The Motion of the Ocean by Janna Cawrse Esarey

Author:Janna Cawrse Esarey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

In response to the gendarme’s booting, we’re back to boating, and I’ve got one more night to survive till we can officially call off this crossing. Only the weather is a bit squirrelly, not bad really, just inconsistent. Which is what I hate most on a night watch, because then I can’t just set the sails and let them do their thing, set Willie and let him do his thing, and settle myself into the cockpit to do my thing (read, write, pluck armpit hairs with tweezers).

Instead I’m watching the anemometer (wind-o-meter in Janna speak) rise and fall like that carnival game with the massive mallet and the red dinger. Uuup. Down. Uuup. Down. DING! The ding comes when Willie gets overpowered by the wind and lets Dragonfly swing off course, and then the sails start flapping and the lines start zinging and I have to take the helm to get us back in the direction we want to go. Which wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that then I have to open the hatch directly above Graeme’s bunk— THUNK-THU-THUNK-THUNK —to fiddle with Willie’s control panel. (And stop reading, writing, and plucking hairs.) There’s got to be a better way. And I know it’s got something to do with this thing called sail trim.

In the year leading up to our cruise, Graeme read about sail trim like a preacher on his deathbed reads his Bible. He devoured everything—magazines, blogs, guides, handbooks—anything he could find on the topic. He was obsessed. Partly because he was truly passionate about sail trim, and partly because, like Socrates, he knew how very much there was to know…and how very little he actually knew.

I remember one book in particular that lived between the toilet and the orange tile wall in our old house’s bathroom. It was called Racing Sail Trim, a white, floppy, oversize paperback with drawings of white and red sailboats on the front. I never once cracked open that book, preferring, instead, to judge it by its cover. And now I must admit the truth. During an entire year of toilet sits, I somehow thought those crisp white boats with their bold red accent stripes meant the book was about paint colors. Like sail trim, as in house trim, as in: What pretty color shall I paint my boat?

For the record, I was a tad off. Sail trim is actually how you position the sails in relation to the wind in order to maximize forward motion. So, for example, if the wind is directly behind the boat, you push the sail waaay out, perpendicular to the boat, to best capture the wind. Sort of like how, if you put your open palm out the car window, perpendicular to the wind, your arm gets thrown back? That’s the same force that propels a boat forward on a downwind run. The other obvious sail position, called luffing, is when you’re not catching the wind at all, e.g., your hand or your sail acts like a blade with the wind rushing parallel to it, right past it.

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