When Sailing Is Deadly

A HIGHLIGHT of the New England yachting calendar is an immensely popular sailboat race called the Figawi. Ted Kennedy used to love to participate. The race, which began in 1972, takes place over Memorial Day weekend and typically attracts more than 200 boats, which sail from Hyannis Port to Nantucket, roughly 30 miles across Nantucket Sound.

As sailboat races go, the Figawi is not particularly long or arduous: the fastest boats complete the course in just a couple of hours. But there are squalls sometimes, and you never know when the fog will blow in on the southwest breeze. It’s not impossible to go aground off Nantucket. The race gets its name, according to legend, from a couple of hapless sailors who once missed the island entirely and called out to a passing fisherman asking where on earth they were — or words to that effect.

Presumably this was before Loran and GPS became standard equipment on sailboats of any size, and the Figawi, in any case, is a race undertaken mostly for fun. But mistakes still happen in sailing, especially during longer, more serious races. At the end of last month, a 37-foot sailboat racing from Newport Beach, Calif., to Ensenada, Mexico, apparently slammed into one of the Coronado Islands, off the coast of San Diego, and broke up. All four crew members died. Just two weeks before that, in a race in Northern California, a 38-footer, racing from San Francisco to the Farallon Islands and back, got too close to the Farallons — spiky, lunar-looking outcroppings about 28 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge — and was hurled up onto the rocks. Three crew members were rescued by helicopter, but five more were lost.

Going back a little further, to last summer, a 35-footer capsized during a race on Lake Michigan, killing two members of its crew. And in August during the Fastnet Race, one of the longest and hardest of the ocean competitions, requiring participants to sail down the English Channel and up the Irish Sea to round the rock at Fastnet, off the coast of Ireland, a maxi-yacht, the 100-foot Rambler, capsized after its keel broke off. Fortunately, all 21 members of the crew were rescued.

Even so, landlubbers might be forgiven for wondering if sailboat racing, seemingly such a genteel and boring pastime, hasn’t turned into a rich man’s version of Indy car racing, with Thurston Howell IV and his ilk recklessly driving their S.S. Minnow replacements — high-tech racing yachts with sails of space-age fabrics so expensive they may as well be woven from shredded dollar bills — in such a way as to cause death and mayhem. Should such people, who enjoy a sport that to spectators looks about as interesting as watching paint dry, even be allowed on the high seas?

It’s true that ocean racing is a rich man’s sport, or at least not a poor man’s. Some of the bigger boats even have paid crews and captains. But rich or not, ocean racers are people who don’t mind hardship, and who find that, far from being boring, time at sea passes with remarkable swiftness. By and large they also know what they’re doing, and statistically, the sport is pretty safe. You’re probably better off — though not drier — in an ocean race than you are on the highway.

Probably the scariest ocean race ever was the 1979 Fastnet, which proved to be a catastrophe. Of 303 boats entered, only 85 finished. Twenty-four yachts were abandoned, and five of those sank (one while under tow). A hundred and thirty-six sailors were rescued but 15 died — or 19 if you count the crew of a trimaran that was not officially racing.

The main factor, as is so often the case, was the weather, this time a freakish storm that roared across the North Atlantic, catching most forecasters by surprise. But an official inquiry later determined that some of the yachts, the smaller ones especially, were insufficiently seaworthy and that many lacked or failed to use the proper safety equipment, especially the kind of nautical safety belt that enables a sailor to clip on to the boat and keep from being washed away.

That race was a “big wake-up call,” according to John Rousmaniere, the author of “Fastnet, Force 10,” the definitive account of the race (in which he also was a participant), and standards have since improved dramatically. “I don’t think anyone knew what a safety harness was back then,” he said. He added, “The boats are better now, and so is the gear.”

SO why the recent rash of disasters? “I don’t see any pattern to these accidents,” Mr. Rousmaniere said. “People push hard, and sometimes things happen quickly.” He added that boats today are safer than they were in 1979, better able to right themselves after a knockdown, but they’re also lighter and faster and can get in trouble more quickly. “They’re like sports cars,” he said. “Ferraris.”

And sometimes, he went on, there’s a crisis management problem in which no one takes charge, or the chain of command isn’t clear. (I used to crew on a boat that had two owners, who liked to make decisions by consensus. We never raced, thank goodness, because sometimes it would take half the morning to decide which way to turn after leaving the harbor.)

The official inquiry into the Fastnet disaster led to a report by the Royal Yachting Association and the Royal Ocean Racing Club that ended with these words: “The sea showed that it can be a deadly enemy and that those who go to sea for pleasure must do so in full knowledge that they may encounter dangers of the highest order.” In all sailing there is a certain element of risk, in other words, and in racing, when people are reluctant to shorten sail and sometimes voyage at night or in weather that might otherwise cause them to stay home, the risk is often enhanced. Most racers like it that way.

As anyone who has ever been on a sailboat knows, the way to be comfortable is to go slow. Racing, and ocean racing especially, can be cold, wet and stomach-churning. It’s one of those activities — like mountain climbing or sky diving — that some people engage in because it makes their lives at the moment seem more precious, and it feels even better when it’s over.