By Joe Cooper
I have read that the teenager’s brain is only half-cooked, versus a Mature brain. Human brains apparently do not cure until say 25 or so. I think about this in the sense of how we record and process information. And then act on the information processed.
Imagine your Christmas shopping date, on Fifth Avenue, Christmas week. The streets are jam-packed with people shopping, armfuls of shopping bags extending out to the sides like an X fighter on steroids. Or hove to looking at the Saks window display (They still have this?), or couples arm in arm or hand in hand, or device in hand looking down, yet all walking up or downtown. Cabs and cars pressed tight against the sidewalks. I occasionally wonder how we all manage to move along without a massive crash-and-burn with presents scattered all over the sidewalk.
I am not certain we are aware of how we cognate where to move in front of any particular obstacle. Especially the ones that pop up behind a row of people, someone pushing a double-wide stroller. Crash stop, full reverse, hard to starboard, perhaps, so as to back out and allow the other party to pass. Maybe.
All of this observation and reaction is happening in our brains. The human CPU. I regularly describe these kinds of activities to the Prout Sailing Team Padawans as information running in DOS, NOT on the desktop. In other words, you need to be able to “sail” the boat on autopilot and use the desktop (front of brain ?) for tactical and strategic decisions. Teaching perspective, spatial relations, and time and motion is difficult.
This discussion has to do with watching how new and even not-so-new sailors analyze time and distance and proximity to something. A moored boat, a family going out for a sunset cruise, a harbor ferry or head boat doing laps (these guys are actually very kind to us and will wait until the fleet has rounded the mark), a port or starboard tack boat, upwind boat and their response to where to put the boat in tight corners. Mark roundings are a classic of course.
© Catherine Roche
During the Friday Night Lights regattas we host at Sail Newport, we high school coaches will often stand on the floats at The Volvo Piers watching our sailors. You can feel the collective cringe when one or two sailors misjudge a layline or the speed with which a starboard tack boat is moving and, yup… Often the crash is gunnel-to-gunnel as the incomer blasts a fast and sloppy tack inside the zone and the boat slides sideways into the now windward boat.
I have not yet stumbled on the best way to instruct other than discussions like this. On occasion, I will gather the troops on the clamshell dinghy lot and we will maneuver two boats on dollies so they are one, two or three boatlengths apart. Simply saying that three boatlengths is 45 feet does not mean much to them. I have had them walk what they think is 45 feet and stop. This is all by way of trying to get them to develop the kinds of memory muscle for when they are on the water.
I get my morning Joe at Cru Café in Newport. This is located at the south end of the Tennis Hall of Fame, the Casino building (behind The Audrain Automobile Museum on Bellevue; “Magic of Monaco,” their most amazing exhibition to date, runs through March 9. – Ed.). Cru sits on a small dead-end street – think a small fiord or a cove in Maine – called Casino Terrace. It might be 150 feet deep and just wide enough for two lines of angle-parked cars and a channel for one car at a time to enter or exit. Next to Cru is an entrance corridor to some businesses in the back of the building and then Newport Hardware, so there’s a lot of activity in this little street. Especially on summer weekends when the Cru line is out the door, and parking spaces cluttered with out-of-state plates. There may be a dozen angle spaces on your port hand as you enter the Terrace. There are “No Parking, Fire Lane” signs on the starboard hand, where everyone (including the local cops and Coast Guard) parks at an angle too.
Now, the thing I get to thinking about with respect to space relations here is the difficulty people have getting out of this little street. One needs to reverse out. It’s fascinating to watch folks trying to reverse 120 feet from the head of the cove as it were, to the open sea, usually opposite the entrance to the Stop & Shop parking lot. The range of abilities and skills in this simple act of driving is all over the lot. It reminds me of the kids at the top mark. Not so much crash-and-burn, but what appears to me as not much in the spatial relations department.
OK, I am not intending to be a driving grumpus here. This (part of the column) is an observation on the actions of humans. Throw in another car trying to back out of their space, or a car or two waiting to get in, and miscellaneous pedestrians wandering adrift in the street, gazing at their hands, and it’s quite an interesting visual on how humans respond to proximity, even in small groups.
Back to the Kids in Boats…A couple of seasons ago, there was such a pileup at a top mark. The weather mark was located nearby to one of the floats at the Volvo Docks, so all the coaches were on the float assessing the work of our charges. There also happens to be a geographic lift on starboard in this corner.
Perhaps five or six boats had sailed in on port, underlaying the mark, then all tacked to starboard more or less in sync. Sited as we coaches were, on the high ground of our vast wisdom and experience, we started to cringe, more or less in sync with our charges. The lead starboard tacker was in the zone in a heartbeat after tacking.
There were another couple boats on the port layline, or just above, blasting in on port. Yes, you can see the set-up. Like the old North Sails cartoon T-shirt with a freighter steaming right into the face of a race in progress. The thought bubble from the ship was, “Holy expletive deleted!”
Same here. “Oh, no!” the two of us who coached the port tack boats said to ourselves, urging our sailors, seemingly completely oblivious the double-wide baby buggy before them, as it were, “Please don’t do that…”
To no avail. Meantime, the starboard tackers had erected this Berlin Wall of just overlapped, nose-to-tail baby elephant walk line of boats, pinching to get to the mark. Ya could barely get a DragonFlite 95 in there, let alone another 420. Huh..? Never let it be said. Fortunately, all the crunching was largely gunnel-to-gunnel after the port tack boats had tacked.
Well, the upside was about an hour of protests, most of which were dismissed because no one had witnesses. This is not a Coop Comment on the T-shirt, but it will be in the next edition. IF you MUST go to the room, make sure you have a witness. The good news is I have all of this action on video.
Now the big question is: If you were faced with such a wall of boats at a mark, What Would You Do? Tough, ain’t it? Not helped by working with a narrative, not pictures. After reviewing the tape a few times myself and then with the kids, I saw a couple things that I might’ve used to my advantage if I was out there.
Almost all of the boats on starboard were sailing very slowly at this point. Some were struggling, in gas; sail trim was forgotten – no multi-tasking with so much input…some were going sideways while pinching, some were distracted while yelling at some invader. One was head to wind almost on port tack and dead stopped… One of the port tackers, realizing the foul, tried to exonerate themselves inside the zone with the rest of the fleet charging in on them.
Remember what I tell the kids: The “sailing” has to go on in DOS, while the tactics happen on the desktop. Don’t get distracted with making the boat sail, even if you have to yell at someone. This pileup of almost dead in the water starboard tackers were all desperately trying to save their bacon and get around the mark. In the meantime, there was plenty of room for the two port tackers to bear off, sail under the last starboard tacker, execute a rim shot off the dock (they are padded, after all) and sail around the stalled pile in front of them at full speed.
Yeah, yeah, Friday afternoon quarterbacking I know, but when you look at the tape it seems so obvious. Ah, they did not.
As a sidebar to this discussion, I watched the frostbite guys and girls in Laser Fleet 413 sailing on Sunday at Sail Newport. The weather mark was again up by the Volvo Docks, so a good vantage point was available.
Guess what. The lead boats were able to execute legal and clean lee bow tacks in the zone. The tail enders were much less effective. One of the Coop’isms that IS on the shirt is, “Tiller time is King.” ■
Australian born, Joe ‘Coop’ Cooper stayed in the U.S. after the 1980 America’s Cup where he was the boat captain and sailed as Grinder/Sewer-man on Australia. His whole career has focused on sailing, especially the short-handed aspects of it. He lives in Middletown, RI where he coaches, consults and writes on his blog, joecoopersailing.com, when not paying attention to his wife, dog and several, mainly small, boats.
