All good sailors are afraid of the sea

All good sailors are afraid of the sea

By Beth Casserly

A sport can only be sanitised so far before the players forget what board they’re playing on, so as the sailor tunes their sparkling ivory steed to perfection they forget that nothing in this game can be controlled. 

Someone on the other side of the boat park is replacing a shroud. The old one snapped from salt corrosion, nearly bringing the whole mast crashing down with it. Apparently it's a pure stroke of luck that it stayed up. A girl complains that she lost her new gloves _and_ her spinnaker pole yesterday. She never capsizes, says she, but this wave just came out of nowhere and completely knocked her off the wire. She was stuck under for nearly a minute, and the gloves just slipped away. 

In a training session, a man explains how we can tell exactly how the day will develop. Consult the clouds, the wave patterns, the tide. You can tell everything, says he, with a good enough eye and a bit of common sense. Forget the creature you float upon and hope it forgets you too. The wind whistles outside and slips in through a bad window to listen to the plan. Apparently it's a north-easterly today; very rare for the region and it'll cut you in two. 

An eight-year-old in brand-new gear is blindsided as the storm rolls in. This isn’t how his mother told him the day would go. The sticky note on his mast tells him that "a flappy sail is an unhappy sail" but he swears he hears a chorus of laughs from his crisp white sheet as the waves seem to hit from all sides. 

His fibreglass - not from the sea - is sent reeling back home.