Every sailor fears the sea (and those who don’t are too dangerous to crew with). But long before we cross an ocean or meet our first typhoon we must face a thousand smaller challenges of sailing and navigation – any one of which can torment us with apprehension, even fear.

Making our first passage on our own, entering an unfamiliar harbor at night, going through ship locks, anchoring in very shallow or very deep water – each of these can fill us with gut-churning apprehension. Beginners and novices, especially, need to be able to deal with worries and fears in ways that strengthen confidence and fortitude rather than undermine them. We may dream of steady winds, quiet anchorages, meeting new people and mastering new skills but our dreams will be shattered if we experience too many occasions of debilitating dread.

From mild anxiety to sheer terror – fear arises from our perceptions of risks, not the external reality. We may have good reason to be afraid sometimes but conditions that make us fearful may be plain sailing to someone with more experience. That doesn’t make our apprehensions any less real to us. Being downright scared on occasion is the reality we face as sailors. Skippers and crew need to know how best to cope.

Yet fear is a subject most cruisers rarely to talk about. And there’s a tendency in the literature of voyages to play down, even omit completely, all mention of anxiety or being terrified even as the boat runs aground or capsizes in a storm. It’s as if recounting our fears is either a sign of weakness or, conversely, of boasting. Yet knowing that people we admire and may want to emulate have also been weak at the knees on occasion can be reassuring – proof that such feelings are normal. And can be overcome.

Unconsciously tightening stomach muscles when facing any challenge for perhaps the first time is a normal reaction to circumstances that are not fully within our control. What’s crucial, if we want to attain our dreams, is to learn to live with our very healthy sense of vulnerability so that it doesn’t overwhelm us. Working through our fears, rather than running from them, will help bolster our self-confidence over time.

Some degree of heightened awareness is inevitable and desirable. Isn’t that sense of being more fully alive a big part of why we’re sailing? As Cap’n Fatty Goodlander wrote in “The Zen of Wood Butchery” (Cruising World May 2009):

“I was dead-dog tired. I was scared. But I felt electric and alive. There’s rare air out there, and I was breathing it.  Few men do.”

So what can we do to better handle our fears and sail with greater confidence? Here are 10 suggestions:

1) Know that you are not alone. Everyone – no matter how experienced – is anxious sometimes. I’ve been forever grateful to a friend with many years of experience who confessed she was nervous every time she entered a new marina. And I’d thought I was the only one! Talk to other sailors and you’ll soon discover everyone has been afraid some times. But they keep going.

2) Recognize your fears. Trying to suppress them only makes them harder to handle. Recognize how you’re feeling, be specific about what’s causing the anxiety, then focus on what needs to be done. For example, you may want to cross an ocean but your fears are making you dismiss it as, “Too risky for me!” If you accept this as truth there’s no way to face the fears and overcome them. Calling out fears helps stop them becoming an all-encompassing reality – which they are not.

3) Plan for what might go wrong. Once you recognize your fears, you can work towards overcoming them. Fears often arise from uncertainty, so use your imagination to envisage possible scenarios and plan how you’d handle high risk situations such as a fire, a grounding, serious injury or if the anchor drags. It’s prudent seamanship. No need to conjure a nightmare; but thinking things through, making preparations and then knowing you’re prepared calms nerves and will help prevent disaster from happening.

Handle nagging “what ifs” by making a checklist of what should be done in situations that make you nervous. For example, the first few times you drop anchor you may worry about laying out enough chain for the rise (or fall) of tide and correctly setting a snubber. Work through your checklist to ensure nothing’s overlooked. Confidence comes with practice and experience. Meanwhile, it’s normal to be a little apprehensive.

4) Give yourself time. We work slower when we’re anxious and trying to rush leads to mistakes, which only unsettles us more. We’re cruising, not racing or making a delivery. There’s no where we have to go, no deadline we have to meet. If the forecast is for bad weather, stay at anchor an extra day or plan to make only a short hop. Setting a moderate pace and allowing yourself time to accomplish modest goals is one of the best ways to build confidence as you ascend the learning curve. Gaining lots of good experiences helps put occasional scary moments into perspective.

5) Stay as comfortable as you can. Eat regularly, even if you don’t feel like it. An empty stomach only encourages nausea and seasickness. Warm drinks, fruit or chocolate can do wonders. We all have our comfort foods and this is not the time to be worrying about gaining weight. Before departure, make sure you’re stocked up on favorite comfort foods for all the crew.

SEE Cruising  Beyond Our Fears (2 of 2)

© 2012 Dennison Berwick.  May be reproduced for non-commercial purposes with full attribution.

A low-tide solution

An old-world technique avoided a budget-busting haulout

by Dennison Berwick

(First published in Good Old Boat, Nov/Dec 2011)

All too often the easiest way to solve a problem in boating is to throw money at it.  Finding less expensive solutions often calls for a little more imagination, work and sometimes facing a challenge or two.  The rewards can be not only money left in the sailing kitty, but also improved seamanship, a sense of accomplishment and greater resilience for the next challenge.
When my 32-foot steel ketch “Kuan Yin” needed a new cutlass bearing in the middle of a 2000-mile voyage from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, I couldn’t afford two haulouts (the repair and the upcoming winter storage) so I decided instead – on the suggestion of the mechanic who would be doing the work – to take advantage of the large tides on the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, Canada.
The problems had started somewhere on the St. Lawrence Seaway between Toronto and Montreal when three engine mounts cracked and the engine shifted. This caused serious wear on the cutlass bearing before the propeller shaft finally fell off the back of the gearbox! I was completely unaware of the problems until I discovered, after weighing anchor and about to re-enter the busy shipping channel, that the boat had no engine propulsion.
I sailed a few hours downstream to Quebec City with fingers crossed the boat would not be becalmed in the narrow channel with a ship approaching, before being towed by the Canadian Coast Guard through the entrance into the Parc Nautique de Lévy, across the river from Quebec City.
The engine mounts, gearbox and prop shaft were all repaired within 24 hours but replacing the Cutless bearing threatened to put a premature stop to my passage downstream towards my intended destination for the winter.
I’d just spent two summers refitting the boat in Toronto, on Lake Ontario, and was finally on my way to Newfoundland, 2000 miles away, on the first leg of a project to retrace an extraordinary voyage made in 1811 by an Inuit sea captain and his family who took two missionaries in a 45-foot ketch 1400 miles north along the remote coast of Labrador into Ungava Bay (the “teacup” just east of Hudson’s Bay). Though the St. Lawrence River at Quebec City has large tides, the water is only brackish and the city is still a long way from the Atlantic Ocean. Given the short sailing season, any delay threatened the entire project.
My boat “Kuan Yin” is a Tahitiana 32 – Weston Farmer’s adaptation for homebuilders of John Hanna’s Tahiti Ketch, which itself was adapted from Colin Archer’s famous 19th century lifeboat for the Norwegian fishing fleet.  The Tahitiana is the antithesis of modern racing-influenced cruising boats. She enjoys bigger seas and remains comfortable, holds a course well, but doesn’t go easily to windward. She was designed above all to be seaworthy and seakindly.  She’s a double-ender, with an exterior hung rudder, a full keel and side decks that are wide enough to sleep on comfortably.  Built of 3/16th inch steel plates, she’s extraordinarily strong but weighs about 11 tons with water, fuel and supplies. Down below, those wide decks make the main cabin seem narrower than modern sailboats with a comparable 10-foot beam.  However, this does keep all handholds within easy reach. “Kuan Yin” has a draught of only 4 foot 5 inches, her keel is up to 10 inches wide and she carries her own support legs that can be bolted to the bulwarks amidships.
Sailing single-handed from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic was intended as a shakedown cruise for the boat and for myself. “Kuan Yin” had new electronics, a new charging system and modified running rigging. I’d only recently completed an intense training course and lacked any depth of practical experience.
So I was not at all keen when monsieur Bertrand suggested taking advantage of the 15 foot spring tide and 10-foot drying height in the bay next to the marina to beach “Kuan Yin” in order to replace the cutlass bearing. Knots of apprehension tightened in my stomach as I tried to imagine how the maneuver might be accomplished. The risks seemed too great. I was inexperienced handling the heavy boat. The mud and grass might be too soft for the support legs to stay upright. The boat might come to rest unevenly on the bottom and topple over. If that happened, it was easy to visualize the masts being damaged and the cabin being be flooded when the tide returned.  I’d never done anything like this before; it seemed a challenge too far.
However, I also knew that if I flunked this test there would be no way to fulfil my dream of sailing to northern Labrador.  If I didn’t have the courage even to attempt a technique that had been common practice before the convenience of travel-lifts, then I’d never have the guts to sail the remote and hazardous coast of Labrador nor the tenacity to tackle whatever challenges that voyage would undoubtably present.
So I took a deep breath and committed myself. I made a rough chart of the bay at low tide, marked the rocks, and plotted a route using bearing lines from conspicuous trees and buildings onshore.  There would not be much clearance under the keel inside the bay and it was essential that “Kuan Yin” come to rest on firm and level ground.
The 15-foot high tide coincided with sunset so daylight was already fading as I brought “Kuan Yin” very slowly into the bay along my pre-planned route.  The top sections of the support legs were already bolted to the bulwarks.  The bottom sections lay ready on the decks.  I was apprehensive but determined.
Closer to the shore, people began shouting warnings and conflicting advice about where to anchor and I could feel my anxieties rising towards a panicked inaction, so I decided to ignore everyone and to trust my own hand-drawn chart and gut instincts.  I dropped the hook near the rocky shore, then quickly assembled the bottom sections of the support legs and lowered them into the black water until the struts hit the bottom.  After that, it was a matter of hoping “Kuan Yin” would take the bottom on an even keel as the tide dropped and that the wooden plates I’d bolted to the bottom of the support legs would not slip in the mud, allowing the boat to fall over.
After two hours, the boat seemed safely aground.  After four hours, I could see, in the beam of the flashlight, that the struts was standing firmly in the grasses surrounding the boat and not sinking into the mud. Relaxing enough to sleep was difficult, though there was nothing more I could have done at that stage to support the boat.
Low tide came in the early hours of the morning, so “Kuan Yin” had to refloat through another high tide and await the next low tide before the mechanic could come out in daylight to replace the cutlass bearing. Foolishly I had not put out a kedge anchor to hold the boat in position. Fortunately, the light wind did not shift overnight and at dawn “Kuan Yin” took the bottom again in almost the same place as before.
At ten o’clock, M. Bertrand  and his assistant came out in their rubber boots with tools and the new cutlass bearing.  It was not quite the same size as the old bearing but we were able to drive the new bearing inside the old sleeve. One hour later the work was done. Then we could only wait for the high tide at sunset and meanwhile enjoy an invitation from the local yacht club to their fall corn roast.
What I learned from the experience was not to automatically accept the most convenient procedure (and usually the most expensive) as the only solution to a problem but to be open to trying less orthodox methods. By attempting a traditional boating technique that had been beyond my experience and comfort level, I not only saved a bundle and avoided a long delay, but this small success (modest as it may seem to sailors with more experience) boosted confidence and improved my skills ready for “Kuan Yin” and I to continue towards the Atlantic Ocean, the Labrador and ultimately Ungava Bay.

In Case You Missed It: Canadian Goverment Muzzles its scientists

Science & Environment

17 February 2012 Last updated at 17:09 GMT

Canadian government is ‘muzzling its scientists’

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News, Vancouver

The Canadian government has been accused of “muzzling” its scientists.

Speakers at a major science meeting being held in Canada said communication of vital research on health and environment issues is being suppressed.

But one Canadian government department approached by the BBC said it held the communication of science as a priority.

Prof Thomas Pedersen, a senior scientist at the University of Victoria, said he believed there was a political motive in some cases.

“The Prime Minister (Stephen Harper) is keen to keep control of the message, I think to ensure that the government won’t be embarrassed by scientific findings of its scientists that run counter to sound environmental stewardship,” he said.

“I suspect the federal government would prefer that its scientists don’t discuss research that points out just how serious the climate change challenge is.”

The Canadian government recently withdrew from the Kyoto protocol to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

The allegation of “muzzling” came up at a session of the AAAS meeting to discuss the impact of a media protocol introduced by the Conservative government shortly after it was elected in 2008.

The protocol requires that all interview requests for scientists employed by the government must first be cleared by officials. A decision as to whether to allow the interview can take several days, which can prevent government scientists commenting on breaking news stories.

Sources say that requests are often refused and when interviews are granted, government media relations officials can and do ask for written questions to be submitted in advance and elect to sit in on the interview.

‘Orwellian’ approach

Andrew Weaver, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, described the protocol as “Orwellian”.

The protocol states: “Just as we have one department we should have one voice. Interviews sometimes present surprises to ministers and senior management. Media relations will work with staff on how best to deal with the call (an interview request from a journalist). This should include asking the programme expert to respond with approved lines.”

Professor Weaver said that information is so tightly controlled that the public is “left in the dark”.

“The only information they are given is that which the government wants, which will then allow a supporting of a particular agenda,” he said.

The leak was obtained and reported three years ago by Margaret Munro, who is a science writer for Postmedia News, based in Vancouver. Speaking at the AAAS meeting, she said its effect was to suppress scientific debate on issues of public interest.

“The more controversial the story, the less likely you are to talk to the scientists. They (government media relations staff) just stonewall. If they don’t like the question you don’t get an answer.”

Ms Munro cited several examples of what she described as the “muzzling” of scientists by the government.

The most notorious case is of that of Dr Kristi Miller, who is head of molecular genetics for the Department for Fisheries and Oceans. Dr Miller had been investigating why salmon populations in western Canada were declining.

The investigation, which was published in one of the leading scientific journals in the world, Science, seemed to suggest that fish might have been exposed to a virus associated with cancer.

The suggestion raised many questions, including whether the virus might have been imported by the local aquaculture industry.

Requests denied

The journal felt this to be an important study and put out a press release, which it sent out to thousands of journalists across the world. Dr Miller was named as the principal contact.

However, the government declined all requests to interview Dr Miller. It said it was because she was due to give evidence to a judicial inquiry on the issue of falling fish stocks.

According to Ms Munro, because reporters were denied the opportunity to question Dr Miller about her work, important public policy issues went unanswered.

“You have a government that is micromanaging the message, obsessively. The Privy Council Office (which works for the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper) seems to vet everything that goes out to the media,” she said.

A spokeswoman for Fisheries and Oceans Canada told BBC News: “The Department works daily to ensure it provides the public with timely, accurate, objective and complete information about our policies, programmes, services and initiatives, in accordance with the Federal Government’s Communications Policy.

“In 2011, Fisheries and Oceans publicly issued 286 science advisory reports documenting our research on Canada’s fisheries; our scientists respond to approximately 380 science-based media calls every year.”

Fisheries and Oceans Canada declined a request by the BBC to interview Kristi Miller for this article. Dr Miller told us she would have been willing to be interviewed had her department given her permission.

The AAAS meeting’s discussion on muzzling is organised by freelance science reporter Binh An Vu Van. She says fellow journalists across Canada are finding it “harder and harder” to get access to government scientists.

Ms Vu Van claims that as well as “clear-cut cases of muzzling”, such as the one involving Dr Miller, media relations officers use more subtle methods. She said that when she requests an interview, she has to enter into prolonged email correspondence to speak to a scientist she knows is ready and willing to be interviewed, often to be declined or offered another scientist she does not want to interview.

“It’s so hard to get hold of scientists that a lot of my colleagues have given up,” she explained.

Ms Munro cited another example of research published in another leading scientific journal, Nature, that was published last October.

An international team including several scientists from the government agency, Environment Canada, set out details of a hole that appeared in the ozone layer above the Arctic.

Ms Munro said she had called one of the scientists involved who she had dealt with several times in the past. He agreed to speak to her, but said that he had been told that her request had to be put to government media relations officials in Ottawa.

“So I phoned up Ottawa and they just said no you can’t talk to the guy. A couple of weeks later, he was available but by then the story had been done. So they take them out of the news cycle,” she said.

Ms Munro also claims that journalists were denied access to scientists working for the government agency Health Canada last year, when there was concern about radiation levels reaching the country’s western coast from Japan following the explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Ultimately, journalists obtained the information they sought from European agencies.

The Postmedia News journalist obtained documents relating to interview requests using Canada’s equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act. She said the documents show interview requests move up what she describes as an “increasingly thick layer of media managers, media strategists, deputy ministers, then go up to the Privy Council Office, which decides ‘yes’ or ‘no’”.

“The government has never explained what the process is. They just imposed these changes and they expected us to sit back and take it,” she explained.

Professor Andrew Weaver believes that the media protocol is being used by the Canadian government to “instruct scientists to deliver a certain message, thereby taking the heat out of controversial topics”.

He added: “You can’t have an informed discussion if the science isn’t allowed to be communicated. Public relations message number one is that you have to set the conversation. You don’t want to have a conversation on someone else’s terms. And this is now being applied to science on discussions about oil sands, climate and salmon.”

–end–

The classic detective story – of Agatha Christies or Dorothy L Sayers for example – very often take place among a group of people who know one another and who are isolated in some manner – the country house, the small island hotel, the steamer (Murder on the Nile), the railway train (Murder on the Orient Express), the archaeological dig out in the desert.

Until I found C. P. Snow’s first novel in a secondhand bookshop recently in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I’d no idea anyone had written a classic whodunnit aboard a sailboat.  Imagine my delight!

(It’s one of my aims in life to read every work of fiction set aboard a sailboat.)

Death Under Sail was C. P. Snow’s first novel and was first published in 1931.  Despite the success of this detective novel, Snow never wrote another but went on instead to write a sequence of 11 novels by which he is best known called, Strangers and Brothers.

He was knighted in 1957 for his services as a civilian scientific advisor during the Second world War.  He died in July 1980.

Death Under Sail has all the ingredients of the classic whodunnit.  A group of apparent friends on his wherry on the Norfolk Broads, the network of drainage canals in East Anglia.  The large sailing barges were a common sight on the Broads in the 1930s as working vessels.  Very very few of them were pleasure vessels.

The murder is committed.  No gory details, of course. Every one under suspicion.  Everyone and no-one has motive and opportunity.  The local police are plodding and, in this book, far too imaginative.  In Death Under Sail Snow contrives to bring in a friend of one of the people aboard – enter our amateur detective.  Neither Miss Marple nor Hercule Poirot, Mr. Finbow is a cerebral English diplomat, very proper, very diplomatic and of course, utterly ruthless and penetrating.

Not all the novel takes places aboard the wherry.  The suspects are all moved off to a friend’s bungalow and left to simmer.  But sailing does play a small role in the drama. How long can a dead man steer a straight course?  What was the actual time of the murder – and therefore who was where on the boat?

All this might seem too prosaic – especially to use who are not used to Hannibal Lecter in our mysteries.  But Snow does introduce an element of humour or comic relief.

The housekeeper at the bungalow is a grouchy prude whose insubordination to her guests (and social betters) is hilarious. It’s worth reading the book just to make the acquaintance of the redoubtable Mrs. Tufts.

Buy now on Amazon.com

Death Under Sail

Writing any book – whether non-fiction or a novel or other forms of fiction – takes a lot of time and effort. And any book takes some effort on the part of the reader first to obtain and secodly, to read.  So one might imagine that an author would want to get the facts of his or her story correct, if only to show respect to readers and for the personal pride of having created a coherent narrative. Alas, Patterson does not respect his readers enough in this thriller to have bothered getting even the simplest details correct about sailing and sailboats.

True, Hollywood movies frequently lack such integrity.  Remember U-571, the 2000 film in which the  German submarine was boarded in 1942 by United States Navy submariners in the Mediterranean seeking to capture her Enigma cipher machine? In fact, it was the British Royal Navy that captured the cypher machine from U110 off Ireland in 1941. According to Wikipedia, the real U-571 was never involved in any such events, was not captured, and was sunk in January 1944, off Ireland, by a Short Sunderland flying boat from No. 461 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force.

Sail is the story of the Dunne family – mother and her three alienated children who go off on a sailboat with the brother of her dead husband (who just happens to be the father of one of the children), leaving her doting husband and the children’s step-father pining for them on land.

Except that the defence lawyer – with a heart of sulphuric acid -  is with his mistress and not missing them at all.  In fact, he’s hired a hitman to murder them at sea so that he can get his wife’s $100 million inheritance.

So far so good.  Basic plot of the average page-turner.

What disappoints most about “Sail” are the absurd errors about sailboats and sailing.  Maybe one should never let the facts get in the way of even a mediocre story (to paraphrase C. P. Scott, the famous editor of the Manchester Guardian). But please, have a little integrity and treat your readers with respect.

Just because we may not know any better is not reason to treat us like idiots.  When we read a historical novel, for example, we make the tacit assumption that the author won’t directly play with history.  Marie Antoinette really did lose her head on the guillotine and was not saved by Spiderman.

In like vein, all boats and ships with through hulls (holes to the outside of the boat attached to hoses for cooling water or for drainage) have sea-cocks – taps that can be closed if the hose breaks.

Yet, Patterson insists that if the hose breaks, the only way to stop water gushing into the boat and sinking it is to strip off all your clothes and push them down the through-hull!!!  What?

And please don’t try deploying a sea anchor with the boat under full sail.

And never store compressed air tanks (for scuba diving) down below in the boat’s cabin in a locker where they can leap out in rough seas, fly through the air and smash the boat’s only radio.

All absurd.  However, in the interests of literature, I’ve set myself to read all the fiction written about sailboats – and there are so great novels – so I kept reading.  And it was a page-turner, after all.

The best I can say about Sail is that it truly is pulp fiction – a book that can be and should be turned quickly into pulp and recycled to make better use of the paper.

Satire is sometimes the best antidote to madness, and if you want a few laughs about the utter stupidity of the times we are living in, I can recommend one movie which, not surprisingly perhaps, is called Idiocracy.

It was released in 2006 but don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of it before.  According to Wikipedia, Idiocracy was released in only seven US cities and expanded to only 130 theaters, not the usual wide release of 600 or more theaters. Critics charge that the film’s distributor, 20th Century Fox, did nothing to promote the movie. No movie trailers, no ads, and only two stills and no press kits were released. The film was not screened for critics. There has been speculation that Fox was actively trying to keep the film from being seen by a large audience, while fulfilling a contractual obligation for theatrical release.

In The New York Times, Dan Mitchell argued that Fox might be shying away from the cautionary tale about low-intelligence dysgenics (the study of deteriorating genes and traits, as opposed to eugenics), because the company did not want to offend its viewers.

Two Americans – a hooker and an apathetic Army librarian – take part in a military experiment to store humans until they are needed as soldiers.  Inevitably the experiment goes wrong – the officer in charge is prosecuted for joining the hooker’s pimping ring – and the experiment is shutdown.

The two hapless time travellers end up – literally – in a mountain of garbage that ultimately collapses in 2500 AD.

By then the low birthrate of high IQ people and the high birthrate of low IQ people has produced a society of stunning idiocy where to speak normally or to read a book is to be a faggot, where the USA president is a former wrestler and water has been replaced with a Gatorade.

Sound familiar?

Our pretty hooker and the apathetic Army librarian find themselves to be the most intelligent people in the world.

I won’t tell you what happens but it’s great satire – and I write this as someone who usually avoids “funny films” as much as possible because too often the plot and the humour are so contrived.

Of course, it’s not hard to see the seeds of this idiotic society within our own – the dumbing down of citizens, the corporate takeover of public spaces and institutions, the sheer wastefulness of the consumer economic model.

According to Idiocracy, the USA is still the centre of the universe 500 years from now – which is unlikely to prove correct. In fact, the world five centuries from now is unlikely to be anything like the world the film portrays thanks primarily to the stupidity of our own attitudes and actions today on this beautiful planet.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the last few days, two separate incidents have reminded me yet again of the extraordinary times we are living in. A veritable “fin de siecle” – the end of an era.

The phrase comes France at the end of 19th century – just before Two World Wars, A Great Depression and several Holocausts changed not only daily life but even how we think of ourselves as human beings.

My two recent incidents were by no means world shattering – indeed, they both shocked me precisely because they were hardly noticed at all and were thought of as entirely normal.

( I must say that — by recounting these stories I am in no way being critical of the individuals involved.  Not at all.  I was just totally taken aback at how normal everything seemed, when a little reflection would surely show that they are not.

Disconnection
Both incidents took place in Bangkok, where I was recently for a friend’s 5th-cycle birthday celebrations. I met a fascinating American man in his early 70s who has spent his entire working life (and beyond as a consultant) setting up car dealerships for the Ford Motor Car Company. For more than a decade he’s been working in China setting up dealerships in that rapidly growing car market.

He mentioned that the average time it takes for a new car (and the new driver) to go from the showroom to the body shop for repairs is 13 DAYS. He explained that most driver’s licenses are bought with little or no driver training!

He also told me of visiting the bare ground before a massive Ford car manufacturing plant being built in Chongqing, in southwestern China, and that the completed plant will produce 300,000 vehicles a year.

So I asked him, “How much oil does China import every year?” (China already has 170 motor vehicles, including 64 million cars and 90 million motorbike).

This genial man looked at me in surprise.  “I have no idea,” he replied. I was shocked that an auto industry professional, who has spent his entire life putting more and more vehicles on the roads, had not thought about where the fuel comes from to power all those vehicles, nor of any of the consequences of so many motor vehicles in the world today (700 million at present) and the effects the unprecedented demand for oil is having on people in the world today.  No, not all oil is used for transportation, only about 70%.

To my simple mind, this is yet another demonstration of the extraordinary disconnect between individuals and reality. Bankers showed the same myopia in their own industry – “Who cares about consequences so long as we’re making lots and lots of money?”

(Just for the record, China is already the 2nd largest consumer  of oil at 6.7 million barrels of oil per day – or 2.4 billion a year, of which 52% is imported.) China’s need for energy is projected to increase by 150 percent by 2020.)

Decadence
My second shock came when an Australian lawyer and I took our birthday friend and two of his staff out for what was intended as a simple meal before the birthday party that evening.

We went to a high-end deli-cafe in central Bangkok – the sort of place that boasts its excess by having an enormous entrance door letting out great gasps of refrigerated air each time the door’s opened, and a ceiling high enough for a trapeze artist to perform over our heads – all that space filled with an enormous amount of costly refrigerated air.

The food was wonderful! What amazed me were some of the packaged products the deli-cafe was selling.  My Australian friend cheerfully forked up US$80 for three little  tubs of sea salt!

$80 for three cupfuls of sea salt?

All in all, the salt, our five delicious sandwiches, a bottle of Chardonnay wine and four coffees cost 8500 baht – US$275. (More than one month’s pay for the great majority of people in Bangkok.)

Verily, we live in decadent and disconnected times.

Some Inconvenient Truths about Iran and the Nuclear Question