Article in this month's Sail magazine by the Editor.


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Posted by John Nichols on May 04, 2005 at 22:47:50 from 165.91.196.105 user Mcneacail.

In Reply to: Re: Titty & Peggy/Bawdsey/blasted Mary Anne posted by Peter H on May 04, 2005 at 21:24:41:

Small-boat blues

BY PETER NIELSEN, EDITOR

It is received wisdom that the best sailors come from dinghy-sailing backgrounds. This is, of course, a result of aversion therapy; if you know that every mistake will result in your either being smacked on the ear by a rampant boom or hurled headfirst into icy water, then you will quickly make is your business to become skillful enough to avoid such disasters. No wonder so many young boys and girls grow up to become top -class helmsmen, able to spot the most minuscule of breezeless at a hundred paces, to sense a lift or a header almost before it happens, and to leave an arrow-straight wake in any conditions.
And then there are those who, like me, learned to sail on "lead mines"- big keelboats. Even though it's a fact that most of the outstanding sailors I've sailed with were products of youthful summers spent careering around in dinghies, I have known people who began sailing late enough in life to have forgone the dinghy experience, but who still developed she skills and senses to lift them above the average. On balance, though, I've found the dinghy crowd can out-trim and out-helm most big-boat latecomers.
The bigger the boat, the less any of this seems to matter, and when you put things in a cruising context, all bets are off. I once skippered the delivery of an elderly ketch crewed by four hotshot dinghy and keelboat racers. They went all quiet and moody as soon as land vanished under the horizon and hated every subsequent mile of their big bluewater adventure. They cursed the baggy sails, they decried the sluggish feedback from the rudder, they mocked the unaerodynamic and unbendable rig that resisted all attempts to tune it for more boatspeed, and they swore never again to indulge in any kind of sailing that got them out of bed in the middle of the night.
When it turned out that the windvane gear could out-helm the sharpest of them, they sulked for days, hares outpaced by a tortoise. They did, however, instill in me a desire to tweak and fiddle with sheets and halyards (often, alas, with little perceptible effect on boatspeed) that manages to exasperate most people I sail with.
Last winter I had the chance to try my hand at a bit of dinghy sailing in tropical waters. Maybe it wouldn't be too late for me to develop the reflexes of Laser god Robert Scheidt or the helm touch of America's Cup superstar Russell Courts. I should have known better. Never before has one person outside of a Revivalist baptism been dunked so often and so thoroughly. I capsized going upwind, downwind, and even when I was in irons. Waterlogged and totally exhausted, I was soon begging for a reprieve-a life sentence back to the lead mines.



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