The Rabbit and the Old Dog

When I fail to win a sailboat race (which happens most of the time) I am usually confused as to why I failed. Was there one reason or many? Was it getting a bad start? Poor boat speed relative to the fleet? Wrong strategy? Etc. etc. etc. It seems hard to makes sense of what happened when you were flailing around in bad air in a crowd of sailors in the middle of the fleet.

But on the rare occasions that I win a race, it all seems much more simple. Usually it is because of one decision I made or one move that I executed that put me out in front. And sailing in front of the fleet is a hell of a lot easier than all that mid-fleet confusion.

Such was the case last night.

It turned out to be another superb evening for informal Laser racing in Bristol Harbor. The wind was patchy and fluky when we first launched but it eventually settled into a light but steady NW breeze and we completed six or so windward-leeward races. There were eleven boats out, the largest fleet that we've had so far on the Tuesdays I've attended.

Our usual fleet captain was not present so there was a bit of confusion as we all waited for someone else to take charge and decide on a course. Once the course was decided there was even more confusion about which of the no-wake markers was actually the windward mark.

"That one up there?"

"Where?"

"The third one."

"Third counting from where?"

"The one to the left of the other one."

"Which other one?"

And so on.

Eventually we got the racing going with a rabbit start and sort of allowed the leader of the first race to decide to choose which mark to round. Then after the race we all had a good argument as to which mark would have been better. After a couple of races everybody knew what the course was and we settled in for some good racing.

I was doing OK in the first couple of races, up in the top four or five as I recall, and was pretty pleased with that. My boat speed was good, partly thanks to all that practice in light air clinics with Kurt Taulbee in Florida I think.

The rabbit for the next race set off on her run and everyone screamed at her that they weren't ready so we did a restart. I notice that she didn't take as long an approach run as the rabbits in the earlier races, so I hovered near the leeward mark/ start buoy expecting her to do the same again. She did. I made a perfect start on her transom and when I looked back a few seconds later I saw that the rest of the fleet hadn't been quite so lucky. Or observant? Or as well prepared?

Anyway, I was leading off the start. I looked up the course and the wind looked stronger on the left so I worked that side of the course and was first at the windward mark. Did a perfectly acceptable rounding and bear away (something I've been practicing a bit lately) and sailed the run partly by the lee and partly on a broad reach aiming to keep good flow on the sail in the light air.

One win.

I was rabbit for the next race and so was over on the right side of the course by the time everyone had ducked me. I still rounded the windward mark with the leaders and finished around third or fourth.

The next race I tried for a start on the left again, soon after the rabbit rounded the buoy. Unfortunately so did three other sailors. I was pinned between two boats and gasping for air. As I wanted to go left I actually ducked behind the boat to leeward that was trying to pinch me off and bore off into clear air. Eventually everyone else tacked away and I went off to bang the left-hand corner. I had lots of pressure, and a slight lift as I cracked off a couple of degrees to round the windward mark in first place again.

My lead was big enough that nobody could catch me on the run. Two wins.

One of the the other sailors came up to me after racing and laughingly congratulated me on winning the evening. I wasn't so sure that was true as we don't keep score, but it was certainly my best Tuesday so far.

Sailboat racing is pretty simple really. Win the start. Sail where there is more wind. Don't screw up.

OK. I know it was only Tuesday night informal short course practice racing. I shouldn't get too cocky about it. But it has given me a boost of confidence after some pretty mediocre results on previous Tuesdays and at the Wickford Regatta a few weeks back. Especially as the sailors in this fleet are no pushovers. There are some people in this fleet who have achieved more in sailing than I can ever hope to. Any time I can finish in front of all of them - and twice - is a good day.

There's life in the old dog yet.

Sailing Coverage for the Rest of Us

There's a great article by Jarrett Fifield about sailing blogs (and other watery blogs) in the July issue of LI Sail, a digital sailing magazine about sailing in Long Island waters.

The article is on pages 134-143 and mentions Proper Course along with tugster, frogma, Jos Spijkerman's Racing Rules of Sailing and Edwards' EVK4 Superbblog.

Check it out at http://www.lisail.com/issues/10-07-July/index.html.

Jarrett is a fellow blogger, author of The Good Old Boat Redwing.

New Crew

My crew for the 2018 sailing season, grandson Owen born last Wednesday.

T-boned!

Regular readers of my blog will know that one of the places I sail most frequently is Bristol Harbor, whether it be for the Tuesday night informal Laser racing or solo practice.

It feels like a pretty safe place generally. If I broke the mast or the boom on my Laser when sailing on my own there in the winter, I would probably wash up on some shore or other before my extremities froze or dropped off. And usually there's not so much traffic that I fear being run down by another boat.

Having said that I do keep clear of the Prudence Island Ferry. I suspect he wouldn't change course for the crazy old Laser geezer.

And there have been some heart-stopping moments on Tuesday nights when the Bristol YC A-cat fleet has been racing on a course that overlapped with ours. Those things are sooo fast and come up on you sooooo quietly.

I also keep an eye out for random motorboats and, if I'm not racing, usually change course to keep well out of their way. I'm never sure if anyone on board is actually looking where they are going.

Sounds as if the latter precaution is well worthwhile as there is news of a sailboat that was rammed amidships by a motorboat while racing last Wednesday evening in light winds in the harbor.

“It was 8:20 p.m., the wind had pretty much died out and the boats were drifting,” a witness on shore said.

“We were walking away when we heard a powerboat and a woman on board just whooping it up. Then there was an incredible crash — it sounded like an explosion.”

The 31 foot Beneteau ended up with a huge gaping hole amidships. Both people on the motorboat, a 21 foot Boston Whaler, were injured but the crew on the yacht were all in the cockpit abaft of the point of impact and so escaped without serious injury.

The forces of law and order have surmised that "speed was clearly a possible cause."

I should say so.

The picture below (stolen shamelessly from eastbayri.com) shows the hole in the side of the yacht with part of the deck of the powerboat hanging out.



Yikes. It's a dangerous world out there kiddies. It's not you, it's the other guy you need to worry about. Especially those evil powerboat drivers. Keep a good lookout. Play safe.

Younger Than Bob Dylan

Thanks to boatinsurance.org for including Proper Course on their recent post 48 Beginners Boating Sites and Tips Pages. But no thanks for the tag they put against the Proper Course link: From a sailor in his 60's.

Come on people at boatinsurance.org! Nobody is going to be motivated by that tag to click on my link. Who wants to read some boring old blog "from a sailor in his 60's"? Especially when the other choices are blogs with such tantalizing descriptions as "A man finds a small boat and uses it for circumnavigation" or "A captain sails the Northwest Passage alone." Even my blogging friend Adam has a good positive plug for his "whimsical nautical blog."

From a sailor in his 60's!!! Is that the kindest thing they could find to say about Proper Course? No mention of my epic tales of world-championship Laser racing. No credit for my talent at self-deprecating humor. Not a word about my zany coverage of monster truck videos and synchronized swimming goldfish.

Why do I bother?

I suppose I only have myself to blame. This whole "Cheat the nursing home. Die on your LASER" ethos kind of draws attention to my age. Not to mention that in my description of myself in the sidebar I start off by mentioning that I am a grandfather and am over 60.

But I don't particularly want this blog to be defined solely by my age. I am more than the number of years that I happen to have inhabited this planet.

Perhaps I need to change those age-related signals that are so prominent on the blog? No more "cheat the nursing home." No more grandfather talk.

Wait. Maybe I should go the whole hog and rewrite that whole mini-biography. Why mention that I am a Laser sailor at all? It only invites readers like Sir Puffing Pecan, or whatever his name is, to have a go at me when every single post isn't about Laser sailing. Apparently he wants more posts about "vang tension" of all things. Get a life Sir. It is what it is.

I could turn this into a more general outdoors activities blog. Or a tree-hugging environmentalist natural food freak blog. Or an advice blog on how to be an active baby boomer in early retirement full of investment advice and health tips. Then I could monetize it with adverts for high fee variable annuities and products to treat erectile dysfunction. Not that I have any problems in that department of course. No wait, that's getting back to the age thing again.

Do other bloggers have this problem? Do you write a "mission statement" for what you want to blog about and then find that you have actually walled yourself in to writing about one narrow slice of the multi-ingredient pizza that is really your life?

Do "real" writers suffer from the same issue of being boxed into one particular genre? Did Arthur C. Clarke ever get sick of writing science fiction and long to churn our some trashy romantic novels? Did Tolstoy want to try his hand at limericks? We'll never know.

Of course, fans get upset when an artist switches gears like that. Bob Dylan's fans booed him when he "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 because Dylan was a folk singer and "folk" was acoustic. It just was. Well it was until Bob decided it wasn't. It is what it wasn't.

So, having arrogantly compared myself to Clarke, Dylan and Tolstoy, where do I go from here?

I have no idea.

But I am younger than Bob Dylan. So there.

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

My third grandchild, Owen Thomas, arrived in the world yesterday afternoon. A couple of hours later we took Aidan and Emily into the hospital to meet their new baby brother. Everyone is doing fine.

Owen is a big guy, 9lb 12 oz at birth. Definitely keelboat crew potential. And sometime soon I will need to work out the logistics of how to take three grandkids sailing.

We're gonna need a bigger boat.

Ohmigod It's Insane!

This looks like even more fun than Laser sailing.

How do I get in?

Unknown Unknowns

Is it possible to be so incompetent that you don't know you are incompetent? How can you know what you don't know? Is this why I never get any better at Laser racing?

Fascinating article on the NY Times website today about the Dunning-Kruger effect. The example that heads the article is one of those stupid criminal stories about an incompetent bank robber who thought that rubbing lemon juice on his face would make him invisible to surveillance cameras. He even "proved" that his method worked by trying to take a photo of himself with a Polaroid camera. (This was in the mid-1990s.) He was such a klutz that he somehow failed to appear in his own photo! QED.

This led Dunning and Kruger to do some research and publish a paper entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments.”

"Unskilled and unaware of it." Perhaps that's my problem. I don't know what I don't know. How could I? How can I fix what I'm doing wrong if I am so incompetent that I don't know what I am doing wrong?

What are the unknown unknowns of Laser sailing?

I have no idea.

Tony Goes Yotting

Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, went to watch his boat Bob

sail in the Round the Island Race today.

Mr. Hayward, I'm speaking now totally for myself. I'm not speaking for sailors, I'm not speaking for oil executives.

But I'm ashamed of what happened in the press and the blogosphere and the twittersphere today. I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private person could be subjected to what I would characterize as humiliating ridicule that's unprecedented in our nation's history, that's got no legal standing, and which sets, I think, a terrible precedent for the future.

There is no question that you are a stupid prat. But we have a due process system where we go through hearings, in some cases court cases, litigation, and determine who is a stupid prat and when you should have to wear a silly hat saying you are a stupid prat.

So I'm only speaking for myself, I'm not speaking for anybody else, but I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a private citizen causes the biggest environmental disaster in our nation's history and then buggers off to the Isle of Wight to enjoy a bit of yotting, he's subjected to some sort of publicity that again, in my words, amounts to humiliating ridicule.

So I apologize.

Truly Awful Poetry

Some days it's far too windy
to sail on the bay alone.
Some days there is no wind at all
so I may as well stay at home
Some days make you want to sail
when you should be doing laundry.

Tuesday was a day like that.

Some days I just goof around
and have no plan at all.
Some days I do random practice
like this day when I did it all.
Some days I want to work on a single skill.
It's just another way to train.

Tuesday was a day like that.

Some skills evade me after all these years
like roll tacks in light air.
Some coaches have tried to teach me the tricks
but I really can't remember where.
Some things I have to learn by trial and error
until they are as familiar as eating cornflakes.

Tuesday was a day like that.

Some places are cold and shifty
like Newport on a winter's day.
Some places are full of sailing friends
like Bristol after work on Tuesday.
Some places are remote and lonely
like the Sakonnet River near Fogland Beach on a summer morning.

Tuesday was a day like that.

Some posts are angry
and on others I just ramble.
Some posts are so darned silly
that my readers want to scramble.
Some days I just scribble bad poetry
with lines that go on and on that I never should have written.

Today was a day like that.

In memory of William Topaz McGonagall.

(O Docker made me do it.)