How not to sell sailing introductions

[DeckScrubber]

Thanks to an overdose of YouTube sailing channels and maybe a bit of mid-life crisis, I have contracted the "want to become a sailor" bug. I've done plenty of windsurfing when I was younger, but beyond that I never even touched a sailboat, let alone sailed on one. Logical then, that I've been searching for the fastest/simplest/cheapest way to get on a sailboat to see whether my great expectations are in any way, shape or form compatible with reality.

Several months ago I spotted a little ad offering a day's sailing experience for complete beginners, priced very cheaply. I cannot afford to spend thousands on any "classic" commercial sailing introduction, so I eagerly contacted the person behind the ad and was informed that the boat's Mercury outboard engine was in for repairs, so no sailing could be arranged. Months ticked by until I got the wonderful news that the engine was now professionally repaired, and I had a green light for sailing, if I wanted to. Two days ago I finally met the 60+-year old chap behind the ad and we set off by van to the marina, 1,5 hours driving away. The outboard sat in the back of the van. The forecast was for 20-25 knot winds with gusts up to 30. The skipper told me he hadn't been to check on his boat for the past three months.

As we drove into the marina car park, he said "Looks like we're going to be the only ones out on the water today with these conditions." Aside from the wind forecast, the temperature was a chilly 5-6 degrees C. The marina was full of boats, but thoroughly deserted as far as any human activity was concerned. When we got to his 22-foot sailboat (forgive me for having forgotten the brand), he invited me to scramble aboard while he messed around with his outboard on the pontoon next to the boat. As I shifted my weight from the finger pontoon to the boat, the simple physics of this act made the pontoon rise out of the water as the boat got pushed deeper into the water. Nothing unusual about that, of course, except for the problem of a missing fender right where one was needed that moment. The rising pontoon violently caught the wooden edge of the dropping boat and broke the wood. A 5-inch piece was dangling off the edge, ready to fall into the water. Clearly the wood wasn't in a great condition, but still.. I was shocked by the damage and the speed with which it was created. Initially I instinctively thought I was to blame (since I was the trigger for the up and down motion of the two colliding bodies), but thankfully the skipper quickly realised the missing fender was the true culprit.. somebody or something had caused a fender to vanish in that particular spot. He blamed a thief and was pretty annoyed at the thought somebody stole a single fender from his boat. I have no idea how common or rare such a theft is, but all I could do was look at the damage and think how time-consuming and expensive it must be to repair.

Mr. X (let's call the owner/instructor that) and I man-handled the outboard to fit the stern attachment. Next task was to fill the tank with fresh petrol. While Mr.X poured petrol in his outboard, I noticed a transparent hose gushing fluid onto the floor of the cockpit. I thought it was water so didn't initially think anything was amiss. Towards the end of the refill operation I joked that we were already sinking, with all that water pooling in the cockpit. "Water? What water?" came the reply. Only then did Mr.X spot the constant flow of liquid emanating from the hose. "<Expletive> That's petrol! Not water!" We were both standing in a sizeable puddle of petrol, which thankfully was slowly draining away into a magic hole. I hoped the hole didn't end up feeding the bilge, but had no idea whether the petrol could or could not end up there. A bilge with plenty of petrol exposed to the elements sounded like a fire hazard at best. I was soon to discover that the petrol was heading somewhere else though. Mr. X grabbed the offending hose to prevent more fuel being wasted onto the cockpit floor and finished off the refuelling. It didn't take my imagination much time to imagine the two of us engulfed in flames, and having to jump overboard to save our skins. Maybe I have watched a few James Bond movies too many. I suggested that any ideas of starting the engine would have to wait until we had properly dealt with the petrol spillage. That's when I saw an impressive oil-slick-like semi-circle of petrol floating on the water around the boat. We were being environmental criminals! I thought there is no way we can start that engine while there's petrol floating in the marina like that, so I had the idea to first disperse the slick as much as possible. I asked if he had an oar on board with which to create waves to disperse the petrol film. Luckily there was an oar on board, so I proceeded with creating lots of waves to try and get rid of the offending evidence. This time the physics of the predicament helped us, and the film quickly dissolved and evaporated. Roughly half an hour after starting the fuelling, we were finally about to start the engine. I remembered seeing a fire extinguisher in his cabin, so I grabbed it and pointed it right at Mr. X - just in case. "Go ahead, I've got your back if we see any flames!"

Mr. X yanked the pull-cord on his Mercury. Nothing. Again. Nothing. "This isn't normal", he said. Yank.. the engine sputters and dies again. Mr. X gets cranky and explains what guarantees he got from his local Mercury dealership, to the effect that his engine was good to go again. He opened the engine cover to expose the entrails which, he said, he knew very well as he had taken apart the engine a few times. More yanking. More false starts. Until the engine gradually keeps running for 10, 20, 30 seconds, but eventually dies again. I noticed that the transparent fuel filter was home to an almost taunting air bubble so I suggested maybe the bubble played a part in killing the engine. "Maybe we should try to get rid of this bubble?" I proposed. The air bubble was indeed the cause of the dying, but even when we first cleared the bubble in the filter, the bubble would gradually reform as the engine ran. In the end we managed to keep the engine running by changing the orientation of the filter from the horizontal to the vertical. Somehow when vertical the bubble didn't reform in the filter. As the engine remained stable at last, Mr. X went down into his cabin, and re-emerged with a 500ml plastic bottle containing an orange-coloured liquid. I thought it might be a petrol additive or something else engine-related. He announced "You know, at home I don't drink a drop, but on my boat, I always drink a bit." "Drink? What do you mean?" I asked him. "Cognac. I always drink Cognac while sailing." "Cognac?" I exclaimed, thinking I never signed up for sailing with any drunken sailor, let alone a drunken skipper.

By then we had been on the boat for almost an hour, still moored to the pontoon. Mr. X finally announced that we were ready to move. I got zero safety instructions but was briefed on the almost rectangular route he wanted to sail outside the marina - a circuit of roughly 25 kilometers. He also explained that when we get back to the marina I would have to jump off the boat and tie the boat to the pontoon. The engine had been warming up for 5-10 minutes and we finally released. "You take the helm! Just head that way, and turn around that big green sailboat there, but don't hit it.." For the first time in my life, I was driving a boat out of a marina. And I didn't hit the big green sailboat.

Five or so minutes later and well clear of the harbour Mr. X prepared the main sail to be raised, and I pulled the rope to raise it all the way. Next came the genoa.. which unfurled without problems. With full sails we headed for our first waypoint, with me still at the helm. My windsurfing experience quickly made me realise that we were sailing that particular boat quite hard. We were regularly healing more than 45 degrees, and at times I really thought capsizing would be a possibility. I had watched a number of YouTube videos of guys being catapulted off Hobies.. this felt a little bit too similar for comfort. I told Mr. X that the genoa nearly touched the water. "No problem! Don't you love this?" He was clearly very excited and proceeded to explain how he loved sailing, and how little he had paid for the boat. "It's a 50-year old boat, but it's solid. But there's no point spending much on it anymore." Mr. X hadn't touched the helm since leaving the marina. I was doing all the steering. Exhilarating while unexpected at the same time. I regularly had to pull very hard on the tiller to keep our course. I guessed this was precisely what I was paying for, so I just swallowed and concentrated on trying not to be the cause of any accident.

As we approached our first buoy (and waypoint), Mr. X explained that we would need to change course. I believe we gybed and ended up with the sails in a butterfly configuration going downwind. I clearly remembered from my windsurfing days how running downwind is much less stable than sailing upwind, and sure enough I had to constantly balance the steering so that both sails didn't violently flip to the other side. At one point Mr. X asked me to release one of the lines in the starboard jammer (right terminology? sorry, not sure). As I flipped the lever, it simply broke and flew off into the sea. More damage. Again not really caused by myself, rather caused by years of UV beating down on a very old little boat. "Oh no, how are we going to X-Y-Z the main sail now?" complained Mr. X.

Next waypoint, another course change, with Mr. X still mightily enjoying himself -despite the minor mishaps so far- and me still on the helm. My stomach started giving me little hints I urgently needed to eat to hopefully arrest any suggestion of seasickness. I told Mr. X I needed to eat something, so he took over the helm and I grabbed my lunch. I ate half an apple, half a sandwich and some fresh ginger (I read somewhere that ginger is a miracle cure for seasickness for some people). My lunching got interrupted by Mr. X shouting something had broken at the genoa. I was back at the helm not ten minutes after first relinquishing it. A bolt running through a U-shaped metal thingy at the bottom of the genoa had disappeared. The metal U was open and dangling in the air. Mr. X cursed and went to inspect, then came back and headed into his cabin to find a spare bolt. He couldn't find a spare, so he used something like a screw to temporarily fix the problem. While this on-the-fly repairing action was going on, I had become hopelessly seasick. I told Mr. X "Sorry, but I'm going to have to vomit. Can you take the helm?"

The winds had been getting stronger and stronger all afternoon, as predicted. On our first leg Mr. X had already announced that he doesn't like to reef like other people do in such conditions. He also told me several times "This is normally the time to reef, but I'm not going to. I almost never reef the main sail." We approached the last waypoint, and for reasons I can't even remember (by then my mental state was severely impaired by being sick as a dog) I had been put back on the helm. The last leg of our memorable "introductory" excursion would have us heading straight back to the marina, but also going straight into the wind. I was too out of it by then to realise that this implied painful zig-zagging our way back. The winds were almost howling by then.. there were plenty of white horses and Mr. X's 22-foot boat felt pretty underpowered to nimbly tack its way back to the marina. Undeterred Mr. X put up a valiant fight trying to make progress while trying to tack what felt like every 3-4 minutes. Even in my seasick daze I knew we weren't progressing enough to make it back to the marina in a reasonable amount of time. At one point I really thought to myself that I was stuck in a nightmare I couldn't wake up from. Mr. X's own lack of experience really showed when the boat was forced to do complete 360-degree circles while attempting its tack. I believe we did four or five of these complete circles. I thought "****, this guy isn't in control of the situation." Eventually I was incredibly relieved to hear him decide that we had to abandon sailing and simply restart the engine to motor it back. Mr. X. struggled and wrestled both sails back to nothing (while I thought I would be toast if he fell overboard at this point), and managed to start the engine. On the way back to the marina, the engine died a few times (things weren't exciting enough, clearly), resulting in more boat pirouettes (full 360 in the water). I couldn't believe how that puny 6 HP Mercury managed to push us against the 25-30 knot winds, but push it did. I thought to myself "Go on little engine, go on! Don't let us down now!" Mr. X wasn't fazed by anything that had happened the past couple of hours, and he was still nowhere near the helm.. enjoying himself and the sketchy conditions as I steered the boat back ever so slowly to the marina. My feet felt like blocks of ice. I had been very cold for the past two hours or so, ever since the seasickness kicked in with a vengeance.

On the water I had two bouts of vomiting overboard. Back inside the marina, and back on the pontoon, I again had to vomit into the water, complementing the petrol pollution we caused earlier.

I've been back home 48 hours now and my entrails still haven't fully recovered. I always suspected that seasickness would be a major spoiler during any sailboat training of any sort. My fear was confirmed. I'm not deterred though. I expected seasickness would be part of the learning curve at one point or other. In the future I will try to get more beginner's introductions on a longer boat, and with calmer weather.. and with a skipper who takes safety a little bit more seriously. (No, of course we didn't wear the lifejackets.. Cognac drinkers don't wear lifejackets).

[jeanathon]

I love it! While I don't agree with putting a beginner on the black diamond slope their first time. You did it, and want to go back for more. You have experienced the worst which does happen even if more prepared than Mr. X. Your next trip will be amazing. By the way nothing wrong with a 22 footer for day or even weekend tripping.