This is a letter I wrote to a sailor in Michigan who wrote BAADS asking how he might best help his 6 year old blind grandson to enjoy sailing. I find much of what I said then still fairly appropriate but have added updates in paragraphs beginning "1999". I wrote this only a few months after joining BAADS, which we think was April of 1992. We started our ASA class in October of 1993.
June 2, 1992
Dear Mr. S.,
Your letter to "Bay Area Association of Disabled Sailors" was forwarded to me by Grant Ross as I am, at present, the only blind member of the club. Although I know of many other blind sailors, I do not happen to have personal contact with them, therefore this should be considered as a very personal and subjective response.
I will divide the letter in two parts, the first being personal thoughts on my appreciation of sailing and what I have learned in my all-too-brief sailing experience as a blind person. The second part will be somewhat more objective; in that I work as a developer of technological aids for the blind, I will discuss some aspects of such as they relate to sailing.
I have sailed very intermittently over the last 22 years or so; my first sailing experience occurred in 1970 when the state college I was attending told me I must take physical education classes. Being a person of no great physical prowess, I took classes I thought might be fun, and always having wanted to sail, I took an "El Toro" beginning class and seemed to pass all right (another class I took was archery). I did not attempt to sail alone, although I discussed doing so with my teacher, and I think it could have been managed if we had had the time and space available.
I believe that with an instructor following in another boat, equipped with either a bull horn, a loud voice, or better yet, a "Walkie-Talkie" radio system, a blind sailor could quite well manage a small boat in reasonable conditions. All one really needs is general directions so as to avoid collisions, with practice I am sure I could manage the boat and its relations with wind and water fine.
As an interesting aside, I met Susan, my wife, shortly after completing this course, and on about our third date, suggested that we go to a local lake and rent an El Toro, in which I would give her her first sailing experience. I expected her to shriek, or at the best giggle politely and suggest a walk in the park, but no!! she said sure!!! (EEKS!!! do I know what I have gotten myself into?!) Well, thank Poseiden, I got away with it, guess there must have been very little wind that day.
It wasn't till we had repeated the performance a few times and Sue had become a little familiar with the goings on of sails, tillers and sheets, that we had the step break away leaving the mast hanging out forward at a 45 degree angle (not our fault). Nonetheless we survived that all, and have sailed several times since.
This has included intermittent sailboard experience on another local lake where I have had some success with those wobbly but enjoyable boat-like devices. Sue stayed on shore and directed me by voice through a megaphone. (Comment from Sue: the directions are usually "Tack", "Gybe", "Drop the sail", or "As close to the wind as possible".) Waterproof radios are very much too expensive. I know of several blind board sailors who are very! much better than I (they never even get their hair wet), and they use somewhat the same techniques.
So much for history. In thinking about the aspects of sailing which most interest me and which I feel a blind person can best appreciate, I am reminded of a televised interview with a blind sailor who attempted to cross the Atlantic a few years ago. (He quit at Bermuda, because his excessively fancy technology quit on him). A famous egotistical right-wing word shark/interviewer who thinks he is a sailor stated that he didn't see how a blind person could enjoy sailing as it is such a visual process.
I believe almost the opposite, that vision is really necessary in sailing just to keep from running into stuff, and to make it a bit easier to learn a new boat. Oh well, I guess it is a little easier to see a sail luff than to hear it, but I think that can be learned. Sailing is a very auditory and tactile adventure. There are few greater thrills than coming off the wind and feeling the boat heel and sails take the strain. You of course know that, but next time you do it when you have someone else to handle the collision avoidance for you, close your eyes and see how much of that wonderful feeling remains alive.
As noisy as sailing can get, and I have not yet experienced anything which can be called weather, there are so many separate and separable noises which tell me what is happening, along with the tactile and kinesthetic sensations from the boat and gear, that I think much of the pleasure taken by a sighted person in sailing is there for me.
[1999: I've now been out in weather! It's noisy, cold, wet and rather scary, but I'm glad I did it and may again, who knows. I think it would take a lifetime's experience before I'd take the helm in truly dangerous conditions. I am often told by supposedly experienced sailors that they sail with their eyes closed. I ain't seen anyone do it much yet, so will await experience before I believe all some people say they can do blindfolded. People kid themselves into believing all sorts of silly stuff!]
The best advice I can give you about introducing a blind person to sailing, you already know: do as little as possible to limit his exploration of the boat and its environment. The phrase "Don't touch that" is almost the worst thing that can be said to a blind child.!!!! It should be used only when touching will bring the kid into immediate danger.
In the electronics laboratory where I work, we have soldering irons, drills, and all manner of tools strewn about the place with great abandon. The first thing we tell all blind visitors is to explore; nothing here will hurt you, and you will not hurt anything here in any really important way.
The saddest thing we ever see is the blind person who has been oppressed for so long that he/she will not explore: someone who upon being handed a gadget in which he has expressed an interest just lets it sit there in his hands until carefully shown what to do now. Bringing up a blind person with this attitude battered into him should be considered an offense worthy of being keelhauled through the props of a four screwed stink pot in Antarctic seas and in the presence of several large "Great white sharks".
(Comment from Sue: Anytime we stop in a hardware store aisle, I can count on Tom to be exploring, touching whatever is close to hand. He can usually describe the panels of ham radio gear he hasn't been near for 20 years, and frequently works out the mechanics of a device faster than I can. This is possible because he has always explored his surroundings by touch.)
Sorry for the diatribe.
A few suggestions which you have probably already thought of. See if you can find a good model of the boat on which you most commonly sail. Make sure it is as physically accurate as possible, be careful that important physical features are not just painted on. Let your grandson have it if you can, if it is a plastic model, let him bang it around, play with it in the bath tub if possible, and otherwise make it part of his life. Show him the parts of the boat with which he is the most familiar, and be sure that if the model has little silly people models on it, they are in correct proportion to the boat itself. This will give him a real feel for the size of things.
Next, if this is practical, next time you haul the boat, find a quiet time at the yard, when other uninformed sighted people will not be around to freak out and get in the way, let him walk around under the boat and feel everything. Standing next to a sail boat, especially one of size, when the keel is at nearly one's foot level and the deck is that far overhead is a most impressive happening and helps give a feeling for sizes.
If your mast can be climbed, even with the aid of a boatswains chair, take him up and show him what the halyards do and so on. In other words, show him everything that can be shown, and if it can't be shown find a model.
One warning, drawings, even raised line ones made by artists, are often a problem. The art of making drawings which communicate to a blind person is not that of the visual graphic artist. For example perspective as used in such work is of no meaning even to experienced well educated blind people. It is merely a trick to fool the sighted into seeing what isn't really there. Use good models wherever possible.
Teach him to swim immediately. Hopefully he will never fall overboard and if he does the harness will make recovery somewhat less chancy and traumatic than otherwise, but being comfortable in the water will make the difference between an experience which could be frightening beyond all possible belief, and one which, although probably hairy and scary enough will not be so unfamiliar.
Get him in the water around small boats, tip over a canoe and let him mess around in it, if possible go sailing in something small and tippable so you can go through that too to teach the proper reactions to a capsize. Besides being excellent and necessary safety and familiarization training, it is a good lot of fun.
You might arrange for him to go off a low dock or a small boat with his harness on, so he can see how it is to be pulled around in the water in it. (I have not yet worn a life harness, and would like to try that myself, except that they'd need a considerable block system to haul me back onboard.)
Also, smaller boat experience, with oars, paddles and sails will get him used to the way things move through the water, and the way tillers and keels and center boards push and pull.
[1999: I've fallen off the dock (my stupidity) and because I am comfortable in the water, I reacted well and no harm was done, except to poor Sue's nerves! (Comment from Sue: I can still hear the traumatic sound of that deep and awful splash!) I still haven't done some of the small boat stuff I recommended and still want to.]
I see no reason why, as he grows, he shouldn't be able to take the helm, probably with you or another sighted person adding occasionally to directions for him. One of my dreams is to stand a solo deep ocean night watch really alone, although that will require a lot of practice and a bit of technical gadgetry.
I see no reason why a blind person who consistently sails on a particular boat should not know every line, block, cleat and shackle on board and be able to perform all tasks expected of any member of the crew with this apparatus unless it specifically requires seeing something which can not be experienced through another sense.
From the tone of your letter, I bet you and your grandson are well on the way to such a situation. Of course he should never be pushed too hard into doing what he doesn't want to do; this is after all supposed to be fun. He must be his own person allowed to develop in his own way.
[1999: I personally prefer hopping about the boat pulling on lines to being at the helm, but I know blind sailors who claim to be hot helmspersons. I have been at the helm of E.T. with no one else on deck for 15 minutes at a time and it was as much of a high as I thought it would be. That was in the Doublehanded Farallons race with Laurence Kornfield. I did however yell for Laurence a time or two when things got quiet and spooky in the troughs of waves. We were broad reaching home in good sized seas and steering was easy: stay between a luff and a jibe and that's good enough! As Laurence said, "What's a little luff between friends."]
Technical assistive things.
I am employed as a rehabilitation engineer at the Rehabilitation Engineering Center of Smith-Kettlewell Institute. We are federally funded by the Department of Education and charged with developing technical solutions to the problems blind people have especially in getting and obtaining jobs.
Most of our work is electronic, and most of that relates to instruments of various sorts. We have designs for devices which can read existing instruments in some cases; where the existing equipment cannot be adapted we often design whole new instruments with nonvisual outputs which best fit the users' needs. We are somewhere between inventors and engineers, and the three blind guys, including myself, who work in our lab build most of our own prototype gadgets, with some help from sighted colleagues.
We can provide anyone with the technical designs for anything we have done, and in some cases can build duplicate devices at cost. (This cost is usually a bit high, as such devices are made one at a time.) Unfortunately most of our devices are not made on a commercial basis as the market for them is so small as to fail to interest capitalists who must make an instant profit before they can get money for anything.
One of the devices we have designed which might be of use to a sailor is an audible compass which produces a pulsing tone. This tone is quietest when the compass is aligned east-west, and when rotated south produces a sharp "Beep-beep,". When turned north of east, it produces a longer repeated "Ding-Ding' sound. Thus, when hung from gimbals, it might be set to its east/west alignment when the boat has reached a desirable course, and would remain quiet unless the boat veers off course in which case the increasing loudness of the beep or ding would alert the blind helmsman to the error of his ways. This compass is a new refinement in design, its sensor is purely electronic, and it is therefore probably a bit more rugged in its basic design than a needle based compass. Since it is new, I have not yet had it out sailing, but it seemed to do fine while I attempted to steer a canoe.
I can envision a more sophisticated compass which could be made to speak its course, and could be set to give a more sophisticated indication of the variation from a given course, but I think that for most sailing the only disadvantage of the present unit is that it always makes some noise.
There are several braille compass designs about, but they require both hands, and steady ones at that, to read and are not particularly accurate. They are fine for standing on a sidewalk and finding out if you are walking north or east, but take too much time and fiddling for the active sailing environment. As I gain more sailing experience with the current compass I will continue to refine my ideas as to the ultimate blind sailor's compass, and see what comes out.
If you have any interest in this or any other device designed by Smith-Kettlewell, please feel free to write me at the work address below. We can send you technical designs for all our devices, and may be able to sell you prototypes of some of them. I would imagine that at six years of age your grandson may be a bit young for such yet, but not for long.
[1999: The Autohelm Audible Compass is far superior to the tone output system we developed at Smith-Kettlewell. Even as good as the Autohelm is, I don't use it that much, but it works well.]
As regards other instrumentation, solutions to problems related to reading instruments can be divided into two categories. The first includes instruments which are electrical in nature and have moving needles or meters. These can be read by electrically connecting audible devices to the actual meter device itself. The second consists of devices which feature "digital" displays, as in calculators, navigation systems etc. These are more difficult and will need more work.
[1999: More difficult is the understatement of the last half of this century. Adapting digital equipment to make it accessible is hard and expensive. It is usually easier to re-invent the wheel. Very rarely the actual equipment manufacturer does the job, as in Autohelm in Britain. Sometimes this even works out.]
[1999: For the kind of sailing I do most of the time, only the lack of an accessible VHF marine radio is a true inconvenience. Autohelm also makes a talking GPS and some other equipment, but I do not feel such is important enough to spend money on. The mechanical wind indicator I mentioned is not yet possible by any practical means I know of. I could do an audible one but again don't consider it worth the effort.]
Again, as I gain more sailing experience I will be working on some of these things. I find an immediate need for the following devices, which I will develop as I figure out how to do them.
A true wind indicator -- unfortunately the good old "tell-tale" is truly a visual device. I find, especially when close hauled, the apparent wind fools me into falling off the wind too much, and when sailing down wind, I often think the wind has died out, thus facing the danger of accidental gybes. (Not a good plan at best.) I am hoping to come up with a simple indicator which can be fixed to the spreaders or shrouds and which will have some simple mechanical pointer easily available in the cockpit which I can check when necessary. This is easy to envision, but must be make simple, rugged and easy to install and keep in repair.
I may also find I need "Luff" indicators on some sails. I have not yet decided if I can learn to differentiate the flapping of the jib leech from the luff of the nearby mainsail.
[1999: I have not yet found an electronic sensor for measuring sail luff or position; am still looking.]
I hope this all has been of some help to you, and that you will continue to make your grandson a real partner in your sailing. If he likes it, and who wouldn't, these experiences will, even if he does not always have access to a boat, be a source of joy and good memories for him and get him started on life as a blind person with experiences of exploration and adventure which will help him to deal with life and gain more from it.
Let me add a small disclaimer here. This is very much a personal response, and although I will pass a copy to other interested members of "BAADS" nothing herein in any way represents the views or experiences of anyone but me.
Tom
Updated 12-10-2000 and 6-20-2005