A Sailor’s Lessons Learned Play Book
My first dozen or so lessons learned
Learning to sail
It all started in March of 1978
Before I can share my first trip, I must explain how I became the gained the basic knowledge I think necessary to make a first trip of a couple thousand miles.
As a boy growing up in the cornfields of Indiana, visions of oceans and seas and rivers were ingrained in my mind by my grandfather – a Danish immigrant and a North Sea eel fisherman. Although I would have wait for college spring break in Ft Lauderdale to get my first glimpse of emerald and blue salt water, his stories of the sea and the transatlantic passage from Denmark on a wooden schooner gave me a leg up on all other wannabe sailors of the world. So in 1978 I found myself at the yacht brokerage dock in Charleston, South Carolina, writing a check for a brand new Hunter 30 – the FIRST and most primary of the many watery lessons I have learned – A FOOL AND HIS MONEY SOON PART.
Now mind you, I had never sailed before – no prior Sunfish experience, no prior Hobie Cat experience, no romantic, captained, chartered, sunset dinner cruise on a tranquil bay, not even one hour’s practice sailing a remote controlled boat on a little pond. But armed with my grandfather’s legacy, many evenings of arm chair sailing with the Hiscocks and Joshua Slocum, and the broker’s “personal assurance” that thirty footers are much, much easier and forgiving to sail than little sailboats like Hobie Cats and Snarks, I found it easy to part with the windfall bonus I had received from my company the day before.
After all the broker did promise that he would […]
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