Sailors Live by Higher Standards

This past week I have received an incessant barrage of emails from frostbite sailors deliberating on and working through the legal, ethical, and moral issues of a simple mark rounding. The thread began with the subject line “I love this sport and the people in it,” and went on to admire a sailor whose boom almost imperceptibly grazed a mark, and who, without a single word from a competitor, penalized himself with the appropriate turn. In a second incident, a boat taking a penalty turn was hit by another, out of control boat rounding the mark. Both sailors took a penalty. The ensuing discussion considered all the rules that might be involved and tried to sort out fault. As the subject line suggests, the people and the sport imbued with the ethical standards of the Corinthian Spirit deserve high praise and admiration. Those who can really live up to the standards to which they aspire and profess surely deserved to be honored.

Contrast this with yesterday’s Noble Peace Prize ceremony. President Obama was in the very uncomfortable position of having to defend war while receiving the world’s highest award for peace. Even being the avowed product of the ethos of Dr. Martin Luther King did not stand in the way of explaining the inexplicable and oxymoronic use of war to promote peace. He eloquently elevated doublespeak to its highest pinnacle in defending the actions of a country which almost always chooses war over peace as a methodology to achieve world stability. He may be a worthy president of the world’s latest empire, and in the end, his strategy may prove to be correct (though I am highly skeptical), but he is clearly not a man of peace. He is no Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela, or even George Marshall.

All of this is an ironic twist on the “audacity of hope.” The Nobel Committee bestowed the prize on the sole basis of hope, and Obama truly has inspired hope on a global scale. But promoting hope over actual deeds is certainly audacity on the part of the Committee. And it may have taken even greater audacity to accept an admittedly undeserved award for peace after escalating a war.

If measured only by deeds, there is no man, woman or child on the planet who has committed more human and material resources to war in the last year than President Obama. This includes the most evil of the evil (who may have more hateful intentions, but far less power). I would have to regrettably declare that he is actually the least deserving person on earth to be awarded a peace prize this year. Such are the ironies of history and such are the impossibly difficult choices of the most powerful head of state in today’s world, that what I believe to be a fundamentally decent, peace loving man, feels compelled to make such an unpeaceful choice.

This begs the question (at least in the nearly random cross connections of my mind): If Obama had been a sailor, would he have made different choices in terms of accepting the Peace Prize. If, in addition to admiring Dr. Martin Luther King, he had experienced fellow sailors, high school and college sailing coaches, club racers, sailing judges, and high level competitors all preaching the Corinthian spirit (and for the most part living it), would he not have the good conscience to call a penalty on himself and withdraw from consideration. Even the best sailors make mistakes, but they accept a penalty and move on. I would like to think that a fellow sailor would have found a way to do the honorable thing.

Is it too late to save the Nobel Peace Prize from cynicism and meaninglessness? I say no! There is still time to RE-GIFT the award. Is there a worthy recipient in this war torn world? Did the Nobel committee have a runner-up, like the alternate chosen to do the duties of Miss America Vanessa Williams when she was deemed unworthy? Can we pick someone who worked for peace in a previous year? Can we honor someone posthumously? So who is the best person to never have won the Nobel Peace prize? Or who deserves to get it twice? Submit your nominations here.

I nominate Mahatma Gandhi. A true man of peace. And at least once, according to the poster shamelessly stolen from AllPosters.com, he was a sailor. Give the award to him, and give the money to the starving people of India. Then at least the award could maintain its integrity.

Mahatma Gandhi Indian Nationalist and Spiritual Leader Sailing from Boulogne to Folkestone

Youth Sailing and Architecture?

By way of some very random thinking, my last post brings me back to a former conversation about Saving Sailing and youth sailing.

It seems to me that our interests and passions can be very non-linear in time and space.
What was I doing writing about architecture in a sailing blog? I abandoned the professional architecture track in the middle of college. I thought there were very good reasons for this at the time. I viewed its educational process as a belittling of very talented students (not necessarily me), and perceived the profession to be one that devoured its young. (I was too immature to see that many professions work this way.) After being completely removed from it for nine years, I decided to start a business designing and building custom houses. And so I was back in for twenty years until the increasing aggravation graph line crossed the diminishing creativity line. Out for nine years again (is there a nine year itch?), I find myself writing about architecture in an unrelated context. And in my own non-linear and discontinuous way, I associate this with the way people become sailors.

In the Saving Sailing discussions and reviews – the book itself, Tillerman’s review with many comments, and my review – the topic of youth sailing programs has been often raised, much maligned, and not sufficiently defended.

Nick Hayes, the author of Saving Sailing, characterizes junior sailing programs as themed babysitting services where kids are dumped off and picked up by taxi driver parents. James, one of Tillerman’s commenters, bemoans the negative effects of over competitiveness. And Tillerman has increased his notoriety with his campaign against competition and coaching gone mad in the use of Mommy Boats.

All of these things are issues to be sure, but all of them seem like natural outgrowths of a sick consumer culture. We consume what Hayes calls “time charters” when we spend our time in activities scripted by others. Worshiping celebrity, we accept that a guy making 40K will spend $200 to take his kids to a ball game to watch players making $10 million plus. Is it any wonder that talented sailors hire private coaches and when not seeing Olympic prospects for themselves, go off to chase some other holy grail? The culture will impose itself on sailing, like everything else, despite our best efforts.

Sailing does pretty well in holding off the onslaught of a culture whose values are largely antithetical to those of our sport. We have hundreds of thousands of unpaid competitive sailors enjoying healthy, friendly competition with a Corinthian spirit. We have as many or more non-competitors enjoying the poetic, perhaps Zen-like experience of wind, water, and boat in harmony. We even have a few hardy souls challenging the oceans to become man vs. nature heroes like Hemmingway’s Santiago. We are not yet an endangered species.

It all starts with the first sailing lessons, frequently in youth sailing. I’m not completely pleased with our local junior sailing programs, and I tend toward the competitive as a high school coach, but in spite of flaws, we who are involved in youth sailing are planting the seeds that grow into future sailors. While Nick Hayes is certainly right about mentoring being the best way to accomplish this goal, we are limited to being Johnny Appleseeds. We plant the seeds, but we can’t be the farmers who nurture the orchard.

Despite our obvious limitations, thousands, nay tens or hundreds of thousands, of these seeds somehow develop into sailors. I like to think, “if you plant them, they will grow.” Can you imagine those little kids taught by Tillerman not becoming sailors? I know I have planted some seeds that may lay dormant for periods of time, but they will eventually sprout and blossom. The seeds will grow, not as well or consistently nurtured as Nick Hayes and many of us would like, but they will grow.

Between the Coasts

Warning: another sailing blog post with virtually no sailing content.

I’ve lived in New England long enough now to have a full fledged case of East Coast snobbery. That was seriously called into question last weekend when I visited Chicago for the first time. Maybe it was because the trip was juxtaposed against an absolutely miserable evening of local sailing politics, but it seemed to me Chicago is a pretty cool place.

We only went there because we were obliged to attend a family wedding. Given the November timing and our gloomy long range weather forecast, we planned for as little time there as possible. What a mistake! Chicago is beautiful with plenty of things to do. The restaurants are excellent, the public transportation is clean and efficient, and the people are friendly – so much so that a New Englander is taken aback with every friendly encounter. And the weather – sunny and 65 degrees.

We stayed in the least swanky hotel (but very nice and surprisingly inexpensive) on the edge of the swankiest part of town, the “Magnificent Mile.” The high end shopping district in Chicago, it is a wide boulevard lined by sidewalks with areas of flowers, shrubs, and trees, as well oversized versions of all the best stores in the country.

Unlike Eastern cities, there is enough open space to afford views of the intriguing variety of creative urban architecture. The high rise buildings all seem to feature unique designs instead of the tall boxes with a few decorations at the top that characterize new Boston buildings. The older architecture features the work of world famous architects Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies Van Der Rohe. It’s all interesting enough to support several architectural tour businesses. Chicago also boasts the most green buildings in the country. That seems to beat what we have here in the Hub of the Universe.

In the little free time we had, we spent a summer-like afternoon in Oak Park, 12 miles west of downtown, visiting Frank Lloyd Wright’s house and studio. It is a work from the very beginning of his career, and the neighborhood contains numerous examples of his early works as well as lovely “painted lady” Victorian houses. Mrs. Yarg was mostly humoring me in this little adventure, but afterward confessed to a visceral positive reaction to the house. The wide streets in Oak Park have sidewalks set far enough back to be lined with mature trees, giving them a welcoming and friendly feel.

It’s difficult to have anything more than a first impression of the people, but we encountered several unsolicited acts of kindness. When we asked the concierge where to buy a tie because I had forgotten to bring one, he offered me his. A stranger struck up a conversation on the subway, introduced himself and wished us well on our return trip. When walking with luggage toward the subway, another stranger asked if we were heading for the airport and offered us directions before we showed any signs of confusion. I wonder why we don’t treat each other more like this in the East.

And I hear they have a big lake with sailing! Ever heard of a sailing bachelorette party?

When we say in jest that there isn’t much between the coasts, the joke may be on us for thinking we are so smart and so cool. I would suspect that some of those Midwesterners laugh at us for being pompous asses, but they are probably too damn nice!

Windward Gates

Maybe I get bored easily. I know that high school students get bored easily. We’ve done the drills. We need to keep doing the drills and keep building the skills, but after two months, enough is enough. So after eight weeks of sailing four days a week, what can I do to make the last few days of the season interesting? The last week should be about fun.

The day planned for “Poag Ball,” a version of Ultimate Frisbee played on the water with a soccer ball, had absolutely no wind and was a complete bust. The other days had too much wind for a game where collisions were likely, but they were ideal for racing – racing that was some how different than it had been all fall.

At the end of every season, we have an intramural regatta with formal scorekeeping and a perpetual trophy for the winning pair (double handed boats). In all honesty, the competitiveness of this event is limited. There is usually a fairly clear pecking order of sailors, so the regatta is more of a jostling to swap positions with the guy just ahead of you than it is a wide open contest. Two may challenge one, but six won’t. Similarly, the new freshman will not seriously challenge seniors who are still in the middle of the pecking order. The final results for a day with many races are usually fairly predictable.

This year, my goal for the event was to make each race as competitive as possible within this framework of highly varied skill levels. My solution was to borrow an idea I have seen only once before. At last year’s 25 boat state championship regatta, Fran Charles, the sailing master at MIT, set windward leeward courses with gates at both ends, leeward and windward.

Leeward gates are becoming commonplace. I suppose they are intended to prevent massive pileups and reduce fouling and protests. They also change the dynamics of the race. A single leeward mark rounding rewards the winner of the contest for inside room by increasing his lead as the other boats round wide or fall a boat length or more behind each other to stay close to the mark. It also allows boats ahead to use boat on boat tactics going upwind to maintain the lead. But by having a gate, a boat that is essentially tied can remain that way by choosing the other mark. Perhaps even more important is that the two boats are now heading different directions, sailing in different wind. Boat to boat tactics are eliminated here. Each boat is sailing against the course more than against the other boat. Choosing the favored gate may be more important than getting inside room, if one has to choose. Gates give the boats behind far more opportunity to challenge the boats ahead.

A windward gate has the same characteristics, but occurs much earlier in the race. This keeps those behind much closer to the leaders as they go down wind. It also makes each sailor think about where she should be on the course to maximize wind shifts and puffs. Overall, the use of gates tends to make racing more about playing the wind, and less about tactics and raw boat speed.

I actually tried this out twice. The first was our intramural regatta, where there was a gate at the windward end only. I reasoned that the fleet would spread out so much by the leeward end of the course that a gate was unnecessary – wrong! The course was successful enough that we built on the idea the next day in a “mixed doubles” regatta. This teamed crews who had not sailed together (or not much) this fall, and put freshmen with seniors, sophomores with juniors, and girls with boys. This time we used a leeward gate as well and a closed start finish line in the middle. The first time we finished with the expected pecking order, but 8 of 11 boats has at least one top three finish for the day. The second time two edged out one, four advanced to three, a freshman (with one of the best crews) vaulted from eight to four, and 9 of 12 boats had a top three finish.

I really like that so many kids had that one good race. I love it when the newbies beat the cocky seniors once in a while. It builds confidence and motivation. If they can do it once, they can do it again! I like finding a way to emphasize the importance of reading the shifts and puffs, even in short course racing. I like mixing things up a little in a way that the kids had lots of fun. And I like that coaches and sailors alike found the windward gate made for competitive, interesting and entertaining racing.

It looks like I’m saying that I like windward gates!

RAD Sails

Thanks to the support of my Athletic Director and the town Recreation Director, my sailing team has a great new toy to play with - Intensity’s new RAD (reduced area design) 420 mainsails. In combination with a standard jib, these are a cross between storm sails and full size sails, with most of the virtues of both.

These sails are a solution to a host of problems from both the coach’s and the sailors’ perspectives.

For the sailors, there is always a upper wind limit beyond which their performance diminishes rapidly. For newer and lighter weight sailors, this limit is reached pretty quickly. For experienced sailors, the limit is higher, but there are still several days each season that excessive wind causes us to sail badly or not at all.

From the coach’s perspective, repeated capsizes by the less experienced sailors undermine or prevent other organized group activities. Leaving some sailors on the shore makes running a practice or a meet manageable, but denies opportunities for the land-bound to expand their skills in the very conditions where they can move up to the next level.

RAD sails give us an opportunity to deal with all of this. We have now used them on several occasions, and I love them! They give us just the opportunities I was hoping for. The freshman can use RAD sails while the other sailors use full sails, making many of those questionable days very productive. We had one day with a weather forecast of gusts to 40 (they were actually never above the high 20’s) in which everyone used RAD sails. We only had one capsize, and the team got some much needed time in heavy and very gusty conditions. We now choose our sails to match the wind conditions and don’t miss any sailing time.

Intensity spent some time developing these sails and seems to have gotten it just right. They are small enough to keep more boats upright but don’t just function as a survival sail. The main is still large enough to use with a standard jib without throwing the boat out of balance. They are naturally a little slower than full sails, especially downwind, but they are not dogs. All of the same sail trim techniques used for the full sails apply when using RAD sails, but they are simply easier to handle and more forgiving. I think they will be very useful in the teaching process. Kids can develop skills of ease-hike-trim, feathering, and heavy air gybing with a little more margin for error, but they are also rewarded for successful sail handling. We have found that the sails are plenty powerful enough to get the boat on a plane.


The whole team is excited that we now have so few limitations on when we can sail, and the kids love that they can have the fun of sailing in the big breeze with fewer negative consequences. The coaches love that we have the flexibility to maximize sailing opportunities for everyone, while maintaining safety and managing the potential chaos. I think Intensity did a great job of developing a product that opens up sailing opportunities to newer, lighter sailors and to all sailors in heavy conditions. RAD sails are a terrific asset to our sailing program!RAD Sails

Resume *’s

On the way to a high school regatta this weekend, my best sailor was beginning to write a resume he wanted to submit to college sailing coaches. He was reviewing his personal accomplishments and those of the team over the last couple of years. As we recalled our final standings, he kept asking the same question – “Can I explain that I would have finished ….. if it weren’t for…………?” I explained to him that there are no footnotes in resume writing – just the facts, usually simplified.

Upon reflection, I wondered what a resume would look like with a bunch of asterisks explaining the details of the basic facts. It would surely be silly. The writer would appear to be an excuse maker, amplifying his shortcomings and revealing his less than perfect accomplishments as failures.

But for a coach, the series of asterisks could serve a positive purpose. If each asterisk represented a lesson learned, the resume would become a list of really important things discovered about how to improve sailing performance. If from each of our mistakes, we found out how to avoid repeating the mistake, we would be very successful indeed. To a college coach, what is high school sailing but a place to make a few mistakes and learn as much as one can?

Here’s what the asterisk part of my sailor’s resume for last year might have looked like:

* At state championship, would have finished second in division instead of fifth if I had not protested another boat who claimed inside room at a mark and then been DSQed myself. Apparently, you have to give him room and protest, not hit him and protest. Team would have finished third instead of fifth.

* At post-season team race regatta, beat the team that won, but finished third because our team sailed the first two races before really waking up. In one of these races, all three of our boats gave away the start to a very good team, and in another, we failed to capitalize on opportunities we routinely take advantage of, and then we sailed poorly to lose boats we were trying to cover.

* At post-season team race regatta, I held onto the 1 in a 1,4,5, as conventional wisdom suggests, only to watch the other team hook a teammate on the downwind leg and take him to 6; thus we lost instead of won. Repeated this losing strategy in next race. Lost regatta by virtue of these two races.

* At fleet race regatta, my team finished first on the water, but third after protests when a teammate was DSQed for tacking too close to the one sailor we had seen protest everything possible over the course of the season. (The team that was second on the water ended up fourth after a protest with the same protest everything team.)

* At fleet race regatta, finished second, both individually and as a team, after blowing away the field because I grazed the committee boat, and the RC said nothing at the time, but protested later. RC’s don’t have to notify competitors of their intention to protest. If I had taken my penalty spin, I could have finished last in that race and still won the regatta, but in high school a DSQ is everyone plus 4.

Writing this kind of resume is a good way to reaffirm lessons learned the hard way. I hope it served that purpose for my sailor.

If I were a college coach, I would love to have a kid who could sail fast, team race well, and never make the above mistakes again!

Less is More Abuse

Here we go on another Tillerman inspired tangent in which the author fails to follow the instructions of the assignment, but instead changes the subject more or less entirely and heads off into realms hinted at, but not anticipated in the original beseechment for sailing related wisdom and foolishness. The author may here and there take issue with the minimalist sophistry embedded in the phrase, “less is more,” which is the inspiration for the assignment to which this is a response, but which strikes the author as a sometime duplicitous representation of one’s work, which falls, in fact, considerably short in achieving the “more” half of the aphorism. That being said, the author in no way endorses the pre-twentieth century industrialization model of unnecessary elaboration and needless decoration typical of practitioners of both the literary and architectural arts in the earlier eras.

Less is more version of the above: Caution – off topic discussion follows.

Maybe that’s just a less is less version.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is given credit for coining the phrase “less is more,” but apparently he borrowed it from 19th century British poet Robert Browning. Browning’s poem admires the idea, though Browning himself makes no claim to embody it in his work.

Who strive - you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,-
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter) - so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia.

Mies (anyone who has studied architecture is on a first name, or first surname basis with him), on the other hand, uses the phrase as a philosophical justification for everything he does, whether or not he really achieves it in a given work. My view is that he began with a bang. The Barcelona Pavilion uses simple planes of a few materials to produce suggestions of spaces and relationships between them that are interesting and rich – certainly more complex than the elements that define them. Pretty cool!

His Barcelona chair is a classic. Each side of the chair uses a curved X of a single sized piece of stainless steel to make the legs, back, and seat support. Again, pretty cool!

Mies’ disciples also used his axiom to do some great work. Eero Saarinen did a pretty good job of making less into more in his own “ism,” expressionism.

And again in a really cool little building, the MIT chapel. It is a small cylinder surrounded by a moat. It has little arches down near the moat. Inside the arches is a recessed wall, and there is an invisible horizontal window in between. There is also a circular skylight in the roof. The result is that light dances on interior walls and over the alter. Less is way more here!

(Look, there’s a boat!)

But “less is more” also brought us this Mies so called “masterpiece.”
There is some nice clean detailing here in the Seagram Building, but I don’t see the “more” part.

And then there is this, Crown Hall at IIT in Chicago, supposedly one of Mies’ crowning achievements.

This is an interior view.

Seems like a clear expression of less is less.

Then along came Robert Venturi who wrote a book entitled Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. It was the beginning of post-modernism. He declared that architecture is inherently complex …and contradictory and coined his own aphorism that so aptly describes the above picture:

“Less is a BORE.”

And so, architecture has gone in a different direction.

I now ask myself, “What is the point of this little digression?” I think Tillerman just hit my anti – Mies nerve – an old architecture school malady. He is one of the three Gods of twentieth century architecture, but I could never worship at his altar. To me, his work (except for the earliest work) is a stronger representation of industrialization, mechanization, standardization, and a bunch of other ………tions than it is of an artistic or Zen-like spirit of minimalism. The industrialized version of “less is more” isn’t working out so well on many fronts, yet Mies usually gets his name mentioned when we want us to consider a much more sublime concept.