They are out there

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 stable financial life. This is an understandable situation with a life dictated by children, mortgages and dual incomes. But why should it only be ex-sailors who get back into sailing? I know of several cases where people have discovered sailing in middle age and are incredibly passionate about the sport.

Mature age sailors

One colleague got a sailing lesson for his fiftieth birthday from his wife, who just thought it was something he may possibly enjoy. Nine years later he is on his second boat and eyeing a third. He races several times a week and is a voracious student of all things nautical. He wonders what he used to do before he discovered sailing!

Similarly, I once had the good fortune to take a woman out sailing in a local winter race when we found ourselves shorthanded. She was in her early forties and had nothing on that afternoon. It was a nice day and despite having never sailed she decided to come along. Being shorthanded meant we had to involve her in sailing the yacht. She spent the day grinding winches and hauling sheets. That night after the race she was raving to her husband and family about what a great day she’d had. Months later she was a member of the yacht club, developed herself into a solid contributing crew member and within a couple of years had done a Melbourne to Hobart Race.

Why is sailing special?

Let’s stop for a minute and think what makes this sport so special for us? For a start it is so incredibly varied that it is hard to envisage as one sport! Go out on a Saturday afternoon on Sydney Harbour and look at the myriad of craft out there - dinghies, skiffs, one design racers and miscellaneous keelboats all racing around in various fleets and levels.

Then there are the little craft gunk-holing around the creeks and tributaries. The cruisers out having a leisurely social sail up and down the waters with friends, and a few nibbles washed down with an appropriate beverage.

Leave the harbour and head out into the vast ocean. The Bluewater cruiser winds his way through tropical isles, the full-on offshore racing yachts scream through the roaring forties. This surely is a sport/ recreation/ pastime that has something for everyone regardless of age and physicality.

It is hard to believe that more people don’t experience the sheer joy of sailing in some form. Why is it so hard to sell?

What we can do

So how do we get people out sailing? I think we have a responsibility, as individuals and as clubs, to do so. I recently heard of a yacht club in America that started Thursday night as “sail with a neighbour” night. Take another family out for a simple evening cruise. Simple concepts like this can work wonders.

Maybe yacht clubs need to look at time frames that fit in with the modern lifestyle, with sailing on alternate days such as Friday and Sunday evenings in lieu of the traditional Saturday afternoon? Try a few days like this on your sailing programme and see how they are received.

I would also encourage clubs to have a cost-effective entry level structure, green fees or a cheap first year membership. Yacht Clubs and sailing groups like class associations need to be very proactive in getting people on the water, it is a bit like the old cliché “build it and they will come”. All we have to do is allow people the opportunity to go sailing. But that first step is the hardest. Get out and promote a “try sailing day” to bring people through the door. Use the modern media; a lot of sailing groups have websites. Use a facebook page or a blog to set up a crew roster, use your local news outlets to advertise events. The populace likes to get down and wander the docks at regattas, have a recruitment drive running in sync with your sailing events. Get out there and really sell sailing. Somewhere in the framework there should be a recruitment aspect, whether an individual or a committee trying to get people on boats. I think this is more likely to succeed with new recruits in a group rather than as an individual. It would be great to have one or two boats set up as introduction vessels where a group of novice crew could learn together under an experienced skipper. This would enable greenhorns to be trained together in a cultivating manner rather than be alone amongst a functioning competent crew where it can be a bit intimidating.

One situation I see at a lot of clubs is a very strong junior contingent and as a result you see a lot of parental involvement. They help in rigging up, running canteens and watching the kids sailing, but many of them don’t sail themselves. They see their involvement as supporting the kids but not as being active in the sport themselves. Sailing is one of the few sports that can go beyond just dropping the kids off, you can participate as well!

We have all enjoyed the wonderful atmosphere of sailing a boat propelled only by the wind. The sense of achievement and its rewards is second to none. It is about time we made a concerted effort to let others do the same. The attraction of the sea is to be shared, as Euripides said in 484 BC “the sea washes out the ills of men”. Not a lot has changed since.