Risk on the ocean wave

Tuesday February 14, 2012

Ocean rowing is dangerous and costly. Does that mean we should ban it, asks Tom Miers?

An extraordinary trend has started that is becoming increasingly prominent in the media: Groups of men and women, often bearded, always muscled and tanned, sometimes emaciated, rowing across the ocean.

Rowing.

In clumsy looking vessels that dwarf the matchstick oars that propel them. The usual dynamic of rowing boats – trying to get them as light as possible to ease the back-breaking method of propulsion – seems inverted. They have to be big enough to carry provisions, a water maker, basic accommodation and navigation equipment. But unlike a Viking longship or a Greek trireme they have no sail to aid their progress.

The nutters who haul these floating caravans across the Atlantic do so from a variety of motives – raising money for charity, attracting attention to a good cause, the will to break records, or, best of all, from a pure spirit of adventure.

My neighbour, Leven Brown, is perhaps the nuttiest and most romantically minded of all, and could fairly claim (he doesn’t, he’s too modest) to have propelled this extreme sport to something approaching mass popularity. Thanks to him, ocean rowing has replaced climbing Everest and marching to the North Pole as the self-torturing endurance test of choice.

Leven has broken many records, but his first trip was my favourite. With a quixotic sense of history he decided to follow the voyage of Christopher Columbus from Cadiz to the Caribbean, rowing solo. Failing to take into account onshore currents, it took him more than a fortnight of morale-crushing pain to leave the Bay of Cadiz, often making as little as a few hundred yards a day as he sought to escape the magnetic draw of the coast.

But he did it, and his feat has inspired a whole host of imitators, from Ben Fogle and Matthew Pincent to a group of amputee soldiers.

But with this new avenue of adventure comes a problem. Ocean rowing is fraught with danger and mishap, from capsizing to mechanical failure. The most essential piece of kit is the water maker, which desalinates sea water to a potable standard. Without it, the need to carry enough fresh water would render these voyages impracticable. If the machine breaks, the adventure is over.

Surprisingly, collision is another worry. According to Brown, the central Atlantic is like a motorway for tankers which lack the manoeuvrability to avoid small boats and often simply don’t see them.

Only a couple of weeks ago a group of six rowers attempting a record run from Morocco to Barbados capsized and were lucky to be rescued from their life raft by a Panamanian cargo ship. The rescue was co-ordinated by British coastguards in Falmouth.

Listening to men like Leven Brown and following their exploits in the media begs a serious question. These people are taking considerable risks, but the consequences of failure are borne largely by others. There is, of course, a personal risk of death, but the more usual outcome is an expensive rescue, with ships going out of their way and coastguards deployed. Also, if death or injury is a consequence, there are grave implications for family, friends and colleagues.

So why isn’t ocean rowing banned?

It would be much safer and cheaper for society if these idiots stayed at home.

When I ask Leven this, he is understandably outraged at the idea. The primary risks he takes on are his own. His family and friends indulge these risks as part of their relationship with him. The rescue mechanisms are in place to be contingent on all sorts of voluntary activity turning to disaster, including trade, pleasure cruising, fishing and yachting, so they should of course deal with rowers, just as mountain rescue teams assist climbers and ambulances help crashed bicyclists.

In other words, it is simply no business of government to judge whether the risks of a particular activity outweigh the pleasure gained.

You can see where I am going with this. The case of ocean rowing – extreme as it is – highlights how corrosive is the notion of government assuming responsibility for the lifestyle risks taken by informed adults. If the state assumed the same approach as it takes to smoking to rowing, ski-ing, hand gliding, sailing, travelling or indeed any other leisure pursuit, it would tax them, constrict them, ‘de-normalise’ them and eventually seek to ban them.

Indeed, the creep of regulatory intervention in lifestyle pursuits is already encompassing eating and drinking for pleasure. The same specious grounds of cost to society could easily be deployed for almost any pleasurable activity.

The ocean rowing story has a further lesson for us, however, which may help to see off the killjoy tendency. When I ask Leven why there is so little fuss about the cost of rescue, he tells me two very interesting facts. First, the bulk of the cost falls on private concerns. While coastguards might co-ordinate the rescue using the latest communications technology, they rarely use their own boats. Instead they direct the nearest passing vessel to the rowers, which is almost always a private one.

The rescuers are sometimes happy to perform their maritime duty for free, but cargo vessels for whom time is money sometimes charge a fee. As a result adventure rowers often take out insurance against the costs of calamity. In other words there is little cost to society for would be regulators to base their meddling claims on.

Now, there is no clear link between an insurance based medical system and a more tolerant regime of lifestyle regulation. But if those who took risks manifestly bore the costs themselves, they would be in a better position to argue the case for freedom.

Tom Miers is Editor of the Free Society