Shared passions form a common bond between strangers
Issue 120: May/June 2018
I rode motorcycles for years, first a 1982 Yamaha Virago 920, later a 1977 Honda CB550. Neither was a touring bike, but that didn’t stop me from making long pleasurable cross-country trips on each of them. One of the small joys I experienced on these solo trips was a camaraderie with fellow riders, complete strangers who would unfailingly give a wave or nod as we passed each other. It was an acknowledgment that zipping along on two wheels without doors and bumpers made our journeys special. We shared an Easy Rider sense of freedom, but also the risks involved in riding defensively among four-wheeled beasts.
That camaraderie born of shared experience is not limited to motorcycle riders; it’s strong among sailors too (surely you knew that’s where I was headed). But, unlike riders who acknowledge their common interest with a quick wave or nod as they pass one another with a 120-mph closure speed, we sailors don’t simply wave or hail one another out on the water. It’s when we discover each other off the water that our community is most apparent.
I was at a full-moon desert bonfire a couple of weeks ago in Arizona, about 20 of us, a few friends, mostly strangers, beers in hand, socializing among the saguaro cacti. It’s the last place you’d expect to find fellow sailors, but when I met a few, I quickly found it difficult to converse about sailing among non-sailing-language speakers. Non-sailors were interested in talk of where we each sailed, but beyond that, too much of our conversation was exclusionary and non-sailors politely peeled off to join another.
Consider this simple exchange between sailors:
“A few years ago, we bought a code zero on a foil-less furler.”
“I’ve been considering those; do you like it?”
“We do, but we don’t fly it as often as we’d imagined. We thought it might be something we could also enlist for downwind work, but it’s really cut for upwind, pointing between 40 and 85 degrees.”
“And where do you attach the drum?”
“To an eye we had welded to our bow roller.”
“You don’t use a sprit?”
“No, it’s forward enough that the luff passes right up through the pulpit.”
It’s straightforward and plain as day, but there is absolutely nothing in that snippet for a non-sailor to follow. It’s a foreign language to them.
Of course, it’s no different than doctors talking shop or gardeners comparing notes; specialized terminology always presents walls to outsiders. But I think for sailors this common language is sort of like our wave and a nod.
We know that anyone who speaks our language also understands the magical aspects that really bind us to sailing but for which there are no words. The rush of quiet that descends when the auxiliary is shut down and your brain reorients the forward motion of the boat from a pushing force from below to a pulling force from above. The creaking of a sheet getting tauter around the winch drum as the wind increases. Our intuitive turns of the wheel or push or pull on the tiller in response to the motion of the boat beneath us.
Sailors enjoy sailing for hundreds more of these intangible reasons, most of them impossible to relate to the non-sailor. So when I meet you, perhaps while working in the boatyard, or struggling to remove a stubborn broken gooseneck fitting, and you offer a lesson you learned when you did the same project yourself, I’ll know you speak my language and that we’re messing about in boats for the same magical reasons.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
