A thread on the “Current Affairs and News” board has been sidetracked off-topic, and into sporting discussions which may be more appropriately pursued here.
avconway wrote:Lootman wrote:Sailing is right up there with other "rich white" sports like skiing, golf, tennis, croquet, polo and formula one.
"Rich white"? This thread is going off topic. To the extent that it is about me, a poor immigrant gone to sea, let me say, to encourage others on this originally financial web-site, that I owe my home and my uptake of a long-wished-for sport, to a succession of fortuitous, carefully considered trades (aka lucky gambles) during the dot com bubble.
avconway
You’re smart, you’ve made it, what next?
So, having become a successful investor – some of us have, some not yet – what comes next? Sure, securing the roof over the head of your family is paramount of course, but then what?
Being British, and thus rooted in sea-faring, you will of course want a sailing boat, which gives you a new sport, a new pastime, and a new attachment to your national roots.
Something like a forty-five or fifty-footer. There is no need to go bigger. Preferably a cutter-rigged ketch or yawl so that the individual sail areas are of manageable size – because it’s only you and your children who will be carrying out the commands your wife will be shouting at you from the helm.
Even going down to a thirty-five or thirty-six footer you’re not sacrificing anything of importance nautically, except a little ultimate hull-speed, and going bigger than a fifty-footer is merely going grander – and going faster. Remember back thirty years, back to the decade of the Sparkman and Stephens Swans, when if you wanted to be or to do anything in the world’s big ocean races a Swan 65 had to be your boat of choice? Fast, comfortable, strong, seaworthy. They had been busy, world-girdling, prize-winning boats for ten years. And are still magnificent cruising boats today – you really should have gone large into Rolls Royce when they were trading at 69/70 pence in the third quarter of 2022.
However, I believe that statistics show that those who go small also go sailing (and swimming and snorkelling), whereas those who go large and luxurious spend their time, leisure and money in harbours and boatyards, not at anchor off the Mediterranean’s warm European and North African beaches.
So, I start by liquidating half my portfolio and go for a fifty-foot ketch do I?
No, you start by learning to sail. These fifty-footers – or even thirty-five footers – don’t sail by themselves. Somebody has to be in charge, somebody has to know what to do, which means you go for a twelve- to sixteen-foot sailing dinghy and you get started on an RYA practical sailing course – with an instructor who knows what to do and will tell you what to do.
Britain is blessed by having produced a plethora of versatile naval architects who have produced a plethora of wonderful small sailing craft, and the designs they produced in the 1950s and 60s were much influenced by the war-time development of light, strong and durable plywood materials, as used by the very fast de Havilland ‘Mosquito’ light bomber and the gliders used at Arnhem. This material gave new scope to Britain’s boat designers and builders to create a wide range of strong, seaworthy, easily-home-built small sailing craft. So you go for a Heron sailing dinghy, or a Wayfarer, or an Enterprise, or a GP 14, or a SigneT, or an OK, or a Mirror, and you get a kit of parts and make your sailing dinghy yourself, at home, with your youngsters.
Look, this is the 21st C. so why should I lose time playing with antique materials? In this age of kevlar, composites and carbon-fibre can’t I get an off-the-shelf dinghy, delivered by the weekend?
Yes, but why would you want to do that? Weren’t your youngsters cock-a-hoop when they first slept in the IKEA bunk-beds that were almost all their own work? How much more cock-a-hoop will they be when they take you and a picnic across the lake in a little ship that, too, is almost all their own work? Time-wise it’s a doddle – start now before Easter and you’ll be lake-side picnicking in the summer school holidays.
Why sailing? Why should sailing come next? If it’s posh I want couldn’t I go for golf instead of sailing a fifty-footer?
Think of it as medicine, doing you good, bringing you down to size, self-improvement. The wind, the tides, and the water do what they’ve got to do, quite unfazed by your mood, your charm, your ego, or whether you have mates in high places. No matter how much you shout “You cannot be SERIOUS,” no matter how predisposed you are to “play the man” and not the matter, nor how devoted you are to "gamesmanship", the elements about you will not be brow-beaten, will remain fixed on the rules, their rules, and, if respected, will deliver you to your destination, or if flouted, will drown you. The choice is yours.
avconway