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 actively dangerous in a dinghy, because the boat is not powered by your intention. It is powered by a wind you did not order and cannot adjust. You can only decide the angle you meet it at.

The first month was mostly capsizing. Not dramatically. 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 not technique. It was giving up on a specific fantasy, which was that I could get where I wanted by going straight there. You cannot sail into the wind. You go 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.

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.

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.