"You Mean You've Never Been Sailing?" - Tales from a first time sailor
By Alice Bain - The Abaconian - 15 July 2002

No, I'm an ersatz Bahamian-I've lived in too many other places. Abaco has rescued me from the privations of this awful fate. Nassau taught me how to drive a car, but Abaco taught me how not to fall overboard.

From the word go all my friends here had boats. The powerboaters called the sailors "blow-boaters" or even "rag-baggers" and the sailors called the powerboats "stinkpots." When I was small, my uncles and cousins all had powerboats which I had been invited to bruise myself aboard intermittently during my childhood, so "boating" to me always meant a planing hull and two big noisy outboards on the back. Hence, the incredulity of my newfound friends. How could I attain a quarter-century's worth of years and yet never set foot on a sailboat?

All sorts of threats to take me sailing and remove my lamentable lack of nautical acumen were forthcoming, but I didn't actually get on a sailboat "under way" for at least a year. I remember when it finally happened. The wind was out of the east, maybe eight knots worth, and we hoisted sails and cut the engines on the way out of the harbour. "There," said one of my friends, "we're sailing. What do you think?"

I thought it was quiet and very strange. There's no noise on a sailboat apart from the waves on the hull and bits of the rigging creaking in the wind.

Sailboats are quiet-this might sound like a rather obvious observation, but I was used to the noise of "going places." Planes and cars are noisy, even roller-skates make a racket. The wind in your ears as you bicycle makes an artificial roar. But sailboats, next to still-water kayaking, are the most silent mode of transportation I have yet encountered bar walking.

In sailing it's the action of traveling that matters, not the destination. Powerboaters are trying to GET SOMEWHERE, but sailors are more involved in the process of simply moving. I didn't realize how involved this process could be until I raced on the 42-foot Beneteau Further Folly in the RTIA Hope Town race. I learned three terms from powerboaters. "Fuel line," "throttle" and "trim."

Sailors pepper their speech with all sorts of pithy words like "boom" "gudgeon" "cleat" "halyard" "sheets" "shrouds" "bitt" "tack" "jibe" and "transom." To my utter surprise, by the time I set foot on Further Folly, I found that I had osmotically absorbed enough terminology and practical sailing application to understand what was happening.

The crew on Further Folly was tight and professional, and the sailing was very serious and technical. Ollie skippered, his son Jaimie was a grinder and on the jib, Matt was the bowman, Mark was the mast-man, Billy was another grinder also on jib trim and guy, Ken was the pit-man and Michelle was on spinnaker trim.

Mark asked me what I could do. "Stay out of the way and sit on the rail!" I replied. "Oh, I think we'll have you pulling in the spinnaker," he said, and I couldn't tell if he was joking or not.

Me? Spinnaker? Wrestling yards and yards of sail on the bucking foredeck? It seemed unlikely.

Dave eyed me from underneath the brim of a large hat. He was smearing a viscous white substance on his face. "Greased up?" he asked. I nodded, and indicated a bottle of Coppertone SPF 45. "Good," he said, "but you should put your shoes back on and you'll want to get a lanyard on your glasses so they don't go overboard." Ollie kindly provided a length of nylon cord and some duct tape.

This was serious! We motored out to the starting line and checked in, then cruised around checking the wind direction as the crew discussed which jib to fly. All decided, we hoisted the mainsail and joined the fleet tacking restlessly behind the line.

The RTIA class started, and we hoisted the "number 1" jib five minutes before the PHRF class starting gun. At the gun we were one of the first over the starting line, tacking towards the "P" mark off Matt Lowe's Cay. As "official photographer" and "railmeat," I managed to shoot about half a roll of film while protecting my Canon from errant waves and scooting back and forth across the deck from rail to rail as we tacked. After rounding the first mark, the spinnaker went up a little less smoothly than we might have liked but Michelle, Billy and Mark shook the "hourglass" out of it and we sailed a tight reach to the next mark off Scotland Cay. As we prepared to round the mark, Mark said "Right, this is where Alice gets to work." I didn't even have time to wonder before I was directed down into the cabin where reams of brightly-colored spinnaker were being pushed down on top of me. "Pull the sail in!" yelled someone up on deck, and I did so, stifling a case of the giggles. Later, I found out that this position is known as "sewer rat."

Well, we won. Further Folly won the race that day, and also won the PHRF class overall. I walked away from the dock with a newfound fascination with sailing and the choreography necessary to make a boat move through the water-using nothing but wind power and muscle.

As always, my timing is impeccableI am moving to Chicago this autumn to go back to school for a Master of Arts degree and will be far removed from the friendly waters of Abaco Sound. But there will be other regattas and I will come back-Abaco is my home. And who knows? I might put in a few dinghy-sailing classes while I'm in Chicago-I hear they have a lake up there.