MAX EBB — I
MAX EBB
t was not the regular crowd in the yacht club bar. Especially for a Wednesday. It was way too crowded, and mostly with strangers. But this was not just another corporate rental. I could tell -—or at least I thought I could tell — by the way these people walked that they were sailors. Of course, the casual dress might have been a more obvious giveaway, but sometimes business groups are downdressed too when they rent the club. These people walked like sailors. "What's the event here tonight?" I asked the only known club member I could find in the room as I pried myself into a small space next to him at the bar. He was watching a football game on the TV overhead, mostly oblivious to the activity all around him. "Something about a 'crew list' party or some such," he said. "I think it's related to a cruising rally to Mexico." My friend was more of a powerboater than a sailor, so that was as much detail as I could get from him. The bartender was too busy for me to get her attention, so I decided to circulate for a bit and see if there was anyone at the party I knew. It didn't take long. "Max!" shouted Lee Helm from halfway across the room. "It's, like, so cool that you're here. Are you going to Mexico this year? With your boat? Or looking for a crew spot?" Lee Helm is a grad student at the university, and I didn't think she would have time to go cruising until her thesis was finished. "No, I can't take that much time off from work," I said sadly. "Are you going?" "For sure!" she answered. "But I'll only be away for ten days, can't stay with the boat all the way to Puerto Vallarta. We'
re looking for two more crew, BTW. Come on over to our table; we have an awesome pupu plate." "Okay, thanks. Do I have to buy a ticket?" I asked as she led me toward the dining room. "I'll sneak you in," she whispered, and then marched me past the person guarding the dining room entrance at well above hull speed. "He's with me," she explained without slowing down. We were out of range by the time there was a response from the
"She looks like the type who gets seasick," said the owner.
gatekeeper. "New recruit?" asked Lee's friend at the dining room table, who I learned after we were introduced, was the owner of Lee's ride to Mexico. "He's a very experienced sailor," said Lee. It was an attractive offer, once the details were disclosed: Big boat, downwind route, beach party at every stop, and best of all, a full-time cook onboard. But I just couldn't take the time off work. "What about that woman who was here a few minutes ago?" asked Lee. "I thought she'd be, like, a great addition to our crew." "Maybe, but she looks like the type who gets seasick," said the owner. "Don't you Correlation between pre-departure DFA and seasickness. DFA is "Detrended do a shakeFluctuation Analysis," or the temporal self-similarity of the shift in center of down sail in the gravity of the standing test subject. A higher DFA index is thought to indicate more rigid control of body position and balance. It seems unlikely that this ocean, just to characteristic can be discerned by eyeball, but other equally subtle aspects of see who has sea legs?" I asked. the sailor's walk might offer clues to seasickness susceptibility. "Don't need to," the skipper answered. "I can tell." "How?" Lee and I asked simultaneously. "It's the walk. The stance and the body sway. Plus, I did an eye-motion screen, and she didn't pass." I looked at Lee, thinking
this skipper might be a few clicks short of a full hoist.
S
ensing our skepticism, the cruising skipper explained further: "There's new research that demonstrates what I've suspected for years: Certain characteristics of how people stand and how they walk are reliable predictors of susceptibility to seasickness. Not 100% reliable, mind you, but the correlation is clear. It's a good first screen." "Who did this research?" asked Lee. "One of the best papers on the subject is by Stoffregen and Chen," the owner said. "published just three years ago." Lee, as usual, was quick on the draw with her smart phone. "Here it is," she announced after just a few seconds of online searching, during which I barely had time to sample some of the assorted sushi snacks on the table. "Archeologists have recovered remains of ships up to 8,000 years old," she read from her phone, "while other evidence suggests that human seafaring may extend back 60,000 years. By comparison, wheeled vehicles and equine domestication are less than 6,000 years old. Thus, watercraft may be the earliest form of vehicular travel." "That's just the intro," said the cruising skipper. "Look at the graphic that relates sway movement to susceptibility." Lee was able to explain, after a few minutes reading the test protocol while I sampled more sushi, that "sway" in this context was the movement of the center of gravity of a standing test subject, measured by a pressure plate. Four centimeters of sway is typical, even for a subject standing steady on dry land. The test subjects, students who signed up for a Semester at Sea program on a 600-ft ship, were asked to stand on the center-of-gravity-sensing pressure plate before the ship left port. "Here it is," said Lee. "Detrended Fluctuation Analysis" or DFA of the movement of the center of pressure on
