road.  More importantly, if we come by boat we can stumble back to the boat and go to sleep.  If we come by car one of us has to be the designated driver and we have that hour and a half trip to look forward to after the evening is over.

I’d forgotten how pretty Gray Hawk is until I was coming back from my dock-walk this afternoon and she just took my breath away.  There isn’t another boat on this dock that I’d even consider trading her for.  And there’s plenty of them to choose from with some of them no doubt insured for 3-5 times what Gray Hawk is insured for.

This isn’t the famous barge that sank at our dock but it likely is the pile driver that ripped Gary’s bull rail off after replacing the finger pier.  We missed that big adventure because we were on a Costco run that day but there’s not that many pile setting cranes on the water here.  There was a surprising amount of traffic on the water today considering that it is the middle of January and not all that warm out.  We saw several recreational boats, one great honking big RCMP boat and a couple of commercial fishing boats in addition to the usual ferries. 

When we first got up this morning it was pretty choppy at the dock and the cloud cover was socked in low overhead.  We had pretty well talked ourselves out of taking the boat out but then the sun came out and the waves calmed down and all of a sudden it seemed like a good idea again.  Sitting here in the late afternoon sun at the yacht club reciprocal dock it seems like a good decision.  Tomorrow we have to get an early start for home because our diver is coming at 1:00 boat time.  If we don’t catch him now he is going away for a month and that will be too long so we need to make sure we get home in time tomorrow.

Ran out of volts

We decided that today was as good a time as any so we packed up the stuff that was scattered all over the cabin, untied all the extra lines we had put on in July and about 2:30 we set out for a brief cruise of the bay.  Getting away from the dock means that everything has to be shipshape, or sort of of shipshape anyway and it forces us to get that done now rather than putting it off for yet another day.  When we got back the sun was still trying to peek out so we pressure washed some more of the green slime away.  Our boat is starting to look like someone loves it again.

When we got ready to leave I discovered that we didn’t have a bow thruster.  That’s bad but not a deal breaker so we went anyway.  After all, that was the purpose of the trip, to see what worked and what didn’t.  After we got done pressure washing I traced the problem to a lack of volts emerging from the 48 volt charger.  I hope it hasn’t killed the batteries that power the thruster but I assume it will have.  Tomorrow we’ll find a new charger and then likely the next day I’ll find some new batteries.

I already mentioned that we had put the dinghy on the foredeck to keep British Mike from ploughing into it during his random-navigation departures and arrivals in the marina. Having it on the foredeck was making it really hard to get around on deck and it meant we couldn’t let the cat outside for fear he would put little holes in the dinghy.  We couldn’t unload it in the slip though because we are too close to our new neighbour so we pumped all the water out of it and as soon as we got out in the bay we chucked it overboard. Its not hanging on the davits exactly the same as it did before but I still haven’t decided whether I like the way it hangs now better than the old way so it can hang like that until I do decide.  Long term my goal is to extend the davits so that it hangs a lot higher than it does now but I’m not sure whether I’m going to hire that done or use it as an excuse to buy a little MIG welder.

Gary (our landlord) has installed wifi in the marina but like most amateur wifi installations it doesn’t work very well.  I bought something called a range extender at London Drugs the other day.  I didn’t even know they existed but when I went looking for an external USB wifi antenna I came home with the range extender instead.  The theory is that it picks up weak wifi signals and rebroadcasts them, both directions.  So if your computer is too weak to reach the router it will amplify that signal and if the router is too weak to reach your computer that signal gets amplified.  It was a bit of a PITA to get it set up, mainly because they ship it with idiot software that is supposed to do everything automatically – and of course it doesn’t.  Then it puts a stupid message on your screen that tells you to call support.  I can just imagine how that call would go “is your extender turned on?”, “is your computer turned on?” – life is too short but fortunately Google was acquainted with both the range extender and how to configure it manually.  So now we have functioning wifi onboard.  Its by no means ripping fast and in fact it becomes snail slow late in the day but its more than we had last year.  And did I mention – its free.

(later – Thursday the 12th)

I never got around to posting this so I’ll just add to it rather than start another one.  Our wifi access comes and goes with the tide.  I’ve got the extender on the top of about 8 feet of PVC conduit with the conduit stuck on the top of the mast but it needs to be just a little higher.  We have a connection pretty well all the time but there are a few times during the day when its really flaky.  I think another few feet will likely make a huge difference. 

Finding a charger for the bow thruster batteries turned out to be more of a challenge than I had expected.  My first stop was Philbrooks in Sidney because they were so helpful during the Webasto furnace adventure last winter.  And they tried to be helpful again although it was clear that they don’t install 48 volt systems and had never actually seen one either.  That’s really strange because my understanding is that higher voltages are preferred for thruster installations and Philbrooks definitely claims to be a high end yard.  I wasted quite a bit of time there and then went to my favorite chandler, Waypoint Marine who is just down the street from Philbrooks.  We came up blank there too but he suggested I try some of the power wheelchair places around here.  Given the number of senior citizens on the Island the only business better than coffin sales is wheelchairs.  I struck out on the wheelchair stores though because they seemed to be staffed by fools who knew that their wheelchairs came with a charger and couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to buy just a charger.  And they seemed also uniformly clueless about the voltage of their chairs.  So I tried a couple of battery stores and hit the jackpot on the 2nd call.  The guy actually had one in stock and didn’t want to argue with me about what I was doing or why or how – he was just happy to tell me he had a 48 volt charger and how much it was worth.  Gotta love that attitude.

The 48 volt battery charger worked a charm but before I figured that out I had bought another one identical to the original online.  The one I bought first is intended for a power scooter.  It charged the batteries just fine but it didn’t seem to want to go into float.  When a multi-stage battery charger starts out it pumps a huge amount of amps into the batteries but over time the charge should decline and eventually the charger should stop trying to put anything into the batteries.  Cheapo chargers like you buy for $25 at Canadian Tire don’t do that which is why, if you leave them attached for long periods of time, they will eventually boil your batteries dry.  I thought that was what this one was trying to do but it turns out that the batteries were just so badly drained that it took longer to bring them back up than I thought it would.  I’ve spent most of my time the past two days in the engine room and this morning I noticed that the new charger had gone into float mode.  That’s a relief but I had already bought another OEM charger online so ultimately we’ll have a spare, which isn’t all bad anyway.  We’ve got spares for pretty well everything else onboard so why not that too.

Everybody else in Cow Bay appears to be heading south to Melacque for a winter vacation.  I don’t think their departure time is related to our arrival but it certainly seems like it might be.  While its warmer here than it would be on the prairies its none too warm nonetheless.  Today I’m trying to refill our water tanks but may end up stymied by the fact that the dock water connections are frozen up.  Right now (4:00 boat time; 2:00 local) there is water running about 200 feet away from our spigot but I’m afraid the thaw won’t make it to our slip before it starts getting colder again.  There was even a hint of ice floating around the marina earlier this afternoon.  There must be enough fresh water dumps into the bay to allow the surface to freeze.

29 degrees of separation

So it was –17 Monday morning when we left Regina.  I know this because I checked the thermometer in the truck after I froze the shit out of my fingers getting the satellite dish strapped back on the truck.  We had removed it the day before while we took the truck through a carwash.  We were bringing so much stuff to the boat that the only place left for the dish to travel was strapped on the back deck which left me out in the dark cold Monday morning. 

Wednesday night as we drove off the ferry in Nanaimo we happened to notice that the thermometer read +12.  Now +12 isn’t all that great either but its one hell of a lot better than –17.  It was raining, of course, its BC after all.  But it felt wonderfully warm.

Gray Hawk was still here although many of her slip mates have moved on.  Gary sounded a bit worried about that – its obviously better for him if people come and stay so he doesn’t always have to be finding new tenants.  I went for coffee Thursday morning to get caught up on all the local gossip and activities.  The most exciting thing that we missed was the sinking of the barge. 

It sounds like it was a major adventure.  The barge complete with crane showed up sometime about the end of May.  A couple of young guys owned it and used it to transport the docks and ramps that they build locally out to wherever they were to be installed.  The barge wasn’t very big and the crane was pretty small as cranes go, one of those old yellow cab affairs that would have originally been on tracks or maybe on the back of a small tandem truck.  When the barge started to sink it pulled the dock partway under with it.  At some point the boom on the crane swung madly around and got entangled in Joe’s rigging.  Then it sounds like they tried to pull the barge free and eventually succeeded in sinking the barge and dismasting Joe’s boat.  I’m sorry I missed it.  Barry said that when they hooked onto the barge with the tug many in the crowd watching agreed that the fun was just beginning.  And it sounds like that was absolutely the case.  Gary is still missing the end pier on that side because both of the pilings snapped off underwater during the adventure.

So now we’re back onboard and the boat seems to have survived our absence with remarkably few ill effects.  We left some butter in the butter dish and while it still looked OK we didn’t want to risk it.  Otherwise everything seems exactly as we left it.  Of course it has been raining ever since we arrived but we have lots of time so I am avoiding outdoor jobs.  We’ve grown a serious coating of green slime but I got the starboard side pressure washed during a brief period of sunshine and I’m holding out for more sun before I tacked the port side and the decks.  We loaded our dinghy on the foredeck before we left because I had seen British Mike maneuvering too many times.  With the dinghy hanging on the davits I was pretty well certain he’d either wipe it out or get hung up in the davits if we left it there.  It was a big job getting it winched up onto the foredeck and I have a feeling getting it back in the water will be even harder.   It is however still in one piece and the davits are undamaged so perhaps my efforts were worthwhile.

Today we have to go bottle wine that we started in early July.  Its been resting in an oak cask since September.  It was ready to bottle in November but Pat said she could keep it in the cask for a while so she did.  If there’s any benefit to the oak then it should be really good stuff.