We few who love sailing—warts and all

The most recent Sydney to Hobart race was an exercise of such concentrated misery it left participants doubting their sanity. The post-race refrain among the bleary-eyed sailors was a rhetorical question: Why would we ever take part in this madness again?

Most of us have probably asked the same question at some point in our sailing experience. This is the nature of our sport.

Unlike other Sydney-Hobart races, no lives were lost in this one, no boats capsized or sunk. It featured a straightforward gale, on the nose, brutally cold, attended by the truly evil waves of the Bass Strait and the consequent epidemic of seasickness.

Our Sydney-Hobart correspondent, Whitbread Race veteran Katie Pettibone, wrote in last month’s SAILING about her first-ever experience with mal de mer: "It’s impossible to convey the awfulness to anyone who has never been in the hellish depths of this malady in the Bass Strait. It was during this bashing that I began to question the Australians’ sanity. Would I continue, year after year, to do a race in which at some point I know I would have to bang my head against a brick wall for a long period of time?"

She asked a long-suffering mate on the rail, a veteran of 15 Hobart races, about this, and he declared it would be his last race. By now, of course, he has changed his mind and is looking forward to his 16th bash to Tasmania.

Though I have not (yet) sailed in the Sydney-Hobart, I have made and retracted similar pledges, some provoked by too little, rather than too much, wind.

"Sailors who have greatly sinned," Ernest K. Gann wrote, "may expect to mildew permanently in the doldrums." We must have had a boat full of sinners the year we mildewed for an entire Chicago-Mackinac Race in doldrum conditions. Having to complete a race by drifting 333 miles was an agony too gruesome to describe in detail here. Suffice it to say it was torture. Toward the end of the ordeal, I passed the time in a reverie in which I carefully plotted my escape from sailing. We would sell the boat, tend the lawn and flower beds to a state of perfection, take real vacations, sleep in actual beds in hotels. It took three days after the finish for me to take it all back, which was a good misery index. Normally I get over a bad sailing experience with one good night’s sleep.

The point is, sailing can be unpleasant. That’s why it’s not for everyone. Even so, many of us keep insisting that it is.

I once wrote half seriously that we should stop using the word "yacht" in connection with sailing because of its snooty connotation in the public mind. I advocated changing the names of yacht clubs to boat clubs or sailing clubs. I spent interminable days in trade group brainstorming sessions to develop strategies to "grow" sailing. I took part in navel-gazing exercises plumbing the mystery of why people are not more interested in sailing as a participant and spectator sport. All of this as part of an effort to change the perception of sailing as an amusement for a select few.

Now I wonder why I did any of that. And I wonder why others continue to do it. Why try to make sailing something it can’t be? It is never going to be a popular recreation competing for the public’s time with mainstream sports. No matter how hard anyone tries to make it sexy, sailing will never be a spectator sport with the appeal of auto racing or even beach volleyball. Let’s face the fact that the perception is at least partly true: Sailing is for a select few.

That’s not to say elite, in the sense of superior economic or social status. Sailing has slayed that dragon (which was probably wearing a blue blazer and yacht club tie at the time of its demise). People who want to give sailing a whirl can buy a safe, enjoyable, high-tech rotomolded sailboat for about what a top-of-the-line mountain bike costs. Or they can use a boat at low cost at one of the community sailing centers that represent our sport’s most successful effort to remove barriers based on financial or physical ability, gender, race or age.

We are a select few because relatively few people really want to go sailing. Those who do have achieved a contented state in which the discomforts, those occasional unpleasant experiences, are rendered insignificant by what Sir Francis Chichester described as the "bliss of being in the cockpit with the sun and the warm breeze on one’s skin, just watching the sea and the sky and the sails."

Sailing will grow at a certain pace, which is to say slowly. I think we should stop worrying about that pace and just enjoy being among the select few.

An afterthought: We probably should worry just a bit, however, when some part of sailing lapses into old elitist notions. That may not be the intent of the International Sailing Federation’s new eligibility rule, but it surely is the effect. The rule states that everyone who engages in sailboat racing, even guests along for the ride, in any race organized under the yacht racing rules, even Wednesday night jib and main races, must be a member of the national authority—US Sailing for American sailors—or organizations that belong to it, meaning mainly yacht clubs. The rule is so contemptible that even the politically careful and correct US Sailing is trying to minimize its effect by prescribing that the penalty for breaking it will be only a warning, not disqualification.

Racing sailors are expected to play by the rules, but there comes a time when civil disobedience is the more responsible course. So I say, let’s not just allow nonmembers to race with us; let’s go out into the streets, the bars, the golf courses, tennis courts and YMCAs to recruit men, women and children to experience a sailboat race. Flaunt their nonmembership, and make a statement about arrogant intrusions into the enjoyment of sailing by the international governors of our sport.

I’m talking about club races here. Don’t invite them to race to Tasmania.