On Yachts and Yacht Handling

by Thomas Fleming Day

No reef lifts above the water, no shallow spreads its treacherous sands, but the frames of his vessel have been broken upon it. The hurricane and calm have taken toll of him; he has paid the penalty of recklessness and greed. He has given to the annals of war its most desperate and bloody conflicts; he has perished that nations might live, and that a people might be free.

His life gave him strength and endurance; his art made him skillful and courageous. He created and used a language of his own, and his customs were not those of other men. The inventor of the sail, the user of the elements, the discoverer, the trader, the protector, the world's benefactor—the seaman.

A noble art makes noble men, and there is no nobler art than seamanship. As free and changeful in its measures as are the elements it employs and combats, it is prolific of resource, fertile in expedient, and a prompter of mental activity. It promotes skill of hand and tenacity of muscle. Courage is bred in its duties, and the mind broadens in its services.

It is this that makes the practice of seamanship so valuable to those who employ it only as a pastime. The care and handling of the sailing vessel furnishes most excellent training for the young. Aside from the skill it imparts, it takes men out into the open air; it offers to those whom the obligations of life keep at the counter and desk an opportunity to be free, to get away from and completely out of the business world. It gives the mart-worn mind a change and a rest. The sea has no postmen; no telegraph messengers. It prints no newspapers. The feet of society merely tread its borders. It is a place where man is really free, and where he can realize his freedom.

Many have written upon this art. Some of these works are an addition to literature and of value to the seaman, but the majority are not. On that branch of seamanship, which we will call yachtmanship, and which is principally the art of sparring, rigging, canvasing and handling fore-and-aft vessels, there has been penned several large works and many small ones. The standard books are by Vanderdecken and Kemp, and the majority of the others, I am sorry to say, are in the most part copies of these two. In some cases the authors have lifted their information bodily, and have forgotten to acknowledge the indebtedness. While standard works of their time, both Vanderdecken and Kemp are now out of date, and, moreover, they deal largely with big vessels, and vessels of a type no longer employed in yachting.

Among the smaller works there are several good ones, but they lack originality and do not properly cover the ground, nor do they contain the information which is most necessary to the beginner. Again, many of them have been written by men who are enslaved by one type, and are therefore considerably biased; others are from the pen of those who have had a special and not a general experience.

But the crowning defect of all these books, to my mind, is that the authors in the portion relating to handling try to teach a man, instead of prompting him to learn. You cannot teach a man to sail—he may learn. In order to do so he must have the sailor instinct. Unless he has that he will never become a seaman. That is why some men can never learn to handle a boat, and why others will pick up the knowledge in a few months.

Again, there are many men who learn to sail a boat; that is, become possessed of so much knowledge as will permit of their working a vessel from place to place, but yet never succeed in mastering the nicer or more difficult points of seamanship. These are the parrots of the profession—men who simply repeat what they see other men do. The skillful seaman is the man who thinks, who studies his profession, and who learns from his own experience what he cannot from the practice of others.

It is often said that experience is the great teacher. To be sure it is; but even experience cannot teach one who will not learn. The most intense and varied experience is of no use to one who casts it aside without first fitting it into place in his life's record by turning it over and over in his mind. Spasmodic storage of experience is of no use whatever; it must be sorted, checked up, ticketed and stored away in its proper place in the next bin to that which it joins in the sequence of events. Unless this is done it will not be forthcoming when needed.