12/24/2003
”Give him the line!” Pete had yelled this to me at least five times.
I stood on deck holding the ever-important forward spring line, confused because the dockmaster I was eye to eye with was a clearly a her, not a him.
”Who!?” I shouted back for the fifth time.
”HIM!” He pointed to the woman by then taking the line.
We were in storm winds and driving rain. He was driving. I was on deck. We’d been married four days. Dixie Belle was a 40-foot bareboat out of Sarasota we’d chartered for a week.
That was 20,000 sea miles ago. What doesn’t kill you, as they say. But we still miscommunicate so often it’s our running joke. And every time it happens, I think of Chief Luce.
*
Chief Luce was my Navy Signalman “A” School instructor. We students loved him. He was an excellent signalman, patient as Job, and a square-knot sailor. He taught his charges two important things.
(1) The aim of signaling is communication. (2) Communication’s take-home point is to avoid confusion. He quizzed us on this constantly. “Why do we do this, Class?”
“To avoid confusion, Chief!” We’d answer in unison.
Chief Luce’s face would light up. He’d fold his hands in contentment. “That’s right, Class. To avoid confusion.”
*
I thought about this today as I waited for the Wrightsville Beach Bridge opening. How the Rules of the Road and radio protocols exist to avoid confusion. They are communication shorthand that make life a lot safer. Hopefully, they’re used properly.
Correct rules. Proper radio channels. Standard protocol language. To avoid confusion.
*
IH was a quarter mile from the bridge at 11:45. The bridge would open at noon for pleasure craft.
I’d already skirted shoalwater too close for comfort to avoid a southbound tug and barge. Without rules and radios, I might have cut across his bow, mind-reading, wrongly, that he wasn’t going to turn in time to keep me from running aground.
But rules – preferred port to port passage, And channels — 13 to arrange passage. And terminology — Roger, port-to-port, standing by 13 and 16. Why?
To avoid confusion.
When IH got close enough to the bridge, we called on 13 to say we were coming through at the next opening. The tender then knew and we knew and everyone in radio range for miles around knew Irish Hurricane would be coming through the open bridge at noon.
No confusion.
The ICW was a mess right then and there. Lots of tidal current, lots of wind. Big, shiny yachts docked on both sides of the narrow channels – the main channel and a side one, both carrying heavy traffic. Marinas. Restaurants. Other cruisers stacked up waiting for noon to come and the bridge to open.
Every small boat in North Carolina on every side, northbound, southbound, crossbound. Jet sks, bass boats, big power boats, little power boats, boys in boardshorts, girls in bikinis, moms with kids, dads with fishing lines. And the miracle of everybody at least kind of knowing what everybody else is doing.
*
The bridge opened on schedule. Four hours later, IH turned into Mile Hammock at Camp LeJeune’s seaward end. We had the anchor set before dinner, which had been in the slow cooker all afternoon.
Katie got her second dinghy ride ever, then a few ball tosses and sticks in the water to fetch. She swam in her lifejacket for the first time. Unsure for a few seconds about her strange, new buoyancy, then clearly having a running-on-the-escalator thrill.
For the first time in many months, our anchor light is burning brightly. There are eight or ten of us tucked in here for the night, four miles south of the Onslow Bridge which will open at seven and not again til noon.
It will be an orderly evacuation at dawn. No confusion. There are rules. And radios. Because avoiding confusion is indeed the most important thing.
Irish Hurricane 