SAILING ENTHUSIASTS FALL INTO
A CATEGORY ALL THEIR OWN
Fred Dyson – Dyson's Starboard View – Messing About in Boats
There are great gobs of sailing enthusiasts in Alaska. Big Lake, Seward, and Kachemak Bay have fleets of sailboats and active racing schedules. Turnagain Arm has a wild and passionate bunch of windsurfing enthusiasts who entertain the Winnebago parades and slow traffic on the road to Kenai.
Sailing people tend to fall into four categories, as follows:
Talkers who don't do it;
Cruisers who tour the waterways, bays, and islands of our water
wonderland;
Esthetic Sailors who just enjoy the process of sailing for its own rewards;
Racers who compete and kill without compunction just to be first to the
windward mark.
The Talkers don't require much space. They are not much different than blowhards in any other field of interest. They spend their time under the tanning lamp instead of squinting into a thirty-knot Northeaster. They spend more time in bars than bays. They are more ready to tell borrowed sea stories than help do any work. These types should be marked on your charts and avoided.
The Cruisers are living the dreams of most of us. They are spending weeks and months of their lives under sail visiting the places the rest of us read about. These folks know their boats, know real sailing, and have a remarkable range of skills. They can navigate, fix things that are broken, respond to emergencies with calmness and confidence, and live independently for months at a time. They pick boats that are handy, seaworthy, tough and comfortable in masochistic sort of a way. If you know some of these types, cherish them, they are real seafarers.
The Esthetic Sailors are the sensitive types who just enjoy the experience of sailing. They like the feel of the wind over the gunnel and the boat standing on its chines (lower comer of the hull). They like the power of fair hull and properly trimmed sails on a reach and the boat's effortless travel without noise or exhaust fumes. Ernie Gann captured some of the feel of a sailor for his craft in the book "Song of the Sirens." Good stuff, that.
The Racers are all off the scale and crazy by definition. They sail to WIN and to WIN at all cost. Mostly they sail in Class boats that are nearly exactly the same, in closed courses with mass starts. They spend much of their life working at improving their boats to gain a minuscule advantage. They bully and intimidate one another to gain advantage at the start of a race and then try to outmaneuver their opponents at every opportunity.
Years ago, I was on a tugboat going through the Locks in Seattle, when a six-meter sailboat tied up next to us. These boats are pure racing machines with no accommodations. The crew slept between the ribs in sleeping bags and ate out of brown bags and thermos bottles.
I asked the skipper how the races had gone, and he said, "Good."
He paused for a moment and then said, "I had a tough decision on the windward leg of the second race. My oldest boy was handling the jib sheets in the forward cockpit and he got washed overboard."
"I wouldn't have minded stopping to pick him up, but we were ahead of the fleet and would have lost position." He shook his head. "It was a tough decision 'cause the kid was a pretty good hand and I didn't know where I could pick up someone to replace him for the next race." Then he brightened a little.
"It worked out, though. I reached over the lee side of the boat and grabbed him by the hair and pulled him over the transom. We won the race," he beamed.
Some of the Racers are fairly nice people when they are off the water, but you wouldn't want your sister to marry one.
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