Page 18 - The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice

intelligence and resourcefulness. We can still be the technological fixes tend to spawn technological
life of our boats, albeit at an intellectual remove. problems, which require more fixes, and so on.
Of course intelligence and resourcefulness are no Nor is resourcefulness always enough, even when
guarantee of success. I once heard of a highly intel- it’s coupled with intelligence. I once heard of a sailor
ligent individual, a structural engineer, who was the whose mast folded in half at the spreaders when the
skipper of a Great Lakes C-scow. Unlike some skip- backstay parted. The top half didn’t break completely
pers, he liked to handle both the tiller and the main- off, but hung above the deck, connected to the lower
sheet, instead of having another crewmember trim half by a thin strip of aluminum. It would have been
the main. But at 3:1, the sheet’s mechanical advan- suicide to climb up there and cut it away. Pulling it
tage wasn’t quite enough to work one-handed. But down from deck level didn’t seem any safer. So the
he was an engineer; it was easy for him to figure out skipper sent the crew below and got out the assault
that inverting the sheet tackle and adding a turning rifle he had on board (he was cruising off Ethiopia
block would give him a 4:1 mechanical advantage, and felt it prudent to borrow the gun from a friend).
disregarding the slight extra friction from the extra Reclining in the cockpit, he set the rifle on single shot
block. Just to be sure, he had his mate, who was also and proceeded to blow his mast away.
a highly intelligent engineer, check his figures. No And it worked.
problem, his mate said, confirming his skipper’s 33 Certainly the skipper gets points for resource-
percent increase in advantage. fulness—it takes a flexible mind to see a Kalosh-
They did the work—it took only a few min- nikov as a potential rigging tool. But this success
utes— and shortly thereafter started a race. On the masks a failure: The skipper had recently replaced
way to the first mark, the skipper was able to prove the jibstay after finding broken wires in it. He had
empirically what the calculations had predicted. No not replaced any other standing rigging—even
surprise: He was an engineer. But when they rounded though it was all the same age and had endured the
the mark and let the sheet out for a run, they sud- same relative loads—because nothing was break-
denly realized that when you increase a tackle’s ing yet. But prudence indicates that the failure of
advantage by 33 percent, you also have to make the the jibstay should be considered an indicator of the
line 33 percent longer to span the same distance. state of the rest of the gang.
They hadn’t. The Figure-Eight knot in the end of the That’s the trouble with resourcefulness. It
sheet fetched up in the turning block with the boom doesn’t address what might have been. That’s why
half out, and the scow went over so hard it sheared it can easily degenerate into innovative-Band-Aids-
the windvane off when the mast hit the water. as-a-way-of-life.
That’s the trouble with intelligence: It doesn’t Successful innovation, in rigging or anything
always see far enough into the future. That’s why else, starts with understanding that a given ques-

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