Heart of Oak

Posted By Sarah on February 13, 2010

Winter is not the best time for working on outside stuff such as boat building. That said, we’re doing what we can and counting down until spring. This means time to review our potential schedules for the summer, make new uniforms and sails, and putter through various 18th century cookbooks. When we need to remember what water in its liquid form looks like, we throw on a nautical-themed movie.

The other night, we watched Jaws. It’s been a while since I last watched it, and Ekk hadn’t seen it since it first came out in the theatres (a fact that has provided me much fodder for old-age jokes), so between us we’d forgotten most of the plot aside from the whole “giant shark eats everyone in sight” theme. We’d also forgotten most of the scary moments, so we began critiquing the film’s various maritime safety flaws in an attempt to prove to each other we weren’t scared of sharks that eat boats like candy.

So without further ado, I present to you our list of “Everything I Need To Know About Boats I Learned From Jaws.” In order to have images without violating any copyright, we enlisted ship’s cat Fang to help with the graphics.

Our version of the Orca. Left to right: Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider. Isn't that obvious by the crudely drawn facial hair?

We’ll start with something that should be blindingly obvious:

1. Drunk swimming is bad. Especially alone at dawn.

2. Make sure you’ve got the right equipment for the job. You’re going out to kill the shark that’s terrifying the town. Do you take something that will a) kill it quickly and conclusively, or b) just *really* piss it off?

a. Always carry a knife (and have spares around). We’re thinking here of how Hooper gets momentarily caught in the line when the shark circles, or how the shark nearly floods the boat by dragging it sternwards while everyone’s trying to *untie* the lines from the cleats. And for those of us who read the original book, Quint originally died because he needed a knife to cut the line in which he was tangled.

b. Non-slip shoes. I betcha Quint wished he’d had a little more traction.

c. Lifeboat or other evacuation plan. While floating to shore on the casks was a nice Moby-Dick-esque touch, it sure was lucky for them that the currents were going in their direction. And that no *other* big sharks were in the area. (You know, like the one caught by the fishermen earlier?) Especially since they had no…

d. Radio. Okay, that should’ve been a warning sign. When your captain snaps and starts destroying safety equipment, perhaps you ought to recognize that he’s no longer acting in the best interests of the vessel or crew. Just an idea. Transitioning nicely into:

Jaws (as played by Stunt Cat Fang) approaches the boat

3. Recognize your crew and vessel’s limits, and don’t exceed them.

a. Know when to quit. Granted, it wouldn’t have been half as good a movie, but the crew of the Orca really should have turned around when they first realized they needed a bigger boat. Sebastian Junger describes the phenomenon of acceleration of catastrophe when talking about steel hulled vessels in his book The Perfect Storm: “The problem with a steel boat is that the crisis curve starts out gradually and quickly becomes exponential. The more trouble she’s in, the more trouble she’s likely to get in, and the less capable she is of getting out of it, which is an acceleration of catastrophe that is almost impossible to reverse.” (Junger p79-80) The Orca crew (specifically, her captain) became obsessively target-focused and lost the ability to accurately judge the conditions they were facing.

b. Set accurate priorities. The engine started to die. The pumps weren’t keeping up. That’s when they should’ve stopped their shark-quest and started heading back to the island, especially since Captain Bat-Happy there killed the radio. Instead, they chose to forgo any attempts to preserve the vessel in hopes of killing the shark. This apparently included such simple details as closing any of the hatches.

c. Keep a watch, aka there’s no excuse for inattention. “Hey, there’s a giant man-eating shark in the area. It’s already proven it’s not any normal shark and is laughing at our attempts to slow it down. Let’s get drunk and forget the whole thing till dawn.” Yeah, good idea. They didn’t close any of the hatches. They didn’t bother to pay attention to the engine’s warning signs. They didn’t even attach any safety lanyards to the poison-harpoon thing. The Orca was pretty much doomed as much by her crew as by the shark.

Oh, the carnage. Non-slip shoes might have helped Quint from making that last epic Slip'n'Slide of Death down the deck into the shark's mouth. Or maybe not.

No cats were harmed in the making of this blog post. (Embarrassed, maybe, but unharmed.)

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