People whose recreational activities propel them to the upper edge of their skill, strength, and endurance frequently experience a euphoria denied the more pedestrian of our species. Rock climbers, skiers of steep slopes, hang gliders, parachutists, deep water scuba divers, motorcycle racers, and sailors of high performance dinghies and catamarans, wax eloquent when they describe their latest feats. To do so is to relive the moments when they were fully in the present, when their attention was so riveted on their activity as to exclude anything else happening around them or any other concerns regardless of how important they were before. Attention equals survival in those moments.
Those people who like to sail high performance craft refer to what they do when driving their boats almost out of control, as “sailing on the edge.” One click further in on the main sheet, one degree further off the wind, one degree more of heel, and they’d be over, over the edge, over their limit, out of time, and out of luck. While they’re sailing on the edge, it’s ecstasy. When they go over, catastrophe. But before I attempt to describe that ecstasy, let’s go over the edge and see why it is avoided.
With a dinghy it would be a matter of simply tipping over, getting wet, standing on the centerboard to right the boat, falling into it, bailing it, and sailing on, water pouring out of the holes designed for it to leave. With a catamaran, it’s a little more complicated. It might not simply be capsizing, though that’a bad enough in a cat because not every sailor has either the strength or the skill to right a cat: one hull must be pressed slightly into the water, while the other lifted out of it using righting ropes. It may be that instead of merely capsizing, the boat pitch polls, that is it performs a sort of cartwheel in which the bows bury their noses in the drink, effectively stopping the front of the boat, while the stern keeps going. In this case the only place it can go is up which it does with consummate grace, often slinging the crew in a graceful arc at 45 degrees to the water over the now stationary bows. They would have been hooked by the belt to a wire coming from high up on the mast, using their weight to keep the boat level by standing on its windward edge, feet slipped into loops, hands clutching sail sheets. When they go over, feet come out of loops and hands release sheets as they fly up and away into the water.
As you can imagine, that’s not a lot of fun because righting a catamaran can be exhausting, especially if you are single-handing the boat as I was when I pitch- polled. I had been surfing on an outgoing tide at the entrance to the Petaluma slough, on San Pablo Bay, on a 16ft Hobie cat. The wind was strong and steady, probably blowing at 20-25 knots. The waves in that shallow part of the bay were a little unpredictable, anywhere from one to two feet high, but enough to allow the boat to get up and surf beautifully. The only problem with surfing a little cat like the Hobie with its short bows, is that when the sterns come out of the water as the bows plunge down the front of a wave, your rudders are hardly wet, so you have no steerage and the boat can easily round up into the wind which will heel you over and bury the lee bow in the next wave ahead. As I said earlier, the stern doesn’t want to stop just because the bow does, and it climbs up into the sky in the blink of an eye. But back to the joy of sailing on the edge.
First you have to be on or in a fast boat. Then you need a big wind; around 20 knots will do. And it helps to have very little chop, though the swells can be big. Chop slows you down, as each little wave smacks your bow and wants to stop it. Swells are fun because they’re like running downhill in sand dunes, though sometimes the wave ahead breaks clear over the deck.
Fundamental to successful sailing is the distribution of the crew’s weight: members must be agile enough to move quickly in response to the needs of the boat to stay as flat on the water as possible. So the crew hikes out over the edge of the boat as it heels to leeward (away from the wind) in order to keep it from capsizing and to get max lift from the wind.
Usually the crew wants to get as much speed as it can from the boat, so it trims the boat for a broad reach, that’s a course midway between sailing across the wind and with it, or downwind. It is often the fastest point of sail for a boat. As the crew settles down on this tack, feeling in control of the boat, getting the most out of it in terms of speed is the order of the day. They trim the sails by tightening or slackening the sheets; the rudders begin to hum; even the centerboards tune in and whole boat kind of tightens up into a living thing that seems to want to skim across the top of the water rather than through it.
It’s at this point that the hydrofoils on the America’s cup boats would lift the hulls clear of the water, reducing the drag, and putting the boats on their way to 40 mph. The thrill is intense and the tension of sailing the boat as fast as you know it can go lifts crews on any cat close to ecstasy. People whoop and holler as loud as they can. If they weren’t nailed down into position, out on the trapezes or on the grinders, they’d jump up and down with glee. It’s those moments that make the eyes sparkle when a person is recounting the event at the bar after a race. The attention is tightened up like a violin string, the body compressed and taught, the breath labored yet regular. Muscles tighten and loosen as reflexes dictate, as the boat moves towards or away from disaster at ever greater speed. Spray from the boat shredding the surface of the water blinds those not wearing goggles, smacks against the sails and mast and any bodies in its way.
When the skipper comes to the end of a tack on a broad reach, he usually steers dead down wind for the leeward mark or buoy, which slows the cat down to half speed, and the crew gets ready to come about, that is, to turn the boat into the wind to gain upwind distance, so they can do the whole thing over again. They relax for a few minutes, let the experience slide into memory, clear the decks, and get ready for the next tryst with the wind.
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