Sorry gang, there’s no picture of us whooping it up at the end of training, as per usual. Saturday was a kick in the pants–we began the day with the winds at Robbins Reef gusting to 32 knots–and by Sunday it had laid down to 4 or 5 knots and drizzled on us. Sometimes you get what you want, sometimes you don’t.
But a word about patience. This is probably the most underrated skill of any sailor. After all, we live in a city of go-getters and “patience” isn’t exactly a sexy quality for the NOW NOW NOW crowd. But it’s an undeniable habit or skill to have cultivated. What do you do, for example, when you are trying to get across the channel and the winds are variable in both speed and direction? The current is setting you down and there’s traffic all around. What do you do?
We teach that you should always “trim for maximum efficiency” and spend most of your time with the helm amidships, but what we don’t always communicate is that sometimes you’ll be doing both while going nowhere. It’s at this point that your boat will be rocked mercilessly by passing speedboat wakes (I was asked this weekend if hunting them should be a legal sport) and you’ll yaw about wildly, whilst pitching and heaving. The answer, I believe, is: do nothing. Trim your sails, relax, and strike up a conversation about something other than sailing. You have to be patient, or you’ll be forever fighting with the sheets in a vain attempt to make a boatlength’s worth of progress. Or, worse yet, you’ll fire up the outboard and putter around noisily.
Don’t get me wrong–there’s nothing wrong with using the engine to “go find some wind”. On the other hand, you also don’t want to be one of those perpetual motorsailors either. So take it easy out there. Some days you just have to make a commitment to having a morning of crappy wind. Trying to “fight through it” is probably just going to give you a headache.
See you on the water,
Julian
