What Kind of Error Would You Rather Make?

Yep.  It's another anchoring post.  My last one is here.

The plan was to get a few boat friends together, pick up a Navy mooring in Weems Creek, raft together, then go out to Mexican Café on Saturday night to celebrate an early Cinco de Mayo.  If we had one too many margaritas, we only needed to walk/row back to the boats to sleep instead of driving home.  The weather report was encouraging, for warmth and some sunshine after a chilly spring that has seemed to go on forever.  We arrived at the planned meeting point at Weems Creek after a brief pleasant Friday afternoon sail to find … disappointment.  No moorings were available; they were occupied by a number of dilapidated, neglected or abandoned boats – one covered with a threadbare tarp, one without a mast, one trailing a deflated waterlogged dinghy. There was still some prime anchoring real estate available, so we set the hook and let out plenty of chain, and got our heads into weekend mode.

We spent a pleasant day chatting with other boats in the anchorage, old acquaintances who had returned to the Chesapeake for the summer.  We met some new folks who, drawn by our hailing port of Northport, Michigan, came over and introduced themselves as fellow Michiganders new to the Chesapeake.  And then our gang showed up, some by boat, and others came to the restaurant by land.  Much laughter ensued; later there were even fireworks we could watch from the cockpit.  The derelict boats spoiling the mood were reduced to a minor annoyance, grit under my fingernails or pebble in my shoe, but the irritation never completely went away.  As the boats themselves will never go away, which is of course the issue with abandoned boats – they cost tax dollars to remove.

There was a recent situation elsewhere in A.A. County that was diametrically opposite: a police launch came along side an anchored boat and very politely said that one of the shore residents had suggested perhaps that boat had stayed long enough and should be moving on.  The heavy irony here is that the boat in question was an extremely beautiful and well-maintained one; the owners, Evans Starzinger and Beth Leonard, long-distance sailors well-known in the cruising community, were aboard; and there was no chance of mistaking this for a dilapidated boat about to be abandoned.   (For Evans’ take on the incident, go to their blog  and scroll back to the post from 4/16/2013; another blogger's reaction to his post is here) In addition, there are no regulations prohibiting anchoring in the Chesapeake as long as the boat is properly lit and not blocking a channel or access, so I'm not sure which I find more disturbing, that a shore resident thought he/she had a right to control who anchored nearby, or that the local law enforcement did nothing to disabuse him/her of that notion.

The inconsistent, in fact contradictory way local authorities react to anchored boats in the county is confusing, or worse.   In one case, boats are allowed to sit unattended for long periods; in the other, a properly-anchored and attended boat was asked to move.

In statistics they call them Type 1 and Type 2 errors.  The technical definitions include lots of confusing phrases like “failing to reject the null hypothesis,” but it’s simpler to think of them as “false positives” or over-reacting, and “false negatives” or under-reacting.  See, in the real world, no matter how you make the decision rules, it is likely that there will be a few extremes or special cases that aren’t properly covered.  The trick is to define the rules in a way that minimizes harm from these errors.  In some cases it is very clear to see which type of error is the more dangerous.  If the rule, for example, is about a new cancer screening, then a false positive means some people will get unnecessary followup tests even though they don’t have cancer.  But a false negative means some early cancers will be missed until it is too late, and people could die.  So you skew your test to have very few false negatives, even if that means you might have more false positives – you over-react.  The Coast Guard does the same thing with “mayday” calls – they’d rather go out on a false alarm or multiple false alarms, than miss someone in danger that they could have helped.  In other cases, false positives are clearly the more dangerous error: for all its faults, our judicial system is skewed to minimize the chances of an innocent person being found guilty, even if that means that some guilty may go free.

There are other cases when it is not clear whether type 1 or type 2 errors are worse.  My favorite example of this is the rules for eligibility for public assistance.  No matter how we write the rules, some people just won’t fit in those boxes and their circumstances won’t be covered properly.  If we write the rules too broadly, there is a chance that some freeloaders will game the system.  But if we write the rules too strictly, there is a chance that some folks who really deserve help will fall through the cracks.  There’s no obvious right or wrong answer, but which type of error we are more tolerant of says a great deal about our values as a society.

Perhaps the case of abandoned boats in Weems Creek is a “Type 2” error, and the seaworthy boat asked to move along is “Type 1” error?  In writing public policy, it is hard to find a perfect balance.   Write the anchoring rules too lax, and you get derelict boats that we all (somehow) have to deal with.  Write the rules too stringently, and no one ever anchors out and learns to appreciate the natural beauty of the Chesapeake.  Right now, we’re making both types of errors; do we have the worst of both? Which error are we more concerned about? What do we value?
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A slightly different version of this post was first published in the Annapolis Capital-Gazette on May 11, 2013:

Call Me? Maybe???

 We've known for a while that "something" was a little bit off about our boat's electrical system.  I really am obsessed with monitoring our power consumption and recharge from our beloved solar panels, and I had noticed that one bank of batteries wasn't quite recharging all the way, maybe they were just a few percent low, but something was still NQR (Not Quite Right).

I'm so glad we hadn't known how close we were to potential disaster! (Photo from here)

That's when we learned how hard it was to schedule marine electricians.  We left a message with one, who never called us back.  The second one, we were able to get on his calendar in a few weeks to come and diagnose the problem.   He was very informative about many issues and new ideas and standards that had come into existence in the 33 years since our boat was built to then-code.  No specific answers to our mystery lack of charge, but he pointed out some things that definitely needed attention.  We paid him for his time, but when we tried to schedule the actual work, multiple phone messages and emails were met with ... silence.  So, disappointed that we would now have to pay someone else to familiarize himself with our systems before getting actual work done, we phoned a third electrician.  Who didn't call us back ...

Back when we had our kitchen design/remodel business, we had at one time a 6-month waiting list for new projects.  We had told one potential client this, and offered some other names that could get to her work sooner, and she said, "No, that's okay, I'll wait.  I heard you return phone calls."  That's it? I asked myself.  Not that we're creative, not that we have good attention to detail, not that our work is on budget and on time, but that we return phone calls?  That just didn't seem to me to be a prize-worthy achievement; it seemed more like the foundation stuff, the goes-without-saying stuff, that should be taken for granted.  But now that we were the clients instead of the providers, I learned how frustrating it was to be so dependent.  Meanwhile, I was looking suspiciously at our battery-selector switch, seriously, dangerously undersized by modern standards, more and more aware that something was going to have to be done sooner rather than later.

Just a look at our electric panel doesn't hint at the chaos behind,  but the hand-printed labels and multicolored breakers should be the first clue that this has evolved over time.  Four owners over 33 years had each added their personalization.

Aaaack!  This is what's inside!  The blue circle on the left side of the panel is the selector switch.  The wires leading up to it are the proper size, but the switch itself is small.  

 Enter Patrick and Rob from Marine Electric Systems.  We broke the project into two phases, partly due to the crowdedness of their work schedule, and partly due to the emptiness in our checkbook.  Phase 1 replaced the battery switch and rerouted the wiring.  The scariest thing they found wasn't the battery switch, though; it was that a few connections had vibrated over the years and were loose, as was one of the crimps on those big honking red battery cables.  I feel a lot better now!

After.  The negative wires (black, yellow, and gray) are grouped on  the back wall, and each  positive (red) is labeled.   The big heavy-duty wires that went to the battery switch have been re-routed to a new, larger switch right next to the batteries.  Shorter run of wire = a good thing.

Battery box "before."

Battery box "after." Big new fuses in the upper left corner, big new switch in upper right corner.

What Is Wrong With This Picture? (Dinghy Etiquette)

Annapolis is really welcoming to cruisers; there is dinghy access at the end of every public street that ends at the water.  It is legal to tie up your dinghy there, and leave it while you go ashore. Some of these public access points have floating docks, but at minimum there are ladders.  There are courtesies that have evolved among boaters, ways to cooperate so that everyone can share this resource.  Here's the end of one street in Eastport, plenty of room for dinghies and a couple of ladders to come up to street level.

One courtesy that boaters observe at a dock like this is that after they come ashore, they move their dinghy out of the way so others can get to the ladder; the dinghy on the right in the photo above did this.  Otherwise, they tie their dinghy on long painter (the line that goes from the bow of the boat to a cleat on shore).  This keeps your dinghy secure, but allows a latecomer to move your dinghy out of the way to access the ladder or dock so they can also come ashore.  Here's a bit of a closer view of the less-courteous boat on another day, looking back from the land side, do you see what's wrong now?

It's going to be tough for anyone else to get to the ladder, since this person has chained their dinghy so close as to take up all the available room.  

There's another dinghy-dock courtesy that says that wherever tides and water depths allow, you don't leave your outboard halfway up with the prop out of the water.  The theory here is that you could bounce on a wake or a wave, and your prop could come down and cut someone else's rubber tubes.  But that's not the problem in this case, the dinghy in question doesn't have an outboard, apparently they row.  Here's an even closer shot of the problem, do you see it now?

 I get that this person is concerned about security and dinghy theft.  At the same time, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  Great heavy chain here, two locks, secured at one end to the ladder mounted in concrete, and at the other end to ... ???

Coast Guard Safety Check

Passed first time! Pasting this year's sticker over last year's, at the base of the mast.

We do this every spring, the voluntary Coast Guard safety check.  Some of the things they look at seem more administrative than practical for a boat our size - checking our paperwork and current registration, of course, although the placards reminding us not to dump trash or oil at sea seem superfluous on a boat for two.  They checked our nav lights (all working properly, though they couldn't verify the anchor light at the top of the mast because it has a photosensor that turns it off in daylight hours), life jackets, air horn, emergency flares, fire extinguishers.   Every year we seem to learn at least one new fact from the visit, whether its because rules change, or because each examiner has a slightly different take on what's important.

It was easy and somewhat chit-chat; we know the drill and had all the paperwork ready.  It was also a bit of fun because the examiner herself was in training and being guided by another examiner, so we had the clear sense of knowing the basics as well as she did.  We learned about some new regulations being considered, and got an update on the latest developments in marine radio technology.

That's the thing about safety, though - you can never get complacent.  Coming back from a library presentation that evening, Dan went to check on the dinghy.  He stood up, pulling on its painter (the line tied to the bow of the dinghy, that we use to secure it to the dock), and just kept going, toppling over backward for an unscheduled sea-bath.



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Side note: There's a rumor among boaters that having one of these stickers makes you less of a target for safety inspections at sea, and at least once we proved it true.

The Coast Guard can also board boats underway at will for these random safety inspections, and there's a whole debate on the Fourth Amendment implications of that practice, which I will not get into; I respect the C.G. and the work they do a lot.  But scheduling an inspection at the dock is a lot easier than having them do it while you're underway.  We had one at-sea boarding, while we were underway in the Waccamaw River in South Carolina on a calm, sunny Saturday morning.  Pleasant, no big deal, we spent as much time chatting with the guys over their choice of careers as they spent examining the boat.

Alternatively, last spring we were in a line of boats, 4 little ducklings in a row following the marks up Currituck Sound headed to the North Carolina/Virginia border, as the Coast Guard hailed the boats one at a time to do inspections underway, perhaps also to give themselves some bad-weather boarding practice.  They hailed the first boat in line a big sportfisher, "Have you ever been boarded at sea for a safety inspection?" "Yes, here last year." And the C.G. said, "We'd like to do one again."  About 15 minutes later, they left that boat and hailed the next in line, an older sailboat.  "Have you ever been boarded at sea for a safety inspection."  "No."  They explained that they'd like to come aboard, and asked the boat to slow to idle.  Fifteen minutes later, they finished that one and left.  And I'm thinking, we're obviously next and the wind is stinky and we don't handle well in these conditions and what would they do if we asked them to wait until we got to the shelter of those trees about an hour ahead?  They hailed us, "Sailing vessel Cinderella, sailing vessel Cinderella, have you ever been boarded at sea for a safety inspection?" "Yes, a couple of years ago in South Carolina, and we had the dockside safety check a few weeks ago before we left Florida."  Silence.  Then, "Thank you for taking the time to do that, have a good trip."  Whew!  Then the fourth boat in line, "Have you ever been boarded at sea for a safety check?"  Four boats, three inspections, one not ... yes, I'll take that sticker ... and it's free!

The Coast Guard crew posed for me for this photo after they completed our inspection in South Carolina in 2010.

Boston

Image from here

They are referring to it as "senseless violence."
As if there could ever be any other kind of violence;
Have you ever heard of "logical violence?"

And several of my boating friends are saying
"See? This is why I want to sail away,
And live on some deserted tropical island
Away from all the madness."

Me?
I like to think I'd be one of the ones running in,
To try and help.

In Limbo (it's complicated)

image from here

About that sadly silent newspaper blog of mine ... it's in limbo.  I'm not writing for the Capital-Gazette at the moment; and I'm not not-writing for them either.  It's not because I don't want to, or have run out of things to say.  (Who, me?  HA!)  But. There have been a bunch of changes, some neutral and some negative.

The Cap-Gaz went to a new web format last year.  More modern, flexible, and interactive; except the blogs portion had some limitations.  I couldn't use links, for example, which meant if I wanted to comment on an article in the main paper, I had to give a long ugly url to let people read it.  And I could only include one photo per article, and that by a funky work-around devised by the online editor.  Most frustratingly, I couldn't preview items before they posted, and for the last few months, there have been no paragraphs in the finished post at all, even if they were there in the submissions.  Disheartening.

Then, the senior editor retired and the online editor who was directly responsible for my stuff left abruptly under very ugly circumstances.  Ugly as in, I-read-the-very-graphic-police-report ugly.  And it's not clear who my new point of contact is, and a few emails/voicemails to them have gone unanswered.  Maybe everyone who was even remotely associated with the old online editor was tarred with the same brush, maybe they're just busy with bigger fish to fry, maybe there are emails from them in my inbox buried in a mass of Facebook notifications and automatic sales pitches from my favorite bar, who knows?

It became one of those things that I never realized the value of, until it was (maybe) gone.  I'd been writing Life Afloat since 2008, and love (loved?) the opportunity to make a little contribution to the understanding of what living aboard a sailboat was really like, and the opportunity to articulate my own thoughts to myself.  And while I am never in it for the money, there were some pretty cool perks.  Most of all, the people I've met through writing, that I wouldn't have met any other way, really broadened my outlook and enriched my life in so many ways.  Hopefully, we'll get the kinks ironed out and I'll be back there, but until then, and always, writing right here!

Nightmares

Before retiring, I wondered how I'd define myself, when I could no longer define myself as "Senior Environmental Scientist" for the U.S. Government.  And all those people who said that after being retired for a while, instead of being bored, they wondered how they ever had time for work ... they were right.  I certainly don't seem to lack for things to do.

This month I'm scheduled to give 3 presentations I've never done before: 16th Century Navigation; Pirates in History (with Dan); and Blogging for Cruisers.  The research for all of them has been a lot of fun, and I have never had any fear of public speaking at all.  I do stress, however, about doing a good job and getting the details right and making the presentations both fun and informative.  So I knew I'd be plenty busy in April, and wondered why I'd voluntarily agreed to do anything that had a (*gasp*) deadline attached to it, even a somewhat fun one.

Two days before the first presentation, I dreamed that I was on stage, totally flustered as I tried to explain how the pirates in the 16th century accessed the internet with their laptops while at sea.  Yeah.  I don't remember my dreams often, but when I do, they are usually disjointed fragments.  No dream interpretation needed here - it's obvious that my subconscious was processing my huge to-do list!

Pirates playing with plundered modern technology - text messaging

PS: The navigation and pirates presentations were first given for a school coop in West Virginia and were well-received.  The school has a blog where they summarized our classes, and there are more photos along with some funny captions on their Facebook page.  The pirate presentation will be given again at the Eastport library on April 18, and the blogging one at the Cruiser's University in conjunction with the Annapolis Spring Sailboat show.  Sorry, but if you attend that one, I will not be telling you how the 16th century navigators accessed the internet!