Awareness

It's always interesting to read your comments on anything I write here. Most people leave their comments within a day or two of the original post, but occasionally I notice someone finds an old post and leaves an insightful comment weeks or even months after I had written the original item.

Such was the case with this comment on my post Snap! that was about a technique for consciously switching visual attention every few seconds between all the factors that are important in a race: sail trim, boat trim, wind, heading, other boats... and so on.

TK, an avid scow sailor from the midwest left a comment about a superior technique using other senses. It is so good I will quote it in full ...

Tillerman,

I may be late, but I found "Snap!" to be very interesting. I am an avid scow sailor in the midwest. And scows depend greatly on 'feel,' but I found the same idea transferred well to the Laser.

I think it is important to widen your field of vision and open up your awareness well beyond what your eyes are telling you.

I've gotten to the point where boathandling and sail control are done mostly by feel, with the occasional visual reference. I think moving your eyes through such a dramatic progression of "snaps" can be distracting.

When you 'hear' what your body is telling you: the boat starting to heel and respond to the breeze can be felt in the rear end and the thighs on the deck, the puff can be felt on your cheek, even the sound of the wake or bow wave...

Awareness of all these senses can tell you lots about the boat's attitude and the handling required.

This allows you to keep your field of vision up and out of the boat. Through a wide lens, watch the wind on the water, watch the angle and attitude of boats near you and those on the other side of the course. Who is up? Who is down? Where is the velocity?

Looking away to the next 'snap' on the list runs the risk of missing something in that field of vision, like that persistent shift.

Making boathandling automatic can mean keeping your eyes up on the racecourse almost the entire time. Fo me, making boathandling automatic required tuning in to what all the other senses were telling me.

With practice, awareness can be greatly heightened.
To the point of telling you almost everything you need to know. So your eyes can see what's happening on the course.

Sounds a little like Zen's Zai Chi. And it works.

Just my $.02

Hope this helps,
TK

Thanks TK. Great advice. I will try and apply it.

Top Ten Sailing Blogs of 2006

In the spirit of the season here is my own personal favorite list of Top Ten Sailing Blogs of 2006. It was tough to narrow the list down to only ten as there are so many great sailing blogs out there. To help me prune the list I ruthlessly applied the following rules to select a blog ...

• It must be mainly about sailing.
• It must have been in existence for most of 2006.
• It must be updated regularly.
• It must be actually worth reading... it's interesting, entertaining, educational, funny, whatever... something grabs me about it.
• The writer engages his or her audience, allows comments on the blog, responds to them, makes comments on other sailing blogs, is part of the community.

Top of the list is The Horses Mouth. Joe Rouse serves up an eclectic feast of sailing news and photos with fish on Fridays and weekend wahines. Spectacular photos, sharp humorous comments, always entertaining. Keep up the good work Joe.

Edward from EVK4 Bloglet writes about sailing his Newport 28 Lady Bug on San Francisco Bay, introducing his son and daughter to sailing, his Polka Dot Racing Team, and more mundane aspects of sailing such as docklines. He's not crossing oceans or sailing major regattas; he's just a guy having fun on the water day-sailing with his family and doing some local racing. But he has a knack for wry self-deprecating humor and he brings the reader into the experience in a way that makes his blog fascinating reading. Thanks for sharing, Edward.

Zen from Zensekai also lives in the San Francisco Bay area and sails an Islander-29. He is a martial arts instructor, has a "made in Japan" wife, and plans to sail to Japan one day. His interest and knowledge of Asian culture, languages and philosophies brings a unique twist to a sailing blog, as exemplified by his post on Tai Chi, Sailing and Laser Racing. Sensei, domo arigato gozaimashita.

Zen dreams of sailing across the Pacific but in 2006 Mark and Judy Handley achieved the dream in their Tayana 42 Windbird and wrote about at HandleySail.com. I have followed their progress all year from the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, and then from island to island across the Pacific to New Zealand. Judy writes posts almost daily about their shore adventures and sailing voyages (not even a broken leg interrupted the flow), and Mark chips in occasionally with articles about the technology on their boat. Gets my vote for best cruising blog of the year.

Sailscape continues to delight us with his superb photos of New England seascapes, classic yachts, small boat racing and Virgin Island views. A feast for the eyes!

Eli Boat feeds his readers plenty of stories and photos from the yachting world at large but my favorite posts are of his stories of Cape Cod Frosty racing in New Hampshire such as this account of the day when 24 Frosties came out to race and the photos in this post entitled Once the ball gets rolling.

One of my prime sources of sailing news is the renowned Scuttlebutt newsletter, so I was pleased to see that this year they also started a blog named... what else but Scuttleblog, a place for Tom and Craig Leweck to post personal commentary such as a peeve about one-design class measurement, to question the future of Olympic yachting, or to bust some gossip about Dennis Conner. These guys know the sailing world as well as anyone and can always be relied upon to keep us informed and entertained.

I follow the blogs of a number of top racing sailors, Olympic contenders and world champions, but the best of the bunch is US Laser sailor Andrew Campbell's CampbellSailing.com. Not just because he is a Laser sailor but because he follows all the rules of good blogging that I listed above (and you would be amazed at how many of the other racing hotshot bloggers don't do so). This year we have been able to follow Andrew's progress from the culmination of a stellar college sailing career through major regattas in Europe and North America, the Olympic Test Event in Qingdao, China, and the Laser Worlds in Korea. Since returning to the USA, Andrew has been writing a series of articles entitled Monday Morning Tactician such as this one on a rules situation near a windward mark. I'm looking forward to continuing to learn from Andrew's experiences and following his Olympic campaign.

And then we have LiveSailDie. You didn't think I could leave this out of the Top Ten did you? Two Aussie sailing instructors in Queensland cover yachting from an Australian perspective in a breezy, fresh, entertaining style. Check it out.

And finally we have Zephyr self-described as Sailing Culture for Voyagers, Zealots, Poets and Populists. This has to make anyone's top ten list of sailing blogs. In May alone the author wrote about Long Island Sound summer anchorages, Dee Caffari's triumph, the lost crewman off ABN AMRO TWO during the Volvo, the passing of poet laureate Stanley Kunitz, MapMuse technology, the opening of the National Sailing Hall of Fame in Annapolis, and a SAIL magazine article on blogging.

Zephyr posts on average about once per day and covers sailing from so many angles. His insights into sailing culture in the broadest sense of the word are often thought-provoking and occasionally provocative. I can't do better then to end this round-up of sailing bloggers by quoting at length from Zephyr.

Technology is having a significant impact on sailing culture, particularly in how sailors communicate with one another and share information about key aspects of voyaging and cruising (weather, friendly ports-of-call, sheltered anchorages). Some of the best examples of this are found in the multitude of individual sailing weblogs being published with more popping every day. Unlike Zephyr, which focuses on a specific topic (sailing culture) and covers it broadly, these sailing blogs are written from the perspective of voyagers, boatbuilders, weekend warriors. They're mostly about the individual journey and serve as a two-way, grassroots window into the sailing world. When I was mate on the Maxi in the late 90'’s I used to punch out email updates to all my desk-bound friends back in the States, compile a mailing list and send them whenever I could find an Internet cafe when we paused in Roadtown, English Harbor, Culebra, etc. I remember people enjoyed them, forwarded them all over their offices, to friends across the country. Sailors are intrinsically storytellers and the Internet has magnified this attribute. Consider the shift from the viral, uncontrolled mass email to a narrow-casted, self published weblog. We are witnesses to this technology proliferating, evolving and beginning to virtually knit together the larger sailing community...not surprisingly the results are (like many things in life) heterogeneous - we discover compelling content side-by-side with the trite, sublime with mundane, unique with conventional...

And who knows where technology will take the world of sailing story-telling in 2007? I'm looking forward to finding out.

Prepare for the Lulls, Enjoy the Puffs

Thanks to the Charleston Post and Courier for this quote from Paul Cayard, skipper of the Volvo Ocean Race entry Pirates of the Caribbean, after the tragic death at sea of competitor Hans Horrevoets...

"Life is like sailing - prepare for the lulls, enjoy the puffs."

Happy New Year. Enjoy the puffs in 2007.

Everything's Coming Up Roses

I set myself a goal: finish in the top half of my age-group fleet in the Laser Masters Worlds in Cascais, Portugal in July next year (2007). Then the class association threw a spanner in the works by announcing in October that they had been unable to agree with the proposed hosts to hold the Masters Worlds in Cascais. During the last few weeks three other potential sites in Europe have been evaluated and yesterday it was announced that the regatta will be in Roses, Spain at the end of September.

According to the official tourist website for Roses...

Roses is an essentially Mediterranean town with a notable tourist and seafaring tradition. It is situated in a unique natural setting, at the north of the Costa Brava, less than 30 kilometres from the frontier with France, 65 kilometres from Girona and 160 kilometres from Barcelona.

Apparently we can expect an interesting variety of wind conditions with nothing too strenuous for us old geezers.

50% thermal wind SE (6 to 15 knots)
40% thermal+gradient wind ENE (6 to 15 knots)
10% gradient wind N (12 to 25 knots)

Sounds good to me. Not too far from where I was sailing in Menorca in 2006 at exactly the same time of year. Hmmm -- maybe I could go early and tune up for a week or two at Minorca Sailing? We haven't visited that corner of mainland Spain before and Tillerwoman is already talking about art galleries in Barcelona. Sounds like we might be in Spain for several weeks. Hey, it's a tough job but somebody has got to do it.

Roses, here we come.

Senior Moments

Why do I run? Why do I sail? Why do I blog?

Well, part of the answer is related to the inherent rewards in each of these activities. But another part is that I am also hoping, vainly perhaps, that these pursuits will hold off the threat of a decline in mental and physical powers as I age.

After I retired a few years ago it dawned on me that I could, within reason, do anything I liked with my time. Travel the world. Vegetate in front of a TV. Hug a tree. Save the planet. Play the stock market. Spend my kids' inheritance. Sit on a beach. Go to law school. Be the backgammon champion of Yahoo! Learn how to play steel drums. Watch the Yankees win the World Series every year. (Hey - this was the year 2000 - anything seemed possible.)

What to do? After a while (and a few false starts -- geeze there are some seriously good backgammon players on Yahoo!) I developed the notion that I should participate in a range of activities that would challenge both mind and body, in the hope of staving off the aging process for as long as possible. A kind of Use It Or Lose It philosophy.

As the years go by the occasional "senior moment" is a check on how well this strategy is succeeding -- or not. That phrase is usually used to describe the lapses in memory experienced by older folk, of the kind celebrated in these jokes from Dull Men's Club. But, as you will see, I use the phrase in a broader sense: those moments, good and bad, that give me a checkpoint on how the Use It Or Lose It plan is working. Here are five of my senior moments from the last couple of weeks.

1. Going to the ATM and forgetting my PIN number. What a shocker! I go and get cash from the bank every couple of weeks or so. And I've had the same PIN number for at least a decade. But last time I went to the cash machine and it asked me for my number... Ummm. Well, I know some of the digits. What are the other two? One-zero? Let's see. No, it doesn't like that. Zero-zero? Wrong again. Hmmm. Wonder how many tries I get before this thing eats my card? So I went home cashless. Next day I tried again and the number came straight back to me. Weird. Have I lost it? Will someone half my age please leave a comment and say this thing has happened to them too? Please?

2. Running a fast 5k. The marathon training has been going well. Ten weeks (out of twenty six) under my belt now and I haven't missed a single workout. Every two or three weeks the program calls for me to run a fast 5k. The time achieved is used to estimate my target time for the marathon based on a table in Jeff Galloway's book. I ran a 5k early last week and was surprised to discover that it was the fastest time I had run this distance for five years. OK -- nothing like as fast as my personal best that I ran in the distant days of my comparative youth in my early forties. But even so it's good to know that in at least one aspect of my life I'm not declining into early senility.

3. Better Tacks. Later in the week I broke the ice on the edge of my local lake and went for a sail in my Laser. It was one of those rare days when the wind was in the perfect direction from the south, down the long axis of the lake, meaning that the usual huge shifts and wind holes and slam dunk gusts weren't quite as bad as they are every other day. A solid 10-12 knots. Gorgeous sunny day with blue sky. I worked on gybes and tacks and windward mark roundings and leeward mark roundings. Especially with my tacks I felt I was really making progress, applying some of the tips I picked up from my instructor in Menorca, tacking better in these conditions than I ever had before. I can still improve.

4. Not getting lost. This week my marathon program included a nine mile run. Relatively easy after the sixteen mile run last week. Afterwards I looked back in my 2005 running diary as I couldn't remember where I had done the same week's long run last year. Ahah. That was the infamous senior moment when I got myself lost in the woods that I wrote about in Sense of Direction. Oh well, be thankful for small mercies. Some times just not getting lost is a sign of progress.

5.....................? I'm sure there was another senior moment I was planning to tell you about, but for the life of me I can't remember it. Perhaps it will come back to me tomorrow? Does this make six?

Tacticat Revisited

The last couple of days I've been trying out Tacticat. My reaction as a beginner in the Laser races is very similar to that of Tim Coleman. I still haven't mastered the crowded starts and mark roundings but it is kind of addictive.

Fellow blogging Laser sailor (and Tillerman sprog) Litoralis spent most of Christmas sitting in my favorite chair playing the game obsessively and thereby kindly allowing Tillerwoman and myself uninterrupted time to play with his daughter, Cutest Granddaughter in the World. Tacticat can't compete with her as a source of amusement (at least not for me) but it's OK now she's gone home.

I see Litoralis is now ranked 4th out of 518 competitors and is the British National Tacticat Champion. Tim is doing pretty well too and is ranked in the Top 100.

I'm still not sure if Tacticat provides the kind of practice that will improve actual racing performance in the real world. It certainly gives you the opportunity to try out different approaches in various tactical situations, but to the extent that it can never be a perfect simulation of real sailing I wonder if it might teach some incorrect techniques too. We will see.

But who cares? Tacticat are offering a Velocitek S-10 GPS Speedometer to the winner of their Christmas Regatta. Now that beats any prize I have ever won at real sailing. So perhaps the better question is whether real sailing talent translates to success in the virtual world?

Terrific Kids

My kids are terrific!

One son bought me the new Laser clew sleeve and hook for Xmas and the other one gave me a new yellow Lotus Lola PFD (and it was even the right size). It was just what I wanted. How did they know? They must be telepathic.

Can't wait to get out on the water and try both my new toys.

Not The Critic Who Counts

A few days I go I posted an email from Mark Hammett explaining the background to the infamous Ham-It-Up video of his crew on a Capri 25 making a few mistakes and learning from them. Comments here and elsewhere to his email have been largely favorable; folk seem to appreciate his integrity and courage in making this training video and letting the world see it, however embarrassing it might be and however mean-spirited some of the criticism was.

I especially liked seeing this quote on the SailNet Forum...

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

Theodore Roosevelt - 1910

Who's Your Daddy?

So who is the Daddy of sailing blogs? Who started the first sailing blog? Who wrote the first blog post about sailing?

It's hard to know for sure. Weblogs have been around since 1998. Some blogs may have been abandoned or been deleted. Some bloggers may have deleted their earlier archives or changed platforms and not transferred archives. And the only way I can think of to research this question is to look back in the archives of currently active blogs.

So with those reservations what can we discover? Some of the sailing blogs that were around in the early days when I were blogging such as EVK4 Bloglet and Zephyr have sailing stories in their archives dating back to early 2005. Are there any earlier sailing blogs?

Ahah. Sherry Fowler's Stay of Execution, though by no means a blog purely about sailing, has sailing stories dating back to September 2003. Ah, but Ant Clay at Soulsailor goes back even further with a post from May 2003 about boat names which told the world that the Enterprise owned by his crew was named Sofa King Lazy. (Say it quickly -- unless there are kids about in which case don't say it at all.) So is Ant the Grand Daddy of all sailing bloggers?

Not so fast. There's someone who has been blogging about sailing for even longer than Ant. Yeah, Rohan Veal has been blogging about sailing since January 2003. The oldest entry in his archives is a link to an account of how he won the 51st Australian Moth Championships. It dates from 13 January 2003. And Rohan is still blogging about Moth sailing and promoting sales of the Bladerider for KA Sail around the world.

So can anyone beat that? Or is Rohan the Daddy of All Sailing Bloggers?

Welcome To My World

So here I am writing a mediocre little blog about my pathetic attempts to race a Laser in a frostbite series...

Now I see that one of the big guns of sailing writing is copying my act. Esteemed old-media dead-tree glossy magazine Sailing World has started a blog and SW editor Dave Reed has written the first post in that blog about... what else but his pathetic attempts to race a Laser in a frostbite series. Of course he writes a lot better than I do but, if his post is to be believed, he sails just as badly as me.

Dave, welcome to my world. What took you so long?