Working on Knowing without Knowing How You Know, aka Your Spidey Sense

My first post at The League was about my friend Bob Wise, and ways of seeing things that I’ve learned from him. It’s not going to far to say that a big reason that Mon Tiki exists is because I became friends with Bob Wise. That was was about 15 years ago, which means I’m about the age now that Bob was back then.

As long as I’ve known Bob he’s been really big on “listening to your spidey sense“, or what the Polynesian navigators call “knowing without knowing how you know”. This sort of knowing is what enables Polynesian navigators to keep their boats on course sailing through cloudy nights with no moon or stars. It comes from learning to listen to your deep intuition, built on a foundation of long experience, to assemble the boat’s position without any particular data you could enter in a log; i.e. knowing where you are without knowing how you know where you are. Over the years, Bob has counseled me to listen to, and hone my spidey sense; to trust it; and to act on it.

Anyway.

As I’m writing we’re on the back side of a pretty strong Nor’easter here in Montauk; winds 25-35kts, with gusts into the 40s, maybe even into the 50s.  I checked Mon Tiki a couple of times yesterday (Saturday) including just before sundown. Everything seems fine. She was riding well, no signs of chafe or other problems. None-the-less, something woke me up this morning just before dawn, a gust of wind that sounded different maybe, something, I don’t know. But once awake my spidey sense told me I should go check on Mon Tiki without delay, so I pulled on my clothes and got in the car.

I can see Mon Tiki’s masts from West Lake Dr. about 1/4 of a mile south of Diamond Cove, and when I caught sight of them everything looked fine. Because it was windy and cold I pulled into parking lot so I could get up close without getting out of the car. Again, everything looked fine. The boat was riding just where she should be, the sails were well-bundled. Everything looked fine.

Then, just as I was telling myself I probably didn’t have to go over to Diamond Cove, get out of the car and walk down the dock for a closer look, Mon Tiki’s stern swung away from the dock about 15 feet. The stern had been made off with two 3/4″ lines so it was hard to imagine they *both* parted, and if they had, why did the boat stop? I jammed the car in gear, raced over to Diamond Cove, jumped out, and ran down the dock.

When I got their I couldn’t have been more surprised. No, Mon Tiki’s mooring lines hadn’t parted. What happened is a day and a half of hard NNE wind and the constant pounding had loosened the dock piling — and I just happened to be there at the moment it let go. I called Skip and I called my wife, and together the three of us got Mon Tiki back to the dock (the wind was howling and it took a come-along to pull her in. And then we got the loose piling made off where it couldn’t hurt anything.

Lessons.

Well the obvious one, and one I thought I already knew is not to depend on any one thing, not even a piling. I had two lines on the stern, and enough line to run to a second piling. It wouldn’t have been any trouble to run the second line to a second piling, and then none of this would have happened.

The other lesson is more subtle.

I don’t know what woke me up. But something did, and whatever that something was got me down to Mon Tiki just in time to see her break free. And because of that, Mon Tiki is fine; no harm, and Amy, Skip, and I are a lot less sore and wet than we would have been if I had got there an hour, or even just five minutes later. As Bob would say: listen to your spidey-sense, learn to know when you know, even if you don’t know why you know. At worst you’ll be up early to see the sun rise on a stormy day.

Above, a 7 ton sloop cast on the beach by this weekend’s storm. Below, a Hobie 18 flipped like a toy by the same winds.

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