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03-02-2003
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Contributing Authors
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Join Date: Jan 2000
Posts: 90
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Learning: The Next Challenge
New learning is not as valued as it should be. Before recommending some venues for gathering it, I want to speculate about why so many sailors resist it. The answer, I think, is that sailors are by nature an opinionated lot. Scratch a sailor and you will draw not blood but a prejudice. Mention “life jacket” around the bar and though nobody knows much about different types of PFDs, everybody will have something to say —and vehemently, too. Some will demand laws requiring everybody to wear a PFD all the time. Others will shout that such rules are an unconstitutional and even immoral restriction on their God-given right to go out and commit nautical suicide. Your ears ringing from that quarrel, you quickly change the subject to keels, only to be hectored about the perfection of multihulls. Say something nice about a catamaran and someone starts pounding the bar about tris. Time to change the subject again, but don’t mention the America’s Cup (unless of course you want to start a riot). If you think I’m exaggerating, invite some friends aboard your boat and ask them to describe the vessel of their dreams. Notice how opinionated they are. Some will insist that the perfect boat must be this or have that, while others will demand that the ideal vessel must be that and have this. As the debate warms, notice how irritated you are at your friends who ignore your broad hints that they need look no farther for perfection because they are already in the greatest yacht ever built. | | Other barriers are set up around seamanship, and that’s not a good thing. Close-minded, proud sailors may be entertaining companions around the bar, but they also may not be the best shipmates. Seamanship is a universal art learned by being open-minded and thoughtful, not argumentative and contrary. If you read this column regularly, you know that I like to seek out seamanship tips in events outside our usual experience. After one column about lessons learned from the Volvo race around the world, a reader vehemently protested that it had nothing to teach us because such a race is totally unseamanlike. I beg to differ. Though the boats and situations of the America’s Cup and the 'round-the-world races may be remote, they do challenge flesh and blood sailors at least as much as an afternoon squall. Like the average weekend cruiser or racer, the Russell Couttses, Dawn Rileys, Ellen MacArthurs, and Stan Honeys struggle with hard chances and balky gear. They became good because they spend enough time on the water in challenging situations to realize that the best way to become an able seaman is to be humble and never stop learning. They take chances, they endure knocks, and they permanently prop open their eyes and ears and minds to new experiences and new lessons.
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This does not mean that you should take stupid risks. When Joshua Slocum advised, “To young men contemplating a voyage, I say go,” he was writing as a competent seaman who would expect that his “young men” would learn some sailing before heading out to sea. But Slocum’s faith and optimism are not often expressed today in sailing, where “caution” has become a synonym for “fear” and the worst-case scenario has become the rule for not just some decisions, but all of them. We must remember that broad, sensible, and well-traveled road that runs between silly risk-taking and, on the other side, knee-jerk alarmism of the contemporary sort that expresses itself in the notion that safety lies in writing more regulations.
Moderation counts. Ralph Waldo Emerson did not say that consistency is a “hobgoblin of little minds.” He said that about foolish consistency. The same goes for foolish caution, which can be constipating. Caution is a good thing, but not the only good thing. What we need more of is learning and challenge. Two very different modern-day sailors regarded them as twins. One is the late Tristan Jones, whose roster of maritime accomplishments (at least as he described them in his many books) is legendary. As it turns out, “legendary” is the right word to describe many of his tales, which are as false as his romantic Welsh name. Arthur Jones of Liverpool wanted to write books. Requiring a subject to write about, he invented one: himself. Yet as he labored at fabrication, Jones also gathered some 75,000 miles of small-boat voyaging in his lifetime, all the while working hard to make himself into a fine seaman. As Anthony Dalton says, “Tristan Jones was an enigma,” but that is no reason to entirely discard him, or to learn from him.
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Compare Tristan Jones with today’s sailing star, Ellen MacArthur. Now only 26, this slightly built, headstrong Englishwoman did not just leap out to sea. Once she discovered in her mid-teens that she wanted to spend her time in boats, she went to sailing school. Once she had grasped the basics in the classroom and her early sails, she bought a little boat and went sailing. Then came her phenomenal record of offshore triumphs in which, along the way, she realized that she was where she belonged. She loved sailing so much, in fact, that she worried that she was not pushing herself hard enough in long races. Her competitors ended up hating the experience, but she has written, “I hadn’t wanted the race to end.” The best way to measure people is how they respond not to success but to failure. By that standard, Ellen MacArthur is a giant. In late February, while trying to break the record for nonstop circumnavigations, her 110-foot catamaran Kingfisher 2 was dismasted in the Southern Ocean. Her hard-won maturity showed in her response. Once she had vented her understandable fury, she became reflective: “It's a funny feeling sitting out here thinking about all that has happened, and wondering what might have been. But then the ‘what ifs’ will always exist in life. They will never disappear, but you can choose to ignore them. What's done is done and, however you want to look at it, you learn from it, we have learned from it. We must just get up and on to the next challenge.” “On to the next challenge.”
If such a sailing star can benefit from a little classroom work and book learning, so can any sailor. Off to School We Go: Sailing Seminars Spring is the time for sailing seminars in America, and here are three programs that will teach you things that you probably don’t know and have never considered: Cruising & Seamanship Seminars are one-day programs on seamanship, sailing safety, and sail trim aimed at typical cruising sailors. Run by North U, the educational arm of North Sails, there are 14 of these seminars around the country this year. (I helped develop the curriculum and will be teaching seven seminars.) For more information: www.northu.com/cruisingschedule
Safety at Sea Seminars are all-day (in some cases two-day) programs on boat and personal safety under the aegis of the US Sailing Association. Seven seminars are scheduled this spring, and I recommend them strongly for sailors heading offshore. www.ussailing.org/safety Suddenly Alone, a one-day seminar aimed at couples and women, was developed from the safety at sea seminars by the Cruising Club of America. One Suddenly Alone seminar will be held on March 29 in Riverside, CT. www.cruisingclub.org |
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