Breakdown

Mario’s Log – August 5th, 2025

“What the hell was that?” Scott said.  The pitch and volume of the engine had changed so dramatically that we were all certain that the engine room door had flung open. Scott pulled back the throttle and I went aft to secure the door only to see it was closed. An alarm on the engine panel sounded. Fuel pressure dropped and only increased at lower RPM. “Jon, rig the dinghy. She’s going to shut down.”  I had no earthly idea what Scott’s plan was, but having learned that he always has one, I was up and donning my foul weather gear without asking the question. Seconds later, the engine control unit shut the engine down. 

Before I retired from the U.S. Coast Guard a dozen years ago, showing up after things went wrong at sea was my full-time job.  As Scott emerged on deck to help us sling the 700-pound dinghy over the side, I thought back on all the times in my career when a ship’s loss of propulsion had ended with a helicopter over a grounded vessel being battered on a rocky shoreline. The “before” picture of those tragedies was exactly what I was seeing.

We were between a line of pack ice and Somerset Island, just two miles from a sheer cliff wall with an onshore wind. We had no propulsion. The water temp was just below freezing, air temp just a few degrees above freezing. The nearest rescue unit was over 1,000 miles away.  If I were back at my old job as an accident investigator and writing the mishap report for this part, I would say “The M/V Sarah-Sarah and crew were not in extremis, but they could see it from there.”  What a crew does next in these situations is always (always) the difference between good and bad outcomes.

I’m writing this, 36 hours later, while we are underway to our next anchorage near Fort Ross. We’re making 11.2 knots, courtesy of our recently repaired main engine and flat calm seas. We managed to slide into the “good outcomes” column without calling for rescue. How we managed that and every detail of the diagnosis and repair of our vessel I’ll leave to Scott to tell you about.  There were lessons learned and he will take the time to share every technical detail with the FPB community, small as it is.  What this incident taught me, or reminded me of, rather, is the vast difference between boaters who I met at work in my old job, and the ones I spend time with now.

There exists a subset of mariners out there who are reading this and turning questions over and over in their heads trying to do just one thing; find the part that they would have done differently.  They do this to convince themselves that they would never have found themselves in this situation to begin with.  Those were the kind I met most in my old job, often as they sat in the back on a helicopter with me, having just abandoned their vessel. Scott is not one of those mariners.  

What Scott understands, fully, is that it can happen to him.  That he understands that is the primary reason I trusted him to take me through the arctic.  As we slung the dinghy over the side and I found out his plan was to side-tow his  85,000 pound vessel using a 40-horsepower outboard, I will admit to thinking – just for a minute – that my trust may have been misplaced.  Four minutes later as I sat at the helm station to steer an engineless vessel making 4.9 knots, I got over it.

Many – too many – boaters treat their boats like a teenager treats a car.  They know how to make it move, having no idea at all how it all happens. Scott not only understands how to maintain and repair almost every system on his vessel, he has a team of ashore experts on call for the others and a spares inventory that is more easily expressed by what is not aboard than what is.  He is a student of the operation of his boat.  Honestly, though I am sure they exist, in my life I have never met a more prepared mariner.  When he told us to rig the dinghy, he was not guessing.  “We maintain our 9.5 knots using just 75 horsepower from our main engine.”  Sarah-Sarah has some weight to her, but she is shaped suspiciously like a sailboat. “It stands to reason that 40 HP can get us underway, right?”

The “it-wouldn’t-happen-to-me” types are thinking, “What if you were 200 miles offshore?”, or “What if [insert any variable you like here]?” Scott’s answer (and mine) is that we would have done something else. What we would not have done, ever, is not ask and answer those questions, to the very best of our abilities, before heading out to sea.  That is not to say that we didn’t get very lucky.  We were just 7 miles from our intended anchorage. It was a well protected anchorage from ice and weather. We could have stayed there for a very long time as we worked on the problem. Making those repairs offshore, hove-to with a para-anchor would have been possible, though not at all optimal.  My point is that yes, we have a para-anchor aboard and know how to use it. Scott did think of that.

There is value in the “what about this?” line of questioning.  We do it all the time on Sarah-Sarah.  We constantly evaluate the decisions of other mariners.  What we also do is approach these questions from the context that it can happen to us. A ship is a complex system and everything in the history of breaking worked before it broke.  That’s why they call it breaking. You have to be ready for it.  A system failing is something you prevent through maintenance, but prepare for like you know it will happen to you.  

I’m on this trip because after all my experience in things gone wrong, I’ve learned that those who plan to fail, fail least often. Scott plans to fail. It is not his goal, of course, but he understands the difference.  He hopes for the best and plans for the worst; truly …plans for it. He is solidly in the camp of those boaters I never met on the job.  My trust was not misplaced.  And Scott, I only doubted your sanity for the slightest of seconds. It wont happen again.