Twilight sailing again...
Nov. 8th, 2013 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranAfter a long day at work, few things are as good at washing away stress than a small boat, a patch of water and a sunset...
This was the sunset last night (the top photo is from a week ago).
It's actually quite hard to operate both a dinghy and a camera at the same time, so there's a lot I haven't managed to capture yet. Last night, as the sun went lower, it turned into the classic red orb through the smoke haze on the horizon and the waves all shone with gold. I also got a close look at a man sailing a Moth - a tiny little racing boat with a narrow hull and two big trampoline wings out each side - just like a real moth. The amazing thing about those boats is that they have foils on their keels and rudder, so they actually lift out of the water like hydrofoils and it looks like they're flying over the waves. I was too busy concentrating on controlling my boat and staying clear to get any pictures though.
Here's the red orb sunset, just ducking behind the pillars of the Captain Cook Bridge.
Quite a lot of all the things I learned first about sailing can be distilled down to angle-of-attack. That is, understanding how air flowing across the sails at different angle produces different amounts of lift, or even no lift at all at some angles. And, just as important, how the sails themselves can tell you what angle of airflow they need. Once you have truly grasped that, everything else can be derived back. What really happens when we tack and gybe and the angle we can sail into the true wind will vary. Why we can sail faster at an angle to the wind than directly with it. How we can stop the boat or steer it just using the sails. Why the fastest route between two points might actually be a wavy line.
Even trying to hold a simple course can be an intellectual thrill because you're discovering the wind along the way as you go. This is something that's like candy to my brain because you continually need to be building mental models, analyzing and observing to look for inconsistencies, and being ready to throw them out and build new ones as soon as something doesn't make sense. Recognizing that something doesn't fit your beliefs and being able to come up with a new worldview is great both for the mind and the soul.
Last week, for example, I was struggling a bit to control the boat with the wind at the side when all of a sudden it seemed to die away. My first thought was relief that I could relax for a while until it picked up again, but there was something nagging that didn't quite fit. The jib (the triangular sail at the front of the boat) had "dropped" quite suddenly, its base, previously arched, floating down like a spread handkerchief. The mainsail meanwhile was still full of air. The sails weren't saying the wind had died. They were saying we were now on a "run", heading directly away from the wind. And of course the sails were right. We hadn't changed course, but the wind had, and since we were now heading in same direction as it, its relative speed now appeared lower, even though it was still just as strong. If I had stuck with my belief that the wind was still coming from the side, I would have had a nasty shock as soon as I turned to another course, especially if I thought the wind had also died.
Something similar happened last night, as I was sailing towards the right hand side of the scene below.
I was pretty sure the wind was coming from the east, towards the bridge, but for some reason I couldn't sail closehauled quite so well when the bridge was on my left than when it was on my right. Even though I pointed the boat at what I thought was the correct angle to the wind, the sails were telling me I had to keep bearing away. While I was still SURE the wind was coming from the east (I could see flags blowing on the roof of the sailing club), the sails were behaving as though it was coming from the northeast. And, sure enough, they were exactly right. Nearer the bridge, the wind was actually coming a different direction (most likely deflecting off the bridge itself and the ramp behind it), and it was only when I moved onto the other tack that I got back into the normal stream of air. (An interesting experiment would have been to switch to a port tack and see if I could follow the curve of the wind all the way around.) If I had insisted on my earlier worldview that the wind was coming from the east and no-one should ever have to tack away from the wind, I would have remained baffled.
Of course, there are also lots of things I don't notice yet. One of the most embarrassing is what happened last night as I was coming in to the beach. I was thinking back over the events of the night when I suddenly realized I had forgotten to check the "bungs" (plastic plugs near the bottom of the boat) before I had launched. It was just as well they were in, or I might have been in trouble.
Except, when I got back, it turned out they weren't in...
Here, it turns out, another lesson was learned (apart from "ALWAYS check the bungs before you launch"...) As long as the boat is moving fast enough, the water will drain out through the holes at the back rather than coming in. In fact, the boat actually finished off drier than it was the week before. It might have been a different story if I'd stopped for long though...
This was the sunset last night (the top photo is from a week ago).
It's actually quite hard to operate both a dinghy and a camera at the same time, so there's a lot I haven't managed to capture yet. Last night, as the sun went lower, it turned into the classic red orb through the smoke haze on the horizon and the waves all shone with gold. I also got a close look at a man sailing a Moth - a tiny little racing boat with a narrow hull and two big trampoline wings out each side - just like a real moth. The amazing thing about those boats is that they have foils on their keels and rudder, so they actually lift out of the water like hydrofoils and it looks like they're flying over the waves. I was too busy concentrating on controlling my boat and staying clear to get any pictures though.
Here's the red orb sunset, just ducking behind the pillars of the Captain Cook Bridge.
Quite a lot of all the things I learned first about sailing can be distilled down to angle-of-attack. That is, understanding how air flowing across the sails at different angle produces different amounts of lift, or even no lift at all at some angles. And, just as important, how the sails themselves can tell you what angle of airflow they need. Once you have truly grasped that, everything else can be derived back. What really happens when we tack and gybe and the angle we can sail into the true wind will vary. Why we can sail faster at an angle to the wind than directly with it. How we can stop the boat or steer it just using the sails. Why the fastest route between two points might actually be a wavy line.
Even trying to hold a simple course can be an intellectual thrill because you're discovering the wind along the way as you go. This is something that's like candy to my brain because you continually need to be building mental models, analyzing and observing to look for inconsistencies, and being ready to throw them out and build new ones as soon as something doesn't make sense. Recognizing that something doesn't fit your beliefs and being able to come up with a new worldview is great both for the mind and the soul.
Last week, for example, I was struggling a bit to control the boat with the wind at the side when all of a sudden it seemed to die away. My first thought was relief that I could relax for a while until it picked up again, but there was something nagging that didn't quite fit. The jib (the triangular sail at the front of the boat) had "dropped" quite suddenly, its base, previously arched, floating down like a spread handkerchief. The mainsail meanwhile was still full of air. The sails weren't saying the wind had died. They were saying we were now on a "run", heading directly away from the wind. And of course the sails were right. We hadn't changed course, but the wind had, and since we were now heading in same direction as it, its relative speed now appeared lower, even though it was still just as strong. If I had stuck with my belief that the wind was still coming from the side, I would have had a nasty shock as soon as I turned to another course, especially if I thought the wind had also died.
Something similar happened last night, as I was sailing towards the right hand side of the scene below.
I was pretty sure the wind was coming from the east, towards the bridge, but for some reason I couldn't sail closehauled quite so well when the bridge was on my left than when it was on my right. Even though I pointed the boat at what I thought was the correct angle to the wind, the sails were telling me I had to keep bearing away. While I was still SURE the wind was coming from the east (I could see flags blowing on the roof of the sailing club), the sails were behaving as though it was coming from the northeast. And, sure enough, they were exactly right. Nearer the bridge, the wind was actually coming a different direction (most likely deflecting off the bridge itself and the ramp behind it), and it was only when I moved onto the other tack that I got back into the normal stream of air. (An interesting experiment would have been to switch to a port tack and see if I could follow the curve of the wind all the way around.) If I had insisted on my earlier worldview that the wind was coming from the east and no-one should ever have to tack away from the wind, I would have remained baffled.
Of course, there are also lots of things I don't notice yet. One of the most embarrassing is what happened last night as I was coming in to the beach. I was thinking back over the events of the night when I suddenly realized I had forgotten to check the "bungs" (plastic plugs near the bottom of the boat) before I had launched. It was just as well they were in, or I might have been in trouble.
Except, when I got back, it turned out they weren't in...
Here, it turns out, another lesson was learned (apart from "ALWAYS check the bungs before you launch"...) As long as the boat is moving fast enough, the water will drain out through the holes at the back rather than coming in. In fact, the boat actually finished off drier than it was the week before. It might have been a different story if I'd stopped for long though...
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no subject
Date: 2013-11-09 02:48 am (UTC)Such lovely precise talk about something so kind of organic... and there is a joy to learning how to get better and better at something, knowing there is no end to the learning. You can have the joy of getting better at it as long as you live.
The pictures are pretty too.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-09 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-09 07:29 am (UTC)In a way, it sounds a bit like horse-riding - experience gives you what riders call "feel", an instinct for the subtle things in the horse's way of going...
no subject
Date: 2013-11-09 08:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 04:20 pm (UTC)This sounds so beautiful.
understanding how air flowing across the sails at different angle produces different amounts of lift, or even no lift at all at some angles. And, just as important, how the sails themselves can tell you what angle of airflow they need.
--I love this notion of being in conversation with the sails and the wind, and I really like the notion of being able to feel/see/comprehend and then deal with the wind. It's such a *big* thing, and complex. And invisible--but not invisible, because the sails make it visible.
And yikes about the bungs! Nice when you get to discover oversights like this in a *gentle* way.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 06:59 pm (UTC)I think one way to describe it is like dancing with an invisible partner. You have to really be alive to every sensation to stay in step, but it's a joyous state when you can pull it off.
And yikes about the bungs! Nice when you get to discover oversights like this in a *gentle* way.
Yes!