What do you do, or how did you get involved in this project?

See:

http://home.maine.rr.com/rlma

Actually, it's kind of a hoot how I got involved. The sons of the couple
that own and run the film company that is producing this series are my kids
best friends. At least every other day I am shuttling their kids or mine
back and forth. As they say, "It's not what you know, it's who you know."

Except that, a couple weeks ago, I got a call from someone saying, "Hi, I'm
a producer with the Lone Wolf Documentary Group, you probably never heard of
us but, ...". The fellow found me entirely without realizing that I knew
his bosses.

If you like sea stories, there is a book out called "Tall Ships Down" by Dan
Parrot. It tells about the sinkings of five sail training vessels. I was
involved in the post accident analysis of three of them. One of the
investigations involved going to London to testify in a parliamentary
inquiry as an expert hired by the British government. The ship was owned by
the Queen's cousin. I was the only one in the inquiry to testify that there
was any problem with her stability (which was truly abysmal as the inquiry
eventually found). As I walked into the room where the House of Lords met
during WWII to tell a couple hundred people that the Queen's cousin was
responsible for the death's of 19 people, well, let's just say I was a
little hyped. The moments after I proved, using the defense's own numbers,
that it only took a 22 percent increase in wind speed to capsize the vessel,
there was a stillness in the room that I can still feel. Certainly the most
dramatic moment of my life.

Another of the accidents got it's own book, also recently published. "Pride
of the Sea" by Tom Waldron. I appear several times in the story as I had
basically been trying to tell people for a couple years, "Hey, this boat is
dangerous." I gave a talk on sailing ship stability (and the studies of it
I had done in connection with the U.S. Coast Guard to establish regulations
for school ships) to the Society of Professional Sailing Ship Masters. I
pointed out the "Pride" as being the vessel in the study population that you
would most expect to capsized (aside from the ones that had not gone down
already). At that moment, only the people drifting in the liferaft knew
that the ship had already capsized. They were found the next morning and my
phone rang a few hours later.....

Because of the extensive study I did for the regulatory project, I arguably
knew more about the stability of large sailing ships at one point than
anyone on the planet. A lot of research was done a couple years later and I
drifted away from the whole world of sail to design oceanographic research
vessels, mostly fast high powered ones, and learn how to fly airplanes.

--

Roger Long