Tom Cunliffe’s piece on strong-wind sailing (p.32) got me pondering the nature of people’s reactions to, well, nature. Tom has sailed many thousands of hard miles in high latitudes and has had many gallons of icy North Atlantic water dumped down the collar of his foulies. To him, dirty weather isn’t something to be feared. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s certainly something to be treated with respect. It is also unavoidable. Sooner or later, every sailor will run into the kind of weather that tests his or her comfort threshold. The question is, how will you cope?

The fact is that most people cope better than they think they are going to. The difference between enjoying a good blow and enduring it usually correlates to the length of time you’re out in it and the degree of discomfort it subjects you to. Most gales around coastlines are shortlived and don’t kick up the kind of horrendous seas that can put a serious dent in your sense of humor.

If your boat is well prepared and you shorten sail when you ought to, sailing in 25 knots or more of wind is often great fun, especially if the sun is shining and you know you’ll be asleep in your own bed that night (there can be an awesome—in the old-fashioned sense of the word—beauty to a gale at sea, but even I admit that it palls after a day or so of being bounced around). There is nothing like the feel of a boat roaring along at hull speed on a broad reach in big seas, boom strapped down tight, foam hissing past the quarters, the helm going light as you catch a wave just right, the rudder biting hard again as the boat squats at the end of a surf. It gives you the tiniest taste of the adrenaline smorgasbord that lures Volvo Ocean Race crews back to the Southern Ocean time after time.

In my early offshore days, I once got so carried away by VOR fantasies in a rollicking Atlantic breeze that I didn’t listen to what the boat or the sky were telling me. By the time it registered that the apparent windspeed had climbed to 30 knots, the boat was surfing at double-digit speeds and my crewmate was glaring at me through the Perspex washboards. I had hurled him from his bunk when I buried the bow in the back of a wave.

After half an hour of getting soundly thrashed by flogging sailcloth I managed to drop the mainsail, and having given up the idea of running before the wind we negotiated the remainder of that gale using a technique that was new to both of us, fore-reaching across the sloping wave faces and ducking over the tops of the biggest ones. It worked amazingly well. And guess what: I’d read about it in a magazine.