It starts with my German uncle Andreas. A business owner based in Munich, recently he has been taking more time off from work, and perhaps enjoying a semi-retirement. This is the same uncle Andreas who took us on a whirlwind tour of Austria one day in December 2008. The same who has a waterfront condo in southern France, between Marseilles and Montpelier, and generously let Sharon and I stay there in September 2011 so that we could use it as a base for exploring that region.
In May 2012, Andreas embarked on a sailing trip. Now, Andreas doesn't do anything half-assed, so his idea of a sailing trip is to spend weeks if not months at sea, going from port to port and exploring. He has sailing friends who have sailed around Africa or something similarly ridiculous, so I'm sure he'll dispute the impressiveness of his excursions.
So the long-planned May 2012 trip was to venture out from his home base in southern France and explore the islands of Corsica and Sardinia and other ports-of-call. He maintained a photo blog during the trip, as did his daughter Cornelia (my cousin) for her segment that July, and their photos and tales in general are truly beautiful and enchanting.
I remember doing a tiny bit of sailing with Uncle Andreas back when I was a child visiting, and have always wanted to do that again. So, after he returned from his trip, I asked him if I could join him on his next trip, and he naturally said yes!
Problem is, I don't really know how to sail. His are fairly big sailboats, and he could probably use the help of a non-idiot when he's trying to get the thing to move under wind power. And so I decided I needed to learn something about sailing.
Atlanta is the rare landlocked metropolis, lacking any water feature whatsoever that might have served as the genesis of the city. In the early 1800's, a train line was built into the southeastern US, and they simply picked a spot in north Georgia to stop building it, and that spot ("Terminus") became Atlanta. As the city exploded in growth in the 20th century, several nearby rivers were dammed to provide reliable water supply to the metropolis, and those lakes now also serve as recreation areas. The two big ones are Lake Lanier to the northeast of the city and Lake Allatoona to the northwest.
The Atlanta Yacht Club operates on Lake Allatoona, which is a bit smaller than Lake Lanier, but also less busy with motorboats and other things that are nuisances for sailing. They offer a 5-day sailing class twice a year, one at the beginning of summer and one at the end. The classes take place on Saturday mornings for 3 hours, for five weekends in a row.
And so for five Saturdays in a row in August and September, I got up at 7:30am and drove up to Lake Allatoona for my weekly lesson. They have 6 small sailboats that they use for training, with each boat getting two students, so the class size maxes out at 12. The boats are called 420's, named for the 4.20 meter length of the hull, and are a basic two-person boat with not too many different ropes for a beginner to learn to deal with.
In basic sailing, you have two sails, a mainsail (big, rear) and a jib (smaller, front). With a typical two-man boat, you have the "skipper" or "helmsman" sitting in the back, and the "crew" sitting in the middle. The skipper's job is to handle the steering of the boat (with one hand on the tiller/rudder) and to control the mainsail (with the other hand on the rope that connects to the boom). The crew's job is to control the jib (smaller front sail) via two ropes coming off on either side. The skipper is in charge of the boat and has the much harder job, reading the wind and the other boats and the goal and making decisions what to do. The crew has the much easier job, just moving the jib per the skipper's order and shifting his weight left and right to keep the boat balanced.
The second and third weeks were quite scary (or thrilling) because we had 12-15 knot winds, enough to start small whitecaps on the water. If you kow what you are doing then these are fantastic conditions. Of course, by definition we did not know what we were doing, so it got pretty hairy. I got clobbered on the head pretty good when the boom swung over -- it took two weeks for that lump to go away. And after climbing out of the boats after that first day of serious wind, several us noticed that our knees were bloody.
By the third week, though, we had a pretty good understanding of how to execute a tack, which is a basic turn into the wind. When you tack, you are changing from sailing with the wind coming from one side of the boat (e.g. port) to sailing with the wind coming from the other side (e.g. starboard). When sailing, you typically spent a lot of time doing tacks back and forrth, running a zig-zag pattern in the water, because that it how you get the boat to sail upwind.
On the fourth week we learned about downwind sailing, including jibing, which is like tacking but downwind instead of upwind. These turns are trickier because with the wind behind you, the mainsail can surprise you and whip around (with attendant head clobbering) if you're not paying attention.
Finally on the fifth week, with regrettably light winds, the whole class did a proper race ("regatta"), with the teachers having us sail up and down the lake between markers. My sailing partner and I did well enough, coming in second place.
And so now I know enough about sailing to not be a complete idiot on the Mediterranean next year. I'll be on a bigger sailboat with much more mass, which should make it a lot less sensitive to our body positioning and more forgiving of mistakes. And the boom should be higher up, so I won't get clobbered in the head. Most importantly, I won't be in charge!
Now, on to the next thing: learning how to operate the radio. When I told Andreas about my training, he suggested that I get a "short range radio certificate", which is basically a license to operate the boat's radio for ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communications. The Atlanta Yacht Club people couldn't help me with that, so I will need to find something online to do that. So far it appears that the Europeans have a different certification for this, so I have some research to do. For starters though, there's this guide from the US Coast Guard on basic radio operation.
Fun, huh?