- Local News for Southern Sailors - September 2002 Next Story
CRUISING
The Herringbone Fallacy
Gooner belief systems challenge Caribbean cruisers
By Bruce Van Sant
 Yachties coming into the Caribbean from North America have changed since year 2000. Sure, boats have grown bigger and more expensive, crews have gotten younger and us older, and consequentially, you see more children aboard. All to the good. To the bad, a treacherous psychology rules this group of gooners. 
A friend calls them Y2KCCCs for Year 2000 Credit Card Cruisers. Got a credit card? Wanna get a leg up on the great Boomer Exodus from Working America? Hit the brokers in Annapolis or Fort Lauderdale, and buy a boat. Listen to what the old salts at the bar say. Do a vendor seminar or two. Subscribe to a glossy industry pub or two. And GO FOR IT, MAN! YEAH!
Should work out. After all, didn't we just board the boom bus in the '80s and '90s, and it all went well, fantastically well in fact. So we just board the yacht. And like in the '90s when we had the new paradigm in business, like when we beat the business cycles, we made a new paradigm for navigation out of the GPS. And we've even beat the weather cycles with Wx Faxes. In their haste to get out there many, perhaps most, substitute gadgets for experience. Inveterate gadgeteer myself, I won't quibble with them. I even can rhapsodize over new paradigms, but only when you lay them over old experience. Something else bothers me, though. And it might account for the largest and worst of the dangers in the new paradigm. Anyone who has ever worn clothing with a herringbone weave will recognize it.
Herringbone cloth has a pattern similar to rows of tightly packed letters of alternating A's and V's. Anyone who has ever waited for an airplane or for the dentist, while wearing trousers or skirts of herringbone, knows the following game. You look down at your lap, and you see the vertical columns of herringbone running up and down your thigh. It strikes you that the A's run like mountain ridges, and the V's run like valleys between the A's. Blink an eye, and suddenly it appears the A's become valleys and the V's become ridges. Blink again, and their 3D appearance reverses itself once more.
Compass Confusion While sailing downwind on the trades from the Canaries to Antigua, before the age of GPS, we had battery charging and autopilot problems, which forced us to steer manually 12 hours a day, sometimes in 8- to 10-foot heavily breaking seas. It made for some excitement, keeping us on the ball. Other times, in 6- to 8-foot seas with an occasional rogue wave, boredom became the problem. We flew a full working jib and a double-reefed main, sometimes running goose-winged, sometimes not. While running downwind, the stern of the boat made figure eights, and we tried to keep the bow as motionless as possible and on course with sails full. Inattention could cause backwinding or broaching. Because of the corkscrewing, I preferred any method of steering that did not involve the madly jerking compass.
They have not yet made the compass by which one can accurately steer a small boat bobbing about in a rough sea. I found it easier to steer by the stars at night by simply keeping the mast fixed within a given cluster of stars, while I checked the compass only at long intervals. Similarly, during the daytime I steered by the direction and pattern of the waves and the fullness of the sails, rarely checking with the compass. If the compass says you lie a bit south of your course, you can turn a little north by hiding one or two stars with the mast and following the new pattern in the sky, then average compass readings again and repeat as necessary at long intervals.
God help you if you try to use the compass while correcting course. You will have a reversal of perception not unlike what happens with the A's and the V's of the herringbone cloth, and sails will back or the boat will broach. But sooner or later you will become confused and attempt to steer the compass card rather than the boat. Today the dichotomy of compass card and boat has grossly metastasized.
One friend nearly caused me to faint by pushing his little screen-based boat through the canals of Fort Lauderdale without once looking up. But it worked. In the Caribbean you navigate in unfamiliar territory with unfamiliar charts, and it all goes to hell quicker than a New York computer crash, one minute steering your boat, the next steering the computer, and scarcely noticing the transition from bow to icon.
You obey your instruments, as a good pilot should. You do everything correctly. You pilot your craft right in the groove. But you get caught by the Herringbone Fallacy, and you steer the compass card, not the boat. Logic turns to nonsense. The groove into which you slide comfortably becomes a mound off which you roll uncontrollably.
Rocky Existentialism Recently a yacht went on the reef in the Bahamas. Cruisers within the harbor responded as cruisers often do — with a phalanx of dinghies, everyone shouting instructions at the hapless skipper. A local sports fisherman I know eventually pulled the leaking boat off and beached it for repairs. The fisherman told me what the reefed boat's skipper had told him.
The skipper's wife sat below monitoring their computer charts, watching the little boat-shaped cursor on the computer screen, and telling her husband above at the wheel where they went as they went there.
"There's a rock ahead!" says the skipper.
"No, there isn't!" says the wife below.
"There's still a rock ahead!" a little while later.
"No, there isn't! You'll pass on the right of it. Just keep going!"
BANG!
"That rock isn't where it's supposed to be," said the skipper to my friend, once his boat lay safe on the beach.
"The chart doesn't show it where it is!" he replied.
"That's what I mean," said the skipper, not understanding the difference at all.
Gooners Galore I recently gave a talk to Caribbean cruisers. A lady in the front row appeared upset with me all during my remarks. I proceeded with difficulty under her hostile stare, wondering if I should just ask what bothered her. Not to worry — during the Q&A session she jammed her hand into the air like an angry traffic cop. I put my most receptive face on and tried hard to listen attentively.
Not to me, but to the group, she announced that their friends had lost their rudder on the Caicos Banks following a waypoint in Passages South — your waypoint — she had her fingers cocked at me like a pistol. She folded her hands in her lap, dropped her chin and tilted her head with a So there! glare at me. I could only point out that I didn't know the boats involved nor their crews nor the particulars of the incident, but that since the middle 1980s many thousands of boats have successfully used my sailing instructions for the Caicos Banks and especially that waypoint in particular. A few weeks later, the "victim" in the case sailed into the harbor, and he went out of his way to exonerate the guide's instructions for me. But, in the meanwhile, I had interviewed other boats in the group of gooners with which the lady had sailed the Banks, as well as other cruisers who had heard their VHF traffic from a distance, both before and during the incident. This latter group did use my waypoints and never saw a coral head at boat depth. The lady of the complaint, they said, always thought the charted depths showed water over any heads, not from the bottom, and she never lost her sense of surprise that the water didn't run deeper than what the chart showed.
What actually happened, of course,
you probably can guess
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The gooner group yakked incessantly on the VHF while crossing the Banks: "Watch for this!" "Oops for that!" "Which one are you using?" "Try the Gascoine/Minty one!" "Pavlidis says so-and-so!" They coupled the start waypoint for the Starfish Channel from Wavy Line Graphics' excellent chart for the Caicos Banks to the ending waypoint from Passages South, then changed the destination waypoint back and forth and forth and back every time they saw a shadow, just to check and double-check, but never checking back-bearings to start points coherent with their new destination points. Heads down in two charts and two guides, eyes a-goggle at electronic charts fed by GPSes with correction offsets they had made for Mayaguana and forgot to erase, but which display their little cursor boat just where they wanted it, all following the leader anyway — someone finally went bang! They checked all their LCD readouts, and they all agreed they had the right of things, and the guides and charts had the wrong.
They'd steered their LCDs instead of their boat. The A's switched to V's and the V's to A's, and you couldn't dissuade them of their rightness with a court of logicians. They had met the Herringbone Fallacy.
 Charts and Guides The ability to copy, change and distribute official charts with cheap computer technology has induced amateur chartmakers and armchair guide writers to produce credible-looking materials, which get passed around between clubs and groups of buddy-boat cruisers. Some even get published. The Y2KCCC picks the glossiest and most colorful resource, not the most reliable, or he takes whatever his latest and saltiest bar mate tells him he uses himself or heard that others did.
Some guide writers — Scott, Doyle, Charles, me — use sketch charts, which they regularly update. Sketch charts have accurate GPS waypoints placed in them, usually not lines of lats and longs. These guides began before the U.S. Government's 1990 decision to not defend its copyrights of official charts. Some later guide writers, like Stephen Pavlidis, have applied computer technology in order to vastly improve upon HO and DMA charts. Steve also wittily embellishes his great graphics with super local lure.
Others who make over official charts — Monty and Sara Lewis, Bob Gascoine and Jane Minty — have done the backbreaking work to adjust the latitude and longitude lines of their charts to the GPS reality, and they have added astonishingly accurate details. The Lewises' Explorer Chart series covers the entire chain of Bahamas islands, while Bob and Jane's Wavy Line Graphics series focuses on the Turks & Caicos and high traffic areas of the southern Bahamas.
Even with 23 years continually running up and down the island chains, I use every one of these guides and charts when I enter cruising grounds they cover. The more the merrier. Why use official charts when superior guides and charts exist.
Lats and Longs Embellished official charts, besides those mentioned above, may or may not have lat and long lines placed as accurately as the GPS can read. Official charts almost never do! And that swallows hard for the Y2KCCCs. If you can't trust your government, they reason, then whom can you trust? Corporate CEOs?
My DMA chart No. 25801 shows the rocky shore latitudes of Hispaniola a full nautical mile wrong in latitude. Many large scale charts, like Mayaguana's Abraham's Bay in the Bahamas Far Out Islands, have latitudes which disagree a third of a mile with their corresponding small scale charts. Yet the Y2KCCC enters there with a GPS which reads to within ten feet.
This should not surprise anyone since the latitudes and longitudes really come from a scarcely literate bosun barking at ten pubescent midshipmen, each his social class senior and unwilling to knuckle under to him, each of whom takes ten sextant sights to arrive at one hundred observations, which the captain will average that night as he takes his rum — and all done without electronic timepieces and calculators. Then, without a surveyor's monument to spike into the middle of the ocean, they knit all the differently arrived at charts together. This intimidates the state bureaucracy from correcting any single one without doing them all. So it doesn't get done.
Knowing some history of charts, the accuracy of most charts astounds me. Nonetheless, the Y2KCCCs expect too much when they demand that 18th century paper should obey constraints of Third Millennium silicone. They pile the official charts aboard in paper and in CD, and they pull waypoints off them. Or worse, they paste guidebook waypoints or buddy waypoints onto them, which invalidates them against charted hazards. Some Caribbean-bound skippers stay busy on the SSB, reading to their buddies behind them long lists of waypoints they've clicked off. The buddies dutifully plot them on charts that have lat/long lines that can't sustain them. When they go bang! they tend to blame the chart, the guides and the rocks, but never their buddies.
Some kinds of charts may work well for you in home waters, and you may have disappointments with your guide to Zamboola, but while passaging and cruising from Florida to the Caribbean, load up on guides and embellished charts that have proven lat/long data. Do not fill in correction and offset information to your computer chart program, to your GPS or to your autopilot. You shall surely leave one of them behind like a computer virus cookie when you make the transition between charts, between chart media or between the chart and the helm.LCD Madness I have charts, guidebooks, depthsounders, GPS, radar, autopilot, compass — and eyeballs — which carry position and progress information to my brain while navigating a tricky cut in overfalls and uncertain light. A Gestalt psychologist will tell you that you use a unique mental configuration to interpret each media which brings your brain information. Occasionally, you carry elements of one of these templates — sometimes the whole damned thing — from one device to another and the information mediated gets badly muddled.
No longer just A's and V's, the Herringbone Fallacy has cracked the multidimensional barrier, and today it stomps rampantly through the Caribbean. While steering the boat instead of the compass card once challenged me severely, the typical Y2KCCC down here still must learn to control the GPS instead of the PC, the autopilot instead of the GPS, the radar instead of the autopilot, the chart instead of the radar — but will he ever learn to steer his boat?
Bruce Van Sant, a frequent writer and speaker on Caribbean topics, authors Passages South, sailing directions from Florida to South America, the Cruising Guide to the Spanish Virgin Islands and the recently published Tricks of the Trades. Bruce cruises out of the Dominican Republic. |