Exactly right. I’ve known from when I started sailing 35 years ago that I was a racer.

Sailboat racing is amazing; it’s this incredibly complex exercise involving physical boat handling skills, teamwork, leadership, communication (in a jargon that itself takes a year to internalize), as well as physics, geometry, meteorology, and minute observation of effects (that dark patch on the water or the flutter of a telltale). All of this feeds into strategic decisions on where to position your boat and tactical decisions of how to do so.

It looks crazy boring from the outside but if you get into it, it’s an activity that is intensely mental as well as physical and requires a very broad set of skills.

That sounds like so much fun. How much of a demand does it place on you physically, ie how fit do you need to be to do it well?

I started sailing in high school and I was fat and out of shape but I was good and I was told I could have been very good. The joy of sailboat racing as the comment above made very clear, it's a brain game. If you're interested you can learn to sail, and race, pretty much anywhere with water, most places have some club or group that is racing Lasers, it's a good place to learn, how fit you need to be depends how far you want to go but it's not the primary factor in being good as far as I can tell (I'm an ok sailor these days, but some of the folks in here are clearly very good).

Counterintuitively, the bigger the boat the less the fitness requirement.

Small boats (dinghies) require crew weight in certain places (“hiking” as far out to windward as possible) and have less mechanical advantage in the boat systems.

Larger boats, the forces scale out of the human range quickly and the crew relies on winches and pulleys to move the sails.

I learned to race first and am now learning to cruise. And I’m glad I learned in that order. Cruising has a very specific set of skills that you’ll never learn racing. That stuff will be obvious and if you want to cruise, you’ll learn those skills.

But what is not obvious to cruisers is that racing teaches you how to handle your boat in many different and difficult conditions, with confidence. When you race you have to go from a specific place to another specific place and you don’t get to pick the weather. You’re often pushing your boat and are in high stress situations.

Often, cruisers will go out, when it’s nice, and turn on the motor when they can’t make their boat go the way they want it to go.

So, what happens when you’re out sailing and an unexpected storm rolls in? Because if you sail enough, especially offshore, it 100% without a doubt will happen. I’d honestly be pretty comfortable handling the boat through all but the worst weather, boat breaking weather. And even that, I would be confident in my safety gear and ability to contact support for a rescue. Because all of that is drilled into you as a seasoned racer. And I’ve been through some bad weather on the race course. I’ve had to make my boat go upwind in horrible sea state for hours on end while my crew is throwing up from sea sickness.

There are multiple occasions on which I’ve turned down sailing with cruisers because I just don’t trust that they have the skills or equipment to keep me safe should things go sideways.

Yup - realised the knife wasn’t for show when we were out of control with a knotted spinnaker halyard headed for some rocks.

Agreed. I used to race on a one design 34ft boats (steward 34s for the kiwis here). For the Thursday night rum racing they always casually divided up sailors amongst all the available boats and therefore the yacht squadron would refer people in town to them. So naturally we got a lot of cruisers on there around the world trips who wanted to try out racing. The most striking was the lack of urgency. Even though many were quite experienced sailors they were often worse than people who never sailed before. The newbies could be told to which as if your life depends on it and they would go full out, some of the cruisers not so much.

I finished my first race Wednesday after a few years sailing casually. And, although it’s true that whenever there is more than one sailboat going the same direction it’s a race, being in a fleet on a defined course is much faster paced and precise. My analogy to driving is that cruising is being able to drive on empty roads, and racing is driving in traffic — it becomes about understanding the flow and rules spoken and unspoken.

The hardest thing for me to get used to is that unlike cars, sailboats do not have brakes! Even the "throttle" is under your control only indirectly. Out in the ocean with nothing to hit this is not much of an issue, anyone can do it.

Close to other boats and rocks and other hazards it takes some practice. Pros can to sail into the harbor, luff up and grab the buoy without touching the engine.

Having no brakes really teaches you to plan ahead.

My teacher in sailing/motorboat school always said that they can spot the accident minutes before it happens.

I've been teaching dinghy sailing since I turned 18 (20 years now, give or take) as a voluntary position in a youth group and whilst the fundamentals of sailing yachts and dinghies are much the same, dinghy sailing is a much more dynamic and (oftentimes more fun) discipline. For example, whilst it's true that there's no brake on a yacht (save for backing your motor hard astern), in a dinghy you have the ability to do stuff like backing the sail which gives you much more control. It's _so_ satisfying when it's blowing hard to come steaming up towards a safety RIB then turn head to wind at the last moment, back the sail hard (literally push the boom over), jump onto the foredeck and then step off into the safety boat with the painter in your hand.

Isn't that the case with every hobby?

Spot on. As a racer, I can say this is mostly true. Although for me and many of the other racers I know, it's less about going deep into the optimization, sail choices, etc, and more about just being competitive. Racers don't always make good cruisers because they're always trying to go faster and push harder, whereas most cruisers want to slow down and enjoy the journey.

If there's more than one sailboat, it's a race :)

I've been seeing some modern junk rig refits on the great lakes the last few years, which really gives me hope about dedicated "get there when we get there" sailors. Those things are basically optimized for chilling the fuck out. Easy to sail (entire tacking maneuver is basically just throw the rudder over and duck), easy to reef, don't heel as hard, straightforward to mend the sail or running rigging on the fly.

Only downside is their close haul is like 12º off the wind vs a bermuda rig and no one knows how to make them. The east coast (esp chesapeake) has some traditional gaff rig setups that have similar tradeoffs, like catboats. I would love to see more small production boats target this end of the "speed/comfort/cost" triangle. Currently it's like if the only bicycles available were race-ready track bikes. But sailing is already a small niche and new boats even smaller I think.

There's a subset of sailors that are looking for the 'optimal' rig, and are trying out various alternative options. And some people want to be different just for the sake of it.

I'd argue the Bermuda rig is overwhelmingly the dominant choice for a number of good reasons. Yes, upwind performance is one of them, but it can also be a good choice from a simplicity and workload perspective.

Choose a boat without runners or checkstays, install an auto-tacking rail, and you too can tack just by turning the rudder. Various autoreefing systems (rolling jib/main) are likewise common these days.

Yeah this was a little tongue in cheek, bermuda honestly has excellent tradeoffs and can be pushed pretty far in a number of directions based on expertise, expected crew count, and goals. I respect it and it's by a huge margin what I've sailed the most. It's also the dominant standard and it's not even close, massive practical advantages from that.

The time I did sail on a junk rig though I was simply blown away by how easy and comfortable it was to sail it, esp singlehanded. Sure you can optimize a normal fractional rig sloop for that but it costs money and complexity. You can't beat the sailing ease of only needing one sail for everything and reefing from the cockpit.

The forces on the sail are completely different, you can use just nearly any fabric you can get a lot of cheaply, even fucking tyvek if you're ok with fugly. I was flabbergasted that the one I sailed on had done the mast refit, bought a sailrite & full canvas for right about the cost of a new main & jib. Ridiculous value.

There's also a specific argument in selling the racing is a better way to develop sailing skills because cruising ideally may not challenge you.

I was born into sailing though dad, and I know how he is about performance and ekking every little bit out of what he can (and can afford) (no huge stuff, 21ft). I mean I never let the sails go all out of trim, but I can appreciate putting it on good enough, setting the autopilot and just chill and listen to the sound of sailing, the sound of sailing in a mild summer day is peak life