TranspacBlogII-3
Command structure A. The hub.

In the Transpac Yacht race of two years ago, (see posted Blog Transpac 2005 on sidebar, if you will) when everybody had arrived in Honolulu, we all (the crew from a wide variety of competitors) sat around drinking and gossiping. What was it like on YOUR boat? What kind of skipper is so and so? He did WHAT? Are you joking? These conversations reminded me that very few boats have the command structure we have on the Psyche.

Command structure in ocean racers is not talked about much; yet it directly determines the nature of the ocean racing experience for all aboard. I raced once, back in 1973, with a Texan named Mean Andy Green. His boat's command structure was the polar opposite of Psyche's.

I was that summer's head sailing instructor at the Fort Worth Boat Club, and Andy was the father of two of my students, Lee and Leslie (or was it Nancy?). Both kids were natural athletes, and focused sailors. They learned fast, and sailed with a natural grace. I verily remember Lee sailing a high-performance 14 foot sloop (a 420 class). Normally, these are two-man boats (helmsman and crew). They have a "trapeze", a wire that goes to the top of the mast to give the crew the leverage to really "hike out". The crew places his/her feet on the side of the boat, and suspends his/her body out over the water on a harness attached to the trapeze. Here's a picture.



Now just imagine this sail boat, not with two adult sailors, hanging on for dear life, but instead, one snotty-nosed 11-year old, not more than 70 pounds, sailing with both sails up, going like a bat out of hell. Now just one more detail. Unlike the helmsman in the above photo, who is sitting on the weather rail, Lee was hooked up to the trapeze with his feet on the gunnel, just like the guy up there in the front. He had one hand on the tiller extension, and the other hand on both the sails (the jib forward and the main aft). The boat was so light that it just screamed along; Lee had know idea that what he was doing was incredible, he was just messing about in boats.

So you can see by this vignette, that young Lee Green was fearless. I watched him catch turtles and snakes in Eagle Mountain Lake without a second thought. But when the topic came around to his dad ('can't crew with you in the twilight race tonight, Dad wants me home'; 'can't come to sailing school tomorrow, Dad grounded me.'), he was sore afraid.

Mean Andy Green's reputation for being mean extended well beyond his nuclear family. Every Texan that knew Andy Green knew that he was mean. And in Texas, mean means mean. Wives shoot their cheating husbands in Texas. With guns. Dead. All the time. To a Texan, that's not mean, it's normal. My take on Texas is that it has some of the biggest hearted, wonderful, souls on this planet; AND the biggest assholes. Suffice to say when a Texan says somebody is mean, you'd best pay attention. Well, I didn't know Mean Andy Green, except by his reputation. But one day he up and asked me, through his two kids, to crew on his ocean racer in a race from Galveston to Corpus Christy, the two main ports on the Texas Gulf coast. I gulped and said "sure."

Andy was a Southern boy; I don't know if he is still alive. He sailed with Ted Turner as a youth. He was pretty outrageous. Prone to Texas pranks and slander, and just, well crazy. He was THE CAPTAIN. He demanded full obedience from his crew, and really, really hounded them to do things right. Well, I had not raced many overnight races at that time (1971), and hadn't really done much ocean racing at all. But I knew how to make a sailboat go fast (dinghies and small keel boats), and knew a lot about round-the-buoys strategy, and a ton about how to teach snotty-nosed kids how to sail fast. So aboard I went. How bad could it be?

I soon found out. This guy was intense. Really intense. He hazed and hounded and yelled and berated and carried on like a maniac. I had butterflies in my belly the whole time. But he also told stories and joked and laughed and made everyone else laugh when they weren't cringing. In short, he was the CENTER of attention. All information originated with him. Everyone else was so nervous about screwing up their job that they turned off all other channels, save the one going to THE CAPTAIN.

Well, there was a pretty sizeable fleet, maybe 15-20 boats in each of three different classes. We got a good start, and were sailing fast, maybe third in our class. The race course itself is a boring reach for the most part, but round about midnight, the wind had backed a bit (now coming from just a little behind the beam, meaning the ballooning spinnaker (first picture below) is better than the more wing-like jib (second figure below) and we were set to raise the spinnaker. Andy told me to take the sail up to the bow and hook up the halyard and sheets. These are ropes (called lines); the halyard pulls the sail up (you pull down on the halyard which runs through a block at the top of the mast and back down to where you have tried to attach it to the head of the spinnaker; pulling down on the halyard pulls the sail up), the sheets pull the sail back. Assigning me to attach these lines was a mistake on Andy's part. I knew it when he told me to do it, but of course, I didn't say anything. Until you've sailed on a particular boat or type of boat a good many times, you are really missing important ingredients, like the details of the fasteners used on working lines; essential details for properly fastening a halyard to a spinnaker.






"Ok, now hoist the spinnaker!" Someone hauled hard on the halyard. Up the halyard went like a rocket.
But without the spinnaker attached.
Shit, that's my fault. I'm sorry, Andy.

Oh, but that is not what Mean Andy Green needed. He needed that halyard to be not up the mast, but right here on the deck, attached to the spinnaker head.
"Don't you have another spinnaker halyard," asked I?
"NO!"
I can still recall how sick I felt, how utterly dismayed I was.


In those days, I was pretty strong and agile. Lots of pole vaulting, wrestling, surfing, all meant that I could climb. So I decided I would fucking shinny up the mast, and get the goddamn halyard.



Now this was not a good decision, but Mean Andy Green did not say no, so up I shinnied. The mast was REALLY smooth; there were absolutely no hand-holds. Getting to the first spreader was really difficult (see photo above), but shinnying up the second section of mast was even more slippery, and the boat's action over the seas was magnified, and I had to actually catch the loose halyard as it swung back and forth half-way up the mast. Understand that this was "free climbing" at its very worse. I could easily have lost hold and fallen a good many feet to the deck. Ooof, or likely worse.

But I actually did it. I caught that damn halyard and brought it back to the deck. We attached it to the spinnaker, hoisted it, and I dunno, I guess we got second or something. But I was very, very rattled by the whole experience.

This long diatribe is meant to illustrate to you the polar opposite of the command structure on the Psyche, the boat we are racing to Honolulu in 20 something days. The Psyche has no Mean Andy Green on board. Many among you might shudder at the thought of such a "leadership vacuum". Many of us have an ingrained assumption that a clear hierarchical command structure is the most efficient way to run a ship. Of course the situation 35 years ago in Texas didn't really represent a hierarchical structure. Information simply flowed from the hub, Mean Andy Green, to all of us on the rim of the experience, and at the rim of our own sanity. We on the rim were not trying to make the boat go fast. Andy in the hub was. Our job was not to pay attention to how to make the boat go faster; rather it was to minimize our losses in our dealings with Andy. This command structure is the one that most ocean racers adhere to, perhaps in less extreme form.

It is not the command structure of Psyche. On Psyche, information exchange is chaotic, completely unstructured, spontaneous. More on this in the next blog.