The captain of the grounded cruise ship Costa Concordia says he hit an “uncharted rock.”

Really?

Let’s look at that in two parts — the literal (could he really have hit an uncharted rock) and the metaphorical (how can you plan to keep your project off the rocks). We’ll start with part 1 today.

Boating on the Rocks

First, a confession. I have hit a rock that “no one” knew was there, in well-understood waters.

I used to race large sailboats. In one race a decade ago, we were fighting for the lead as we came to the turn-around point in the race, a small island in very, very deep Puget Sound called Blakely Rock. Most racers here round it twice a year in two different races each called the Blakely Rock Race. We know it well. There’s a broad shelf on the northwest side — let’s call it a reef, in keeping with the Costa Concordia articles. Everyone knows that you give Blakely Rock a wide berth to the northwest as you round it. That shelf is usually underwater, but we all know it’s there, in part because almost every race there’s at least one boat that cuts it too close and scrapes their keel along the bottom, usually with little or no damage.¹

But the other three sides of Blakely Rock drop steeply to the sea.

Puget Sound is very deep — almost 1000 feet deep in spots, though it’s only about three miles wide. It’s a fjord, basically, carved by glaciers.

So there we were, in second place in our division. We cut close to the rock to pass the last boat between us and the lead, and then… wham! We came to a sudden stop.

We’d hit — and come to rest upon — an underwater spire. We were a good 50 feet from the Rock, with its near-vertical eastern face to starboard, and we were hard aground on something where there shouldn’t be anything.

As other racers passed us, they stared, because they too “knew” there was nothing there. Except that at low tide, a spire that is normally covered by 10 to 20 feet of water was now covered by only 7 feet… and covered also by a large sailboat with nine frustrated but uninjured crew.

We got a tow off the rock (thanks to the late race photographer Kelly Henson, who tossed us a line once she stopped laughing) and limped back to the dock and thence to a boatyard to repair the damage (bent keel bolts and a beat-up keel fin, easily if not cheaply repaired). After the race people kept coming up to me and saying, “What did you hit? There’s nothing there!”

Note in the chart at left I’ve included an inset showing our approximate course (the red arrow). The asterisk is a symbol that means “rock you can hit.” Note how quickly we went from 87 feet of water to 7. On the larger chart section you can see the well-known shelf north and a bit west of the rock. Also, note the depths near the right edge of the larger chart — 719 feet, 681 feet, etc. Puget Sound is seriously deep.

Three facts relating to all of this:

1. No boaters in their right mind would approach this island at full speed… except when you’re racing, where every foot of distance you don’t have to cover is a foot closer to the lead. Grounding is an “occupational hazard” when you race; pretty much every one of the 200 boats in the Seattle racing fleet has found the bottom at one time or another, though few find it as abruptly as we did. (There are lots of sandy shelves where, especially in light wind, sailors get as close to the shore as possible to avoid the powerful currents that run through the Sound.)
2. No boaters in their right mind, lacking “local knowledge,” would traverse anything but a marked ship channel without a chart.² (Racers quickly build up that local knowledge, but as I’ve demonstrated, it’s fallible.) That said, I’ve seen way too many boaters, mostly but not always powerboaters, who indeed run across even marked reefs, but they’re crazy to do so… and it often costs them their boats (and occasionally their lives, given that Puget Sound is frigid even in summertime).
3. Rocks are no longer “discovered” the hard way. Areas where commercial boats travel are heavily mapped using sonar and depth sounders. Any possible hazards are charted, and they are marked by buoys and other devices. Commercial travel lanes are routed to avoid these hazards. (Note the purple “traffic lane” at the right edge of the chart fragment shown above.)

The Uncharted Rock

Could there have been an uncharted rock where the Costa Concordia traveled?

That’s the wrong question. Here’s the right one:

Could there have been an uncharted rock where the Costa Concordia was supposed to travel?

Almost certainly not. The Tyrrhenian Sea off Isola Giglio is heavily traveled by commercial vessels. It is certainly possible that the particular rock the captain hit wasn’t on the charts… but it is almost impossible that the captain had the boat where it was supposed to be. The waters off the coast of the island are over 300 feet deep, except when you approach the shore off Le Scole point. In fact, the configuration of the island where he grounded are such that any experienced boater would expect to find rocks and reefs: a chain of visible small islands extending from an onshore peninsula. Of course there are rocks there!

Some commentators have asked, Shouldn’t he have at least seen the rocks? To that I can say, probably not. These cruise ships draw about 30 feet of water (meaning their bottom is at least 30 feet below the surface). A rock 30 feet underwater is by definition not visible.

But…

1. The boat was, it appears, well out of the marked/safe area for commercial vessels, let alone a ship the size of the Costa Concordia.
2. The reef or rock it hit may or may not have been on the chart (I’ll bet it will turn out to have been marked once they reconstruct the accident), but any experienced boater would have considered it likely that there were rocks and reefs in the area.

Lessons for Project Managers

So what are the lessons for project managers here? Well, there’s the obvious one, which is don’t drive your project on the rocks, but let’s go deeper than that.

And I’ll go deeper (30 feet deeper, I guess) tomorrow.

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¹Racing sailboats generally have keels that stick down about four to eight feet below the waterline. My boat at the time, a Schock 35, “drew” about seven feet (the bottom of the keel was seven feet below the surface of the water).

²When I’d race outside the Seattle area, or when I’d sail casually anywhere, I always had charts out, even for routes I’d traveled a dozen times. We live part-time (and kept our last boat) in the San Juan Islands about 70 miles north of Seattle, a paradise of small, rocky islands and islets — up to 700 of them, depending on how you count. It’s full of rocks, reefs, twisting unmarked channels, and wicked currents running at up to 7 MPH. No matter how many times I’d made a particular trip, I always double-checked my charts. Even if I’d wanted to stay in the deep commercial-traffic lanes, there would be times when the 450-foot ferries that serve the Islands would be using those lanes. Many of the passages aren’t wide enough for a ferry and another vessel, so you wind up hugging the shore and avoiding the rocks anyway. Charts — paper or electronic — are essential; there are too many rocks and reefs to commit to memory once you’re outside the bay where your boat is moored/docked.