NE Sailboat: For some reason or another you seem intent on bashing
Barnes with a lot of venom. You've posted 1/3 of the responses to this
thread and seem to be drawn to following this post. That's easy to do
when you're sitting behind a computer somewhere in the NE. You weren't
on his boat and you don't know the conditions of his systems or of
Barnes himself.

Many people set out on voyages not fully prepared for them. You over
estimate your abilities or the condition of your boat and you under
estimate the severity of the conditions that you can run in to. Many
times luck is on your side and you escape unscathed. Sometimes luck
runs against you and all hell breaks loose. I suspect that it was a
combination of the above.

I think about the 1st time that I sailed from Newport, RI to the BVIs
and I can't believe how nieve I was. Back then I had at most sailed
from RI to Florida and back and had done at most a handful of over-
nighters. Now I'm amazed at how little I knew, but I came through in
one piece.

Since then I've put on 30,000+ miles and still would doubt my abilities
to handle the conditions in the off the coast of Chile. I have no
desire to go there, call it either having the brains to know my limits
or not having the balls to undertake such an adventure. But you have to
give the guy credit for trying.

If you read the credits at the bottom of his web page it appears that
he's spent the last 4 years planning and preparing for this voyage. One
can hardly consider this a lark on his part. Things just went bad for
him. After all of this planning I doubt that he would just abandon his
boat for no real reason.

Most accidents aren't due to a single failure. They're due to cascading
events and fatigue. None of us were there and we don't know the whole
story. Right now we're relying on dribs and drabs of info from the news
media, some of which seem to be wrong. It's not fair to criticize the
guy until all of the facts come out. Even then, it's easy to be a
Monday morning skipper and say how you would have done things
differently.

-- Geoff