The thrill of learning to sail
Intense, 14-day lesson gives students the chance to sail
Eight days into a two-week sailing course in New Zealand, I felt like the young and ineffectual officer in Master and Commander who ends his troubles by jumping off the ship holding a cannonball. When we shortened the mainsail, I failed to recognize the tack — a grommet at the corner of the sail — for the first reef. I asked how to read the jib’s telltales, something we had been taught three days before. One time, I wrapped the jib sheet on the winch counterclockwise, the opposite of the way it should go. In a man-overboard drill, it took me three tries to snag a life ring named Frank with a boat hook.
Sailing was once an important occupation in America; in 1870, one per cent of working men were sailors. Today, it’s entertainment. People are born into sailing by proximity to water, wealth or an antiquated view of a well-rounded education. I learned to sail at a summer camp in the 1960s. I knew, however, that real sailing happened in boats with keels and sails so big you couldn’t control them just by hand. It involved knots, lore and history. It was also a cramped and dangerous version of life.
Last fall, I learned that the National Outdoor Leadership School — an organization headquartered in Wyoming with branches around the world — offered a two-week, learn-from-scratch sailing course in New Zealand. Most students at NOLS are in high school and college. This one, however, was for “adults,” which at 65 described me well.
In one of the periodic sessions to review my progress during the course, the instructor, a 49-yearold Australian named Stephanie, brought me to the foredeck late one afternoon. She stopped me as I recounted my deficiencies.
“Instead of learning to sail three hours a week over nine months, we do it in two weeks,” she said, stating the obvious. “It’s hard work, confusing and overwhelming. But we find it works.”
She was right, as she was in just about everything on board.
As its name suggests, NOLS is a school. It teaches backpacking, rock climbing, sea kayaking, sailing and skiing at 17 locations, among them India, Tanzania and Chile. The courses last from one week to five months; some colleges give credit for them.
In addition to outdoors skills, NOLS aspires to teach more abstract ones — judgment, selfawareness, clear communication, tolerance for adversity and other traits of good leaders. It contends that a group of people working together has needs, like an individual, and is nourished by healthy “expedition behaviour.” NASA routinely sends new classes of astronauts on NOLS trips, so I knew this would be an ambitious course in a beautiful place.
That place was the Marlborough Sounds, a ragged collection of straits, channels, reaches, bays, inlets and islands at the north end of the South Island. The sounds open onto Cook Strait, the notoriously rough passage between the South and North Islands. Across it and out of view lies Wellington, New Zealand’s capital.
We sailed on two chartered Marconi-rigged sloops, one 11 metres (35 feet) long, the other 12 metres (39 feet). They had diesel engines, the usual electronics and selffurling jibs. Nothing fancy. The group consisted of nine students (six men, three women), two instructors and one instructor-intraining — six people on each boat.
The instructors knew everything about sailing. Their judgment was good. They never sidestepped a teachable moment. They were patient and indefatigable. They showed that, despite heroic efforts to shoehorn it into a curriculum, leadership is best taught by example.
They also embodied the truth that sailing is one of the few activities in which unrelated adults can tell each other to do things without decorous preliminaries, including saying “please.” This could be jarring at times.
NOLS likes hardship. If there’s a difficult or old-fashioned way to do something, NOLS will choose it. This builds character. Up to a point, I agree.
The course forbade alcohol. We had to leave our cellphones on shore, which was good for all sorts of reasons. The boats had handheld showers in the heads, but we didn’t use them because we were conserving water. To freshen up, we swam off the boats at the end of the day.
The food, however, was bad. We had pasta, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, quinoa, rice, oatmeal and flour. We made bread, scones and muffins.
We had vacuum-packed tuna that smelled like cat food and vacuum-packed beef that looked like dog treats. Our weekly vegetable-and-fruit ration for six people consisted of three onions, two heads of garlic, one cabbage, one pumpkin and a dozen apples and oranges. But it was late spring in New Zealand. Berries were coming into season. There were greens galore!
There was one thing I wasn’t prepared for, although maybe I should have been.
For people my age who aren’t already sailors, the most consequential nautical decision they ’re likely to make is what size cabin to get on a Viking cruise. I realized that my US$5,619 bill was for tuition, not a vacation. I thought there might be a few other late-life novices. There weren’t. I was twice the age of the other students.
So, what’s so hard about sailing an 11-metre boat?
I’m a (nonpractising) physician and I can best describe it this way: It’s the difference between doing a finger-stick to check a patient’s blood sugar and putting a central line into his subclavian vein.
Learning to sail, in fact, is a bit like learning medical procedures.
Both require doing things in a specific sequence (and not being able to consult a cheat sheet while you’re doing them). They demand that you know what’s happening to objects — lines threaded through mast and boom, needles, guide wires and catheters — even when you can’t see them. Both favour “situational awareness” and decisiveness, and punish dawdling. Both are done in front of an audience — the patient or the crew — and can do damage.
One secret of NOLS’s pedagogy is that it lets students do things before they are competent or confident, but always with an observer ready to step in and help. That’s similar to the “see one, do one, teach one” culture of medicine — learning in which there is little actual teaching.
But it wasn’t all work.
One day, we were catching 25-knot gusts on whitecaps at the edge of Cook Strait. People were getting worried as the boat heeled over more than it ever had before. “Let the boat tell you what to do,” Stephanie said in an uncharacteristically Zen pronouncement. A little while later, two members
of the crew, simultaneously and unprompted, let out whoops of delight. Everyone else joined in, thrilled by the forces we had, for the moment, harnessed.
And then there was New Zealand all around us.
Although the South Island is temperate, not tropical, the forests are jungle-thick. The treetops are so tight against each other that the land appears to be clothed in a sweater of nubbly yarn. Many of the trees are exotics I’d never heard of — tree ferns, tea trees, cabbage trees.
The fauna was pretty exotic, too. Sailboats are famous for not wasting space, and sailors are famous for keeping the space tidy, but there’s no getting around the lack of privacy. I slept on the banquette and table in the “saloon,” the common area below deck. The phone booth-sized head opened into this space. At night, a stumble going topside was likely to wake the whole boat. But we all got used to it, and to each other.
It helped that, the first week, we gathered around the table after dinner and told our stories. This was both bonding and entertainment.
Two weeks goes by faster than you think. There were life lessons right up to the end.
We can be thankful that life is more forgiving than sailing — and practise helps.