Most of the earth is accessible only by boat. Drive north from Albany and within 10 or 12 hours the pavement will end, still barely half way from the equator to the North Pole. The entire southern hemisphere is 80% water. Even the northern hemisphere is 60% water. Many of the best places to visit are islands: small ones like Aruba or large ones like England. From NY, you can fly there in a few hours or sail there in a few weeks but you cannot drive there. How an hour by plane equals a day by car, and an hour by car equals a day by sailboat, merely reflects the relative joy and grace that each such mode of transport affords.
Now, there are just two kinds of boats: stick boats and stink boats. The latter, which are powerboats, have only one means of propulsion: an engine. Unless there are two engines, any failure leaves you, as they say, dead in the water. Sailboats, in contrast, have three means of propulsion. You can sail, of course; or you can motor; or you can motor sail. Short of sinking, no single mode of failure disables all three.
Everything made by man fails eventually, and in the harsh marine environment it will be sooner rather than later. Gear must be designed, therefore, to fail gracefully; to break down in a benign way. Electronic instruments, for example, usually connect to one another via wires. When a wired connection fails, the fault is often easy to find and fix, even without tools. Connecting instruments via wifi would eliminate a lot of wire runs; but then, when the wireless interconnect repair while underway. Similarly, a 150% genoa on a roller furler is a godsend in light air, faster to deploy and more convenient than a hanked-on jib, but when the wind rises abruptly, as during a sudden squall, it can become impossible to furl it or drop it. Consider, as one last example, the marine head: Wouldn’t it be nice to replace that wet-bowl, dry-bowl, manually pumped hopper with one of those modern electric heads that you can flush with the push of a button? Well, perhaps, but what happens when it breaks? And which kind is likely to break first or most often?
If something can go wrong, when at sea sooner or later it surely will. Good seamanship is mainly a matter of staying out of trouble. All else is merely good style. Staying out of trouble means staying always alert for the worst that can happen. It means knowing your boat, the waters you are sailing, and the weather report. Knowing, also, your level of ability and how not to exceed it. Seamanship cannot really be learned from a book, although many a book has been written on that topic. It can only be learned through experience.
The Age of Sail began in the 16th century and lasted for 300 years, ending around the time of the Civil War. It was preceded by a long age when ships, and particularly warships, were mostly rowed by oars and it has been followed by the age of steamships, only recently supplanted by diesel and nuclear vessels. Sailing was the high technology of that bygone age, a body of knowledge that was immensely complex, had its own specialized vocabulary, and took most of a lifetime to learn. Sailors were the teamsters of astronauts, going where no modern man had ever gone before. Whether it be an ordinary 30-ft cruising sloop or the 72-ft Team Oracle catamaran that moves at more than twice the wind speed on all points of sail, almost every sailboat built today can outperform even the best craft afloat during the Age of Sail. How their crews compare is perhaps a different story.
It takes about an hour to learn how to sail, albeit much longer to learn how to do it well. A huge quantity of information is available, particularly nowadays on the internet, and authorities can be found on almost every topic. Some of them are right some of the time. What sometimes works on a particular boat might not always work there, however, and it might never work on a different boat. Be ever skeptical of everything you hear or read about sailing, even in this book. Try it, test it out, and see for yourself what works best for you. If you read something here that is wrong, or doubtful, or could be expressed better, or perhaps ought to be left unsaid, please let me know. Send email to:
Shawn.Spilman@Gmail.com.