GO / DON'T GO................

"There are bold skippers.
And there are old skippers."

One of the hardest decisions a skipper can take is not to go to sea.

All sailing skippers, in my opinion, should be acquainted with the work of Solomon Asch. Asch, a psychologist, set up an experiment where subjects went in a group into a room and were asked how many sounds they heard in a series. Unbeknown to the subject, all but one of the people in the room were stooges, briefed to reduce the number of sounds heard by one. The true subjects mainly last only a couple of repetitions of the sound series, before they, too, give an answer which fits in with the group. This was the invention of the term peer pressure.

A sailing skipper may be under all sorts of pressure to put to sea when he has doubts about the wisdom of doing so. There is that event we have all looked forward to. There is the bus I have to catch home. There is the possibility that things will not be as adverse as the skipper's feverish imagination. There is the uncertainty of when we shall sail together again, if not now. There is the resounding laughter about the bloke who owns a boat but never sails it. There is the cajoling of the crew, who want to go. There is "the waste of a day". There is time pressure.

Years ago, I sailed as part of a quest to extinguish, through adventure, doubts about myself and my character. To prove myself. This thirst took some quenching, and in the course of drinking in its adventures, has taught me that, with age, the purpose of my sailing has changed. It is now simply to revel in the company of friends, in benign enjoyment of the sea, the coast, and a boat, in conditions propitious to that harmless delight. Drama has no real place in it, and is a symbol only of my failure of preparation, or of poor decision making.

I've had drama. The injured crew during a crash gybe in a big sea, at night. The broken bones. The prolonged seasickness, from an enforced departure into a storm. Racing the onset of nausea to get dressed below, in a boat pitching madly. Forcing myself on deck for my watch, when every cell of me wants to go to bed, ill. Punching myself in the face to stay awake during night watches, when my fatigue level has brought me close to hallucination. Nearly going overboard, when the deck was raked by a pitiless sea. Many times, wishing I was anywhere but on this boat, here, on these angry waves.

Perhaps one has to have these sorts of experience before one gains the timidity that may truly mark the experienced skipper. But I do not see my role as a skipper of my boat as the facilitator of such experiences, unless they are unavoidable. If caught out on a long passage, for example, then perhaps they are inevitable. But for the leisure sailor, avoiding them is the product of a simple decision, even if not always easy to take.

When you read the stories written in the sailing magazines, of how people ran into dramatic difficulties, they almost always start with an apparently innocent description of weather conditions which the cautious would immediately spot as malevolent. The protagonists clearly missed this, or, more likely, let their definitions of themselves as heroes prevail over a more appropriate awe for the sea and its destructive power. Once, a friend of mine recounted with vigour, how he was skippering a yacht out into a force 6 on the nose, and after some hours of bashing against tide and wind, going nowhere, taking the decision to return to the starting point. When I suggested it might have been better if he hadn't set out in the first place, I met the astonished responses of the entire group I was in. Solomon Asch, eat your heart out.

This coming weekend, I face such a skipper's dilemma. I've asked my crew what they think. Perhaps they will think as a skipper should. But, if they don't, that's what I'm there for.