Yesterday the Coast Guard airlifted a teenage boy from a sailboat 125 miles offshore, off Cape Cod, after the boy began to suffer the effects of dehydration. He was taken to a hospital for medical treatment.

Although the Coast Guard report did not specify the cause of his dehydration, it almost certainly resulted, as it usually does on a boat, from repeated bouts of vomiting due to seasickness.

If you’re not sure whether you or a crew member may experience seasickness when conditions get rough, don’t take chances. Use a remedy to prevent seasickness if possible. This may mean you have to experiment with different remedies to learn which works best for you.

Dehydration can become a medical emergency. Learn what symptoms to watch for.

This summer seems to be starting off badly in terms of boating accidents and fatalities. Just in the last week there have been multiple reports of sailors being rescued, or dying, after falling off their boat.

In Florida, a man fell overboard not wearing a life jacket and is fortunate that someone spotted him and alerted the Coast Guard, which was able to reach him within 20 minutes to effect a rescue.

Two people fell off a sailboat in Lake Michigan, in a harbor just off Chicago, where the winds were gusting 20-30. Another boater rescued one, and the other was pulled out by the Chicago Police Marine Unit and taken to a hospital, where he died shortly after, most likely as a direct or indirect result of the cold water.

We always think it won’t happen to us. And it so often happens in situations not involving an emergency or weather extreme—often at the most routine of times. Last summer in a small New England town a few miles from my own, a man was climbing from his dinghy onto his moored sailboat in the harbor when he slipped and went into the water. Not wearing a PFD. His wife watched from the porch of their yacht club a quarter mile away as he rowed out, but didn’t see him fall in—just noticed the dinghy drifting free a few minutes later on the tidal current that had swept him away from the sailboat. In cold water you don’t have much time. He drowned. It feels especially tragic to think of his wife watching, so nearby, on a calm summer day.

We all know we should wear our PFDs whenever there’s any chance at all of mishap. And in many circumstances we should also wear a safety harness and tether to keep us on the boat. It’s for each of to think about when we do, and when we don’t, and what can happen.

It’s happened again—another sailing accident that should serve as a reminder to us all to be more careful out there on the water.

New England’s been deluged by an early-summer nor’easter that’s brought many days of rain, fog, gloom, and gusty winds. The weather makes many of us antsy, waiting for good days to sail, and sometimes when we decide to break out the foul weather gear and do it anyway, we’re still feeling a little frantic. Maybe that’s what was happening on the J24 racing a couple days ago off Salem, Mass. Not one but two men on the same boat were struck in the head by the boom, one after the other. Both were experienced sailors. Both suffered head injuries and had to be treated at the hospital.

Keeping an eye on the boom when tacking and gybing—and whenever shifting or gusting winds raise the risk of an accidental gybe—is one of the first things sailors learn. Still, it happens. You get caught up in the race or preoccupied with other thoughts, and the unthinkable happens and your head is struck by a flying heavy piece of metal whose force can be considerable—and often lethal. Fortunately both these men recovered from their injuries.

But we’re not all so lucky all the time. Keep an eye out, folks!

It’s not too late to plan to get out on the water tomorrow and sail the longest day of the summer. The “Summer Sailstice” organization makes it easy to find sailing events in your area though a geographical search on their website. Exciting things are happening with sailors everywhere. Crew on someone’s boat, find a flotilla to join in your own boat, or celebrate shoreside with sailors gathering at a favorite waterside pub.

And if you happen to be a dad, this year’s calendar gives you double cause to celebrate on the water!

My recent post on the Coast Guard rescue of a sailboat that went aground in the fog received several comments critical of my assertion that an inexpensive backup GPS could have prevented this disaster and subsequent expensive rescue. I apparently gave the impression that GPS was the only, or best, solution—something I didn’t quite intend.

As readers rightfully pointed out, these sailors could have avoided the situation altogether with basic navigational skills (even dead reckoning with paper charts) and good planning. And even with a GPS they could have gone aground if they simply headed for a waypoint and paid little attention to a current or other factors that could sweep them off course into the shallows. GPS, certainly, is not some sort of guaranteed answer to the difficulty of navigating with limited visibility.

My point should have been that we should use all our available navigational tools and skills at all times—including our brains. There are many ways to keep track of your boat’s position, and if they all fail it’s best not to go anywhere near land or shoals until you’re certain again. Sailors of yesterday had their ways—though ships still went down in storms and unusual situations, but less often simply by naively sailing into danger.

I learned two of my favorite navigational techniques sailing in deep fog in Maine in pre-GPS days. Potato navigation: as the boat ghosts forward in deep fog toward land, someone stands at the bow with a sack of potatoes, throwing one far forward every minute or so, and when you don’t hear a splash ahead you let the anchor down. Spruce navigation: headed up the bay weaving through islands, tack as soon as you smell the blue spruce in the wind blowing off shore.

Got any favorite tricks of your own to share?

The other day I noticed a news item about President Obama having basketball court lines painted on the White House tennis courts and backboards installed, and I thought about how refreshing that was, basketball being far more “of the people” than, say, golf. Then I heard something about him playing golf. Oh well. Do we really need more images of a president jogging with Secret Service agents and playing golf?

Then I recalled that famous old Life magazine cover photo of Jack Kennedy and his future bride Jacqueline smiling on a classy sailboat, wind in their hair. Yes, thought I, Barack Obama should sail. President Clinton at least celebrated our America’s Cup sailboat America True (photo), although the Bushes were known only for speedboats. Yes, Obama should sail!

Unless he does already? I googled the idea and, while I didn’t actually examine all 547,000 resulting hits, couldn’t find any evidence that he’s actually gone sailing in his public life. But he’s been described as sailing metaphorically more than half a million times, and that has to mean something.

During the campaign he was constantly sailing to victory or moving full sail ahead. Now as president he sails the ship of state with a steady hand and sails clear of crisis after crisis. His appointments have sailed through Congressional hearings. The opposition never takes the wind out his sails. And he and Michelle have ever since been sailing around the world with a message of peace and a new image for America.

Metaphors may be the truest measure of reality, suggesting the many positive connotations we sailors have always known about sailing. On a beautiful day at sea, the boat gracefully heeling to the power of wind, the song of water along the hull, nature in harmony with human endeavor—who doesn’t at such time solve all the world’s problems?

Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images

Yesterday I read a news story about another sailboat death—all the more sad because it likely could have been prevented. A man was hoisted on a “sling” to the top of the 29-foot mast of a docked boat to make a repair, and then fell. His head struck something on the way to the deck, and the paramedics’ “life-saving efforts were unsuccessful.”

My guess is that this “sling” was an improvised device used because they didn’t have a proper bosun’s chair to hoist to the mast. A commercial bosun’s chair locks the climber into the chair in a way that it’s virtually impossible to fall out. Other devices such as mast steps and new climbing systems also are generally quite safe when used correctly.

I don’t like to harp on the negative, but all of us should realize that sailing and sailboats involve certain risks that we can minimize greatly with precautions and the right equipment. Read here about safe ways to go up your mast—and prepare in advance so that you’re not tempted to improvise when the need arises.

A few days ago a 40-foot sailboat went aground on a sandbar off Fire Island, New York, in the fog, requiring rescue of the three men aboard. They were sailing from Georgia headed to Newport. According to one of the rescuers, “The fog really hampered their travels when they were getting up in that area. They basically ran into the beach.” Fortunately no one was hurt and the rescue was successful.

This happened quite often a hundred years ago – and surprisingly still happens all too often. The difference is now that such groundings, followed by rescue at taxpayers’ expense – often putting the rescuers’ own lives at risk – are wholly unnecessary.

To be fair, I don’t know what other factors may have come into play beside faulty navigation. The media haven’t reported any details, saying only that the boaters later could not be reached for comment. Maybe there was a catastrophic failure of the rudder or other essential boat gear. Or maybe it was just, to put it bluntly, stupidity. Who would undertake such a voyage, or come even vaguely close to land in the fog, without a working GPS unit? When you can pick up a backup handheld GPS for under a $100, who would do it without a backup in case the boat’s primary chartplotter failed?

As I wrote last week, the Coast Guard rescues several thousand people very year – and a few hundred die. Going to sea without adequate navigation gear should be as unthinkable as not wearing a PFD in risky circumstances. But most of those who die, it turns out, weren’t wearing a PFD after all.

It makes you wonder. What do you think?

It was recently announced that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has received one of the most sophisticated high-tech aircraft in the world, which will be used to detect and track boat smugglers in the Florida area. So far only two planes have this James Bond-like technology developed by the Department of Defense—and the other remains with the military. Integrating telescopic video cameras, infrared technology, radar, and computer systems, this system is said to be so powerful and exact that the pilot can see the smile on a smuggler’s face from 10,000 feet, or a seagull floating on the ocean.

While it’s great that the homeland is becoming more secure against the smuggling of drugs and illegal aliens, I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before the Coast Guard receives the same technology for search-and-rescue operations. Although modern technology has made available the highly efficient satellite-based EPIRB (emergency position-indicating rescue beacon) system that any sailor can use offshore to summon help, once a boat has gone down the Coast Guard still has to search often hundreds of square miles of ocean for a tiny life raft or person in the water. When you read those rescue stories about pilots and crew peering out rain-splattered windows hoping to catch sight of something or someone floating on the ocean below, you realize that so far, EPIRB technology has only gotten the searchers closer to their target but that better visual sighting ability is still needed.

This new spy plane technology seems to hold the promise for a epic leap forward in search and rescue. The Coast Guard is doing a terrific job finding and saving several thousand boaters every year, but nonetheless a few hundred still die annually. Hopefully Congress will extend the budget needed to help us all be a little safer out there on the water.

Recently the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report titled “GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM: Significant Challenges in Sustaining and Upgrading Widely Used Capabilities” that warned the system is at risk for near-future failure if not maintained better and upgraded soon.

From all the resulting furor in the sailing press, you’d have thought that NASA had announced unequivocally that the sky is falling.

Dust off your sextant! Carry paper charts in your hip pocket—everywhere! Don’t get on an airplane! Buy a new plotter keyed to the Russian GPS system for when ours fails! Hubbub! Outroar!

It’s not as if I’m some superpatriot who believes the US government never screws up, but really, c’mon, people! The satellites aren’t falling (yet) and I really doubt a budget issue will ground the system. This reminds me of the Y2K furor nine years ago when some people were convinced every computer on earth would stop and society would rapidly disintegrate back to caveperson days. It just ain’t gonna happen. Look at what this report actually says:

If the Air Force does not meet its schedule goals for development of GPS IIIA satellites, there will be an increased likelihood that in 2010, as old satellites begin to fail, the overall GPS constellation will fall below the number of satellites required to provide the level of GPS service that the U.S. government commits to. Such a gap in capability could have wide-ranging impacts on all GPS users, though there are measures the Air Force and others can take to plan for and minimize these impacts.

There are more qualifiers in those two sentences than you can shake a stick at. “If… likelihood… level commits to… could have… though there are measures…”

That said, I own a sextant myself and keep paper charts on board. But the likelihood of a electric or electronic failure on your own boat is several thousand times that of a whole GPS system failure. If you’re concerned, put your energy into triple backing up your own systems.

Besides, even if a few satellites did actually fall before they fixed the system, with modern GPS receivers your navigational potential error zone might expand only from inches to a few feet.

And if you’re passing within a few feet of a killer rock or reef, I’d say you were already in trouble—long before Chicken Little looked up.

Related article: Basic Navigation with a Chartplotter