On the appeal of sailing in any weather
We hit waves as we motored to the start of the race of the Hamilton Island Race Week. It took us by surprise because while it’s technically an offshore regatta with strong trade winds, Hamilton Island is known for idyllic conditions and beautiful beaches, not for rough conditions.
The entire first half of the week the weather refused to be idyllic, with waves, rain, clouds that brought squalls over 30 knots. We were wearing wet weather gear and even got our PFDs on the third day (before we broke the boom).
While it’s easy for almost anyone to see the appeal of sailing in nice weather, it can be hard to explain why anyone would want to do it when it gets rough. Sailing gets significantly less glamorous when it rains and you cannot go downstairs. Sure, we still saw a lot of whales but we were also getting pretty wet despite our wet weather gear (I discovered that the break I took from sailing was too long for my favourite red overalls when they started leaking water). Why would anyone enjoy the discomfort of it?
The surface answer is that sailboat racing is a sport, even if it’s the only sport that can be done while drinking beer and smoking at the same time. You don’t bow out just because it’s raining, that’s part of the deal. I would also argue, while writing from the comfort of my warm and dry house, that the discomfort during inshore racing, bar injury, is mild. Sure, you probably get bruises in weird places and might also get wet but then you get to the bar and then home. It’s nothing like the relentless mental discomfort of responsibility we carry for our families, the stress and tedium of other people’s expectations at work. In fact, a sailing race tends to wipe out all that noise in your head because for the time of the race your only concern is to keep the boat moving as fast as you can.
Part of it is being outside. Just like my own babies tended to calm down when taken outside even in inclement weather, adults tend to do better in nature. And while a walk around the neighbourhood can sometimes help with stress, sailing never quite loses its novelty as an outside activity. It never failed to take me out of my head.
Sailing has a lot of layers in mastery: from understanding its language which can be confusing to a beginner to trimming sails to anticipating shifts of the wind after the start of the race. There’s always something to learn and that appealed to me, although I stopped being so desperate to prove myself on a boat with time. Watching people manage the entire boat or calculate the best position based on the tide and wind shift is never going to get old to me.
It is during sailing that I met people who always pushed a little harder instead of playing safe: got spinnakers up in heavier breeze, sailed light sports boats in 20+ knots, stayed on deck in very heavy conditions; people who were doing slightly crazy things and persevered despite an available easy option of retirement, of taking it easy. That same drive in myself made me buy a sports boat I wasn’t qualified to fix or drive, do offshore racing while fighting off seasickness, sit on the rail in the heavy rain. Having a hobby that doesn’t fully fit into a definition of being reasonable, even if it’s about sailing through squalls in the pouring rain, can make you feel surprisingly alive, especially when you usually make rational choices and avoid risks outside sailing.
About half way into the race on the third day, as we were sailing through squalls and rain, we noticed that the boom was bent. We retired from the race and took the main down. The boom was cracked and we were lucky we noticed it early and it didn’t fall on anyone (being hit by the boom is probably the most common injury while sailing and people have died from it). Our boat was out of the race week.
“I might need another boat,” I said to a friend I met afterwards. “Or… you could just take it easy,” she said.
She had a point. But taking it easy has never made me feel fully alive.
Sails and Commas 