pat loughery

I am an armchair sailor. By that I mean that I love to read sailing adventure stories, and dream of one day circumnavigating the globe. I realize that it’s only a dream, though; Shannon suffers from seasickness in too many attempts at oceangoing for us to pursue that dream.

But I still get to read, and to wonder.

Right now I’m reading the first book by Bernard Moitessier, a renowned ocean sailer who was born in French Indochina in 1925, left Indochina in 1952 aboard a rickety vessell, shipwrecked in the Chagos between Africa and India, built a replacement sailing ship by hand without plans, then continued to explore the world by sea. He’s an amazing picture of resourcefulness – he designed the sails for his boat by imagination and guesswork; he created a simple underwater breathing apparatus that allowed him to caulk holes in the undersides of boats; he made his own rope and he pioneered some heavy weather sailing techniques.

He’s a wonderful picture of the resourcefulness and ingenuity of men and women who lived in the last century. It seems to me today that we are more specialized than our forebears, and by virtue of the power of information sharing, we get to stand on the backs of those who have gone before us, but we’re forced far less often to make do with our own minds and what’s available at hand. At least that’s true for me. And I think that’s a good thing for us, but sometimes I wonder how I would have survived living a hundred years ago.