Posts in “Sail”

One day last week I went out sailing with Sergey and Koby after work. The evening was warm, and the sunset was beautiful. There was only one problem: the lack of wind. We persevered under the sails, as is our custom, and it took us an hour and a half to cover a mile... if that.

These “cruising grounds” were supposed to be one of the best on the US East Coast, if not in the entire country.

That day we were not supposed to be visiting Peddocks Island at all. Ben, Lena and I had a boat for two days of the July 4th weekend, and were planning an overnight cruise. The forecast for Friday was for north-east wind 10–15 knots, building up to 20 in the afternoon, with gusts up to 25 knots and 3–5 foot waves.

We are in the East Puerto Rican city of Fajardo, embarking on a week-long sailing trip to the Spanish Virgin Islands, traditionally called the Passage Islands—a group of Caribbean islands sitting between Puerto Rico on one side, and the US and British Virgin Islands on the other.

The sail last Sunday went quite well, and I thought it deserved a report. Especially since it was my first day-long sail after breaking my ankle back in July. My friends! It’s hard to put into words how happy it made me to be out there, breathing the fresh air.

After talking a lot about sailing, and also introducing the concept of slow life, I think it is a good time to talk about them together.

In quantum mechanics, there is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: it is impossible to know the position and the velocity of a particle at the same time. As soon as we measure one of these two properties, the other one magically vanishes, melts into uncertainty.

I am asked from time to time to recommend a sailing book, so here is a short list of books on my shelf (to be expanded later). I am not including specialized topics (such as celestial navigation), history books and travelogues (with one important exception below).

A couple of weeks days ago I helped to deliver a boat, a relatively small Pearson 26, overnight to Provincetown, some 45 nautical miles away. We had very good south-west wind most of the way, and the boat was happily making six or even six and a half knots, which frankly feels to me over her top speed.

Sailing people who live in houses often envy those who live on boats. But those who dwell afloat all year around miss one great thing: the annual pleasure of throwing off a land-based existence in exchange (however briefly) for a seagoing life that will rock them with different demands and buoy them with different delights.