Few activities depend as much on eyesight as sailing does. When we’re on the water, we’re
looking all the time, and what we see is often beautiful. Having had poor eyesight since my youth, I have never taken this for granted, which is why every boat and phenomenon seems fresh and new to me. Perhaps that’s why I find myself thinking so much about looking at boats, though I suspect this art also means a great deal to others who can exuberantly say, with Psalm 104, “There go the ships.”
The art of looking at sea has two realms. One concerns observing the details of seamanship, the other takes in the sleekness of boats. When done properly, both types of looking are done in two ways—to enjoy the sight and also understand what’s going on.
Let’s begin with seamanship, or handling a boat safely and competently. Some sights at sea are beautiful and others are frightening, and a lot are both beautiful and frightening. Every one of these is instructive. Think, for example, of a cumulus cloud rising above the horizon. The darker it is and the higher it is piled up, the more beautiful it looks—and the farther you should stay away from it because, as any weather manual will tell you, a cloud that looks ominous is ominous.
The blend of danger and beauty is part of any bad weather.When we raced out to Fastnet Rock in August 1979, we were hit by a force 10 gale of wintry ferocity. Awe, beauty, and danger walked hand in hand as we charged along on the edge of control alongside huge blue-green, whitecapped waves. When I reached shore I telephoned the woman whom I was seeing at the time and told her how enthralling I had found the storm. She, of course, had been reading newspaper reports of deaths and sinkings, and did not want to hear anything of it. “I hung around the telephone for three days with tears in my eyes worrying that you were dead, and you were out there having a good time?”
I should have kept the wild joys a secret. Living on the edge in a boat on the sea has a hard-edged beauty that no sailor would be content to live without, no matter how sharply it may cut across his contentment, his self-confidence, and his relationships.
More normal seamanship presents other fascinating visual images.Take, for example, the rich picture of a new breeze advancing toward you in puffs that drop here and there, like the feet of a cat sneaking up on its prey. The rough texture and splayed-out designed of these cat’s paws (as these gusts are called, naturally) can look beautiful and can be exploited. Sail toward the dark water
—that’s where the wind is
—but try to keep it to windward so it will lift you, enabling you to steer a little higher or ease sheets.
Reading a catspaw is one good test of a sailor’s visual acuity. Another is reading the tidal current.When the water flows around a buoy for a lobster pot, the ripples are both pretty and an indication of the current’s direction and force. The lower the tide pulls the buoy, the faster the current.
Obviously, then, looking is a valuable tool of good seamanship. Or at least that should be obvious. In a notorious case of denial, in 1987 a blind man of noteworthy courage but not the best judgment announced that he would sail alone across the Atlantic Ocean in a boat whose electronic equipment would do his “seeing” for him, with the assistance of friends ashore. The columnist (and sailor) William F. Buckley, Jr., rightly criticized the fellow, but the reaction transformed an object lesson in sensible seamanship into an immense, gassy debate about human rights that filled the newspapers and television, and was even entered into
The Congressional Record. The fellow did sail off, some gear failed, the boat was towed into Bermuda, and I was left regretting the fact that, though I disagree with Buckley on most issues, I didn’t support him publicly on this one. The fundamental rule here was not equal opportunity but the mariner’s fundamental requirement to be self-sufficient.
You don’t have to have sharp eyes
—or even be a good sailor
—in order to enter the second realm of on-the-water looking, which concerns studying boats. People blind from birth may not know how to read clouds, but everybody probably has an innate vision of what a sleek boat looks like. A sleek boat fits in the water, while an unsleek one, boxy and high, clumps across it. I confess that I used to rebel against this adjective, “sleek,” which seemed lubberly because so many non-sailors used it so readily. I was a snob, of course. Finally recognizing that shore people may be onto something, I have had a change of heart. When Mystic Seaport asked me to write the text for a new collection of 80 classic photographs from its Rosenfeld Collection, the title
Sleek came right to mind. If you have your doubts, study the cover photograph of two big Herreshoff schooners slicing through the sea like a hot knife through butter and ask yourself if they are sleek. That’s the look the photographers wanted. “What motivated us was always the best thing we could see,” Stanley Rosenfeld said when I asked him about his family’s approach to photographing boats over almost 70 years. When everything is right, the boat fits so intimately into her environment that the water and wind seem made for her, not she for them. Although people fall in love with boats, looking at fine boats or their photographs is not merely an emotional activity. As with looking at clouds and wind, there is a practical side to this type of seeing. A boat’s ultimate beauty lies not just in the eye of the beholder but also in the satisfactions of the sailor, and that is why the ultimate judgment of a boat lies with the crew on board a boat in tough conditions. Not always, but often enough, the boat that looks best somehow is the one that ends up performing best, too. So when you look at a boat, look not just for a sleek appearance, but also for the promise of a sleek performance.
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