Bull Sails. Sailmakers

We have all been impressed by watching a racing yacht creaming around the top mark with the crew working in harmony. The spinnaker snakes up and bursts open. The headsail comes down. The boat settles quickly and gets on with the race at hand. A tight synchronised crew is probably a boats biggest asset. A tardy one its biggest liability! Getting a successful crew makeup, it takes time and patience. Last edition I wrote about how hard it is to get crew, let along top crew. It is a lengthy process from simply getting a group of people on a boat to making them a competent crew. But one that can be incredibly rewarding! Develop crew tolerantly The reason your new crewmember has joined you is a desire to go sailing, to learn a new activity and to have fun. The owner and existing crew members need to keep this in mind at all times. Keep your sailing upbeat and enjoyable. It is not always idyllic out on the water but even a bleak winter’s afternoon can be a lot of fun and provi...

Every week I hear the lament of the boat owner. “Where can I find a crew”? It seems to be harder to get one together these days. It is not uncommon to see the Saturday afternoon fleet slowly diminishing in size and calibre while good race boats spend their weekends swinging on moorings. So how do we go about introducing others to the wonderful world of yachting? Extolling the virtues of sailing to readers of this magazine is very much preaching to the converted, but it is worth pondering the question: Where are all the sailors? We know the typical demographic of the sailor. It is very a very popular activity with the younger set and why not? Parents see sailing as a great education. All of the skills needed for sailing are important life skills. Decision making, patience, team interaction and self-reliance are just a few. A lot of these kids will leave their yachting pursuits upon entering adulthood and make reappearance in their early forties once they have achieved a more s...

One of the new buzzwords we hear floating about these days is cross-training. In order to get fully fit it is not enough to just embrace the one exercise regime. We need to partake in some running or cycling for aerobic fitness, some weight routines for muscle tone and play some games to improve our hand eye co-ordination. All together they give us a much more rounded fitness benefit than persevering in one discipline only, even diverse sports such as sprinters or weightlifters are embracing the benefits of cross-training. Similarly we can go a long way to improve our sailing by taking on different styles of sailing to enhance our skills. Recently I was asked to sail a JB 5050 in the Australian Masters games in Geelong and other than being a very steep learning curve it was a lot of fun in a very convivial environment, it also(eventually)brought out some long forgotten skills . There is so much the keelboat sailor can learn from a stint in dinghies or a smaller one design boat and...