The clogged-head test finds few elitists in sailing

It's been a long time since a letter to the editor got under my skin. I thought I was immune. I’ve been exposed at the top of this magazine’s masthead since racing sails were white, and have the scar tissue to prove it. This is one ship where the captain, not the crew, gets the floggings. I’ve learned to accept them calmly. I even save the most colorfully written missives from irritated readers in a “Cranky Letters” file for handy future reference when a humility check is needed. When a fellow recently expressed his disagreement with an opinion presented here by e-mailing a recommendation that I give up writing to spare my readers further aggravation, I kept my cool and sent a polite reply suggesting he take it up with my boss.

But now someone has done it, penetrated the armor, inflicted a wound. A disgruntled reader has resorted to the E-word. You can see for yourself on this issue’s letters page. He describes an article we published as being “over the top even for an elitist magazine such as SAILING.” Elitist! Can there be any greater insult to a publication that fashions itself as Everysailor’s magazine?

I’m going to take the charitable view and assume that the letter writer has only recently discovered SAILING and is unaware of our history of relentless tilting against the windmills of elitism in sailing.

He probably hasn’t had time to read our Used Boat Notebook evaluations of older boats on the market, or studied our Retrofit issues in which experts tell how to fix up boats you can buy for a song, or checked the array of affordable boats featured in our annual Small Boat Issue. I hope he at least found the story last month about the couple struggling to keep an old, abused wooden boat afloat to live their sailing adventures.

I know, we print photos and stories about big, expensive sailboats too, and maybe the glare from these shining hulls obscures the content about more prosaic craft. But come on, people who possess glamorous boats, as well as those who like to look at glamorous boats, deserve some attention from Everysailor’s magazine too. I don’t know if Roy Disney’s feelings would have been hurt if we hadn’t run that spectacular two-page photo of his new 86-foot Pyewacket a couple months ago, but I do know the rest of us would have been denied an edifying glimpse of a fantastic sailing vessel.

I probably shouldn’t be surprised that featuring fancy boats invites the elitist label. The term has been hanging around the sport of sailing’s neck like the ancient mariner’s albatross since sailing for recreation was discovered. No doubt the first Viking who spent some of his pillaging proceeds on a clinker-built daysailer for his family was dismissed as an elitist by the gang chugging horns of mead at the corner bar.

Funny thing, I’ve been searching for elitists in sailing for a long time, and I haven’t found many. In fact, what I have found is that sailing is a great equalizer. In spite of the whiff of wealth sensitive noses have always detected around “yachting,” something about sailing renders social and economic status irrelevant.

People who in their onshore lives may be kings of corporate realms, princes of medicine or queens of real estate are just ordinary seamen aboard their boats. That’s because sailing for almost all of us is a hands-on thing to do. If you’re going to do it, you have to know how to do it—yourself.

When our anchor drags in the middle of a dark and stormy night, or we’re reeking of diesel oil after bleeding the engine’s fuel system, or we’re up to our armpits in a head unclogging project (talk about a social leveler), we’re all in the same class, and it sure isn’t elite.

Folks who earn their livings selling sailboats know our type well. Powerboaters, I’m told, often buy on impulse. Sailors buy on completion of an excruciating exercise in microscopic examination of minutiae. No matter the wealth of the buyer or whether the boat is a 22-footer or a 62-footer, sailboat sales people know their customers are likely to obsess over the electrical current draw of the watermaker, subject the capacity of the holding tank to mathematical analysis and dither for days over whether to go with 7/16-inch rope for the mainsheet or upgrade to half-inch.They also know that because sailors are, by nature, prudent and careful, actually getting them to relinquish the necessary funds, regardless of how generously they are endowed with them, to complete a sale is one of the great challenges of the retail world.

Well, that’s sailors for you. Blame it on our ethic of self-sufficiency—we’re a little different. But we’re not elitist.

It’s too bad the writer of the “elitist” letter—Bill Meinert of North Manchester, Indiana—used that unfortunate word, because outside of that he wrote a pretty good letter. He takes issue with the story in the January issue about 14-year-old Shark Kahn’s victory in the Melges 24 World championship.The article quoted some people saying that the fact that young Mr. Kahn’s father Philippe is a very wealthy software magnate who hired some of the world’s top pro sailors to train his son and arranged for three pros to sail with him in the regatta didn’t really make much of a difference. Which, of course, is baloney.

The headline over the story said “Whiz Kid.” Mr. Meinert made the good point that the true whiz kids of sailboat racing are youngsters who work their way up to class championships without the advantages of the best tutoring and best crews money can buy.

OK, maybe the likes of the Kahns, father and son (the former, also well trained by hired pros, is a formidable yacht racer in his own right) are part of a sailing elite. I’ll agree they’re not likely to be unclogging their own heads.
But, damn it, just because we wrote about them doesn’t make SAILING an elitist magazine. It’s a good thing I’ve learned to take unfair, below-the-belt reader criticism calmly.