People ask me, why do you do this, it seems so hard, so dangerous, so unforgiving. Well, it is. Sailing isn’t a lazy man’s game; sailing is more about thinking then it is about muscle, damn good thing too at my age with my knees.
Sailing in a foreign country, in a different place with different people lets you see things through their eyes. American’s have a perspective on things, a more or less standard set of ‘normal’. It is only when you visit different peoples in their ‘normal’ that you come to appreciate what we all have, it is truly astounding. The Bahamian people are friendly and eager to please, for a price, everything in the Bahamas is for sale, from the best things to the garbage, it’s all meant for making money. They want their heritage, their history, their customs, and our average family income, and you can’t blame them. When you see a 300-foot super yacht pull in to town and the owner peeling off $1,000 bills like paper mashie, well its hard for them to not want more, fancier, stuff.
I sail because I get to meet people, good people, bad people, young people, old people, arrogant people, saints and thieves… some Bahamian, some American, and every other country. Seeing this kind of diversity in as single place, gives you an opportunity to look at yourself by comparison. You can’t do that in a vacuum.
The natural beautify here is breath-taking, astounding, one-of-a-kind. These are things I’d never see if I only sailed the Neuse River, or near shore North Carolina, or the eastern United States, you only get this here.
I’ve spent my working life solving puzzles, seeing problems no one else could see, designing and building solutions. Sailing uses all of those skills, each day is a new set of puzzles to solve, the puzzles aren’t static, they can change right before your eyes, and you have to adapt on the fly, it’s a challenge like no other. The sea is the ultimate test platform for anything designed and made by man, you get to ask yourself, ‘how does my designs hold up under the worst test chamber in the world?’ It will let you know., it has let me know.
There is something called the cascade of errors, in essence one bad decision leading to another, until it’s to late, you get to a point of no return, that is when really bad things happen. You halt the cascade by thinking far enough ahead to see that it could end badly if certain things happen. But if you change your decisions early enough, you break the cascade. Sort like this, I want to go from point A to point B, here is the straight line to get me there in the shortest amount of time, but doing so I sail head on into the wind and swells and if they build, get higher and steeper the boat will eventually breach (bow into the next swell {wave}) which puts tremendous forces on the structure of the boat. That is the typical power boaters mind set, point A to point B, straight line, full speed ahead. I’m sure that everyone has had a power boat ride into the sea where is sound like every screw and bolt in the entire boat is coming undone. I should also say that there are many professional power boat captains who understand the limitations of their vessels and adjust accordingly. A sailor solves that problem differently, his path from point A to Point B looks like a zig-zag, 45 degrees to each side of the wind/swells, speed isn’t the goal, a safe arrival in whatever time it takes. A sailboat under sail rides peacefully up and down each swell, no stress on the boat or her crew, the skill of the captain here is to find that ‘sweet spot’ the perfect angle to the seas to maximize comfort and speed, that sweet spot will probably be different on each side of the course line. Usual an autopilot can’t do it for long periods of time, the captain has to hand sail for a lot of the trip. The captain can feel the boat (yes I actually mean feel) and adjust accordingly in a way a piece of electronics can’t, at least not yet. Since this is all dynamic, the force of the wind, its direction, the sea state, direction, swell period, all change all the time, none of it is ever constant. That is the ultimate puzzle to solve, from minute to minute, hour to hour, and day to day.
Sailing Boater vs Power Boater, in a nut shell the sailor works with nature, riding on top of the swells, using the wind, and accepting what nature has to offer, a Power Boater tries to force his will on what nature is offering, blasting through the swells and ignoring the wind.
When I was a young sailor and teaching myself to sail, I would sail the boat with my eyes closed, I could adjust the sails to maximize the balance between the forces on the boat and the forces on the sails. On Aine I can feel the sweet spot through my feet and legs, the place where the sails are at just the right angle, you can feel the boat accelerating, you can feel the heal (angle of the hull to the water, think tilt) of the boat, you can feel the direction and force of the wind on you face and arms. All the things you need to know to sail, you can feel with your eyes closed.
There are a lot of reasons why I sail.