[Public-List] Keeping a good lookout

[Mike Meinhold]

I know how hard it is to spot and be spotted on the water.  I was board
sailing on the Chesapeake in March on a brilliant sunlit afternoon when I
had a rig failure I could not repair. I was at the mouth of the Magothy
River with a strong tidal current aligned with a 15 knot breeze, carrying
me out and down the Chesapeake at a good 2 knots. I jettisoned my rig so I
could paddle in , but had so little progress I decided to try for help.   I
was in a wetsuit, in a bright yellow life jacket and had a bright yellow
harness.

In spotted a powerboat looking to make a 1/10th mile CPA. I stood on the
board, waving my harness and watched him roll by. This happened 3 times, as
the sun got lower and I contemplated whether I could survive the night, and
tried to estimate when I might be able to paddle and where.

Finally I saw a sailboat coming right at me. They picked me up and I saw my
rig on their foredeck!  They had run over it 40 minutes before, and had
been searching for me. They said they would not have seen me otherwise.

It drove home how difficult it is to see someone on or near the water.

Mike
Rinn Duin 272


On Sat, Mar 14, 2026 at 10:59 Gordon Laco via Public-List <
public-list at lists.alberg30.org> wrote:

> Here’s another story…
>
> We sail with friends and much enjoy their company as well as the adventure
> of the passages we make up the coast here on Georgian Bay.  The male half
> of the couple is a friend I’ve had since first year university… he and I
> met when we lived across the hall from each other in Sydenham Hall student
> residence at the University of Western Ontario a long time ago.   When
> we’re together with our wives we try to not talk about old girlfriends…
>
> He crewed for me in my boats over the decades, and a few years ago bought
> his own boat.   He wanted something bigger than an Alberg 30, so settled on
> an Invader 36; an early C&C design from the days when Cuthbertson (naval
> architect) and Cassian (aeronautical engineer) were a design office and not
> a builder yet.  The Invader was the last full keeled design from C&C
> produced.  In many ways it’s a bigger Alberg 30, which I have to say
> pleased me because it embodies all the positive prejudices I am burdened
> with in my taste in boats… evidence that I molded my friend to be burdened
> with them as well.    Why did C&C call this line of yachts Invader?
>  Because it was intended to sweep the silver racing in Lake Ontario… the
> year it came out our American cousins were getting a little uppity with a
> successful season.  It worked.
>
> Back to the story.
>
> My friend and his wife have one strange characteristic in how they sail
> their boat.  They both only look straight ahead when they’re sailing.  Many
> times we’ve come up to them and they’ve not seen us till we’re right
> alongside.  The never look around.  Not great seamanship, says I.   So
> here’s a story about keeping a good lookout.
>
> Years ago when I still had Touch Wood, my wooden Folkboat, my old friend
> and I were sailing across Lake Ontario from Toronto to Niagara-on-the-Lake
> on what we used to call a pillaging expedition.   A more direct term would
> be ‘a pub crawl over in Niagara’.   We were merrily reaching across the
> Lake… we’d sunk the land behind us but for the taller of Toronto’s downtown
> skyscrapers, and the Niagara Escarpment was just beginning to show as a
> blue line ahead of us.  Out of old habit, I was keeping a look around all
> the time… 360 degrees.  One may encounter a ship that’ll need tracking to
> avoid interception/collision… or more importantly, one may see another
> yacht which will need defeating (two yachts in sight of each other will
> always be racing).
>
> We spotted a strangely shaped speck to windward.   As we trudged along
> doing something like 5.5 or 6kts and got nearer, the speck was revealed in
> binoculars to be two specks, close together.   We were a long way out for a
> small boat so we tightened our sheets and close reached up to get a better
> look.  The two specks turned out to be two young women in bikinis, each in
> a truck inner tube, adrift.   Wahoo… a rescue.
>
> We hove to to windward of them… I adjusted our leeward slide to set us up
> to come alongside them as nearly stopped as heaving to could manage.   My
> friend got one of them aboard up at the shrouds… the other bumped along in
> her inner tube and came adjacent me in the cockpit.   The wind was strong
> enough to hold us rail nearly in the water hove to… and the wave action was
> making things difficult.  She got one leg up on the rail and an arm around
> a sheet winch… I was holding the tiller hard down with my bum while
> grappling with the arm on  the winch… she was slippery and very cold… I
> made to grab her around her thigh and hesitated… I was bashful about
> contact there… she saw this and hissed ‘please just grab me’.    I flipped
> her in and into the cockpit.
>
> We put sleeping bags on them and once  they started shivering (yes, their
> hypothermia had progressed beyond shivering) we heard their story.  They’d
> started out up at Queenston on the Niagara River with a bunch of people
> having a party on the river.  Everyone was in inner tubes holding a rope
> while they drifted down the river holding a long rope.   There were a
> couple of canoes supposedly as safety… and interspersed also in inner tubes
> were bar tenders with beer coolers in their laps.
>
> It was all great fun until several hours later the flotilla got to the
> mouth of the Niagara River.  The current there met the opposing wind and
> waves of open water and the sand bar …  a fair maelstrom.  The party broke
> up in confusion in the steep waves… many people were rescued but our two
> mermaids were missed and they were on their way out into the void and
> likely death.
>
> As they told us what had happened to them, we tacked the genoa and got
> Touch Wood galloping again southward for Niagara.   Both girls had never
> been in a sailing yacht before… one of them said to me ‘Wow, this is fast!
> I didn’t know sailboats were so fast!’   I laughed and told her ’that is
> EXACTLY the right thing to say when you come aboard someone’s boat!’
>
> Some time later, we spotted another speck… this time a bit to leeward.  We
> eased sheets and went down to investigate… this time it was a guy.  He was
> also in a bathing suit, but on his head was a Gilligan’s Island skipper’s
> hat… sun glasses and unlit pipe in his mouth… red beard and a cooler of
> beer in his lap.  He’d lost most of the beers (they were awash but afloat
> around him)  He was one of the bar tenders and had also been missed when
> the party got onto the race at the mouth of the river.   We picked him up
> too.   Later I learned he was a boyhood friend of my future wife… her
> family were in Queenston way back.
>
> Those three people would likely have died of hypothermia.  We found them
> just before sunset and they’d been in the water for many hours.  They told
> us they’d seen searchers miss them… as well as two other sailing yachts
> which went by, one fairly close.   When I tell this story I embellish by
> commenting that we were getting lonely sailing across… and picked up a
> couple of mermaids… we were getting thirsty, so we picked up a mer-man to
> be our bar tender.   Ya that’s funny, but those three people might have
> died.  All of them were in distress when we came upon them… from their
> point of view at the waterline no land had been in sight for hours…     We
> zig zagged the rest of the way across looking for other people adrift but
> saw none, and learned later that once we got our rescues ashore, all were
> accounted for.
>
> My friend well knows that story… but he just never looks around when he’s
> sailing.   He only looks straight ahead as if driving on a highway.   I’ve
> told him that some day I’m going to come up on him and the first knowledge
> he has of me will be a water balloon on the back… he laughs because we used
> to have water fights with friends… but he never looks around.
>
> Gord
>
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