By Patrick Twohy
A few weeks ago, a friend and I were having a wide-ranging conversation via email about our lives. We’d been students together a million years ago and went off in our different directions and were catching up. At one point, she wrote, “Tell me why you love sailing so much.”
I thought I’d share a somewhat spiffed up version of my response…
Sailing fascinates me because it’s at the confluence of a number of things that all attract me: nature and the outdoors, geeky science and various anachronistic technologies. Also it’s a pursuit that rewards patient application of effort over time.
Sailing represents for me what I think of as grace and beauty, something I think we all need in our lives, particularly while living, as we are, in “interesting” times. I suppose if I didn’t have this as my source of grace and beauty, I’d have to have found something else to supply it for me. It might have been music, which comes pretty close to the perfection of grace and beauty. But, after 50 years of trying, I don’t have the skills and imagination to be a good musician, and listening alone isn’t enough.
I find inner peace most accessible in the natural world — mountains, desert, open water — places where we humans are temporary visitors. Nature is solace. There’s not much more that needs to be said about that
As for geeky science, well, no excuses here. I’m a proto-geek. I’m not an engineer, and wouldn’t be a good one if I were one. I’m a little too ADHD. But a good sailor makes use of a bunch of science and the better better the sailor understands that, the better a sailor he or she’s gonna be. For example, sailors understand that the wind doesn’t push a boat. We use a function of physics called the Bernoulli principal in which the curve the sail creates a zone of low pressure zone in front of itself that actually pulls the boat forward. Sailing is fundamentally a practical use of the physics of fluid dynamics.
There’s lots of stuff like that — a numbers geek can get very, very deep into the weeds through sailing. Navigation, particularly celestial navigation, is a numbers game. So is weather prediction. And then there’s marine science, materials science, science and numbers related to tension and pressure on various materials — These are all in a sailor’s potential bag of tricks.
Anachronistic technologies, for some reason, also, if you will, float my boat. Lots of sailors are into the science stuff, but this one is a little more particular to me. In the days before “technology” simplified our lives, we humans were still able to accomplish amazing things. In the place of electronics, we used other, I would argue equally complex systems to accomplish our goals. Sailing vessels were among the most complex of those systems. A sailing ship of the 18th or 19th century was a marvel of complexity in the service of transportation. Step aboard the Balclutha at the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco, for example, and you’ll see what I mean. This was a Victorian-era cargo ship that operated through the use of hundreds, possibly thousands of control lines and levers. Together they create a 301-foot-long functional work of art.
I’ve heard it said that any sufficiently advanced technology is tantamount to magic. For me. Technology has achieved, let’s say, emeritus status has even more magic. It represents human potential in time before ours. You will not be surprised, therefore, to know that I have a small collection of slide rules. It’d probably be a bigger collection if slide rules were somehow sailing-related, though I do have a special slide rule-like device once used for air navigation, which kinda counts.
Patient application of effort is what makes sailing possible. It’s a pursuit with what I’d call a shallow learning curve. When I teach, my students learn the basics in a few hours and can sail a boat on their own in a few days. Unlike the process of learning pursuits, my students have fun from the very moment they step on board. (By contrast, learning to ski, for me anyway, involved a period of time where I really hated it. Falling down and not being very good weren’t much fun.)
The flip side of a shallow learning curve in sailing is that the learning curve continues up forever. That, for me, is an attribute, though I can see that for some might be a frustration. After you’ve learned the basics in sailing, everything else is nuance, to which there is actually no end. Or you could say that learning the basics never ends. In any case I love the fact that I learn something new about our sport pretty much every time I step on a boat, even if we don’t leave the dock — and I’ve been doing it for more than 40 years. Most of my added knowledge is nuance, but no less important or interesting for being so.
I really like learning new stuff. So a pursuit where learning is a part of doing is pretty top.
This is an expanded version of the spiel I give my students in explaining why I’m passionate about this sport, and hope they may be too. But that’s not quite accurate. This explains why I enjoy sailing. It’s not why I’m passionate about it. My passion came fairly recently.
Which brings us back to 9:30 or so on one morning a few years go when I came to realize the true importance of grace and beauty.
Let me first tell you quickly how I viewed things before that morning: There were things that people can do in this world that were important, and then there were things that people do that were fine, maybe even enjoyable, but not terribly important. Things that weren’t important were, in my previous world, frivolous. I felt it important to be engaged in something I considered important.
When I retired from a career I considered important, I felt a little at loose ends. It wasn’t enough for me to have done something I considered important in my previous career. I wanted to be relevant — not frivolous — now.
What counted as important were things that positively affect the human condition and society. Things like art, music, or cleaning windows, paving roads, even plumbing (as important as that is!!) didn’t make the cut in those days for me. Admittedly, I was pretty obtuse.
Then that Wednesday morning came along. I was teaching a beginning sailing class that had begun that Monday. I had four or five students, including a couple who had taken the week off work to do the class together. In the days before Covid, we taught a the morning portion of the class in a classroom at the sailing club. That morning, the guy in this couple showed up at 9 and said he wasn’t sure if his wife was going to make it that day. The evening before, she had had experienced a deeply saddening experience was feeling unable to face the world.
I’d had an experience similar to the one her husband described, so I understood a little about how this woman might have been feeling. I understood why it might be very hard for her to do something as seemingly trivial as going sailing. But also, for reasons that were not immediately clear to me, I felt a deep hope that she would find the courage to join the class that day.
What I had needed to help me reorient to the world after an upending experience was to find ways to connect, or reconnect maybe, to the fundamental rightness in our world — what I think of as grace and beauty.
It was at that moment in class that morning, while pondering the power of grace and beauty in the face of trauma, that I became passionate about sailing and teaching it. = Suddenly, sailing moved from the realm of frivolous to that of important. (So did a lot of other things, but that’s another story.)
In our darkest times, we need grace and beauty to pull us through. They’re not frivolous. I think that fundamental need is one of the things that make us human.
This woman did show up in class that morning, I’m glad to say. though I don’t know if she found the grace and beauty she needed at that moment. Where people find these things is so dependent on our personalities. But I can tell you I worked very hard to give it to her. And ever since, I have approached teaching our sport from that place. What I offer students is an access point to something they need in their lives. If I’m able to present sailing as the grace and beauty my students seek and need, I will consider myself successful. I will have done something important.
