Sailors’ creed trumps landlubber’s reckoning

It’s not polite to bust the chops of a man adrift, so before sounding off on the lunacy of trying to sail around the world by yourself and having to be rescued, I planned to wait until Ken Barnes Jr. was safe.

I’m glad I did, because after a few phone calls and a little thought, I’m changing my tune.

Does it make sense to play Magellan minus the crew? Especially when you read that private and commercial fishing vessels all committed time and potentially their safety to rescue Barnes off the coast of Chile in bad weather? It’s human nature (at least, mine) to feel a little resentful toward the sailor who got himself into the mess.

Spoken by a true landlubber.

Death wish? Utterly reckless? Self-absorbed adventurer? A guy who owes someone some money for his rescue?

That’s what I asked a few longtime sailors Friday, trying to get a fix on what kind of person takes off around the world by himself on a boat.

“I think it’s correct to say it’s a small subset of sailors who would want to do it,” says retired engineer Craig Smith of Newport Beach. But it’s much too simplistic, he says, to categorize those who do as daredevils.

“It demands a supreme degree of self-confidence,” says Smith, 68, and the author of “Extreme Waves,” a new book about rogue waves at sea and the perils they create. “You’ve got to picture that you’re all alone, out there at a time when the boat is bouncing around so much that it must be fearful. And you have to sleep, so you have to put it on autopilot and hope you don’t run into a whale or an iceberg or a big ship.”

Smith says he’s interviewed “a number of people who have done what Ken attempted to do” and that it’s hard to lump them together.

Most do it because “it’s just something they want to do,” he says. Most accept the risk. Most know what they’re doing. Most prepare conscientiously for the trip. History tells us of some who did it on a whim, Smith says, and “didn’t fare too well.”

Smith isn’t sure how many solo sailors have circumnavigated the world but said it could be in the hundreds. Setting out to do so, he says, isn’t tantamount to a death wish.

That was seconded by Tom Kardos, an Aliso Viejo man who has done some long-distance sailing. “In modern craft, where it’s a complex ocean-going craft or aircraft,” Kardos says, “there are means by which a single operator can handle everything.”

He emphatically disputed my inference that solo sailors were heedless risk-takers. On his own 40-foot sailboat, Kardos says, “I have various means to avoid or mitigate risk.” In 2005 he sailed from Los Angeles to Costa Rica and then the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. Oddly enough, he required a rescue two years ago when he was just 10 miles offshore as he tried to kite-surf to Catalina Island.

Far from having a death wish, Kardos says, circumnavigators are more likely to want to live life to the fullest. They want to experience things most people don’t, Kardos says. And as a way of passing on what they’ve learned, he says, many sailors then talk to others about their experiences and widen those people’s views of the world.

Smith suspects a huge wave knocked Barnes’ boat out of commission. He tells of interviewing a Southern Californian who has sailed around the world twice in competitions and who, on one trip, was roiled by winds of 40 to 50 mph and 50-foot waves near where Barnes’ fateful experience occurred.

Despite its fearsome reputation, it’s not as though navigating Cape Horn is tantamount to a death wish, says Andrew Dossett, another veteran sailor. He’s been sailing for 60 years but his longest solo venture was from California to Hawaii.

Sailing around Cape Horn, he says, might well be seen as “the ultimate challenge. I don’t know if I sailed around the world I’d go by Cape Horn,” Dossett says, “but I think all of us sailors would like to sail around it. Recently on a cruise, we went around it and the captain said, ‘We hope the weather permits us to sail around the Cape. Everyone on board was aghast, saying, ‘That’s why we’re on the ship, to sail around it.’ Turned out it was like the east end of Catalina.”

Although Dossett, 79, never came close to contemplating a round-the-world trip, it’s not daredevil stuff, he says. He knows of a “conservative ocean-sailing guy,” for example, who has done it seven times. “It used to be regarded as un-seamanlike to sail solo,” Dossett says, “because you can’t keep watch all the time, but that has changed.”

OK, they’ve convinced me Barnes doesn’t deserve to be dissed for making the try. We wouldn’t have any adventurers if society scorned risk-takers.

But how about the dicier question of paying for the trouble Barnes caused his rescuers?

A fair question, Smith says, but he notes that Barnes, even with a communications system, wouldn’t have reasonably expected to be rescued if he ran into trouble near Cape Horn. Rather, his thinking most likely would have been that he would be killed if he got surprised by a serious storm with monster waves.

Smith notes that the southern latitudes are known as the Roaring 40s, the Furious 50s and the Screaming 60s. In other words, it’s not as though Barnes took a supreme risk and counted on others to bail him out.

It’s just that 99.9% of seaman, Smith says, follow a simple code:

“It’s a pretty deep-seated tradition,” he says, “that if a ship is in trouble and that if your vessel is in the area and is closest to it, you’ll go help the other guy.”

Yes, there have been occasions when rescuers have died, Smith says.

So, here’s my conclusion: Ken Barnes might have gotten in over his head. Maybe he made tactical mistakes. But it’s as likely he got blindsided by a rogue wave that wasn’t preordained.

And if I’m reading the maritime code correctly, as these sailors explain it, when you rescue someone from likely death on the high seas, you don’t then hand them a bill for your services.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.