Rush’n to Sail

I bought a boat.

Not just any boat, a sports boat. One of the last Young 780s ever produced called “Rush”.

By the time I decided to buy “Rush” I had been thinking of buying a boat for about a year. I knew it would be the worst financial investment I could possibly make, a black hole for money and time. There are a lot of jokes about boat ownership and I had heard them all. Still, the thought persisted and I kept looking around. “F-Sharp”, the boat I helmed for a season, was for sale – yet I found it hard to get excited about it. There is nothing wrong with a Sonata 8, it’s inexpensive and fairly sturdy. “Rush”, on the other hand…

“Rush” is a very light boat. She does not just sit on her mooring, she dances around it as if impatient to go sailing. “My wife is afraid of “Rush”, – the old owner admitted as I was sitting on the boat with the agent, a friend who found it for me. A very light boat with a huge sail area is bound to be scary at times, especially with a kite up. She gets on a plane very easily. There are no lifelines. There are no comforts on the boat at all – but she seems to be very impatient to go sailing. Just like me.

And she’s beautiful. When I look at her I can’t help thinking how pretty she is, every single time. It feels like love.

“I like the name,” I told my friend the agent. “Because you know, it’s “Rush” and I am Russian.”

His face lit up and he said, “You should add an apostrophe and an “n” to the name!”

And I did. The new name is “Rush’n”.

The old stickers were a nightmare to remove. On the Melbourne Cup day, a big Australia-wide celebration of gambling and fancy hats, I slipped out of the office straight after the race while my co-workers were partaking of the provided beverages and snacks. I was carrying a bag with a hairdryer and a razor blade. The old sticker on one side came off fairly easily with a bit of persuasion from the hairdryer. The other side would not budge at all, no matter what we did. The next day I tried a domestic steam cleaner. It increased the speed of removal to about a centimetre in 30 minutes. I removed the lower part of “R” before I dropped the steam cleaner off the ladder one time too many, rendering it unusable. By that time my arms felt unusable, too. The result prompted a few people to ask whether the name of the boat was now Push.

We did eventually got the old name off with a rubber wheel that I bought on eBay specifically for the purpose. Overall, the process of getting the new decals on the hull involved 7 people – my wonderful friends who helped me with advice and printing, provided drills (to use the rubber wheel) and manpower, told me not to stress about silly things and eventually got the new sticker on.

I am still clueless when it comes to working on boats. When I was towing the boat with a tender kindly provided by another friend I was thinking about a book I read about a year ago. A guy with no experience in sailing decided to sail around the world, spent all his savings on a boat and crashed it into the marina almost immediately. I didn’t crash mine but at times I was overwhelmed by helplessness because I didn’t know how to do so many things. I read the surveyor’s report (finishing with “fast boat, very little to do”) and had to look up “split rings” on Wikipedia. I have a to-do list for the boat stored in Evernote, it’s all very organised, but I only know how to do a couple of items on the list by myself – they involve climbing the mast and buying things.

The stereotype has it that boat owners are rich. And some of them are. Other boat owners are resourceful and good at working on boats. I am neither of these things – but I love my boat and I’m determined to keep her going.

I found a very long thread about Young 780s on Sailing Anarchy and read all of it before buying the boat. I read that one guy bought a Young 780, raced it, got scared shitless by it and then kept it in a trailer for about 10 years. The former owner of my boat claims that it was “Rush”. He himself owns too many boats so he wasn’t sailing her that much – yet every time he sailed he was getting good results. His extremely experienced crew also managed to break the rig so I got the boat with a brand new mast, a boom and spreaders. A few things still need adjusting. The main gets out of the track very easily, the vang snapped off the boom during the very first race because it wasn’t secured properly. There are many things to do, the list is long.

I was expecting a steep learning curve and it’s definitely steep. A boat doesn’t win races by herself. I am inviting people I can learn from and I am trying to be patient. Yet it doesn’t escape me that the funniest thing of all is that after writing about being a boat slut I almost immediately committed to a boat.

“Why are you buying a boat?” – said one of the kindest skippers I know. “You can sail on my boat any time!” And I will. I learned so much from other people that I don’t intend to stop sailing on other boats. Yet my heart is now taken and it belongs to “Rush’n”, a temperamental sports boat that still needs a bit of work.