Sailing at Varuna

You cannot argue with wind, which took me an embarrassing number of weekends to accept.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2023-04-22 · Life

I learned to sail badly, at Varuna, on weekends, in a small boat that punished everything I thought I knew about making things happen.

My instinct in any system is to push. If a thing is not moving, apply more. That works reasonably well in an office and it is dangerous in a dinghy, because the boat is powered by a wind I did not order and cannot adjust. I can only decide the angle I meet it at.

The first month was mostly capsizing, slowly and with plenty of warning I did not know how to read, then the mast in the water and me in the sea working out which rope had done it.

What changed things was giving up a specific fantasy, which was that I could get where I wanted by going straight there. A boat cannot sail into the wind. It goes across it, one leg then another, and the route looks inefficient drawn on a chart while being the only route that exists. Everyone who has ever sailed knows this in about ten minutes. I needed a season, because I kept treating the first tack as a failure rather than the method.

I would like to say this fixed how I work. It did not, entirely. I still push at things that would move on their own if I left them a week. But when a business is not going where I want, some part of my head now asks whether I am trying to sail straight into it.

There was a man at the club, older, who came most weekends and rarely raced. He would go out, sit, come back. For a while I found that a waste of a boat. Later I understood he was doing the thing I could not do yet, which is to be out there without needing an outcome from it.