We were sailing from Atlantic City to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, on a breezy summer day, and I’ll admit we were kind of a hot mess. The boat—a 45-foot Solent-rigged sloop—was new to us, and we’d just embarked on a monthlong shakedown cruise to New England.
Or someplace. It was hard to say, really. This was the boat we dreamed would be taking us cruising full-time sometime soon, much bigger, heavier, and more complex than our 34-foot IOR racer-turned-cruiser that we and our two kids had sailed for seven years on the Chesapeake. But how hard could it be? Johnny and I had sailed and raced thousands of miles together, offshore and elsewhere. We’d sailed our whole lives.
So it was unnerving to feel like Osprey, the big new boat, seemed more competent and comfortable out here than we were. The breeze was building, and we were sailing with a full main and genoa on a broad reach, rolling some, and basically sailing away from the destination to keep the headsail happy. My brother, who was along for the ride, pointed to the pair of poles stowed forward like an A-frame, their tops attached to cars on a track on the front of the mast, their bottoms attached to the deck on either side near the shrouds.
“Maybe we should try one of those and see if we can sail the rhumb line.” He was on a timetable. He was all about the rhumb line.
We had raced with spinnaker poles countless times. But we hadn’t tried the headsail poles on the new boat, which was designed and set up for dead downwind, trade wind sailing. Truth is, we were nervous and still mired in IOR-think, which is to say, dead downwind is a squirrely, exciting, short trip to broach city.
It took a bit of sorting, but we got one of the poles set. And like magic, we were flying. It was a revelation, sailing straight and steady for the waypoint, nearly DDW, the boat finally in her groove as if she’d been waiting for us to figure it out. In the years to come, we’d refine and return to this setup over and over on passages—sometimes with both headsails poled out and no main at all—and smoke other boats we were sailing with who either didn’t have a pole or were uncertain how to use one. While they rocked and rolled, struggling to sail angles to maintain sail shape in the seas, we sailed fast, stable, and straight, lux as a Caddy on Route 66.
Times have changed. I have yet to see a new boat come standard with a pole. Most have small jibs, often self-tacking, and integrated sprits for a code zero or other asymmetrical headsail. Mainsheets no longer attach to a traveler but rather through a centerlined set of blocks, usually on the cabintop well away from the cockpit. Backstays are either fixed or eliminated.
This is all about making sailing easier and ostensibly safer. But as Andy Schell points out in his primer on sailing with poles in our October issue, off the wind, these boats are often underpowered with the small headsails, and using the asym sails means sailing higher wind angles, ergo more miles to get downwind.
“Even in cruising mode without flying kites, you’ll need to sail higher wind angles to keep the jib full on a broad reach,” he notes. On an afternoon sail across the bay or the sound, no biggie. But if you aspire to go farther, there’s food for thought here. And things to learn and, as in our case that day, un-learn.
The thinking that seems to drive much of new boat design philosophy is that you shouldn’t have to think about sailing. Set it, forget it, and go entertain in the aircraft carrier-sized lounge spaces. And I get it—sometimes you just aren’t into working that hard, and new boats sail well and can be really fun in their simplicity of handling.
But for me, sailing has always been fundamentally about learning stuff—about the boat, the wind, the sails, my crewmates, myself. The thought process and action of sailing, of learning how to make your boat sail well in a variety of conditions and situations, is a big part of the fun. If you can sail faster and with more stability by learning how to set a pole, why not learn how to do that? If you can get a better sail shape by tweaking backstay adjustment, or get better control or speed by moving the mainsheet traveler, let’s do that and see what happens. Self-tacking jibs are great, but I still love an overlapping headsail I can manipulate by sliding the sheet cars forward or back, depending on the angle of sail.
Yes, it’s more work. But it’s also—to use an overused phrase—adding tools to your toolbox, giving you options, offering ways to learn and grow. And I would argue that this is just as valuable to sailors—and sailing itself—as making it easy.
Keep on sailing,
Wendy
[email protected]
October 2024
