How to Sail a Boat by Matt Vance

Author:Matt Vance
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781877551864
Publisher: Awa Press
Published: 2013-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

There have been volumes written on what constitutes a proper cruising yacht. Indeed Arthur Beiser produced a book entitled exactly this. He agreed entirely with the famous American naval architect Nathanael Herreshoff, who stated that for a yacht nothing short of 40 feet long was acceptable. This sort of theory is best left to the extremely wealthy. The fact is that for cruising nearly any boat will do. The more agile, simple and easy-to-sail a boat is, the more likely it is to be sailed. The bigger the boat the less likely it is to be sailed; size seems to give a yacht a sort of inertia, fuelled partly by intimidation and partly by inconvenience, which holds her to her moorings. Ideally a boat should be able to be sailed by one person. Others coming along should be a bonus: you can choose the sanity of solitude, or shipmates with whom you are willing to share your kingdom.

The right boat can eventually be found by trial and error. However, severing the bonds that hold the sailor to the shore is not so easy. There are the bills to pay, and the birthday parties and corporate barbecues to attend. Left unchecked, these can smother a sailor and slowly render them a landlubber. Part of this is that people of the shore are convinced the sailor will be subverted by the freedom of the sea. They are right of course, which is even more reason to slip the moorings.

Cruising usually implies a destination or a quiet anchorage. Islands and bays are always high up on the list, as is any piece of geography inaccessible by land. Inaccessibility alone seems to give these places a magical quality: when you approach them from the sea it is as if the boat has dreamed them into existence.

Occasionally there is no such destination to aim for and cruising for cruising’s sake becomes the objective. The little coastal town in which I grew up had only the wide South Pacific and the monotonous sweep of a grey shingle beach. On Sundays the cruising fleet would sneak out early in the morning and begin beating to windward in the sea breeze. Feeling the pulse of the long ocean swell and seeing the land shrink into a long thin sliver was exciting beyond measure for a small boy. Around three in the afternoon each yacht would tack, set a spinnaker, and run home. The timing was never mentioned, but with the hindsight of adulthood it is clear it was carefully calculated so the sailors would be home in time for the opening of the club’s bar – in itself a noble destination.

Arthur Beiser offered other theories around the vices of the cruising sailor. ‘A man accustomed to a drink or three at lunchtime will not be pleased when the skipper locks up the bottle until nightfall.’ He followed this up with the boldest of his assertions: ‘Seldom will two women get along if this is their first time in close quarters.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.