Sailing, particularly as a sport, has three defining ‘M’s: machines, men, and mother nature. I’d argue that makes sailing unique among athletics. No other sport encompasses all three—or at least to anywhere near this degree.
Machines include not only the obvious bundles of moving parts like motors, the pulleys on blocks and the gears inside winches. Most fundamentally, it includes the hull itself, and how it , the attached keel, and rudder sit in—and move through—the water: how it heels, planes, counter drift and provides lift. Sails themselves are complex machines. Each sail’s three (typically) sides and each of its corners can be adjusted (”trimmed” in nautical parlance) to change the shape. While sails are referred to as vertical wings, they can shape shift much more than those of any airplane or helicopter. Lore domains: These are the knowledge of ancient professions: naval architects and sailmakers. Upon that are layers of technology, increasingly complex: the stuff of silicon—and the software that runs it.
Men means the crews that run—and therefore race—boats. While there are occasional single-handed competitions, they’re still racing against the crews on other boats. Communication is constant—and comprehensive. Crewmembers share information on all the machines, including competing machines—and mother nature, as described below. While sailing hails from top-down traditions honed, particularly over the past several centuries, those hierarchies have since again flattened. Lore domains include managing information flows that became much more dynamic. It means recruiting, training, retaining and managing teams. Self knowledge is key too. This means knowing one’s blind spots: boats hold plenty of literal ones from any vantage points. And figurative blind spots abound tool: one’s cognitive biases, risk preferences, talents…
Mother Nature includes the air: the winds, the storms, the high and low pressure front. She includes the sea: the complex interaction of currents, eddies, tides and waves. She encompasses from the tiniest creatures (both animal and vegetable) that colonize a boat’s hull and keel up to the earth’s greatest: whales. (I’ve dodged several during races. Orcas actively attack rudders: talking about you, Iberia). Lore domains include meteorology, marine biology, oceanography.
Actually, in all of existence, those three encompass everything. There’s the things we’ve created (machines) ourselves (men), and the rest of creation (Mother Nature).
Read More: