My strategy is therefore to skulk off and practice by myself for a while. When I get up to the level of a typical two-lesson student, I'll go back for lesson three. Since a lesson costs $160, it's the only sensible thing to do; I can probably buy a small yacht for the price of learning to sail it. I've compromised and picked up a small dinghy (2nd hand from Balmoral Sailing Club) for something less than the price of learning to tack. Martin (a handy colleague from school) and I spent Saturday AM building a dolly for it out of offcuts from the theatrical set-builder's studio around the corner, and Monday I took it out solo for the first time.
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| Home made dolly |
My dinghy has a halyard (to hold the top of the sail up) and a downhaul (to hold the bottom of the sail down) - don't go sailing based on these instructions! - plus a horse aka a traveller, which attaches the mainsheet to the deck and also seems to hold down the tiller, as well as a vang, which I think might be a kicker in the manual, and of course, a cunningham, possibly the more poetic name for the outhaul. That's five lines and eight names. Thanks to a generously minded passing onlooker, who waded in when he realised that on-shore coaching wouldn't be adequate, I've discovered that your vang, downhaul and cunningham can all be less tight that recommended without seriously inconveniencing a sailor of my expertise. In fact, given that I capsized AFTER fixing all these minor details, loose rigging doesn't appear to be wholly disadvantageous. Plus, you can have a tangled horse and a very wrong mainsheet and still actually sail from A to B - so long as you define B as the point you get to after leaving A and eventually deciding to go no further. (There's no shame in walking the boat back to the landing ramp - but remember to hold it by the bow!)
So, rigging is less critical than you might think. And like everything, one failed attempt to do it by myself was worth three or four attempts to follow someone else's instructions and/or example. I'm pretty sure I will get the thing exactly right next time. Well, maybe the time after. And even for all the mistakes, the only one with a real mechanical failing was the mainsheet, which I failed to rig to exploit the mechanical advantage of the block and tackle involved. Here my gym-related diligence probably paid off - I'm a lot stronger than I used to be - more than a 2:1 mechanical advantage, maybe.
Anyway, rigged, tick. Launched, tick. Thanks to Martin for the dolly-building and the old guy who didn't speak English who helped me launch and watched my shoes. I was able to un-launch later by myself, so I think a couple more goes with the dolly and I'll be right in both directions. In a way, the trickiest thing is keeping hold of the boat while getting the dolly back out of the water.
The rigging is, in fact, the trivial part of the exercise. The boat on the water is vastly more difficult. The first problem is fluky winds. I was at Rodd Point, and I'm pretty sure the wind on the point was not blowing in the same direction as the wind on the water. It certainly wasn't blowing as hard near the shore as it was 50 meters out, although an alternative scenario is that it took me 50 meters to get the boat, rudder and sail pointing simultaneously in the right direction. Once done, however, the thing took off, beam reaching (probably) up a storm until I decided to change direction. Then, and I've no idea how, since I'm sure I decided to gybe, I found myself "in irons", which means facing windward (as in tacking, not gybeing), and consequently, not moving. This means I must have tacked by mistake, and I know I've always had trouble with left and right, but even calling them port and starboard can't convince me that I did actually head starboard. I suspect that in fact I had managed to "beam reach" myself on to a windward tack, because let me tell you that knowing where you are and what direction you are travelling in is, strictly speaking, impossible. To start with, the boat doesn't travel particularly in the line you are pointing the rudder, unless perhaps you're sailing downwind. Probably every sailor knows that - I think it's physics, but it's not very intuitive. It seems like you're sort of sliding/skidding across the water; whether or not it's possible to keep a straight wake, and what it would mean if you did, I haven't fathomed* yet. (*Nautical pun alert) To add complexity to this is the fact that the boat wants, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, to head upwind. That is, to stop. The goal of all those forces acting on the boat is to reduce themselves to zero. It's a battle out there. I want to go somewhere; the boat doesn't. That kind of behaviour is exactly what I don't like about horses, and I'm sure no-one ever mentioned it about boats. Maybe the boat got me in irons before I decided I wanted to gybe. Maybe I gybed through 270 degrees (no, it's possible, I never wrote up my first lesson, but trust me, you can gybe a long way), who knows. Anyway, I felt like a dill, doing nothing at all in the middle of nowhere very much, but I do in fact know what to do in this situation, sort of. One up for voracious reading: you sail backwards until you are going fast enough to sail forwards. Knowing it isn't quite enough to make it sound plausible, and doing it seemed a lot more like waiting for something to happen (which it eventually did), but another bout of incompetence circumvented made me feel quite cheerful.
There's a lot more...can one blog entry stand it? Note this is a short 1 hour episode, not a multi-day epic.
I'm sorry there are no pictures, but my sporting self-glorification camera isn't waterproof, so I wasn't wearing it. Sadly that means my spectacular capsize, and surprisingly semi-competent righting of the boat went unrecorded. I'm glad I've spent the last 6 months learning to swim properly, because it's one less thing to worry about; in point of fact swanning around in salt water in a life jacket isn't particularly difficult, but if you're as stressed by water as I was 6 months ago it's hard to find the mental energy to work out exactly what to do next. Righting the boat may not be difficult, but getting back into it while it tries to sail itself (or capsize again) requires a bit of thought/good fortune. Like everything, I know more about this for next time. I rather think that the first sailing lesson should be( 1) how to capsize & (2) just try to sail, followed by a prolonged debriefing. Well, I've always liked learning that way. I'm not very good at turning theory into practice - I'm much better at enlightening practice with retrospective theory. Of course, that's all very well and good, but I still have to work out how to gybe (risk of capsize) or tack (risk of stalling) or I'll be condemned to sail in straight lines for ever.
I haven't mentioned recognising the buoys that warn you about shallow water, avoiding windsurfers and canoes, sticky centreboards, detachable tillers and ... no, I think that's about it. Oh, wait, I didn't finish the bit about knowing where you are...not only does the boat want to steer in its own direction, plus the wind shifts around in a superficially random way, but water all looks the same in every direction. Unless you pay a lot of attention to landmarks you could sail in circles (except that you can't actually sail in a circle) for eternity.
But, lest it all sounds a bit horrendous, let me note that the bits in between the bits described here, the bits where your're bumping along at what seems like quite a reasonable speed (walking is quicker, but sailing feels faster), are fantastic. And coping with stuff going wrong is very cheerful after you get home and under a hot shower. So, apparently, there's no downside - although I haven't been thumped in the head by a boom yet. And it's good to have water at the end of summer, it would be a lot colder in January (It has to do with currents, apparently).
I can't quite see myself racing yet, but I can see myself wanting to try.
(On a related note, I started Matthew Flinders' diary over the Easter weekend, courtesy Gutenburg (free e-books) and am/was shocked at the navigational challenges of the 17th and 18th centuries. It wasn't impossible for charts to be out by 10 degrees - as much as 600 nautical miles. OK, Australia's big enough to bump into anyway, but what bit of it were you bumping into? Even once longitude got sorted out, theoretically, people couldn't afford the chronometers. Cook used the rival "lunar distance" method, which wasn't much chop either. Running into islands must have been more good luck that good management.)
(Plus, drinking water...I'd assumed evaporation would have been standard, but Flinders talks admiringly about somebody's "ingenious device", meaning a desalination still, so it clearly wasn't common)
