OFF MY DOCK
When you don’t know what you’re looking for until you see it.
Some time ago, I read an article about gathering wild morel mushrooms, written by a novice who spent a day tramping through the woods with a veteran morelist. While the expert was filling a bag with fungi, the author could not get off the schneid for hours—until he finally spotted one of the elusive shrooms. Suddenly, he could see morels everywhere. The point being that he could not see a morel until his brain understood what exactly he was looking for. Once that image was in his head, the hunt became easy.
“It’s like deer in the ditch,” my good friend Chuck Larson said as he slammed down the dice cup on the worn blue Formica bar top at the Lake View Inn. “You don’t know what to watch for until you hit a couple of them.” Obviously, this also relates to boating.
Say, for example, you are at the helm of a Grady-White 268 Islander, cruising into Frederick Sound between Wrangell and Juneau, Alaska. You admire the scenery while also keeping watch for whales and deadheads, neither of which you’ve ever seen because you are from Wisconsin, where neither whales nor deadheads proliferate. You look to port and notice, perhaps a half-mile away, a commercial vessel that appears to be steaming along at a good clip on a course that will directly intercept yours. And you also notice the captain waving both arms over his head on the flybridge of this vessel. Odd, you think. And then there’s a flash of orange in your peripheral vision to starboard, and your companion, who is also your employer on this voyage, shouts, “Whoa!” You chop the throttles, nail the trim button and, a moment later, coast right over the drift net attached to a large orange float, now right there off your starboard gunwale. And then it all starts to click in your mind, and you look over at the other boat and notice the captain has kind of slumped over the wheel and might be shaking his head, his disappointment obvious even from this distance.
I still cannot fathom how I missed an orange float, except that maybe the edge of the windshield blocked my view. I dashed astern and observed that our motors had not snagged the net. My employer decided it might be best to avoid confrontation and we should simply vamoose. He made this decision without considering that a new Grady-White 268 Islander with the name of a national magazine plastered in large red letters on each hull side is a bright and shiny thing in southeast Alaska.
About an hour later, another fishing vessel hailed and informed us that the local protocol is to stand by while the net is inspected. We were encouraged to hail the first captain on our return through Frederick Sound and make arrangements to compensate him for the alleged damage we did to the net.
It has bothered me for 27 years that I didn’t see that orange marker. But now I have a name for not seeing the obvious: morelisis, the phenomenon of not knowing what you are looking for.
“I get what you’re saying,” Chuck said. “It took me seven deer and three wives to know what to look for.” Morelisis indeed.
I still cannot fathom how I missed an orange float, except that maybe the edge of the windshield blocked my view.