The Year Out and Those Who Never Come Back....

I was just thinking back about all the truly great amateur sailors I have had the pleasure of sailing with, and how much I'd like to put them all together as a dream crew with my Wookie pal Big Andy on main to keep me entertained.

Then I realised that most of them don't sail or otherwise just potter about. Nothing serious.


Me, well I tell myself I am just taking a year out, but...?

Now in fact a couple of these guys I think of were actually "pros" in that one worked for North Sails Seattle and the other is actually a first engineer on a tanker. These are the two guys, simon and steve you know you who are, who I learned absolutely most from in sailing. While I'm running the credits, the irish national j24 coach, Brian Mathews taught me some fine polished skills and tricks while sailing on a boat which has come to reside on Oslo Fjord: the IMX 38 "Braveheart".

However, good people give up. Really, really great sailors throw in the towel. Why?


The main obvious reason is the combination of crews and owners. You never quite seem to get the right boat , The Right Owner and The Right Team.

The fact is that most people who can afford a forty foot racer-cruiser are either a bit dull (surgeons, lawyers, actuaries) and so lack that killer instinct, or they are egotists ( entrepreneurs, divisional directors, sales managers) who frankly can't run a team without control freaking. They manage their working life teams on fear and false promises and when it comes to a true team sport like sailing, they are the weakest link.

Then there are the bitchy crews, the lazy crews, the over-boozed crews, the overly serious crews, stupid individuals who can't be fired, deck fluff-teasing females, owners wives-sons-daughters. Crews which implode on their own egos and unfullfilled expectations. Crews which are fully disfucntional in simple tasks. Crews who try and do each others jobs and shout out the action the next man has just started to do. Crews who get sacked for drinking too much and doing pranks or violent misdemeanors. Crews who are no good and are not interested in admiting their wrongs and learning. Also of course crews that disintegrate due to pure lack of interest.

Once in a while you get a really good team dynamic or at least an atnagonism which gives tension and drive in the will to win. Every tack is a formality, each gybe is coordinated with eyes fixed on the job and hardly a word uttered. Small mistakes are spotted really quickly and corrected seamlessly. Information flows from the gunwhale back over and decisions are made upon this, or after respectful further requests for advice from the rail. Everyone gives 110% and the boat wins, the sails are stowed neatly and the boat is ready for the night's festivities before even a single beer can is breached.


More often though, great teams in the forming are snuffed out by owners, usually when they start bringing "management consultants" on board : transom twitterers, back seat team drivers. Or perhaps the owner decides to bump someone out a job, or demands that everybody does all the regattas or drop out.

Quite often good individuals gravitate towards a free meal ticket- literally: a rich owner who puts crew dinners and lubrication through his companies. The main catalyst here is often that sailmakers stick to these owners like a cheap suit, and supply a stream of the best dinghy sailors and some heavy rail meat in the knowledge all repairs, tweaks and extra sails will be bought from them.

It is pretty rare that the rich bother with the risk of sailing one design: they have cash to splash, and like sailing in their own wind, tweaking the boat and blaming the handicap for the conditions when it goes down the pan on a bad call.

So many truly great sailors, and myself being a reasonable sailor, give up because of one or many of these reasons. It becomes very clear to them that these is not really a space on a boat they would want to sail on! The club-cliques are a bit afraid of lurking "better" sailors or have had their egos bruised, or have dismissed them as unruly trouble makers ( like me and some others). We end up with no one worth sailing with, until we get our own boats. My current club is just like this: there are no places apart from on the boats which are not worth sailing on in the otherwise tight OD fleet.


To remedy this situation there needs to be more of a methodological, structured coaching and training in the sport. The better clubs, independent of their size, should adopt national certification for crews and team building or rather teaching in what a good team dynamic is. More fundamental, although this may seem ipso facto a part of this process, opening sailors minds up to being on a learning curve that never ends. Owners and many crews need to learn how to learn!

Clubs tend to conspire to put all their efforts into youth sailing: this provides after all free baby sitting for endless hours for many brat spawn of the worthy club members. It provides some sailing minded teenagers to crew on larger boats, but rather the most of these "youff" drop out when they discover Alco Pops and necking and endless hours of tedium with 900 "friends" on facebook. Youth programmes are then largely counter productive for the sport and really the broad base of the pyramid suddenly becomes so sharp in getting into the squads and coaching that clubs should put a lot less effort into them, or rather focus on a smaller number of young sailors.

Clubs should spend more time and money on their long suffering adult members and especially those boat owners new to sailing, with there a focus on one design sailing. Indeed it may need to be within the OD class association to organise this, or become a virtual on-line sailing club such they can affiliate to the national bodies and get funding.

"ISO 9000 "for a boat is not actually a bad thing at all: it would mean as crew you could turn up and do your job within some tight boundaries, and the same goes for the reverse expectations for owners. At the level I used to sail at, cat 3 or whatever with some Cat 2 sailors, then this is virtaully what happens anyway: you can throw a team together even on the day and get results. If I were to go out tomorrow I would be so rusty this woudln't work at all!

I think these type of organised coaching efforts in the sport at a local level would attract back sailors like me ( year out- two years out?? Five years out?) and also leave less to chance: On the clyde in the 80s and 90s we had some fantastic OD sailing: FF; Pipers; IODs; Sonatas; 1720s; Smegma 33s and even an emergent 38 fleet. The whole bendytub, Elan / X332 IRC optimised thing blew it all to bits when everyone went cheque book racing and no one really wanted OD. The money got sucked up into property, the rich got richer, the middle class got less affluent, and then this pyramid selling sprung recession took it all away. I think the glimmer of hope for the clyde is the bloody SB3 and the established FFs and pipers. People can have their cruisers for WHW.

Ranting done !