An old adage tells us there’s only one chance to make a first impression. There’s another expression that the exception proves the rule.
By CaptaIn Ray
Published: March, 2012
An old adage tells us there’s only one chance to make a first impression. There’s another expression that the exception proves the rule. Recently, I was fortunate enough to witness what may have been the exception, having an opportunity to reintroduce someone to the joy of sailing.
It all started with what I thought would be a series of unexceptional private lessons. The client was a man with previous sailing experience. He wanted to review and refresh his skills, build on what he knew and get to the point of being able to skipper and charter boats on his own. His wife, who had taken a few sailing lessons some years before, would accompany him. Her goal was to be prepared to serve as his crew.
They had plans to charter a sailboat in the British Virgin Islands in a few months and wanted to be ready. It seemed rather straightforward: I would work with him to get his skills up to a level where he could comfortably skipper the boat, and I would help his wife gain the knowledge to crew for him competently. With this preparation, they hoped their vacation would be fun and not fraught with angst.
There was, however, one significant problem with their plan: While he was enormously enthusiastic and eager, his wife had a bad experience during the few lessons she’d had years before, which left her very apprehensive. She had been yelled at, frightened and made to feel stupid. She came away from those lessons feeling inadequate and useless. Regrettably, similar first-time exposures to sailing are not uncommon. Over my 25 years of teaching sailing, I’ve heard stories like this all too frequently.
This kind of poor management on the part of a skipper usually comes from insecurity—concern that you haven’t thought of everything, or that something important is being overlooked. What follows is apprehension that some unseen or unaccounted for something is about to go terribly wrong.
I can very clearly remember the very first day I was paid to be a skipper. All I had to do was sail the boat about two miles and pick up a mooring. It was in Kona, Hawai’i, which has some of the best easy sailing weather in the world: calm seas, gentle breezes and clear visibility. After we had arrived at the mooring and our guests were all in the water snorkeling, my crew came over to me and very quietly said, "Ray, the word for today is mellow." I had been suffering from that same fear—the "not on my watch" syndrome! I wasn’t going to let anything go wrong and was so uptight that no one was having a good time. My crew said things were better on the trip home, after I’d been told to chill. But I sometimes wonder just how many people I put off from sailing while I was learning to relax.
Fortunately, my new student was open to having another go at sailing. The weather cooperated perfectly; the winds were light in the morning, strong enough to be easily discerned, but not so strong as to be intimidating in any way. There was time for her to begin to understand the ways of a boat, learn the crew’s role when tacking and hold a steady course when steering. As the day went on the wind strengthened, and so did her confidence that she could do this.
Maybe there is a lesson in this for all of us.
Ray Wichmann, is a US SAILING-certified Ocean Passagemaking Instructor, a US SAILING Instructor Trainer, and a member of US SAILING’s National Faculty. He holds a 100-Ton Master’s License, was a charter skipper in Hawai’i for 15 years, and has sailed on both coasts of the United States, in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Greece. He is presently employed as the Master Instructor at OCSC Sailing in the Berkeley Marina.
