The first is to remember a dry towel. I’m about 95% successful at this, which makes me sound like a towel-remembering genius. But let me tell you, the 5% of the time I forget can be pretty costly.

I almost always remember to pack one of these

The other thing I always think about before I go sailing is this:

“The desire to sail well often results in winning; The desire to win rarely results in sailing well”

Dr Stuart Walker said that, and he knows a thing or two about winning sailboat races.

Anyway, the quote came to mind when I was re-reading some bits of John Bertrand’s wonderful book, Born To Win (I’ve reviewed it here, if you’re interested), which I pulled out when I was writing my (silly) post on Australian sailing. Talking about his early years as a sailor he says this:

“The pursuit of excellence has always driven me. We (John and his crew, Geoff Augustine) did not do it for domination but to achieve sailing perfection.”

 When I was younger I would almost always turn up at regattas thinking one of two things:

1. That I probably wasn’t in with a shout of winning (if lots of top sailors were there); or
2. If the competition wasn’t all hot-shots, that I had a pretty good chance of doing well

The problem with this is obvious. On one hand, if I thought I wasn’t in with a shout of doing well then the chances were that I wouldn’t do well. On the other hand, if I thought I had a chance to win (or at least come very close) then I would put too much emphasis on the result, and not enough on just sailing well. This would often result in my not doing as well as I should have.

It’s not that I didn’t want to sail well – of course I did. The problem was that my focus was on the result, not on the process.

Of course, thinking in the way Stuart Walker suggests does improve results. But more importantly, it edges the emphasis away from results and more onto performance, allowing you to feel good coming off the water regardless of where you finished. In other words, you might come last because of one big mistake, but still come off the water feeling good because you did everything else right. Or, conversely, you might sail really well, but someone else sails even better – no matter, you’ll still feel great, even though you were beaten.

It is surprising, when you are conscious of this idea, how often you hear athletes from all sports talk about how they have focused on the processes in training or in competition.

In a way, it relates to a post I wrote called Would George Clooney Improve His Sailing Quicker Than You?. Both ideas avoid focus on the result, and instead on performing the small things well.

Interestingly, John Bertrand describes at the beginning of his book the start of the fifth race in the 1983 America’s Cup. Australia II is 3-1 down in a best of 7 series – this race is do or die. Lose and the Australians are going home. And what happens at the start of the race? The Australians are over the line and have to re-start.

There are many reasons why they might have been over at the start, but one could be that they were too focused on the result. They had to win, so the result may have become the focus. If that is the case, then it is comforting to know that even the great sailors focus on the wrong things sometimes.

That said, I bet he didn’t forget his towel.

Originally published October 2014

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There are two types of thinking that we do: focused and diffuse thinking. Focused thinking is the kind of thinking you do when you are concentrating on something specific – doing a maths problem, working on a crossword, or reading a complex text. Diffuse thinking is the big-picture, making-connections, general kind of thinking.

We tend to use diffuse thinking when we are doing something that doesn’t require concentration – like jogging, or washing up, or even sleeping, and it is great for getting a handle on something that we have been struggling with. We’ve all, for instance, experienced being stuck doing a crossword, and then being interrupted by our flipping wonderful children. When we return to our crossword we suddenly get the word we were struggling with quite quickly; or we’ve been working on a complex topic, go out for a walk, and when we come back we seem to have a clearer idea as to how it all fits together.

The funny thing about focused and diffuse thinking is that we can’t do both types of thinking at the same time. we’re either one or the other, but never both. A lot of leading scientists working in the field now reckon we should work on something for around 25 minutes, and then take a five minute break before continuing, to incorporate both types of thinking. They also recommend working on a problem until frustration begins to kick in, and then doing something completely different, to allow diffuse thinking to kick in and do some of the work moving us forward.

So much, so unsurprising. A lot of us know these things already to a greater or lesser degree. Also not particularly surprising is that some of the geniuses from human history have developed ways to enhance this to do amazing things.

Salvador Dali is said to have sat in a chair, with a key on a string hanging from his fingers, and relax, drifting off to sleep whilst loosely thinking about a piece he was working on. When he dozed off the key would fall from his fingers, clanging on the floor and waking him. He would then get up and immediately work, using his dream-like thoughts to develop his art. Given his paintings, this is hardly surprising.

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More surprising is that Thomas Edison used a very similar technique. He used ball-bearings rather than keys, but other than that he did pretty much as Dali did, using the technique to help move on through difficult problems, or to get creative ideas. Einstein and Aristotle are also said to have used the technique.

Very interesting stuff.

But what does it have to do with sailing?

One of the things that this research showed up was that even those of us that don’t have time to loll around in chairs fondling ball-bearings can still use diffuse thinking to help with specific things. The idea is that we focus on something that we want to improve just before we go to bed, and then tell ourselves that we want to dream about the topic. This has been shown to produce significant improvements in various activities, from solving problems to physical ability.

So, in theory, by watching a video of a top sailor just before bed, and then deciding to dream about it, our bodies can develop better technique for sailing.

Which does sound a little unbelievable.

But…our bodies are controlled by our brains. By allowing the brain to look at a great example of how to sail our particular class of boat, and then letting it loose on the image with diffuse thinking, it is able to create new neural pathways that weren’t there before. We’re allowing our subconscious to understand how to sail better, and as most of the boat-handling manoeuvres are best done without thinking about them, this is crucial to sailing well.

You could also use it to help work through complex tactical problems, technical issues, and so on.

Or you could use it for something useful like a problem at work.

Or you could just go to sleep like a normal person. But then you’re a sailor, so you already have a track record of doing ridiculous things.

I have no idea if this technique works, but, if nothing else, it’s a good excuse to watch sailing videos.

If you’re interested in reading more about the technique you can find Dali’s book here, and there’s an interesting piece on how to achieve lucid dreaming here.

Originally published October 2014

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For the day of the first races it was blowing a solid force 4, with a decent if not huge swell. I love sailing in these conditions, but I get better results in lighter breezes. So when I rounded the windward mark in seventh I was pretty happy, and when I gained a spot on the downwind I was even happier. Sixth place and gaining – this frostbiting thing was easy.

The breeze was building a little, so I ramped on the vang for the second beat. The first shift came in, and I tacked onto port. And my buoyancy aid got caught on the boom, and… I capsized.

I got the boat upright and got going again having lost a handful of spots. Then, a couple of tacks later, my buoyancy aid got caught on the boom, and…I capsized.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHhhh!

I finished the race 14^th, knackered, cold and frustrated.

The most annoying thing about all this was that it gave me a problem in heavy winds. I wanted to hammer the kicker on to depower, but I couldn’t afford two capsizes every beat. Never mind where I came in the races, my ego simply couldn’t handle it.

My results suffered as a result. In force 3 and under I always finished in the top 5. In force 4 and upwards I didn’t get a single top 5 result, and most were in the early to mid-teens.

The next summer I got the opportunity to attend a couple of training sessions with the guy that had won the second of the two frostbite series I’d competed in, and he was particularly quick in a breeze. He was watching us tacking, and made a suggestion to me. He told me to slide my bum back about a foot as I turned into the tack. I already put my back foot across the boat before the tack (so that it hooks under the toestrap as I come onto the new tack), but sliding back had one big benefit. It meant that as I crossed the boat I could push the old back foot into the back leeward corner of the new tack and push myself across and, crucially, forward onto the new tack. This meant that my head and body passed through the biggest gap possible, allowing me to put more vang on upwind.

It was a real light-bulb moment for me. Others among you would have thought of it, no doubt – many probably did, or just did this naturally. But, for two reasons, it think it would have taken me a long time to figure this out (if, indeed, I ever would have figured it out):

1. I’m not exactly a genius
2. I grew up sailing Optimists.

The square back of an Optimist means that the more you dig the back corners into the water the quicker you stop the boat. This means that when you tack, you tend to keep your feet reasonably well forward. It was so ingrained in me that sliding back means slowing down, I suspect I may never have really tried it if it hadn’t been suggested to me by a good sailor.

All of which goes to show that, firstly, getting coaching can really help unlock a problem very quickly (especially if you know specifically what you need help with); and, secondly, that you should always revisit your assumptions and analyse the things that you think you know – they may not always stand up.

Oh, and thirdly, if anyone is likely to park their bum in the wrong place then it is me.

First published October 2014

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If you’re thinking about doing a Frostbite or Winter sailing series this year, and my poetry has failed to convince you (although this does seem unlikely), then perhaps Malcolm Gladwell might have more luck.

In his book Outliers, Gladwell describes how children of all backgrounds learn and improve at approximately the same rate during school term time. However, children from more disadvantaged backgrounds fall behind during the holidays – particularly the summer holidays – a phenomenon known as the “summer learning loss”.

The idea is that, where families with money and opportunity help their children to continue their learning and maintain their knowledge through things like museum visits, cultural holidays, access to a range of educational books and material, families without money (or, to some extent time, if they are having to work multiple jobs to keep their heads above water) are not able to provide this stimulating environment and so their children fall behind.

Like pretty much any study or claim these days, there are some that question these findings but, regardless of the rights and wrongs, it is probably fair to say that those that continue learning gain significantly on those that don’t.

And the same applies to sailing:

Those that sail competitively through the winter improve; those that don’t, don’t.

I saw this first-hand when I sailed a competitive frostbite series in Dublin. Not only does your racing continue to sharpen, especially as you’re racing against guys you don’t normally compete with in your own club, but things like your sailing fitness improve too.

It also helps with other things. Getting out of your comfort zone, and dealing with creating new routines for yourself, all help you to figure out what helps you perform well and what hinders you.

And sailing in cold, windy, wavy conditions certainly make those breezy summer days feel a lot easier.

So, if you want to get a headstart on the fleet for next season, then Frostbiting or Winter racing is the way to go.

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Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell

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It keeps you fit; it builds skills in the off-season; you make new friends; you learn from good sailors; and it can also give you new experiences that you wouldn’t otherwise have.

A few years ago I was frostbiting out of a club in Dublin. As I sailed out of the harbour a seal bobbed up behind my boat and swam along behind me for a little while, diving down and then popping back up. He was never more than a couple of boatlengths from me, and he was having a good look at what I was up to. He seemed to want to play.

And then, as I approached the harbour wall he had a last look, dived down and swam back into the harbour. It was as if he realised only someone crazy would venture out of the nice, calm harbour.

He was probably right.

The incident struck me more than it probably should have. It’s unusual, but nothing life-changing. But there was something strangely peaceful and personal about it. After a busy week, and then a busy boat-park, and with my mind on work, or race strategy, or family, it was a moment out of normal life. It was different.

The funny thing is, I didn’t tell anybody about my short encounter for several weeks. Not on purpose, I actually forgot. It had been a strange day’s racing, with the wind swinging 180 degrees so that for much of the first race we were surfing upwind on one tack, and lurching with a cross-swell coming from leeward on the other. And I’d done quite well, with a couple of top 5 places, and so, somehow, the seal was forgotten. It is amazing how quickly life takes over again.

But whenever I think of it I can remember that sense of other, of something else in life than the day-to-day, and it makes me happy.

I’m glad I went frostbiting that day.

First Published September 2014

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It’s Frostbiting time of year again,
And so I pull out my trusty pen
And start to fill in the entry form,
When slowly memories begin to dawn

Not of that second place I got
Nor of the time I overtook Scott,
But rather of waves fifteen feet tall,
(alright, they were four feet, but they didn’t feel small);

And of breaking ice off my Laser’s cover
While trying to remember why I bother
To spend my Sundays in the shivering cold
Starting two races (and both times being rolled
Off the line by someone I otherwise like,
But who, in those moments I could stab with a spike).

I think and think, and I’m about to give up
And put my pen in my pen-holding cup
And throw the form in the wastepaper bin
When suddenly a thought begins to seep in.

If I don’t enter I’ll spend the whole time
Checking the forecast (it’ll probably be fine)
And thinking “Force 2? I could’ve done well”
Or “Twenty knots – there’d be a nice swell”

And I’ll imagine the reaches where you can’t breathe for the spray
Or the gybe mark where my only hope is to pray
Or getting a start that is as I intended
(Yes, I’m heading to a place where reality’s suspended)

And I realise that I will have to take part,
If only to prove I was right from the start.

Amazing, right?

I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking that I should have warned you that you were about to read something life-changing. Something Earth-shatteringly brilliant.

And you’re probably right.

Still, it’s pretty great to think that you are among the first to read this great addition to a strong literary canon of sailing poetry. Just think, your children and grandchildren will probably be studying this poem in the future, hunched over their textbooks, the classroom hushed, a sense of awe pervading the room.

Some of you (I call you ‘doubters’, but others might describe you as ‘people with at least a basic education’) may be thinking “That’s not a poem, it’s a rhyme. At best.” To you I would say this:

1. I am not bound by the poetical cliches of metaphor and simile, of themes and motifs. I am above these techniques, and my writing is pure.
2. If I had used proper literary techniques then it would have taken me a lot longer than 5 minutes to bang this poem out, and I’ve got other things to do.

So there you are – my gift to humanity.

You’re welcome.

First Published September 2014

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It occurred to me at the time that this was an excellent idea – a good way of getting yourself in the right frame of mind for the relevant conditions. A lot of people use music to psyche themselves up, but this is something I’ve rarely been able to do. I think it is because I like music too much – by this I mean I am too emotionally invested in music. I don’t mean I burst into tears at the sound of Kristin Hersh’s voice, more that any particular song may arouse a range of feelings making it difficult to match the songs with the required mood.

Whatever the reason for my musical confusion, the idea of getting into a particular mindset seems sensible, and not too difficult to do. On the drive to the sailing club it is quite easy to do a little imagining in order to get set up for that day’s sailing. I really should remember to do it more often.

All of this popped into my head as I was reading a particular passage in the timelessly brilliant book ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’. In it the author, W. Timothy Gallwey, describes a technique he calls ‘Programming by Identity’. This is how he describes teaching the technique:

When introducing this idea, I usually say something like this: ‘Imagine I am the director of a television series. Knowing that you are an actor that plays tennis, I ask if you would like to do a bit part as a top flight tennis player. I assure you that you needn’t worry about hitting the ball out or into the net because the camera will only be focused on you and will not follow the ball. What I’m mainly interested in is that you adopt professional mannerisms, and that you swing your racket with supreme self-confidence. Above all, your face must express no self-doubt. You should look as if you are hitting every ball exactly where you want to. Really get into the role, hit the ball as hard as you like and ignore where the ball is actually going.’

It is a brilliant idea. Putting it together with some of the other things he writes, it becomes a very good way of improving your sailing.

Here’s a suggestion. If you are a Laser sailor then watch a few videos of Tom Slingsby, Robert Scheidt or Paul Goodison. Watch them as if you were preparing for an acting role, as described above. Really prepare for the role, not by trying to remember exactly where Tom Slingsby’s back foot is halfway through a tack, but by trying to imagine what he is thinking and feeling at any given moment. Create a visual picture of what it all looks like. Think about the relaxed concentration they tend to exude. Create for yourself a mental impression of how they look – their hiking style, where their head looks, what their general movements are like.

Then, next time you go sailing, play the role. Don’t worry about where you are coming in the race, the director can edit that out. Don’t worry about making a mistake – he can edit those out too. Just concentrate on playing the role of a brilliant Laser sailor. As Gallwey himself says: the results can be dramatic.

If you want to read more about it, I can’t recommend “The Inner Game of Tennis” enough – it really is brilliant:

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This page uses some affiliate links so, if you click on the link and end up buying an item, I get a small commission. Just like a shop makes a profit when you buy something that they display on their shelves.

The money from this goes to paying the website costs (hosting, plugins, etc.) and buying me the occasional coffee, so any purchase is much appreciated.

Originally posted in September 2014

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There’s been a fair amount of comment about how sailing has an ageing demographic, which would suggest that our current customer is in the 40+ age range. These are great members to have – they’re experienced, have decided that sailing is their core interest, and, of course, they tend to have disposable income. We’re lucky to have strong membership in this age range.

However, most of the talk around this subject focuses on kids, and particularly on how to keep kids in sailing. The drop off at around the mid-teens is dramatic, and if we can stem the flow then our demographic would look a lot more balanced.

And so a lot of the discussion is around how we can make sailing more fun for kids (I’ve written a little about this in a previous post).

But are these our real “customer”?

Well, it depends on your point of view. Because, as any good business knows, if your market is children then your customer is both the child itself and their parents.

The parents are often the people that decide to take their kids to a sailing club. They are the ones who part with the cash. They are the ones who ensure that the kids turn up week after week. And so they are our customer too.

But how many parents don’t sail at all? My experience is that they number is alarmingly high, and this matters a lot in a sport like sailing.

Unlike soccer, or basketball, or athletics, sailing can be comparatively expensive, and so kids often need financial support from their parents beyond their teens. And if the parents don’t sail then the kids can easily drift off into some other activity that they can finance themselves.

On top of this, it can be easy to drop the kids off to a summer camp for a couple of weeks each summer, but when it comes to organising children to go sailing every weekend, year after year, parents that aren’t involved in the sport (or at least in the club) will soon tire of the chore. And so we lose sailors.

My view is that we should always take the long-term view. How often do we say that sailing is a sport for life, for 7 year-olds and 70 year-olds?

With that in mind, here’s a few thoughts.

Offer a Discount on Beginner Adult Courses

For parents that have kids enrolled in a sailing course, we should offer a big discount on a beginner adult sailing course. Let’s do everything we can to encourage the parents to learn how to sail

Temporary Family Membership

Let’s offer temporary family membership to people that have their children enrolled in a sailing course, and encourage the parents to sail whenever possible. Highlight the benefits of learning alongside the child, and of reinforcing their learning by practising their skills with a parent. Maybe even offer a free or discounted adult beginner course for people that have a child doing a course – something to ease their path into sailing.

The temporary membership might give the family access to the club, but no voting rights or other such perks. And, if they enjoy it, then hopefully they’ll join up fully the following year.

Include Family Sailing

It would be nice, as part of whatever course the kids do, to have a family race or two. This would mean a parent or parents would sail with the kids, thus almost forcing the parent to sail. What parent is going to refuse? Do it on an occasional weekend during the course and bingo, you have a family that has sailed together.

But what about the parents that really, really don’t want to sail? Not everyone loves the smell of a damp wetsuit (the weirdos).

My view is that we need to make the club a place that these people want to go, even as non-sailors. This can be tricky, as clubs can be reluctant to diversify. There is a school of thought that goes along the lines of:

we are a sailing club and sailing is what we provide for. If you don’t like sailing and want to do something else, then go and find somewhere that provides for the thing you want to do.

I have a reasonable amount of sympathy for this point of view. But what if we can find common points of interest that are sailing related, but appealing to aqua-phobes?

For instance:

• Provide fitness classes at a time that non-sailing folk will be at the club – Pilates and Yoga are popular and low on equipment
• Have the bar or galley open, a TV on, books, newspapers and magazines to read.
• Set up a nautical book club
• Survey parents as part of the kids enrolment and find out what their interests are – can these be linked to sailing in any way, and, if so, how can the club leverage this knowledge?

I’m absolutely certain that there are many, many far better ideas than this, but the point stands: if we can interest non-sailors (or reluctant sailors) in the club then the passionate or interested sailors will sail more and for longer.

It’s got to be worth getting to know all our “customers”.

First published March 2015

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You would think that these long drives were a lot of fun.

Especially for the adult or adults driving us.

Two or three hours in a car (each way) with bored teenagers is a barrel of laughs for all concerned, and I’m sure, if you were asked to guess, you’d predict that my parents (or my friend’s parents) looked forward to these journeys with great anticipation.

Surprisingly, this wasn’t the case. Arguments over music, elbow room, noisy breathing, whether Craig Johnson was better than Paul Walsh, who got the biggest banana, and so on, seemed to annoy them.

And even though we very regularly interspersed these arguments with queries about how much longer the journey was going to last, the adults in the car still did not seem to be enjoying themselves.

Then, one magical day, all this changed. Well, it changed a little bit.

All sailors have a sailing watch (or at least all sailors should have a sailing watch), and we were no different. And, in those days, all sailing watches had a stopwatch which timed to a hundredth of a second. On one particular journey we were travelling with a friend, and he came up with arguably the greatest game ever created – Stopwatch Nationals.

This Timex watch (or something very like it) was the pinnacle of Optimist sailing arm-wear at the time – it even had a high tide display (if you took the necessary hours to figure out how to program it)

Stopwatch Nationals is a game of elegant simplicity.

Each player has to start their stopwatch and then stop it as close to exactly one second as they can.

If you stop it at 0.99 seconds, 1.01 seconds, or exactly at 1.00 seconds then you get a first place.

If you stop it at 0.98 seconds or 1.02 seconds then you get a second.

0.97 seconds or 1.03 seconds equals a third place.

And so on.

(Try it now, on your sailing watch or on your phone’s stopwatch – it is very addictive).

We would generally do seven race championships, with one discard, but over time we found that we could do the Nationals, Europeans, Worlds, Inlands, Regional Championships and every Open Meeting in a calendar year in one single car journey.

Occasionally, in a moment of reflection, I wish I’d shown as much commitment to my actual sailing as I did to Stopwatch Nationals.

I’m sorry to say that Stopwatch Nationals didn’t usher in a golden age of car-based harmony.

If my memory is correct this was because other people kept cheating and, as this is my website, that will be my official stance on the matter. But it did keep us (relatively) quiet for a lot of car journeys, and also gave me my first (and, to date, only) World Championship victory.

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“Smile – it’ll make you sail faster.”

This is me learning to sail in an Optimist. I don’t know if I was smiling. You’ll notice the wooden spars, which even at the time were old skool. Reminiscing with my brother about K-1293 he said that the mast was “so heavy and dense that it was technically a black hole”. He wasn’t wrong.

I remember it not because it is good advice, but because they used it so much. I mean, they used to say it all the time.

But it is good advice.

The problem, though, is that you generally say something like that to someone who isn’t smiling. And it is the last thing that someone who isn’t smiling wants to hear.

You know what I mean – it is the sporting equivalent of saying to someone that is grumpy “Cheer up, it might never happen”, or “It takes more muscles to frown than to smile”. These are not good ways to cheer someone up.

That said, the adults that taught us (and used that saying) were right. You do sail better when you’re relaxed and happy. And, possibly more importantly, you sail more often if you are happy and relaxed when you are out on the water. I also suspect that they could see something that we kids couldn’t – that we were already starting to take sailing too seriously. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with taking something seriously, but we were already starting to see results as something that defined who we were, instead of seeing them as a by-product of the fun we were having.

I remember the first Open Meeting we did. It was at a neighbouring club, a lake with lots of islands. The course brought the boats near to the shore once per lap, and as the Optimists from our club reached past (bringing up the rear for the most part) our parents would throw chocolate bars to us. It was fun (if nutritionally questionable). I doubt if any one of us remembers how we did at that event, but we all remember having a good time.

As we grew older, and started counting our position from the front of the fleet instead of from the back, the chocolate bars stopped coming (we’d have probably been protested for receiving outside assistance or something). But that is how we wanted it. We weren’t just sailing around with our mates any more, we were racing with our mates, and that’s what we found rewarding.

Those of us that were still sailing, that is.

The first Optimist we had was called “Box of Chatter”, and the reason it had this name was because my older sister would go out sailing and spend the whole time sailing around chatting to her friends. After a while she and her friends realised that they could chat just as well on the shore, and they wouldn’t have to worry about where they finished in a race, or whether their younger siblings were ahead or behind them (we were mostly behind – she was a good sailor, my sister), and nor would they have to spend time learning about knots, or tides, or any of that nonsense.

And so, over time, they sailed less and less, until they didn’t really sail at all.

So why have I brought all this up?

Well, it occurs to me that we worry a lot about making sailing fun for teenagers and early twenties sailors. We’re losing a lot of sailors from this age group, and our immediate reaction is to wonder how we can make sailing more fun.

More fun.

But, wait a minute. Sailing is fun.

We need to stop worrying about making sailing more fun**. I don’t think my sister stopped sailing because sailing isn’t fun. I can’t speak for her, but I think she stopped sailing because it wasn’t rewarding enough. What I mean by this is that different people are motivated by different things, and they’ll gravitate to the things that fulfil those needs or wants. This means that we need to figure out what these needs or wants actually are.

Maybe she’d have carried on sailing if we’d have got her a Mirror instead of an Optimist (so she could sail with a friend), and they’d been encouraged to sail to an island and had a picnic instead of sailing in races.

Then again, maybe not.

Maybe she’d have preferred sailing on an evening when there was no racing on, and there was some social event after they’d been sailing.

Then again, maybe not.

Maybe she’d have carried on sailing if, when sailing with my dad in our Enterprise, he’d have stopped falling out of the boat, leaving her flailing around trying to sail the boat single-handed whilst he enjoyed his impromptu swim.

Then again, maybe not.

My point is that sailing was more about competition and the pursuit of improvement for me, and less about the social aspect (although this was still important); but it was more about the social aspect than the racing for others. But trying to make sailing more fun is a bit like telling someone to cheer up or smile more – you can’t force people to enjoy something.

But you can help them find the bit of something that they do enjoy, and let them explore that.

Maybe we just need to try and empathise with what others want, and find ways of helping them do more of it.

** Some thoughts on sailing and fun from Scuttlebutt articles:

• “But if we want to keep more young sailors engaged in the sport in their 20s and 30s, they need to see more of a return on their time in the form of fun and social interaction.” (Where have all the young ones gone?)
• “Create different event formats and get club/community sailing boats to make it easy, fun and cheap to participate.” (Not every kid needs to be the next America’s Cup skipper)
• “In my experience, by far the most challenging aspect of running a junior sailing program is finding the right balance between competition and fun for so many unique personalities.” (There’s more to a successful junior program than racing)
• “If it (sailing) is fun first, so kids want to remain doing it, then the ones who want to can push themselves and the rest can have a lifestyle, a sport, a family activity they can do until at least 82 – the age of a mate of mine still cruising in the South Pacific.” (It’s time for Adult Sailors to take the Youth Challenge)
• “Most would people probably love sailing, because it really is amazingly fun. We just have to remember how to keep the fun in it.” (Will 2014 be the year for change)

First Published March 2015

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