By Elizabeth Dudley, Airwaves Writer
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Sail1Design is excited to introduce our newest team member, Elizabeth Dudley. Elizabeth grew up sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. She went to The Gunston School where she sailed and was captain of the Varsity Sailing Team. Elizabeth also attended and graduated from Boston College in May 2011 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. She sailed for the Boston College Varsity Sailing Team all four years on the women’s circuit as a crew and was twice named to the NEISA First Crew Team. Elizabeth is now living and working in the Maryland/DC area, and joins the Airwaves team as a writer and reporter. Enjoy her first piece below. |
You have been a dinghy sailor all of your life, but as you get older, and especially after college, there are fewer occasions to sail dinghies. So do you continue to search for dinghy sailing opportunities? Maybe look to enter a different one design class? Or, do you look towards something bigger?
As a recent college graduate, I have been asking myself that question quite a lot this summer. How can I keep myself sailing? I no longer have mandatory practices four days a week and college regattas on weekends. So when the opportunity to sail a “big boat”, a SR 33 in the A2 class during Annapolis Race Week, presented itself I was on board. It would be my first “big boat” experience. I was not sure what to expect.
I asked the owner of the boat what my job would be and he told me “you will probably just be an extra set of hands until you work yourself into a more permanent position”. An extra set of hands? How much could there possibly be to do? Apparently enough to warrant having ten people on board. And since when did I have to earn a job on a boat? So long to my college sailing days where the skipper drove and played the main while the crew did everything else. Turns out, a “big boat” is comparable to an organism. Everyone has his or her specific job that must be performed in a specific order. If jobs are not executed in the proper sequence problems arise all too quickly.
So I arrived at the dock Saturday morning feeling nervous and apprehensive, assuming my day would consist of staying out of the way and being rail-meat. I feel confident in saying that I can hold my own on a sailboat, but I have spent my entire sailing career on boats under fifteen feet. I was about to sail a boat twice that size and with eight more people than I was comfortable with. I was not even sure what to do to help rig. For the first time in a long time, I felt out of my element around a boat. When I asked what I could do to help, I was handed a grocery bag full of meat and bread and was sent to make sandwiches. I was clearly the low man on the totem pole. I had become the new guy in my own sport. Great.
After a long motor out to the race course it was time to raise the main. To me, it was a massive 374 foot main which took several people to hoist. It was no longer the one person job I was accustomed to and my goal was to continue to stay out from under foot. But then the racing started; the same racing I have been participating in since I was eight. I immediately started to feel more comfortable, at least after the start. I am not sure I have ever been in a scarier boat-on-boat situation. There were a lot of big boats in a small space. In an attempt to calm the chaos around me I made myself official time keeper. I yelled louder than I ever have on any boat and apparently even that was not always loud enough. However, I had created my first job and my second was soon to follow. I was asked, as a dinghy sailor, to call puffs. A simple enough task but crucial for the main trimmer who can not necessarily see them coming. It was also good to keep the rest of the crew in the loop. Calling puffs was something I was very familiar with but I was worried that they way I had always done it was wrong for “big boats”. Turns out, consistency is all that really matters.
As sailing goes, there are a lot of different ways to do just about everything on a boat. Just because you do something differently than someone else does not mean that either of you are wrong. You have to figure out what works for you and your boat. This goes for all aspects of sailing, including planning out a route across the boat during tacks and gybes. There is a lot going on and a lot of hardware/people to step on/fall over. It may also be prudent to take a look at the rail and attempt not to be the person that gets stuck sitting on the twing block for the majority of the upwinds. I was not so lucky and the back of my legs still hate me.
On this boat, my upwinds became much more focused on the one task of calling puffs. That alone was my responsibility. It almost felt more stressful than sailing a dinghy where the crew has a few more tasks on their list. But I was involved and that felt great. When we turned downwind, we needed someone to fly the pole, so I volunteered. Although I did make sure to announce that, like everything else on this boat, I had never done it before. But I had in fact done it before. It is the exact same concept as flying a spinnaker on a 420, just on a larger scale and with a winch. It took a little bit more coordination than I was accustomed to but again, it was not completely foreign. I was contributing and it felt good.
I was the new guy on a boat filled with people who had known each other and had been sailing together for at least a season. It was intimidating. But I tried to be involved as much as possible, without over stepping my “new guy” status. Sailing with ten people has a completely different feel than sailing with just two. There are so many moving pieces and everyone has to work together to make the boat move forward. It is really cool to be a part of that.
It is impossible to know everything that there is to know about sailing. But almost everything carries over from one aspect of the sport to another. If you know how to sail one boat, odds are you can figure out another with time. Just because you are a dinghy sailor and have never stepped foot on a boat over 15 feet, does not mean you have to limit yourself to small boats. The sailing world is a small world, we
all know that. But it is often times bigger than you think and there are plenty of opportunities. So take a chance and expand your horizons.
You can reach Elizabeth at : elizabeth@sail1design.com
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