Rail meat forever? Don't count on it

This may be news to folks who sail on cruising boats and daysailers or heel-resistant multihull boats and have actually experienced comfort while sailing: A whole class of sailing enthusiasts spends much of its sailing time packed together sitting on the hard edge of a backward tilting deck leaning out over the water in a contorted position exposed to the full force of wind and spray. These are racing sailors, and what they do is called hiking.

Hiking is boring and uncomfortable, sometimes to the point of being painful, but hikers, who are collectively known as rail meat, do it with pride because it is one of the most important jobs you can do on a modern monohull racing sailboat. The importance of hiking, in fact, can be taken as a measure of progress in yacht design.

In less technologically advanced times, sailboats were kept from heeling excessively by putting heavy ballast in the keel. Sailors sat in cockpits in comfort, upright like human beings. Now in a new millennium, with the benefit of powerful computers and space age materials and building techniques, designers have succeeded in creating boats that require a crowd of people on the rail to stay upright enough to sail fast.

Such dazzling progress has elevated the status of rail meat to the point where only the hopelessly uninformed would consider hiker an unskilled position. Achieving proper form—torso under the upper lifeline, stomach against the lower lifeline, buttocks balanced on the hull-deck joint, legs dangling over the side—requires practice, balance and muscle control.

Demanding as the rail meat disciplines are, the job can be enjoyable, at least in course races, where the windward legs are short. The view from a perch on the rail is great. Chitchat with the mates with whom you are joined at each hip is often entertaining. And you can feel important by loudly broadcasting such information as, "Puff coming in 33 seconds," which is useful if the helmsman is blind.

Hiking in long-distance races is a sterner test that separates the prime cuts of rail meat from lesser grades. Here, where weather legs can last many hours, even days, endurance counts.

In boxing, they say the legs go first. In hiking, the butt goes first. The human buttocks was not made to rest for long periods on fiberglass, which next to cubic zirconia is possibly the hardest man-made material in existence. The condition known as rail butt is excruciatingly painful.

Some of the rail-sitting greats, using methods explained in an underground tract entitled "The Zen of Rail Meat," deal with it by meditating to achieve a state of blissful numbness in the nether regions. A lucky few are able to fall asleep in the classic hiking position. You know they’ve been successful when you see a body hanging in the lifelines like a spider that has expired in its own web.

Surviving as rail meat, however, is not just a matter of physical or metaphysical endurance. In fact, the first priorities are location, location, location. Successful rail sitters will use any means—guile, bribery, intimidation, whatever it takes—to score a favored spot on the rail as determined by the following immutable rules.

Rule one: Don’t sit too far forward. The poor wretches who end up in the forwardmost two or three places are called wavebreakers for good reason. What’s more, on the rare occasions when food or drink is passed along the rail, they’re likely to be left out. On a boat with a large crew, a bag of cookies almost never makes it to the wavebreakers.

Rule two: Don’t sit too far aft. Rail meat near the back of the boat is too close to the elites in the cockpit. Any attempt to flout authority by sneaking below or to ease the pain by leaning back or pulling legs on board can be easily observed. Worse, aft hikers miss out on the single luxury afforded their long-suffering occupation—the occasional opportunity to sit on the indescribable softness of a headsail laid out on the windward deck in its sausage bag in anticipation of a sail change.

Rule three: Choose your neighbor carefully. To be avoided at all costs are seats to leeward of smokers and anyone prone to seasickness. Wind tunnel tests have shown the airflow along the deck of a beating yacht invariably carries smoke exhaled by a hiker to windward directly into the nostril of the person to leeward. Similar, though somewhat grosser, consequences result from being to leeward of a hurling hiker.

I can write authoritatively about hiking because of my long association with the practice from both the management and worker points of view. As a skipper, I am proud to say I enforce an egalitarian rail meat policy: Everyone, even the ordained members of the afterguard, hikes when not doing something else essential. Besides feeling good about the basic fairness of this rule, I enjoy the camaraderie of rubbing shoulders (and butts) with the men and women who serve in the rank and file of the rail.

It’s too bad I can’t get away from the helm to do more of that. But I’m needed there, and it seems I can steer for hours on those long beats. When I do accept relief, there are other important matters to attend to, like going below to reread the race’s sailing instructions or doing some preventive head maintenance.

When I sail on other people’s boats, of course, I put in plenty of time on the rail. A part of my body still remembers a race in which the skipper (a bit of a martinet, I thought) cancelled watches and kept the entire crew hiking for the duration of a bumpy, 13-hour beat. It was a big, fast boat that could make 10 knots to windward, but its tendency to slam into every fifth wave, something akin to driving an SUV into a brick wall at 11.5 miles per hour, exacerbated the misery of rail butt. Under drenching spray, the 15 bodies on the rail would slide forward at considerable velocity until we fetched up on stanchions.

As a member of the rail meat hoi polloi in such conditions, I was amazed at how quickly I embraced a proletarian viewpoint and developed a survival instinct manifested in a sort of feral cunning. When a rail sitter left a prime spot on one of those oh-so-soft headsails to answer the call of nature, I stole his spot without a hint of remorse.

When the skipper, in an act of heart-melting compassion, gave permission for one person at a time to leave the rail to add layers against the frigid night, I not only was the first to get below, but managed to get lost in the dark cavern of the maxi-boat hull long enough to catch a few winks on a canvas pipe berth that felt like a feather bed.

Designers have treated the rail meat profession kindly by producing marvelously tippy boats, but there are disquieting signs that the glory days could be ending. Inspired by the spectacular performance of boats built for around-the-world races, racing yachts with water ballast and canting keels are gaining popularity. The alarming flaw in these boats is that they don’t need weight on the rail.

The bottom could be falling out of the rail meat market.