Mayday! Here I Come!

I’d wondered …

The Financial Times had an article on July 1 that scratched an itch. And scratched it in a way that made me more or less smile.

I grew up on the Severn River. (The Naval Academy anchors the Severn’s wide end, at the junction with the Chesapeake Bay.) Though I didn’t go to “the academy,” I went on to spend 4 years as a regular officer (USN, not USNR … Big Deal), in Vietnam and the Pentagon. In my own mind I … Bleed Blue, as us watery types call it.

The FT article: “Lost or Hurt at Sea? Phew!” In short the author, Victor Mallett, who writes about sailing, contrasts the sometimes shabby record of mountain climbers (shabby = leave other climbers to die) with the extraordinary lengths, with major risk of life and limb, and at routine cost of a likely racing victory, that sailors go to to rescue those who are stranded and or wounded at sea. Mallett: “I cannot imagine any sailor knowingly leaving another to die if there was the slightest chance of effecting a rescue—regardless of hardship and difficulty, let alone one’s personal ambitions or position in a race. Those climbers who passed [David] Sharp [who died], remember, were not on their way down from the summit, but on their way up with reserves of oxygen and personal energy.”

Etc. Etc.

“Eternal Father, strong to save …”

Tom Peters posted this on July 13, 2006, in Leadership.
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