A minor taste of reality, or wresting deep thoughts from an afternoon of sitting in a boat.

The experience of success, great or small, often encourages the building of expectation that further success is a logical extension of that first success. We humans scurry about the good ship Earth striving to achieve goals and dreams, whether they be goals of vast wealth and influence or mere subsistence. Overall, humans do adequately well in achieving those goals – our proliferation as a species and ability to make claims of progress and improvement provide evidence; the null hypothesis suggests that were we not proficient in achieving goals, aside from fading from existence, we would generally be weighted by the burden of repeated defeat and perhaps exhibit a general despondency. We are not an unhappy defeated species.

The evidence of this success makes the assumption of further general success seem a rational, even reasonable assumption. Since we have managed to accomplish x, why would we not be able extend ourselves to do y, which may be a yet more ambitious goal, and not immediately within our grasp… let our reach exceed.

A brief discussion just now with my lovely better half prompts me to point out that I am referring to the faulty “there was success, therefore there must be further success”, rather than the more realistic “there was success, therefore further success is a possibility.” Also, beware the risks inherent to talking about emotional reaction from an overly intellectual or rational bent.

How about getting to the point, three paragraphs in? In the race last weekend, my reach did exceed my grasp:

Not only did I cross the finish line in absolute last place, I managed to make my handicap noticibly worse. This is not at all in keeping with the expectations borne out of the previous race results. Why indeed would I entertain the possibility that, of all the shocking and horrible outcomes, this one would come to pass?

My yet-nascent skill becomes painfully apparent, analysing the progress of the race consists mostly of recognising that on the first lap I kept up rather well; on the first leg of the second lap I lost time adjusting my outhaul; the third lap was shocking as I lost the plot and dwindled to a speck behind the fleet, and the fourth lap was a bit better as I made some time up on the fleet. I think there is room for improvement in working to windward… check that, I know there is heaps of room for improvement. The trick is figuring out what to do differently in order to gain the greatest benefit.

Tacking and gybing were major weaknesses in the first half of the race – either because of the winter break, or because of my rudimentary ability, I managed to come to a nearly dead stop on the majority of my tacks… not a good way to win a race. I think I got the hang of it again by midway through the third lap.

But in the end, we cannot lose sight of the fact that a bad day on the water (or engaged in our favourite activities) is better than a good day in the office (or wherever we must be).

September 1st – The first race of the season.

Ah, Spring. That glorious time of year when a young man’s mind turns to thoughts warm and wet. Lapping waves, freshening breezes, and clear, sunny skies on Saturday afternoons down on the river, locked in fierce competition against fellow gladiators of the seas. Sinew, alumin(i)um and fibreglass come together as one in the all-consuming pursuit of rounding the marks ahead of the fleet (or at least, not too far behind it) and steely resolve galvanises body and mind.

Ah, Spring. For those unfamiliar with the antipodean calendar, as I was, the season kicks off on September first, rather than coinciding with the vernal equinox as it does in the old country. No matter when it starts, Spring is a delightful yet mildly flighty season. Three days of temperatures in the mid-twenties, with glorious sunshine beating down amid 30km/h breezes, all falling on weekdays when we valiant champions of the river are locked in our private salt mines, toiling away to pay the rent and purchase assorted bits and bobs for our steeds. On the inaugural day of the season, threats of rain, almost twenty degrees of warmth and an almost teasing breeze fairly mocked us as we dredged our skills and knowledge out of storage, where they had lain over the winter.

But this is a criticism of near-perfection, which is unwarranted. Would the Mona Lisa be any less alluring with a small pimple on her jawline? Nay, she would not. And so it is for sailing days. So long as there is water and the faintest suggestion of a breeze – or even single digit temperatures (Ottawans: I know that’s not cold. Temperature does become relative, though!) and howling gale force winds… a bad day on the water is better than a good day in the office, any day.

As the preceding paragraphs suggest, our sailing club commenced the 2007-2008 racing series Saturday past. This will be my first season in the new boat, who has already suffered the ignominy of having her name misspelled on the official time results! Everyone seemed to remember which bits went where and attached to what, which is exceedingly fortunate in that this likely prevented a number of capsizes into the still quite chilly Parramatta. A number of the kids didn’t seem to notice that is was cold… maybe their thermostats are shot.

The race itself turned out mostly as expected: the top boats, sailed by experienced and accomplished members of the club, whipped around the course in short order. Those of us with more rudimentary skills joined in a fierce competition for the best of the bottom seven or eight rankings. At times, the racing down at our level of the ladder was intensely close, punctuated by exciting breakaways as one or two discovered a gust of wind or a sail setting that yielded an advantage of dozens to hundreds of metres. Metres, of course, that were surrendered a leg or two later, as is the nature of things.

Ron, with the advantage of experience, has a great sense of where to be in order to move along smartly. No matter how aggressively I try to outsail him, he calmly sits in his boat and finishes ahead of me. Steven’s also got a pretty calm approach, and a fairly well developed technique (at least, to my unpractised eye). Peter and John (grandpa/grandson) in their individual boats did well this week – John found a great gust and took off on us and never gave up all of the lead. Geoff sailed like he’s ready to step up to the next level – after a very crowded rounding of the #4 mark he got knocked way off course behind us. In fairly short order, he made up the ground and finished very well! It’s all boat speed, as he says.

Yours truly is quite pleased to report that I did not finish last. In fact, I tied with Steve for 13th, out of 15 or so boats. We staged an exciting duel at the finish for the finishing committee (who are tasked with logging the finish time of every boat… right down to laggards who finish up to an hour after the first boat). Steve was well ahead on the final leg to the pre-finish mark, but in what seems to be a misjudged tack yielded just enough of his advantage for me to catch him right at the line for a photo finish!

However, once handicap corrections are taken into account, my elapsed time was reduced to put me in 8th place on handicap. This means that I have a rather shocking handicap, in that the adjustment is quite large. So, my goal this season is going to be improving my handicap by an unspecified amount, such at it is at least a bit better than it is now.

And now, all that is left is to look forward to the next race.

Fair winds.

Noticed that...

it was warmer in Ottawa than in Sydney today. Unbelievable, it was only a max of 18 or so degrees. Maybe we better plug the car in...

The DNTO podcast this week was all about old folks - I had no idea Leslie Nielsen was 81. Right near the end of the podcast Sook-Yin talks to Sybil Rampen about the "Hell's Grannies" documentary. Sybil's something like 78 years old, and one day she got bored so she got her friends together to be a motorcycle gang.

Great stuff.

Anyway - Saturday's race was a bust thanks to the wind not showing up to play. At least I was able to find the car in the morning. It ended up being a good little sail anyway, but the season is clearly drawing to a close with the wind becoming lighter and more erratic.

We're just like the big guys though: the Louis Vuitton Cup races have been postponed a few days for lack of wind too.

Sailing results

This having your own boat thing appears to be paying off. That, or the handicapping system is being really kind to me. Today we did a handicap start - depending on how good or how... inexperienced a sailor one is, one gets to start a number of minutes ahead of the 'scratch' boats - those with sailors that are good enough not to need a head start.

I had a 15 minute headstart. I'm not sure whether to be pleased (that I don't need the biggest headstart in the fleet), or miffed (cos I can use all the advantage available to me). I suppose the mark of an accurate handicap is if (for example) I finished close to the scratch boats... I was 3 minutes behind the leader, so plus my 15 is a normal 18 minute split. Pretty good.

Of course, I didn't help myself at all. Nearly capsized once, stuffed up a gybe, stalled twice (didn't think sailboats had clutches...), and stuffed three rounding three marks. Add all those mistakes up, and my handicap would have been spot on, if not a little generous.

Yippee, this is a fun sport.

And thar she blew... sort of

Light winds are, I am told, the most challenging to sail in. I think I would qualify that to claim that racing in light winds is difficult. Sailing with little or no wind is easy. You just sit there, try to keep in the shade of the sail a bit, and enjoy a bit of a drift with the current or the tide. When there is a bit of wind, scoot along and when it dies down again, sit back in the shade again.

Racing in light wind is another matter altogether. There are puffs of wind, apparently randomly distributed over the area of the race course. Each one of these puffs seems to be coming from a different area, and some indeed must be generated by the sporadic efforts of an oscillating fan.

So the experienced, the good, the skilled sailors complain about the lack of wind, how it is shocking (as though someone just could not be counted on to bring the wind, when they promised to do so), and then they proceed to just blitz around the course whilst we neophyte sailors look on in wonder.

It's all about not making mistakes... and reading the wind... and being able to react when there is wind... and reacting the right way... and doing that consistently all round the course. Suffice to say, yesterday was not my best showing ever. (By the way, go Renee! First on handicap, well done!). Yep, last (not counting the new sailor who joined in for fun, and nearly beat me too).

At least I know where I went wrong. First, getting mixed up with the Herons while rounding a mark really killed a lot of time. Then stuffing up the approach to a mark, after I'd caught up a bunch of guys, sort of deflated any hope for a better finish.

Next time. Next time.

Pictures of the new baby

The pictures are posted here.

Introducing the newest member of the family

Well, it is all done and dusted. She came home on Monday, kindly dropped off by her former guardians. We hadn't had long to get acquainted - we had only met her for the first time the day before, on Sunday. She seemed too good to be true: I had been looking off and on for her - or at least, someone like her, but as they say, good ones are few and far between.

Actually, there are plenty of good ones. The problem is that they're too expensive. And that just goes to show you that you can put a price on just about anything. It also goes to show that no matter what, I am unabashedly frugal. (Simone might call it 'tight-assed', but I prefer to think that that is an Australian colloquialism for 'frugal).

Back to the story. She was dropped off on Monday morning - Simone popped home from work and locked her in the garage. When I got home I opened up the garage to see how she was doing - she seemed to be alright, so I checked her out a bit, and then relocked the garage, went up and had dinner.

This morning, we let her out. We hooked the trailer to our shiny new trailer ball, and trundled off to the park. Simone, noticing that I was still a little awkward, left us alone for a bit to get to know each other.

So, I started putting her together: mast into the sail sleeve, attached the outhaul, re-attached another way, and then did it one more time to get it right. Next it was the vang, which only took two tries. The downhaul was easy - one attempt. Now, with the sail all put together, everything else was as I'd practiced on the club boats. No problems.

In my excitement to get out on the water, I rather forgot my life jacket. Whoops.

Wow. I have my own boat, and she sails a treat. Finished third last on scratch, second last on handicap. Not bad at all for a new boat.

Her name is Jatani. To the best of my knowledge, that's a city in India (in the state of Orissa, no less). She's green, she's old, and she's awesome.

Soon, I shall post photos (that Simone took) on Zooomr. They're just on the other computer at the moment.

Like a rookie, sailing for the very last time

Beautiful day to be back on the water yesterday... if only my performance had done it justice. In the cadet race (the earlier, shorter race for younger and more neophyte participants) things went alright, with a top-three finish.

In the real race is where things went awry. For some odd reason, my bung (drain plug for draining water that gets into the hull) came out, with the obvious consequence of having an open hole in the hull. Those holes are definitely not one-way flow devices: halfway into the first lap of the race, I was wondering why the boat was handling so oddly, and when the waves started coming over the front instead of sort of splashing to the side, I headed for shore and safety.

Drained the boat, fastened the bung (and checked it three times) and rejoined the race. By now the wind had really picked up, and my ability in stronger winds is quite minimal... I rejoined in last place and stayed quite solidly there.

But it was a beautiful day nevertheless.

And the thunder rolled...

Another Saturday on the water, and what a day it was. There was only the lightest of breezes in the morning, but around lunchtime things really picked up. I have no idea what the wind speed was, only that it was getting up to very challenging levels.

So the race started, we took off down the river tacking back and forth like madmen and madwomen. With the force of the wind, many tacks included a generous portion of swim time. All through the first lap the wind continued to increase ahead of the coming thunderstorm. Things did go quite well on the first lap, until a gybe around a mark that was intended to turn into a run. The actual result was a spectacular capsize - I was ejected from the boat, rather than sort of just leaking into the river. At this point I had been catching up some other boats. They righted their vessels much more quickly than I did, so that was the end of that charge.

However, while capsized I did make significant progress along the course: The sail was sticking up perpendicular to the water, so a few hundred metres of course was completed while capsized. Of course, pointing the boat into the wind so that I could actually right it, get in, and get underway took a long time...

Eventually, back underway running before a strong breeze, planing in front a closing RiverCat ferry, things started looking up again, and thanks to my relative light weight, I started catching up on the downwind leg. The following reach worked really well, I actually passed another boat (okay, Jeff was making some emergency adjustments to his rudder). Then it's back to working into the wind... covered half the upwind leg, and then capped it, righted it, capped it, righted it, capped it... all the while not making any headway at all. I think this marks the point where the conditions exceeded my modest sailing ability.

With the see-saw nature of this adventure, my rudder pin was dislodged and the rudder fell off. Hurray! Caught it before it sank to the gluey bottom of the river.

Once I had re-attached the rudder, caught my breath, I started applying the principle of not going completely head-to-wind, and limped around the course, the 'encouragement' of the race leaders lapping me ringing in my ears, exhaustion and refrigeration taking their toll.

Halfway through my second lap the race was abandoned 'cos of that thunderstorm. We may be mad enough to sail in strong winds and driving rain, but when there's lightning and thunder, sitting in the middle of a wide expanse of water with a little bitty aluminum mast sticking up doesn't seem the wisest thing to do.

And for the defining moment of brilliance, I had left my backpack under a tree... which seems to be in the path of the park's primary drainage routes, and hence everything, including my phone, drowned.

I must be mad to love this so much.

The CRSC Marathon to the Gladesville Bridge

Instead of sailing a normal race course around our normal sailing patch of the Parra, we had a marathon, sailing from near the Concord Bridge right down to the Gladesville Bridge (with a loop into Hen and Chicken Bay), and back. Way too cool, sailing in new waters. Arrr, we be explorers.

I didn't place too proudly, so in addition to my lack of experience and/or skill, I claim the following handicaps:
1) Different boat from usual, so every quirk I was used to wasn't there, and the quirks that were there were inscrutable to me.
1a) This boat seemed to absorb water into the hull. Seemed like about fifty litres over the course of the race, so ... it got slower (even slower than at the start!)
2) The Mortlake ferry got in my way. It's on cables, so I was rather cautious about trying to slip past. In the end I circled around a couple of times to avoid running into the ferry and the cables. I suppose a better sailor would have avoided the situation altogether, or handled it more effectively, but hey.
3) No telltales or leech pennants on the sail. As long as it wasn't flapping, it was set right.
4) ... er, no, that's about it.

On the upside, coming in last does mean I got to sail for longer than anyone else. Again.

It was worth the sunburn

Spent close on 7 hours on the water on Saturday, as the remaining scraps of sunburn peel will attest to. All those seemingly fruitless circuits around the marks are paying dividends: I no longer swirl at the dreary depths of the results form. Even better, I made it around the course before the timekeeper ladies went off for tea. Granted, I came last, but it was within the time allowed by the sailing rules. I might have been second last had I made the last tack properly and not nearly capsized. So:
September 2, didn't finish (on time).
September 9, didn't race 'cos of work.
September 16, didn't finish on time.
September 23rd, didn't finish (but I am listed first among the didn't finishers!).
September 30, didn't race.
October 7, first finish! Hurray!
October 14, sailed a different boat, so that confused the racecounter a bit, finished second last!
21 October, last of the non-finishers.
28 October, didn't finish, but made it into the first lot of non-finishers.
4 Nov wasn't so good, dead last.
Remembrance Day we did some short races, and I placed 21st out of what looks like 27 active boats, but if we count everyone, it's 21st out of 40 or so.
18 November, dead last, but only by 13 seconds.

Aye, these be promising results.

Thar she blows - all over the place!

That was a windy Saturday to be out in a little ol' boat. I'm not sure what the final score on the wind speed was, but I think it was up there on par with the day I got a black eye and broken glasses from a swinging boom.

I reckon there's about 8 guys at the club that handled it alright and completed the race - the majority of us headed for shore after a lap or so.

Strong winds compound the difficulty factors: 1) Really strong winds can be tough to handle. 2) Those winds whip up pretty neat waves that can be fun to surf down, or fly off the top of. They also break over the bow and spray which makes 3) things a lot wetter than normal, and 4) add in the winds and it gets pretty chilly. (I should get some more insulation!)

All that whingeing aside, it is freaking awesome hanging off the side of the boat on the knife-edge of capsizing, but just flying along (and actually believing that you are in control!)

Whew.

Believe it or not, there are lousy days to be on the water

What a miserable day... drizzly, overcast, cold (by Sydney standards). I hated to do it, but puttering around in a wind-powered bathtub doesn't appeal.

So, it's a day of household chores and errands instead.

Bit by bit, little by little

Spent a number of hours on the water yesterday, about half of which were actually fruitful, and the remainder were frustrating.

Early in the race I managed to stay with the frontrunners, and got up to third or fourth place on the first leg, and stayed in the top eight for the second leg. However, after that I seemed to go backwards, and once again finished after the scoring ladies left for tea. At least the first half of the race went better. It seems that as long as there is only very little wind, the club boats are on some sort of par with the 'good' boats owned by other clubmembers. That, or I have more time to copy their technique, and reap the benefits of being a little lighter than average. Once the wind picks up a bit, the good sailors on the good boats seem to leave little ol' me in the dust (imagine watery dust, for that metaphor to work).

Better luck next time.

New Complete Sailing Manual - Steve Sleight

I'm pretty sure this is the same book I can't find back after moving to Sydney. That's a shame - it's a really good book.

It's a sailing manual. If you like sailing, (and are still learning to do it), it's fabulous. If you're not interested in sailing, it's probably pretty boring.