Your boat takes you to places you can’t reach any other way
Issue 32 : Sept/Oct 2003
How far is it to somewhere else? It’s a relative thing. It’s straightforward to lay a tape measure on something and measure the “distance” between two points on it. If you were simple taught, measuring the distance between two points on a chart is also straightforward. If you were taught the complexity of representing a roughly spherical planet on a roughly flat paper chart, you carry the disadvantage of knowing that picking off a distance with dividers is not simple nor even guaranteed to be accurate.The problem is that you are not measuring a distance on the thing itself, you are working with an abstraction. That’s OK because, oddly enough, in the pastime of sailing, it may be the abstraction that is significant.
Albert Einstein told us that distance is relative, If you think about what he said about the relativity of distance, it can make your head hurt. Fortunately, Einstein’s relativity is only required for understanding motion across great distances at very high speeds. A fast cruising sailboat is slower than a slow bicycle, so we don’t need to worry about Einstein’s relativity theory here. Still, in sailing, distance is relative.
Excluding recreation, travel and transport by sailing craft have been almost entirely replaced by faster and more effective means. The sailing craft we are familiar with today is a recreational craft. It continues to exist because it can take the sailors places he cannot get to any other way. These are not external geographic places; rather they are the internal places of the mind. They are an abstraction.
When you board your sailboat, you have a destination in mind or will soon decide where you will go. In part, that decision is determined by the “distance” to the destination. This is a practical matter and an elegant personal and philosophical matter as well because in the case of travel by sail, the journey and destination are blended into a continuum of experience that starts when the first line is cast off.
There is no guarantee that the dar destination will be anymore rewarding than the near one. In this sense, distance is truly relative. The voyage is on the inside after all.
How far is it to somewhere else? It depends on how far you want to go.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
