Hoist

I am enamoured with sailing like I’ve never been with any of the other sports I’ve participated in through my life – and there have been many. What I love about sail boat racing is that it requires the coming together of many elements – strength, balance, team work, communication, planning, practice and dedication. And you have to have a good understanding of the many, complicated rules that read more like legal text than a sport rule book.

Sailing requires enough physical capability to strong-arm huge sails full of wind, the ability to problem solve quickly when things go bad (and something always goes bad) and a knack for reading the wind, the course and your competition well enough to be able to win more often than the next guy. You need to be able to hoist and douse sails quickly at mark roundings with other boats in your way whose crew are often yelling at either you or another boat, adjust crew weight for optimum heel (angle) based on the amount of wind and accelerate out of a tack.

Oh - and I should mention you need a few bucks to sink into parts that are constantly breaking at the wrong time, sails that shred in heavy wind, $1800 spinnakers you tear holes in before the second time you hoist them because it was on the bow pulpit when you crashed into another boat while on port tack (i.e. in the wrong) without the guy who paid for it on board but who is watching – horrified and helpless - from shore, running rigging (ropes) that makes rock climbing look cheap and your clumsy fore-deck guy who needs liability insurance, against himself.

And then there’s all that beer. A healthy appetite for cursing, beer drinking, rum swilling, bar lounging, sun baking, waiting for wind, being scared because there’s too much wind and a whole bunch of particularly awesome people is required above all else.

That all does not account for the extras and the time you spend caring for these often old, rather tired pieces of work. There’s yearly scraping, painting and maintenance that costs a few hundred bucks before you even put the thing in the water in the spring. There’s a winter of dreaming of ways to make it go faster before the lake starts to thaw.

A job that requires regular visits to Hudson, a bevy of wonderful sailor friends, the availability of a welcoming guest room under the roof of a wonderful family and an obsession with all of the above are things I’m beyond grateful for. I know I’ve made choices that have intended for this all to happen but as I sit here on an airplane with a full week of regular work and regatta training ahead of me I can’t help but pinch myself in disbelief that this is my life and this little sailing dream has come true.