Safety of Life at Sea – SOLAS – Death of a friend

Port Townsend, WA, 23-DEC-2022 – A phrase from years ago, which was repeated to me with annoying frequency, was that sailing was safer than driving a car. I’d never really given it any thought.

Back home, in Mount Sinai Harbor, every year or two a drunk would fall into the water at the Mount Sinai Yacht Club and drown. But as Jennifer and my sailing years progressed, we came into direct and indirect contact with people who died on the water.

About 36,000 people die in the US each year in car accidents. It is roughly 12 deaths per hundred thousand population*.

In the last nine years, since we’ve been sailing Caro Babbo, I haven’t known a single person who’s died in a car accident. I’ve personally known two who have died in boating accidents and had one degree of separation from three more.

I’d like to tell you about all five, in varying degrees of detail. I won’t do, and haven’t done any research on any of the five. I will write what I know from dealing with the person in the situation directly, or the story told to me.

Des, my Zingaro Saloon friend died a few weeks ago. Des and I had never met. The Zingaro YouTube saloon is a WhatsApp group. Once a week there is a Zoom call that I attend when I can. In the three years or so I’ve been attending, Des’s life progressed. He was an out-of-work commercial pilot looking for work, which he never found.

On calls, he was very funny: quick with word plays.

Des and I spoke a few times one-on-one. He told me I was obnoxious on calls, but that was why he liked me. No one had ever told me I was obnoxious, but I had wondered if I was.

There was another group, where people spoke, that I was not a party to. Word drifted back to me that Des was very lonely. He might have found someone, but, when he took her sailing on the boat in Scotland where he lived, the weather had been terrible and the woman had bailed.

Des was a Londoner who was living in Scotland where he had a house. During the time that I knew him, he sold the house and moved aboard his boat, Jay Jay. He coated the bottom with copper powder mixed into epoxy resin. There is a commercial version of this called Coppercoat. When I had done this to Caro Babbo, I used the commercial preparation because I thought there was too much at stake. Des bought copper powder and epoxy resin, mixed it up himself, and applied it himself.

Somewhere, either in the saloon or in the last conversation he and I had, I learned that he was a Mirror dinghy sailor. A Mirror dinghy is a 10-foot sailing pram that is generally home built from plywood. The name comes from the Mirror newspaper in the UK. My father built a succession of them and I towed one all over Long Island Sound and up into New England behind a 26-foot Thunderbird sloop.

I bought Des a book about a Mirror dinghy called Jack de Crow. I thought it was a very good, very funny book. Des never mentioned the book. I presume it was not to his taste.

I learned after Des’s death that to combat his loneliness from living aboard his boat someone suggested that he take his guitar into any local pub and play. It is the surest way to meet people, and ironically his undoing.

On saloon calls when Des was being funny, thoughtful, and asking questions, invariably there would be a glass of red wine in his hand. I’m not sure I ever saw him drink any of the wine, but then the video on the screen highlights people who are speaking, not those who are silent at the moment.

On our last call, Des was adamant that the major car companies would all collapse: GM, Chrysler, Ford, Volkswagen, and the others. Electric cars are the future and none of these companies would be able to make the transition. Des had bet money on Tesla and was, he told me, able to live without working based solely on that single investment. I disagreed that the major car companies would inevitably go by the wayside. His emotional investment in their failure was much stronger than my investment in their success and we let the conversation drift away.

The last interaction we had was me trying to buy him that Kindle book; he lives in the UK. The book, incidentally, was cheaper on UK Kindle than on the US Kindle. Eventually, I sent him the money via PayPal and he bought it for himself.

Like all announcements of someone’s death, it comes in a message with no warning. It comes in a message that is expected to be mundane and routine like all the messages that come from the source of, now, ill tidings.

Clive, another saloon member, sent me some text via WhatsApp. I didn’t reply to the WhatsApp message. Instead, I called Clive directly. Clive was circumspect about the reason that Des had drowned. With a little probing Clive told me that according to the harbormaster’s viewing of surveillance camera footage, Des had taken 20 minutes to climb into his dinghy. I said something like, ‘‘so he had been drinking,’’ or, ‘‘so he was drunk.’’ The first phrase is a polite wording of the fact contained explicitly in the second phrase. Clive answered in the affirmative, then told me that it was an unusual set of weather circumstances that brought his body to shore rather than carrying it out to sea.

‘‘His body.’’ It’s interesting wording. His body was a possession of Des’s. It is not Des.†

It’s difficult to envision his lifeless form floating in the 40s Fahrenheit water, color gone, wrinkled.

I know that Des had trouble with his family growing up. He admired his father and talked about him to me, but I got the impression from other people that they may not have been in touch.

Des’s plan had been to take the boat down to the Mediterranean and spend time there before heading off to I’m not sure where.

I don’t know how tall Des was. This height is an interesting matter. Voices tell little. His voice was lighter than mine. I don’t know what voice he sang in. I was surprised when I met the owner of the Zingaro saloon, James. He’s only my height, 5 foot 10. I envisioned him taller. Graeme in the saloon mentioned he was 5 foot 2. Another saloon member, Phil, when I met him, turned out to be 6 foot 5. Jennifer asks why does this matter, how tall anyone is? Because, if I were to meet them, how would we stand, how would we look at each other? What would his handshake be like? All the things that one wonders in anticipation of meeting someone are lost now that I will never meet Des.

I don’t know why that should matter to me. It isn’t the measure of someone, though in fact, literally, it is.

Like the expected mundane message I thought I was going to receive from Clive, death is so often so mundane. Des, who we all rooted for, through whom we all expected to vicariously live in this completely new chapter of his life, instead ends up as a drunk who fell into the water and drowned.

I don’t believe in God and never have. I don’t believe there is a hereafter. I do believe that dying is the same as falling into a deep dreamless sleep.

While I know there’s cause-and-effect: Des drank too much, it clouded his reasoning and diminished his ability to perform motor tasks. But there is such randomness in life and the leaving of it.

It’s customary at the end of a piece like this to address directly the person whose life has ended, wishing them well. They’re gone, and as my mother would tell me, a funeral is not for the dead, it’s for the living; what words would I say to someone who is gone and will never hear them?

The words that come to mind are an expression of disappointment, moderate anger, and to wonder and ask how it could end like this?

I’d intended to tell the story of the other men, they were all men, who lost their lives in water, but this is enough death for one post.

I’ll write their stories as I knew them in successive posts in the next week, but unless I hear a clamoring that you’d like to read them successively, stories of ends at the end of the year, I’ll interleave them over the next year’s writing: too much death.

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*In 2020 and 2021 traffic deaths in the US took a cumulative jump of 18%. In 2015 and 2016 the deaths took a cumulative jump of 12%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year

† That Des’s body is not Des is cultural – it is the view of the culture I live in. In another story about a young man from Hydaburg that I will write, they were hunting for ‘‘him’’ even though he was dead. The loss, for the days we were there, knocked the workings of the community out of alignment. Is it related to there being a separation between the physical person and the person (the body and the soul)?