Sailing is Simple

I’m a big fan of Robert F. Kennedy jr, and I read his recent writings celebrating his mother’s life with affection. I’m convinced Bobby will play a big part in turning this country around, something we sorely need. America has been headed in the wrong direction for decades and we need better thinking from the top. I hope Bobby can do this. He seems smart and has done his homework on health issues. He understands the chronic disease epidemic is a scandal. Chronic diseases are things not caused by infections or acute injuries, they are things such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. There is no reason for the rates of these things to be so high and this chronic disease epidemic seems caused by the modern lifestyle and is not a natural part of human life. I hope Bobby can bring some clear thinking to this.

But in addition to being a deep thinker on health subjects, Bobby Kennedy jr is in the end, a person, and like all people full of the qualities of humanity. He obviously has a deep love for his mother and is proud of her achievements and among her other athletic accomplishments, boasts of her success at “the Larchmont regatta”. He is a son proud of his mother, this is a human quality. It’s not his job to examine his mother’s life with a cool eye and present it quantitatively, it’s merely his job to be a son. Human qualities come through and produce human reactions, and I read this part knowing a little something about what he was talking about.

There is no Larchmont Regatta, there is a Larchmont Race Week and a Larchmont Junior Race Week for the children. I know this because I grew up in Larchmont and my family were members of the prestigious Larchmont Yacht Club. The race weeks in the summer were some of my fondest memories. Every major yacht club on the Long Island Sound has a race week during the summer and the sailors from the other yacht clubs sail their boats over and often stay in the homes of the host club. It’s a great way to meet people and have adventures as a child. Sports are great for these types of experiences and in a better world every child would experience this in their youth. It’s part of what makes sports worthwhile.

What Bobby is talking about here is his mother competing in the Junior Race Week for children. No eleven year old can win races against adults and they are never allowed in the adult competitions. What he means here by competing against older people most likely means competing against twelve and thirteen year olds. Still, this is an impressive achievement and his nostalgia for this part of the past that I share with his mother brings back memories for me.

Just like Ethel Kennedy, I was also a precocious sailor and also won races at the Larchmont Yacht Club. I actually won a lot. At the end of the summer they would hold another week of races just for the children of the club to compete against each other. It was four races a day for five days, twenty in total. I won 18 races in a row, and then on the third race of the last day I was called for an error by the judges and started arguing with them. At some point I realized the judges were right and I was so embarrassed at having argued with them that I stormed off and went home, and thus given last place finish for the last two races. I was thisclose to perfection. It was a good learning experience, you need to control your emotions, another thing sports are great at teaching.

But the question is, before I lost my temper, how did I win eighteen races in a row? The answer is very simple because sailing is very simple. Sailing is easy to understand and that’s the problem. It’s too easy to understand. I easily beat the other children because I accepted the simplicity of the correct answers, something which the other children had trouble with. Because sailing is simple.

Let me explain with an example. Sailboat races start with an upwind leg. You are sailing into the wind and trying to squeeze as much speed out of the boat as you can while doing this. There are many elements to this, but an obvious and extremely important part of this is correctly adjusting the sail to the wind. The main line draws the sail closer to the center line and controls the angle of the sail to the wind. There is only one angle that is perfect, that gives you the most speed for the direction and conditions you are sailing in. In a race it is of utmost importance to keep the sail constantly in perfect trim, in a perfect angle to give you the most speed.

Sailboat racing is really two sports in one. There is the sport of making the boat go as fast as possible and the chess game of the turns and directions you take, the strategy of your placement of the boat. People tend to be better at one than the other. Some people just love making the boat go fast. This requires constant attention and moment by moment adjustments. Other people love the strategy behind the decisions you make about direction and when to change direction, and the interplay between your boat’s placement and the competitor’s. If you place yourself properly you can steal the wind of another boat and slow them down. If you are behind the leaders in the race, you can place yourself in a position so that if the wind changes direction you will easily fly into first. Some people like this part better. It’s hard to focus on both which is why on large boats they usually hire an expert to just focus on strategy while the skipper, usually the owner of the boat, barks out orders to make maximum speed.

But when you race as children it is usually solo racing in a small boat or just two man boats where the skipper makes all the decisions. Some people find sailing boring, but to me it kept my mind busy at all times as I was constantly focused on doing the two parts of the sport at the same time, strategizing and making constant adjustments to keep the boat going as fast as possible. It’s a race, you have to go fast.

And it’s a sailboat, you have to keep the sail in perfect trim to get the most speed out of the boat. Some people are better at this and even when racing against others in identical boats, called one design racing, their boats will pull ahead because they are simply better at the adjustments that make the boat go faster. And this means keeping the sail in perfect trim, held at the exact angle which will propel your boat through the water the fastest. The importance of perfect trim should be obvious, it’s a race and the race goes to the swift.

How does one achieve this miracle of perfect sail trim on the upwind leg of a sailboat race? This is the point I am laboring to make, sailing is simple. It’s not hard to find the perfect angle for the sail in an upwind leg. Sailing is simple. What you do is let out the main line, the rope controlling the sail’s angle to the wind, until the front edge of the sail, called the luff, starts to shake. When a sail has been let out too far it shakes and you lose speed. If you let it out far enough it functions as a flag and generates no forward speed at all. And flags shake in the wind, ripples constantly start at the front end closest to the flagpole and ripple all the way backward. If you let a sail out too far it becomes a flag and does this as well.

So you don’t let it out that far. You let it out until the shaking, called luffing, starts at the edge closest to the mast. Any luffing at all means the sail has been let out too far and you are losing speed because of this. Then you pull the main line in, this pulls the sail back closer to the boat’s centerline. Pulling the sail closer to the centerline stops the luffing. But if you pull the sail too close to the centerline for the wind conditions and direction you are sailing in, you also lose speed. This time there is no visible indication that anything is wrong. The sail will not do anything to tell you when it has been pulled too far in, but you will be losing speed because of it. Perfect trim is in large part having the sail at the exact angle to the wind which gives you the most speed in the wind conditions and direction you are pointed at. The boat speed also influences this and so for each boat the perfect angle will be different. And you need the perfect angle to have perfect trim and make the boat go fast.

“Go fast” was in fact what we called anything that made sense back when I was racing. We would say things like, do this, it’s go fast. Or we would call prime pieces of equipment go fast. It’s a race and going fast is the whole point. And on an upwind leg, which is how every race starts, go fast means finding the perfect angle of the sail to the wind, neither let out too far, which causes luffing, nor held in too tight, which invisibly reduces your speed. You need that one single angle for the conditions you are in and the direction you are moving in which is perfect trim, which produces the most speed. This is how you win eighteen races in a row, this is how Ethel Kennedy, then Ethel Skakel, won Larchmont Junior Race Week, something her family still remembers. She obviously knew how to sail well, it’s a major event for children in the northeast and very competitive. If you want to win, if you want to go fast, you have to find that one perfect angle to the wind for the sail. You have to draw in and let out the main line, which controls the sail’s angle, until you have perfect trim, until you are go fast.

The good news is this is easy. Because sailing is easy. It was always easy for me. Anything you are good at comes easily to you, that is just how the world works. Because things are simple, and if you are good at something you see that. Sailing is simple, and I always saw that. Perfect trim on an upwind leg, the first leg of every race, is a simple thing. You let the sail out, you let the main line run out letting the sail move farther away from the boat’s centerline until it starts to luff. That means the edge closest to the mast starts to shake. Then you pull the main line in until it just barely stops luffing. That’s the whole thing. It’s over, you found perfect trim and it wasn’t even hard. Because sailing is simple.

To find the perfect angle for the sail on an upwind leg, let the sail out until it luffs, then pull it back and stop pulling it back at the exact moment it stops luffing. There is no better angle than this. It takes seconds to do and any child should be able to do it. Any adult should be able to do it. It’s not hard at all. Finding the perfect angle for you to sail on an upwind leg is the easiest “go fast” thing you can do on a sailboat, and it will win you races, it won them for me. Because sailing is simple.

The problem is it’s people that are complex. Most of the children I raced against simply could not understand this. Many adults who race boats on weekends and take it casually simply cannot understand this. You let the main line out until the sail starts luffing, then you pull it back and stop just when it stops luffing. The sail is now at the perfect angle for your conditions. It’s not that hard, it’s actually very simple. And yet people somehow refuse to do it. You explain it to them, and their faces go blank and they stare off into the distance. They don’t want to hear what you are saying. People don’t want sailing to be simple and they reject simple explanations.

You let the sail out until it luffs, and then pull it back just until it stops luffing. So many times I tried to explain this to people. They don’t want to hear it. They want an equation, or some complicated drawing. They want a complicated answer that satisfies some human need for complicated answers. Their brains simply reject the right answer because they aren’t happy with it. It’s not complicated, and people like complicated answers. Sailing is very simple, but most people are bad at it because they don’t want it to be simple. People get confused about things because they reject the right answer. And people reject the right answer because the right answer is almost always simple. This happens in every sport, the fundamentals are never complicated ideas, it’s always something very simple. And some people quickly see these simple ideas and understand them and become good at it. But most don’t.

Life is simple, it’s people that are complicated. And people want the answers to life to be as complicated as human psychology, as complicated as our own mysterious thoughts. Everything has to be an equation, or somehow take years to learn. But most useful things are simple. Let the sail out until it luffs, then pull it back until it just stops luffing. That is the whole thing. I’m not leaving anything out or misleading the reader. It is that simple. And so are most useful things.

I was a good sailboat racer as a child and I have an open challenge to Bobby Kennedy to race anytime. I think I’ll win, despite his sailing bloodlines. But whichever of us wins will be the one who does the simple things right, because sailing is a simple thing. Everything else is simple too. All useful ideas are simple ideas. It’s the complicated ideas that lead you astray. The problem isn’t the complexity of the world around us, it's the complexity of our human psychology and our stubborn insistence that everything around us be as complex as our own minds. We reject the correct answer because the correct answer is always more simple than we wanted it to be.

If Ethel Kennedy was as good at sailing as her devoted son insists, then she understood sailing, which means she understood a very simple thing. If she won all those races it’s because she understood very simple rules on how to go fast. Because sailing is simple. Because life is simple, we want it to be impressively complex and we want mastering the world around us to mean we understood something impressively difficult to understand. But thinking that way is go slow. Anyone who’s good at what they do knows how to see it as something simple. Everything I’m good at, including sailing, seems simple to me. Everything I’m bad at seems complicated to me, but it seems simple to those who, unlike me, are good at it. No one is ever good at something without seeing the simplicity of it. Because life is simple. I hope Ethel Kennedy taught that lesson to her son, and I hope he can in some way teach it to a larger audience. Because everything is simple if you want it to be.