Making adjustments.

Making the Pathfinder ‘fit‘ for me to sail and live aboard.

At one time, as a climber/mountaineer, we used to think about hazards in mountaineering having either an objective or subjective nature ; the objective hazards being primarily the route itself and perhaps the conditions whereas the subjective hazards are what we ourselves brought along as an additional problem. Today, I tend to think about my sailing life in much the same way and while most of the voyages and passages I make now should be well within my skill level they might not be so in terms of my strength, balance and endurance. In short….I am most of the problem now so to go to sea and get anything from the venture it’s me that has to make some adjustments.

Blog time, June into July 2024. Right now we’re at home having just done the long drive back from Norfolk and our holiday. I’m glad the planned break happened when it did because I was almost out of shed door jobs. Just before we packed up and left I finished most of what was left and sent off my rig/sail measurements to the sailmaker. I was a bit tempted to suggest a trip over to their loft to maybe chivvy them along a bit as so far iv’e had no word about progress : the next main project job being to put the masts in, rig them for sail and then try out the new canvas. In the meantime – the rest of today basically – I finished turning my butt plugs – that’s the end plugs for the alloy tubes BTW and then I have a long clean up job in the workshop as it’s now covered in fine wood dust and wood-flour from the lathe.

Part of this post, perhaps even the greater part, comes from thinking about and then resigning myself to the facts of reduced strength, balance, endurance and mental flexibility that have been a feature of my life post stroke. It’s those features that I have to consider and then plan around as I prepare the Pathfinder for it’s sea trials and proving voyage and those selfsame features that I want to discuss in this post. For now, I come back to the project where I am far down the jobs list as for it to remind me that I have to get both it and myself ready for life at sea again.

A fine collection of ‘butt plugs’ – heel and masthead caps for the various tubes

A life of risk…..or just a life spent thinking about risks.

Most of my readers will know that iv’e spent much of my life doing something or other, a bit dangerous or risky, in the great outdoors. From my start as a climber and mountaineer, through my years as an ocean racing sailor, ultralight hiker, canoeist/sea kayaker and latterly a solo sailor of small boats there’s always been something that iv’e been mentally and physically engaged with. As it happens I started my life in offshore yacht racing just before the Fastnet race disaster of 1979 and along the way I witnessed the sinking of the RoRoRo ferry Herald of Free Enterprise, the Lyme bay kayaking tragedy and countless more fatal outdoor incidents. These things among many more added to my own outdoor practice eventually led me into thinking about and then teaching about risk and human error : where that eventually took me was becoming the risks and safety guy for the small team of specialist nurses that I worked for at the end of my clinical career.

Where I finished with that whole rigmarole was a greater appreciation for evidence – what has gone wrong and how did it happen. What I did was to spend hours and hours trawling through every new clinical incident report, about 120 new ones every month, and seeing what we could learn from them, especially where our team was involved. What I came away with when I retired from the whole shitshow was to always start with what the actual evidence is and where that took me immediately was the then yearly RNLI launch reports : I didn’t know then, although it is obvious, that the highest number of lifeboat shouts was for machinery (engine) failure.

Small craft…..objective and subjective risks……right here – right now.

The last time I had to think about this set of actual or potential problems was when I was preparing the previous boat, WABI”‘ for it’s cross channel adventure followed by 110 days cruising and living aboard in Brittany. Then, I was well used to to the boat, it was as well set up as I could make her at the time and I was still a tough, fit and experienced sailor. Today nearly everything is different in that my new boat is barely finished, I don’t know yet what our adventures might be and the main thing is that I am no longer strong and/or fit and, post stroke, it’s the me factor that arrives with lots of problems to deal with at sea.

Back then I had the simple objective problem of making a quite long offshore passage in a boat that really wasn’t intended for offshore sailing in that it had neither the sailpower or the stability had conditions turned against me : as was all that happened is that I got my bum well and truly kicked, was extremely sick and got very cold and tired. I don’t think I would repeat that passage today although i’m setting the boat up right now to be capable of something similar……today of course I would tow the boat down to Millbay dock and let the excellent captain Dennis of Brittany Ferries do the work.

And so…..what’s the problem now ?

Well obviously it is that iv’e recently had a stroke and i’m just getting used to all of the post stroke effects : my balance is poor which affects my walking gait, sometimes recently iv’e felt globally weak, my manual dexterity is affected too,As far as I can tell I have a change in personality which I thought odd – i’m often a bit emotionally labile and can flare up irrationally and I think that my mental flexibility and problem solving is often poor.

My background as both a professional sailor and now a retired nurse prompts me to think about hazards and risks although, like many, I don’t like and don’t respect who immediately starts to guff off about health and safety issues : as soon as I hear someone talking in that kind of parish council language I immediately know that they don’t understand risk. A small example is that I once came up against that kind of idiot but one wearing the uniform of a modern nurse manager and just 3 questions from me exposed her as a bully and a fraud. I’m sorry to say that most nurse managers in the form of modern matrons talk risks and safety but what they are actually doing is looking for some way of absolving themselves of responsibility and/or finding some hapless junior to shift the blame onto ; in matronspeak it’s called root cause analysis.

However, the opposite side is what I recently heard outoorsman, film maker and overall eccentric Australian (Beau Miles) say about his time as outdoors guide and instructor, say about leading people on adventurous trips “always get the chickens home”. I had my own version of that as a professional sailor which was to get the guests home with the same number of fingers and toes that they arrived with. I did also have some experience with taking disabled people to sea and in so doing learning to work around those disabilities : today of course it’s me that comes with some degree of damage and disability and I have to both learn to deal with it and modify/adapt my own boat somewhat to make it work for me.

It is tempting to write an entire piece about translating risks and hazards into actual changes but it would be overly long and tedious to read. Just as a couple of examples right now I know that I have poor standing and walking balance coupled with an overall reduction in upper body strength – thus it would be all too easy to get thrown about in a seaway so on the actual boat in question i’m adding handholds around the cuddy and a fixed central boom gallows to get a hold of when I am standing in the cockpit.

Cuddy handholds and boom gallows mock-up.

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