[QUOTE=goboatingnow;1581829]Actually I would disagree. Racers, especially inshore racers can afford to push a
boat upto and in fact exceed its limits. Failures have little consequence, supervision and
rescue is close at hand. Ocean
racing tends to have expensive over specced
gear that few cruisers can afford.
What good cruising and long distance
passage making teaches you is to " husband resources " the key is to arrive in one piece. Pushing another 0.25 knots is irrelevant, especially if you risk
gear failure or put a crew in
danger.
Anyone who has sailed through any serious
weather gets a fine sense of where the limits are IMHO.
I have delivered many boats where the owners were accomplished racers , some made very bad cruising ones.
Dave
Dave, I don't think that you have grasped the point well here. SOME inshore racers can afford to exceed limits and pay the bills to recoup. This does not describe most lower level racers... the kind of folks that will take on inexperienced crew for races. These guys pay their own bills and don't like to bust up gear. I know, for I was one such for a lot of years before going cruising. And I think that the
racing made me a better cruiser in the long run, especially the
single hand racing, but that isn't the subject treated here. We're talking about getting early experience as a sailor from sailing OPBs.
And why would not a
racer understand that the key is to finish the voyage ("arrive in one piece")? DNFs due to gear failure sure hurt the season standings, and as I used to say, "ya gotta finish in order to win". I only failed to finish two races in all my years of racing. One was when I
lost a turtled
spinnaker overboard under the Golden Gate bridge and decided that turning the
engine on and being sure of recovering it before it sank was better than continuing in the
race after I failed to recover it (this was singlehanded with a typical SF seabreeze blowing). The other was when I inadvertently took two Bonine pills instead of one, and could not stay awake... really scary when this happens in the midst of the Potato Patch shoal! The rest of all those races I managed to keep my self funded
boat going all the way to the finish... sometimes in first place. I didn't break much gear 'cause I could not afford to replace it.
Finally, sailing successfully through heavy
weather does not show you where the limits are. It is the UNsuccessful ventures that show you where the limits were! But that is a hell of a hard way to learn!
So I stand behind my approval of joining a
race crew to help learn about sailing in a useful way. You sure as hell won't learn all of the essential cruising skills, but you can learn how to sail a boat well. And for what it is worth, from my observations of folks who proudly display
ASA this and that, the formal
training route does not always do such a hot job of instilling those cruising skills either!
BTW, we don't race our cruising home formally, but we sure tweak the
sails when sailing the same direction as another similar boat (or a cruising cat!).
Cheers,
Jim