Highlights from A Voyage For Madmen by Peter Nichols
Highlights from this book
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This business of making myself thoroughly unpleasant to the body which God gave me is something that has fascinated me for almost as long as I can remember
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He found that she could run and reach off the wind – as Slocum’s Spray had been able to do – for long periods under reduced and balanced canvas, long enough for him to get sufficient sleep before she gybed and threw him out of his bunk below. The boat had always possessed these abilities, but it had required necessity and the abandonment of other methods to discover them. This is what sailors have always done as long as they have gone to sea in boats, and it is only the recent invention of efficient self-steering systems that has brought about the widespread atrophy of this skill in modern sailors.
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He ate well. Skinny all his life, with a tendency to lose weight, he began to gain, always for him a sign of a sympathetic environment. His unceasing close communion with the three constant physical elements of his world – his boat, the sea, and the weather around him – filled him with joy. And to complete the picture of happy asceticism, his hair and beard had grown long and matted until he resembled a sailing holy man.
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Harnesses have unquestionably saved people from going overboard, but they have also failed, come undone, broken, chafed through, and sent people to their deaths. An overreliance on them breeds an atrophy of the best of all devices to keep a sailor aboard: a fully developed horror of going overboard.
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The photographs sailors take of the great waves that impress them so at the height of a storm, are always later disappointing in their inability to convey what such a scene ‘felt like’. Ironically, the impossible and wholly unrealistic computer-generated waves and conditions depicted in a film like The Perfect Storm do in fact provide very accurate impressions of what it looks like far out at sea in a terrible storm. It is their excessive exaggeration that mirrors the subjective impression of the human observer. Yet the movie feels safe. It comes without the horrifying realisation that this is real, there’s no way out, nothing in all the world will save you now but luck
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I wrote about it here https://blog.felixzieger.de/a-voyage-for-mad-men/