Sailing Lessons

Now for something completely different.

I took my sixth sailing lesson today.  UMass Boston offers them free of charge to its students, graduate and undergraduate, on small Mercury boats.  After a minimum of six lessons, I can take the qualifying exam and be eligible to sign out a boat and go solo.

When I was about fourteen years old, I made a list of things to learn how to do decently well over the next few decades (i.e. while I’m still young enough to enjoy doing them).  I’ve already crossed off snorkeling, first aid/CPR, wilderness survival, firearm use and safety, bartending (added that at age 16), woodworking, plumbing, building and maintaining a desktop computer, car maintenance, writing a simple computer program (used C++), and now sailing a small boat.

The list is still pretty deep and includes skydiving, defensive driving, scuba diving, golf, lacrosse, piloting and other fun stuff – you can see the trend towards the expensive stuff and the things that don’t come from Boy Scouts.  Sailing is a special case; I could have learned it in Boy Scouts but never got around to it.  I had resigned myself to having to wait until I could afford the time and money for lessons, when lo and behold the offer letter came from UMass Boston.  Research into the school and its Graduate Assistantship program had revealed that I could A) go to b-school without debt and B) take sailing lessons free of charge.

The format of the lessons is relatively simple.  You make an appointment (every hour on the hour), you show up on time (five minutes and you’re doomed to wait), and you get in the boat with a tanned guy or girl in a life jacket.  You rig the boat under close supervision – there’s a definite order to it, and several knots that have to be right – and hoist the sail.  Then you’re off.

When sailing a small boat, you handle the tiller (rudder) and the mainsheet (the line that controls the mainsail).  By controlling these with one in each hand and distributing your weight properly, you can do whatever you want with the boat.  There is a heavy metal plate called a centerboard in the middle of the boat, which hangs below the keel and provides resistance against side-slipping when the wind is hitting your sail.  When you have some good speed, the centerboard on a Mercury helps you keep from capsizing even in a very strong wind.  The really good sailors (which I’m not – not yet, at least) will lean out over the water to counterbalance the effects of a high wind, and get some really serious speed even though the wind is pushing the boat about 40 degrees off vertical.

I started my nautical career in a canoe, so this is unsettling to watch and even worse to experience.

I’m not going to go into rigging, or points of sail, but I will say a little bit about jibing (rhymes with “imbibing”) and tacking because I think they’re interesting. Jibing is changing your direction through the direction of the wind while heading downwind, tacking is doing so while heading upwind. So picture a clock. The wind is blowing towards the 12:00 position and you’re sailing towards the 10:00 position. Now you want to turn to the right, towards the 2:00 position; maybe because your buddy in the other boat just fell over and you want to help him out. You need to perform a jibe, because your sail is currently on the right side of the boat and now it has to move to the left side. This requires some coordination because the boom (the big heavy thing attached to the mast and the sail) is at about head height, and it must by necessity swing over to the other side of the boat. Generally you haul in your sail as much as possible before executing a jibe or a tack, but sometimes you can’t or you don’t.

I haven’t actually seen a slam-jibe (a fast and relatively uncontrolled variation of this move) go horribly wrong, but I’m told that the results can be memorable. Like, “guy-gets-clocked-in-the-head-and-goes-overboard” memorable.