Trapped Under a Sail

 I was reminded of a scary incident from my youth and I wanted to tell about it.  I was sailing a 505 high performance sailboat from the Palo Alto marina in California in wind in the upper 20s.  I was 20 or 21.  The Palo Alto Marina was killed by the city so it no longer exists.

The sailing venue at Palo Alto is extremely shallow, with a very soft, muddy bottom.  The deepest part is in the middle.  When sailing on a flood tide, there's a benefit to going left, where the water is shallowest, to get current relief.  Carried too far, this leads to boats running aground, in the nasty, soft green mud.   To minimize this, our fleet set a buoy halfway up the weather leg, which we called "E".  This kept us away from the worst of the mud.

On the day in question, I was sailing with a different boat than usual.  We were getting close to the layline for where E had been 5 minutes ago when we realized it had drifted, and we were a little overstood.  So we tacked right away and sailed towards E.  As we got closer, E was continuing to drag it's anchor so we bore off to follow, when suddenly we capsized, hard, to weather.

I was in the water, under the sail.  An experienced sailor can usually see a capsize coming a few seconds in advance, but this one was a complete surprise.  Consequently, I was pretty disoriented.  The water in the bay near Palo Alto is pretty murky and visibility was less than 2 feet.  I couldn't see the edge of the sail.  I hadn't had much time to catch a breath before the sail came down on top of me, so I didn't have much time.

I made my best guess, and fortunately, was not too wrong.  I quickly found the edge of the sail and found my way to air.  The skipper, who I did not know well, was looking for me and I spoke up as soon as I realized.  I said "What the ... happened?"

He explained "The centerboard broke".  I immediately understood.  505 centerboards are designed to jibe in their trunk.  there's a clever arrangement that if you rake the board slightly forward, it increases its angle of attack.  this increases lift and thus pointing angle quite a bit, and also load.  But if you're sailing too low, it greatly increases the lateral force on the board.  In this case, it sheered off right at the hull.  The right thing to have done was to rake the board aft a little when we'd had to bear off.  We both knew it but there was so much wind, we didn't want to stop hiking to do it, especially when.

The moment when I realized I was trapped under the sail and didn't know exactly where was what came back to me.  A 505 main sail is vaguely triangular about 20x12 feet.   when it's on the surface of the water, the sun is illuminating it, but everything else is in shade, and the water was pretty murky, so I couldn't see the edge of the sail or any part of the boat.  I literally had to guess.  worst case is I might have swum the wrong direction maybe 15 feet or so, before I found an edge, and provided I didn't get further turned around.

I've tried to confine the sailor jargon to the explanation of why it happened--you should be able to figure out what it was that happened without understanding the jargon.

Should Trump Be Crucified?

 He certainly deserves it.  But the tl;dr answer is no.

The ancient Romans mostly reserved their most horrible punishment for what they deemed the most serious crime: Sedition against Rome.  Crucifixion was the worst way to die that they could think of, and they were very inventive.  The person is suspended by their outstretched arms so that in order to draw breath, they were working against their own weight.  Eventually, they would suffocate, but it would often take days.  They'd often add several other non-fatal injuries to make it even more painful, and to attract scavengers, which would begin picking the victim apart while still alive when they realized he couldn't resist.  Once the person died, they'd be left up there for all to see, as the scavengers completed their work.  To a Roman, a proper burial was important to their idea of afterlife, so this was a fate worse than death.  It was a reminder, often left standing for years, that loyalty was important and enforced.

History has undermined much of the meaning of this.  Part of it was done by the Romans themselves, by applying the punishment occasionally to crimes other than sedition and by tolerating the punishment to be weakened, most often by killing the victim early or by allowing the family to remove the body and give it a proper burial.  Jesus benefited from both of these.  The story of Jesus has also resulted in the punishment being connected with martyrdom.  Modern passion plays sometimes have a willing victim crucified, although generally not for long enough to kill them.  Jesus was purportedly convicted of sedition, but what the actual act of sedition might have been has been lost or possibly suppressed.  The Romans were actually pretty tolerant of alternate religions; it's unlikely they'd have crucified Jesus based on the story we're told.  (one possibility: there were actual bands of seditionists in the holy land doing terrorism to try to make the Romans abandon their colony.  It's certainly possible that Jesus was involved with one of these in some way.)

Donald Trump has been our very worst president.  He is amazingly corrupt, and what little he actually did accomplish was deeply counterproductive.  His handling of the virus probably killed half a million americans more than a competent handling would have, and several times that world wide, and has led to the virus becoming intractable, where a better response might have been able to suppress it.   His support of Putin and other autocrats has given them freedom to suppress their populations and kill their neighbors.  His tax cut had no positive effects at all, and made the deficit much larger.  His deregulation has resulted a significant bank panic and several environmental disasters.   His judicial nominees have proven to be shockingly corrupt. He openly leaked highly classified documents to his Russian allies and stole  hundreds more--possibly planning to use them to buy safe passage once US authorities caught up with him.  And he attempted to overturn a fair election in several different ways to stay in office.  Sedition.

Trump is exactly the guy that crucifixion was intended for, and my gut really wants to see him tortured to death this way, as a punishment for him and as a warning for all the mini-Trumps who might like to continue his misdeeds.  But my head reminds me that cruelty like that would lower me to his level...the 8th amendment got it right.  No cruel or unusual punishments, no matter how terrible the crime.  But we need to actually punish this guy, and soon, or his imitators will not be intimidated.

Politifact Lie of the Year

2022: Putin's lies about Ukraine
2021: Lies about the Jan 6 insurrection
2020: Rs, especially Trump, downplaying the coronavirus
2019: Trump's repeated false claim that the whistleblower got Trump's Ukraine call almost completely wrong
2018: Online smear machine tries to take down Parkland high school students
2017: Trump's repeated false assertions that Russian election interference is a "made up story"
2016: Fake News
2015: Trump's campaign lies
2014: The Ebola Scare.
2013: If you like your health care you can keep it.  (Had this been expressed "If you like your qualifying health care, you can keep it" it would have been true: the plans that were closed by ACA were fraudulent in some way.   In 2008, they had rated this same statement as true)
2012: Romney/Ryan completely false claims that Jeep was moving its factory to China
2011: Democrat's completely true statement that Republicans voted to end medicare as we know it.
2010: Republican's absurdly false claims that the ACA is a government takeover of healthcare.
2009: Republican's dangerously false claims about death panels.