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ON THE WIND
By Chris Caswell

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I don’t like cars that tell me, in a neutered voice, to put on my seat belt. I don’t think I’d like a voice in my headphones telling me to tack, even if it were French-accented and
female. It’s one thing for my crew to shout at me, “OK, dummy, tack now or we’ll have to reach back for the weather mark,” and another one for an impersonal computer, even with prosody, to make my decisions.

December 2006

Black box gizmos take the sailor out of the sailing

BIadmit it: I’m not a techno-geek. It was a struggle for me to transition from manual typewriter to electric. My learning curve was so flat I kept forgetting I couldn’t lean on the keys while thinking.

When it came time to make the move to computers, I was lucky that I had a 6-year-old down the street who could answer any of my questions. I felt a bit like the neighborhood child molester. “Hi, Mrs. Walters. Could Billy come play with my computer for a while? It seems to have crashed.”

As far as I’m concerned, the new navigational electronics are like those flaky high school girlfriends. I love them dearly, but don’t trust them completely. GPS and chartplotters make quick work of navigation, right up to the point the lights go out. I’m of the old school so I still carry paper charts and I update them from the GPS, but I also do the math just to be sure that I’m where I think I am. If the electronics go on the fritz, it’s OK because I just carry on with the paper charts.

But there are times when I think we’re just too clever with electronics for our own good. Or, as the Brits say, “too clever by half.”

Item: An American company has developed portable weather buoys that it plans to “deploy at strategic locations on the perimeter of the race course at major regattas.” The buoys measure wind speed and direction, current speed and direction and the sea state. These 11-foot carbon fiber buoys will then transmit the information to “subscribers” who can read the immediate conditions via pocket PC computers or even smart phones.

Item: A French company has developed a “speaking sailing assistant” that will use “text to speech with natural prosody” to coach you while sailing. Don’t feel bad. I too was stumped by prosody, which means natural voice intonations. By loading a polar diagram for your boat into the unit, along with waypoints for all the marks, the unit will interface with onboard wind sensors to make decisions for you. This information, such as when to tack or jibe for the next mark, is delivered via waterproof earphones in your choice of male or female voices in either English or French.

I can’t be the only one, but, pardon my French, this kind of crap raises the hackles on my neck. Talk about taking all the sailing out of sailing. This turns sailing into some kind of video game, with little voices telling you when to turn the boat and by how much. Geez, I hate being an old curmudgeon, but I liked sailing better before all this gadgetry.

If we start relying on electronics, why don’t we just send robots out to sail the race, with the sails trimmed by computers? We’ll stay dry in the club bar and the money we save on foul weather gear can be spent on beer.

The buoy company, a big Internet supplier of sailing gear, launched the project when the company’s owner was competing in a regatta and had hired a coach. The coach would race around on his boat before the start and then report on the conditions on each side of the course, thus giving the sailor better information than boats without coaches. But he was concerned that the information wasn’t instantaneous: the wind could have changed in the time it took the coach to check both sides of the course. He wanted both sides and the windward mark reported at the same moment.

I’ll tee off on the use of coaches and coaching boats in another column but, in a nutshell, I think it’s completely wrong. Not everyone can afford such a luxury and it takes some of the fun out of sailing. After all, who should get the trophy: the skipper who went to the right or the coach who told him to go right?

I’m not a rules expert, but it strikes me that the weather buoys are getting close to infringing Rule 41 for outside help. You can certainly tune in to NOAA weather forecasts but this seems so regatta-specific it shouldn’t be used after the starting sequence has begun. And, unless the whole buoy system is shut down, who’s to know if you stopped listening when you started racing?

The French system is odd in its own way. I don’t like cars that tell me, in a neutered voice, to put on my seat belt. I don’t think I’d like a voice in my headphones telling me to tack, even if it were French-accented and female. It’s one thing for my crew to shout at me, “OK, dummy, tack now or we’ll have to reach back for the weather mark,” and another one for an impersonal computer, even with prosody, to make my decisions.

And perhaps that’s what I dislike about both systems: they remove some of the decision-making process that has made sailing such a great sport.

Before the start, you sailed the line and made a decision about which end was favored. You looked as far as you could to windward and made your best guess, based on experience and intuition, on which side of the course was favored. You thought about how the wind was going to swing.

And then you made the best of it, sometimes out in front, sometimes bringing up the rear. But whether you took home silverware or left licking your wounds, you knew that it was of your own doing.

Sailing seems to be one of the last freedoms we really have in our world. Cell phones pursue us in libraries, churches and restaurants, and some people feel it’s OK to carry on personal conversations for everyone to hear. Computers measure our buying habits everywhere from video rentals to the grocery store. I tried to buy a 2-by-4 piece of lumber with cash and the clerk couldn’t take my money unless I gave him my phone number.

But sailing is where you are on your own, with the wind and the sea and the sails. Set your own course, and win or lose by your own skill. I can tell more about my sails from a few pieces of yarn than I can by watching green numerals on an instrument.

And after the race, do I buy my tactician a beer and say “Good call on that jibe” or do I pat a black box and offer it a few extra amps? Do I like sailing or do I like computers?

Me? I’ll take sailing by the seat of my pants any day.

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