Oh, sorry.
Sorry.
You know, one of the grave dangers of listening to an audiobook is that you can fall asleep,
although I'm sure no one will fall asleep listening to Introduction to Sailing by Christian Williams.
That's me.
You know, I love books, I grew up with them, sailing books filled with diagrams and polar
charts and such.
But nowadays all of the technical stuff about sailing--how to tack and jibe and rig a spinnaker--is
marvelously presented in YouTube videos that are free.
So what I wanted to do was to evoke the whole picture of sailing, I guess for people who
know a little bit about it and would like to know more, would like to get started sailing,
would like to move up to a bigger boat.
I mean, how do I find one?
How much should it cost?
How big should it be?
What's it all about?
So that was the goal of Introduction to Sailing as an audiobook, and I think in fact it is
the first specifically designed to be listened to, instead of thumbed through page by page.
Which I guess means that if you don't like it you can't throw it across the room.
But even so, there's an added benefit--and that is, that you can listen to it in your car.
And so, to use that specificity, let's head for the boat.
A project like this makes you think about how you learned yourself, and I did it by
making every possible mistake, which leads me to think that mistakes are good.
Sailing's not inherently dangerous and we might as well just give it a try, under controlled
conditions, and see what happens.
You just remember more about things when you screw them up and it's easier to fix them next time.
In writing this book I really got a chance to revisit my own experience, and in particular
the closeness of the camaraderie of crews.
Bob Woodward's crew, which we called the Timeless crew, we sailed together five of us for three
or four years, went all over the place--Bermuda, Virgin Gorda--and those friendships have
lasted 30 or 40 years.
It's a great bonding experience.
And I've also sailed with people that I hardly knew.
We had a crew of 19 in the Fastnet race in 1979, which I discuss a little bit, and in
a Force 12 storm there's nothing that brings people together faster than that.
The social aspect--the social currency, the social experience of sailing--is not something
that's talked about enough.
Brokers talk about lifestyle but
it's more like people doing the same thing together and feeling the sun and the air on
their face and learning new stuff together.
Somewhere between 30 and 40 feet in overall length is a boat ready to handle weather,
cruise for weeks at a time, give dinner parties at the dock and even cross oceans, which if that
has appeal is entirely within the province of sailboats this size.
[walking]
Here's why we're here.
Emergency beacon registration, has to be renewed.
You get a sticker every two years which has your correct information on it, so that when
the Coast Guard calls home in the event of a disaster and the phone rings the answer isn't
"Lost at sea?"
"Never heard of him!"
I do believe in learning from your mistakes but that's not one of them.
What a day, too bad we're not going sailing.
Here's a five-minute sample of Introduction to Sailing.
Hi, I'm Christian Williams, and welcome aboard.
For the next few hours we'll be talking about sailing and sailboats in what I hope is more
like a conversation than a textbook.
We'll discuss boats small and large, which might be right, how to choose and how to buy
one, and how the simple decision to learn to sail can change everything and open up
the door to a new world.
We'll even learn how to sail, at least in our imagination-- because that's where most
sailing takes place, in the rehearsal and contemplation of it, in the memory of a line
in your hand and a sail set against the sky and in the reconstruction of new experience.
Because sailing is something that's always new, even to those of us who've been at it
for a while.
Sailing is imagination.
I have on the wall before me a photograph of Harold Vanderbilt, in necktie and blazer,
at the helm of his 135-foot -long J Class sailing yacht with a paid crew of 30.
He looks stern, as befits a railroad baron at leisure, the sea rushing past his two-tone
yachting shoes.
Sailing has always been that.
But it's also a nine-year-old girl in an Optimist pram, a tiny bathtub of a sailboat less than
eight feet long, struggling to keep up with her sailing class in some sunny harbor.
There are lots of kids like her, and she's sailing, too.
Somewhere in between is us, and with always the ability to change boats and ambitions.
Sailing is an open door for those who choose to go through it, and life on the other side
is often forever changed.
I guess you could say that about golf, too, or badminton.
No you couldn't.
Sailing is more than a sport or a pastime--well, as I say, it's an open door to the universe.
Set foot on a sailboat and the water around us is suddenly alive.
It laps against our side, and if we put our hand down into it, why we're suddenly aware
of this strange blue liquid that covers 70 percent of the planet.
It buoys us as we float, it cradles us for the moment, although in the very next moment
it may become spray flying and whitecaps flashing and our heart in our mouth because this is
real water, not water in a water glass, not water on a mop, but water as it has been for
four billion years, the water of which we're made, and without which we couldn't exist.
It reflects its colleague the wind, which scores it with waves and ripples and makes
beaches foam and flags snap on their poles.
In our conversation I'll probably go on and on a bit about how small boats are the best
teachers.
They're easy to buy and store and a good starting point and also a good ending point.
Did I say that we can sail all our lives, and through infirmity, and when athleticism
has long gone, if we were ever athletes at all, and that we can be in the seventh grade
or a middle-aged woman or a young buck or an old goat and find equal challenge and companionship
and competition.
I don't think you can say that about the NFL.
Small sailboats are suitable for families on a quiet afternoon and also to knock the
socks off young men and women for whom triathlons are just too easy.
It depends on what boat you choose.
A daysailer is a trailerable sailboat designed for four where anyone can take the helm while
someone else uncorks the prosecco and passes the hors d'oeuvres around.
Here's to that.
But a sailboat the very same length can be entirely different, designed as a high-tech
rocket ship on which skipper and crew hang in trapezes, fly enormous spinnakers, and
rise out of the water like a motorboat to hurtle off waves in hair-raising demonstrations
of skill and nerve.
The next step beyond dinghies
and day sailors is cruising boats. They're designed to take us sailing to overnight destinations.
They can be small, suitable for no more than two or three crew, and in which waking up
in a new anchorage means making coffee on a Sterno stove with a bucket for a toilet.
Or they can be 40 feet long, with air conditioning and hot showers and ice cream in the deep freeze.
If we learn to sail a dinghy we've also learned how to sail them--the partnership with
the wind is the same for every kind of sailboat.
What is not the same is the price range of boats large and small....