Any data port in a storm

There are times when I wish I'd been born 100 years ago instead of 64 and could have lived my active years without the Internet and satellites, BlackBerrys, cellphones and computers cluttering the landscape. This is not one of those times.

Because if you turned the calendar back 30 or 40 years, I'd have spent last week bashing into monstrous head seas in the North Atlantic in a small boat, probably a leaky, wooden one, bound for Bermuda in survival conditions with no communications, no weather information, no way of knowing when or whether the dreadful storm would end.

Instead, I spent the week staring at a deteriorating sky from the front porch, watching the wind build as the remnants of Hurricane Ida roared up the coast, and sleeping soundly in my own warm bed.

Every ocean sailor knows it's better to be on shore wishing you were out there than out there wishing you were on shore. It wasn't long ago that the only information you had to go by to make the difficult decision whether to go or not was your own flawed and limited instinct. Those days are over.

Three of us were supposed to depart Annapolis last weekend, taking Bermudian Tom Vesey's 44-foot cat-rigged ketch Jackrabbit home after it spent autumn in the Chesapeake. The first of November was as early as his insurance policy permitted him to cross the Gulf Stream, supposedly after hurricane season was over.

Whenever Vesey does an offshore passage, he contracts with Commanders' Weather Service in New Hampshire to handle the routing. Commanders' has been around for 12 years and specializes in routing ships and yachts to avoid storms and find the most favorable conditions. The services it provides could not have existed before satellite imagery and modern global communications.

While we scurried around provisioning the boat and fixing broken bits before our Sunday departure date, the folks at Commanders' were watching the weather maps and tracking the progress of a tropical storm that had formed 1,500 miles away in Nicaragua. It soon became Hurricane Ida.

Commanders' doesn't tell a skipper what to do, but the guidance it gives makes the decisions easier. Sunday, when we were supposed to push off, dawned clear and mild in Annapolis. But from their perches in the heavens, satellites were sending grave warnings. Commanders' reckoned by the time we reached the Gulf Stream on Tuesday or Wednesday, Ida's remnants would be roaring in, easterly winds would be near gale force and seas would be 15 to 20 feet.

The Gulf Stream runs northeast at up to four knots. When it slams into contrary winds from the north, seas build to breaking combers that can wash over and bury a low-slung sailboat in green water and froth. No go, said Vesey, wisely.

Monday and Tuesday passed uneventfully, with very little breeze and only a high overcast signaling the possibility of bad weather approaching. You wonder if you did the right thing. But by Tuesday night, Vesey's wife, April, called from Bermuda to say winds were howling there, blowing up so much spume she couldn't see the water from their hilltop home 150 yards from the sea.

Wednesday morning we downloaded and printed weather maps from NOAA that showed 40 and 50 knots of wind along our intended track all the way from Cape Hatteras, so-called Graveyard of the Atlantic, to Bermuda, and all from the east, the direction we'd be headed. Vesey and I have both seen 50 knots of wind and more at sea, but never on the nose, the worst possible point of sail, and never sustained for days, as these promised to be. Neither of us ever wants to see it.

"The thing I would probably do in that situation is trail a drogue, drop the sails and drift, and hope we had plenty of sea room," said the skipper, who has thousands of ocean miles. "Then you go downstairs, make a pot of tea and wait."

Waiting for the weather is something seamen have done since Polynesians put the finishing touches on the first papyrus rafts thousands of years ago and set off in search of new islands. Those poor folks could only see to the horizon, and communicated by word of mouth.

In many ways I'm a Luddite, wary of technology and the way it takes over your life. But the sea is a different case. "Use every advantage you have," is good advice to the offshore sailor, because the fight is never fair. The sea holds all the cards; a human in a small boat is but a feather in a cyclone.

On Wednesday, Ida's outer rings began pounding the Chesapeake with strong winds; by Thursday, 50-knot gusts were hammering Norfolk. When I went to take the dog for a walk, she looked at the trees swaying and the rain slanting in and sauntered back inside. It was a good time to be on the sofa watching TV, in the garage tinkering or in your bunk in a boat tied securely to a sturdy pier.

Anywhere but at sea.