MARINE "CAPSIZES." How They Happen.

Free Lance, Volume VI, Issue 308, 26 May 1906, Page 6

MARINE "CAPSIZES." How They Happen.

THOSE who go down to the sea m ships and have their business m great waters are a hardy race. Sometimes they are even foolhardy. They try to make up for being foolhardy by being heroes when its too late. The man who carries a naked light m a dangerous coal mine, the gentleman who "tamps" dynamite with a steel bar, the too 1 familiar person who throws a lighted match in a keg of blasting powder, and all the other every-day folk who* take chances, aa'e no commoner than the skipper who wants to make a better passage than another skipper, and hang the consequences. • • • Sometimes you hear that a timber scow or a schooner or some other kind of a wind-jammer "turns turtle/ One boat knocking about the coasts of New Zealand, and wellknown m this port, has performed this interesting trick twice o<r thrice in three years. The average man puts it down to the elements, but the expert knows better. Everything thai can carry canvas is a pride to> her skipper. If a pockethandkerchief would give him half-a-knot a. day better sailing than the old hooker in his wake, well, he's going to set the handkerchief, that's all. « • • His boat is empty as far as cargo is concerned. Has dumped his timber in a Southern port, takes ballast aboard to come back with, and starts. The aid hooker behind is making, good weather. Evidently she is lighter than the greyhound scow he is in charge of. Why not throw the ballast overboard? Nobody will ever know. Over it goes. Everything in the shape of rags is set, and the greyhound scow sets a clinking pace. But you cannot handle an empty timber boat like a half-rater yacht, and squalls are sometimes too sudden for the best of skippers and the most expert of crews. • • • The boat that was coming up the coast "in ballast" capsizes. Perhaps the crew are drowned, perhaps the boat is lost, perhaps anything. The strong probabilities are that if the boat had not heaved her load of mud or metal overboard she wouldn't have "turned turtle." Who is to blame? You say the skipper, of course ' Well, perhaps he is, but there are owners who want scows and blunt-nosed craft with the speed of a tortoise to cut out a trip m "Shamrock" time, and this is probably the reason why skippers strain every nerve, set every stitch, and throw ballast overboard.

A scow or two here or there, on the foaming wave or down, with Davy Jones, do not matter perhaps, but men matter. Owners who know that boats, from barges to brigs, will race, ought to strictly prohibit skippers from getting rid of ballast when returning to port for cargoes. This seaman's dodge is commoner than isi supposed, and the authorities, no less than the* owners, should suppress it sternly. There is no doubt whatever that many of the capsizes set down to our notoriously freakish weather, have been caused solely by skippers racing without ballast. Familiarity breeds contempt, even contempt for life. It is time for someone to ask every skipper who comes to port with most of his empty timber boat above the water-line, what he has done with his ballast.