My Old Man and the Sea

What do you do if you're 54 years old and a tad bored with life, as co-author David Hays says, in need of raising his "personal and professional threshold for bullshit"?

What to do if you're 20-something co-author Dan Hays, bored with traditional schooling and wary of the worn, gray treadmill looming before you?

If you're father and son David and Dan Hays, you buy a 25 foot engineless, fiberglass, Laurent-Giles designed sloop. You spend two years outfitting her for something more than afternoon bay sails. You tear out your stock interior. You reinforce hull-and-deck and hull-and-shroud connections. You build rudder, foul weather gear lockers; install water tanks, rainwater traps, handrails, and bow pulpit, you make ten thousand and one boat tweaks.

You endlessly wonder what if.

Then you plan your route around The Horn.

Yes, that Horn.

"At the age of ten I dreamed of the adventure....older, I read Dana Slocum, Morison, and old logs. I began to understand the struggle and the despair in the simply written ships' journals, in the monochrome prose that could suddenly bloom with feeling.

March 29, 1913: Terrible heavy N.W. gale. Lost mizzen upper topsail and main lower top gallant sail. Got two men hurt. All hands on deck all night.

30th. 6 AM: Quick shift from N.W. to S.W. with Hurricane force, with terrible heavy cross sea. Ship under two lower topsails and under water. Lost outer jib. Washed off the boom.

31st: Wind S.W. Very heavy gale.

April 1st: Terrible heavy W.N.W. gale, sip under two lower topsails and drifting to the Eastward, and my heart is broken under these heavy gales all the time.

So reads the log of the Edward Sewall, 263 days out from Philadelphia to Honolulu, battering to westward in the grip of The Horn for 67 days.

My Old Man and the Sea is the log of the Hays' journey around The Horn, from their home in Connecticut, to Jamaica, through the Panama Canal, onto The Horn via the Galapagos, Easter and Falkland Islands, then north to home.

It's also a log of father and son sharing a 25-foot space for months.

On the importance of wet gear lockers: "Boots are the worst offenders, the meatballs in the spaghetti of wet everything."

On personal hygiene: "He scolds me when I wipe my mouth with the cat."

Of the possibility of dying at sea: "I see you there, Dad, cold, what do I do?" "Well, Dan, you take off any clothing that's useful and my my wristwatch and you roll me in and keep sailing and you know that I died doing exactly what I wanted to do and in company I love."

On modern sailing gadgets:

Once upon a time sailors could not look at the digital LED readouts in their cockpits or go below to check the wind speed from a dial. Imagine!. They relied on what they saw and the pitch of the windsong through the rigging or their hair. So they invented the Beaufort scale for clarity. It's not much different than the way Dan and I talk about the weather. "What's it like out?" "Windy." Extremely windy?" "Very fucking windy."

The Beaufort scale goes from 0 to 12....I've never been at sea in anything near Force 10, the official description of which calls for 29 foot waves where "the tumbling of the sea becomes heavy and shock-like...the whole surface of the sea takes on a white
appearance." In other words, "extremely fucking windy," which sounds like "ydniw gnifcuf ylemertxe" as the words are blown back down your throat.

On shipboard maintenance: "During the passage to Easter Island, Dan and I installed a small cleat for the foreguy, the line that holds the main boom forward to prevent a jibe at sea. Indeed, arguing about whether to call it a foreguy or a preventer took up half of one day."

Of meal preparation onboard: cooking is "time spent in the galley area, after which, the food scraped out of the utensils and off the walls is served."

The boat's official mascot, their cat Tiger: "The cat fell into the pressure cooker onto the custard I was making. We hardly notice the hairs, except when they lodge in the back of our throats. We could get hairballs."

On not washing dishes: "We worked on the continuous meal theory: you don't clean off your plate and utensils between bites, therefore between meals is only a logical extension of that time."

The days: "I love the hissing and the chewing cold. I like burning calories just to stay heated. I feel awake and alive."

On their fair ship Sparrow: "Seas and wind built and it was a proper gale, going with us. We took in the jib; she flew with only a spot of mainsail exposed. Slocum's phrase repeated in my head: 'Even while the storm raged at its worst, my ship was wholesome and noble'. And Sparrow was magnificent: delicate but steady, swift and airy on the foam crest, strong and driving through the great valleys. She seemed born for this day."


On life: "I won't stuff desires, or whims, or fantasies away with reasons to justify why I shouldn't pursue them."

Why it will bend your brain

The book reveals the ties that form when we create - create a ship, or a relation-ship:

Last night, when Sparrow fell and I was in the ocean, I thought only about her, not me. If I'd been rolling over in a car I'd have thought about whether I'd live or die. But in the water I wanted to get back on board to help Sparrow live on. I understand that without her I'd die, and that isn't the same as a wrecked car or a burned-down house that you walk away from. But there's a deep bonding and it can turn into love and purpose. Perhaps it explains why men could live a horribly hard life on the old sailing ships. In bad storms, they would put out to sea away from the dangers of land."

Einstein's Credo

Alan Lightman, in the introduction to Einstein's Ideas and Opinions, writes:

I first began reading the essays and speeches of Einstein in the early 1970s, as a graduate student in physics. Like other such students, the more I understood Einstein's theories, the more I marveled at his scientific mind. But I wanted more from him. I wanted a role model for life. And so, during those intense and exhilarating years, when a young apprentice scientist is living science twenty-four hours a day and desperately trying to prove him or herself, I was sneaking away from the equations on my desk to a park near the university, where I would lie in the grass beneath a certain tree and read Einstein's humane writings.

One such writing is what became known as Einstein's Credo, which you can read
here (the page also contains audio of Einstein reading his Credo).

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.