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Home > The Fundamentals Of Sailing
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The Fundamentals Of Sailing by Tar Zan
If you have never been on the water, it can be quite intimidating to try and learn the fundamentals of sailing. Sailing is filled with jargon. To many, it seems like a new language. To some extent, it is. Everything on a boat has a specific name. In racing or emergency situations, it is very important to be able to reference very specific pieces of equipment with precision. In racing, small adjustments mean the difference between first place and ninth place. The skipper needs to direct the crew to make these adjustments very quickly. Even more importantly, in emergency situations the skipper needs to direct crew members with critical instructions that can mean the difference between live and death. A rogue wave, or gale force wind, will not wait for a lengthy description of some obscure part of the boat that needs adjusting. Thus, a large vocabulary is required. Additionally, there are basic concepts of wind, force, resistance, tides and currents that need to be understood. The largely involve physics and an understanding of resistance and lift.
Jargon and basic physics can be easily learned in the classroom. In the end, it is a memorization exercise. However, learning the fundamentals of sailing is about more than having a great new lexicon. There is a certain sense that sailors develop over many years of being on the water that is quite hard to define or teach in a classroom. Sailors gain an intuition about the wind, water, and their surroundings. They learn from past experience how the environment will interact with their water craft. After enough experience they are easily able to predict what their boat will do based changing environmental cues. They gain the ability to predict what will happen based on trends they see in the wind and water. This is perhaps the magic of sailing that keeps bringing so many back to the water. It simply feels great to be this connected with your physical environment and have a mastery of this intuition. Yet, most find they are continually challenged and learn more about what they still don't know with every trip on the water.
I believe there is no better way to gain the fundamentals of sailing other than simply putting in the hours on the water. Just simply being on the water develops your abilities. It's also helpful to experience a variety of conditions. The learning comes from time sitting idle with extreme low-wind conditions as well as being in very tense fast-moving conditions. Even when nothing is happening and the wind is at zero knots, you will be thinking about the boat, the sky and the water. You will run simulations in your head about what could happen when the wind picks up. How will my boat move? What will happen next? Before too long you will find you are simply lost in the learning. You will be enjoying yourself and building the fundamentals of sailing before you know it.
Tar blogs at http://www.bigblogmonkey.com/blog
About the Author
Tar blogs at http://www.bigblogmonkey.com/blog
Sailing equipment at http://www.miserlymonkey.com/
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