The Maritime Marital Counseling Program

Racing sailboats has always been, traditionally, a man’s game. As a broad generalization, persons of the male persuasion seem well fitted by evolutionary biology to enjoy chasing other men in circles around randomly located marks, hooting and slapping backsides at each other, while persons of the female persuasion have historically found this to be a rather jejune way to pass the time. Another explanation for the male/female disconnect in the world of sailboat racing is the fact that—let’s be honest here—men stink. For most men, “foulies” is a aptly descriptive word for the waterproof garment worn during inclement weather, which is seldom if ever taken home for washing. And while the advent of the pee bottle has done much in recent years to improve both safety and hygiene aboard racing boats with all-male crews, it is still common on long-distance races to see a row of rail meat hanging over the lower lifelines with a focused look in their eyes, dangling their legs over the side and, um, letting gravity assist the flow of nature. And we have not even touched upon the whole gaseous emissions problem.

In short, there are many good reasons why women have run screaming from any suggestion that they join their male friends, lovers, and husbands on the race course. But, thank goodness, times change, due in large part to outstanding organizations such as the Oregon Women’s Sailing Association. New generations of women are now sailing, racing, and learning how to use a pee bottle in a seaway. For a long while, separate but equal was the rule, with women-only crews racing against men-only crews. This satisfied everyone, until the women started winning the races, and it became clear to even the densest masculine understanding that mixed gender crews made the best of the talent pool, as well as enjoyed the tastiest after-race snacks. Racing now entered a new golden age, with fleets of happy mixed-gender crews, aboard boats that no longer stank like garbage scows. Oh, no fundamental change in human nature occurred. There are still emissions of “bad air,” and much hooting and slapping of backsides, but the insults that fly back and forth across the water now involve actual witticisms instead of crude comparisons of bowsprit length.

However, one unforeseen consequence of mixed gender crews has been a distressing increase in the number of husband-and-wife racing teams, a development deplored by all right-thinking sailors. Once confined to a once per year “couples race”—a day everyone else knew to remain off the water—marital racing has spread like a virus to beer cans, weeknight club racing and beyond. All of us have witnessed the unappetizing spectacle of a husband and wife attempting to dock a big cruiser in a cross-wind. For reasons that have long puzzled top scientists, there is a direct emotional connection in the sailing wife between the fact that her husband just muffed the dock approach and the fact that last night he forgot, again, to take the garbage out. Similarly, in the mind of the sailing husband there is no synaptic distance between the latest proofs of his wife’s poor line-handling skills and her constant nagging about leaving underwear on the floor. No one truly interested in preserving the harmony of the seas could ever believe it appropriate to transfer this warped interpersonal dynamic to the pressure-cooker of a racing cockpit. Yet, more and more often that is what is happening, with predictable results.

Where before the insults would fly between boats, with good-natured observations about the likely parentage of the other skipper and the size of the army boots his/her mother wears, increasingly the insults are flying between the coamings, with biting commentary along the lines of “You sound like your mother!” and “Leave my mother out of this!” It goes without saying that when crew communication sinks to this level, racing performance suffers.

But help is on the way. A consortium of local yacht clubs has authorized an expenditure of $1.5 million this year on a pilot program they call: Maritime Marital Counseling. It works like this. Every race on the river will be monitored on channel 16 and 72 for calls of marital distress. When a call is received, a quick reaction team mounted on jet-skis will speed to the boat’s location, with air cover provided by a pair of F-14s scrambled out of Portland International. Each team consists of two highly trained marriage counselors and a pair of former collegiate sailing champions. To avoid causing loss of time and distance in the race, the teams will board the stricken vessel by ranging alongside at full speed and then vaulting onto the deck, using catapultive assault techniques developed by the U.S. Navy Seals. The collegiate sailing champions will take over the helm and motivate the remainder of the demoralized crew, while the two counselors will separate the bickering couple, and begin emergency counseling, using all the tools at their disposal: scream therapy, psychotropic drugs, and choke-holds, as deemed necessary for crew safety and to preserve the boat’s position in the race.

Once the situation is stabilized and the boat again reaches optimum VMG, the team will leap back onto their watercraft, and roar off, ready again to intervene whenever the outcome of a sailing race is threatened by marital discord.

Medical science has discovered no cure yet for marital racing, much less for its underlying cause, marriage. For good or ill, mostly for ill, the scourge of couples racing together will be with us for the foreseeable future. There is something in the nautical married mind that insists, against all evidence, that the festering resentments at the heart of almost all marriages will not detonate under the stress of a failed spinnaker launch. Yet the situation is not hopeless. With your generous contributions, we can develop new techniques, such as the Maritime Marital Counseling Program, that can reduce the evil effects of marital racing, until that blessed day when a cure is found. Until then, fair winds to all.

The author and his wife own a Merit 25. They do not race together.

As readers of these occasional articles may recall, I recently acquired a Merit 25, Nausicaa, at the insistence of my wife, Deedie, who found its lean, low-decked profile irresistible. While Deedie loved its racy looks, she does not love to race, and so to me was left the joyous task of campaigning the boat through the winter series, the Frostbite, the spring regattas, the SYSCO spring and summer series, etc. The boat had come loaded down with 30 years’ accumulation of junk. I ruthlessly stripped everything off Nausicaa that did not make her go fast, replacing bulkheads with Styrofoam stringers, glass windows with duct-tape and cellophane, and the port-o-potty with a plastic pee bucket that doubles as the beer cooler. Yes, the crew begged for a separate ice chest or even a second plastic bucket dedicated to beer, but I sternly resisted those whiners. As racers know, every ounce counts.
Meanwhile, my fair-weather sailing wife spent the cold, wet winter months making or buying all kinds of frou-frou items for the boat: lace curtains, hanging planters, a ratcheting stainless steel paper towel dispenser, even cockpit cushions, fer the love o’ mike. I wanted to ask her: what’s wrong with sitting for eight hours on non-skid fiberglass? Once the nether regions go numb it is actually quite comfortable, I could have pointed out. But some marital instinct for self-preservation told me to just let this one go.
Deedie patiently waited until the July 4th lull in the racing calendar to announce that Nausicaa would thenceforth assume her namesakes’ character as a beautiful Homeric princess, bedecked with gewgaws and pretty frilleries. She insisted that a proper head be installed, as well as sunbrella-covered memory foam settee and v-berth cushions. She hung up the lace curtains, the hanging planters, and the ratcheting stainless steel paper towel dispenser. The pee/beer bucket she jettisoned in disgust, and replaced it with a monstrous cooler with a built-in wine spritzer, which barely fit down the companionway. Finally, she insisted that the sail locker/v-berth be emptied of the racing sail inventory, leaving only a single ancient cruising headsail and a single chicken chute. Satisfied, she declared that we would now sail this gaudy, overloaded, underpowered, floating perfumery upriver to Beacon Rock State Park, in the Columbia Gorge.
Well, I put my foot down, I can tell you. That is, I can tell you, but I couldn’t really tell Deedie. One look at the happiness on her face as she knitted cupholders to hang on the lifelines, and the words died in my throat. If it killed me, I had to accept that Nausicaa was no longer a sleek racing machine, but a plodding cruiser.
Still, I had to break the news to Deedie that with our limited sail inventory, and the strong currents in the Gorge, we would not be sailing fast. “That’s all right,” she responded, “I don’t want to sail fast.”
Not…Want…To…Sail…Fast? The words seemed familiar, but their collective sense escaped me. For a minute the world spun wildly like a broken top, devoid of form and meaning. But with a massive, audible shifting of mental gears I was able to see, briefly, through cruiser-colored glasses. Yes, I could understand now: it doesn’t really matter how fast you sail. Nor does it matter how much junk is lashed on deck or hanging from the lifelines, or how much algae is hanging off the bottom-paint. Sailing is not all about winning races. It’s about…what? I groped for an answer, but the vision faded. Well, I hoped I would find out.
Our crew on the Beacon Rock trip included our daughter, Joie, her boyfriend, Gaelan, and our anxious mini-schnauzer, Loki. The two teenagers arrived dragging distended duffle bags crammed with an improbable number of impractical items, including enough clothes to change into new outfits every watch. As we heaved the bags aboard I glumly watched the boat sink below its trim line. We cast off, and wallowed upstream to our first stop, Sandy Beach on Government Island. A delicious dockside dinner, and a gentle rain that fell considerately after we tucked into our berths for the night, ended the day. Deedie slept in the v-berth, while I bunked down on the sole, between the two smoldering volcanoes of teen hormones sequestered in their separate quarterberths. My snoring, I am informed by reliable sources, is a sure antidote to romance.
The next morning a modest west wind tempted us out into the current. Despite recent spinnaker lessons with her women’s sailing group, Deedie was nervous about flying the kite. The spinnaker proposition was put to a vote of the masses, and the result was two hands yes (Tod and Gaelan), two hands no (Deedie and Joie), and one paw hell no (Loki). Vox populi et canis having spoken, we poled out the genoa and went wing-and-wing, in classic cruiser fashion. By early afternoon we reached Rooster Rock State Park, where we met Gaelan’s parents, Jan and Usha, aboard Dauntless, their 20-foot cedar-built, gaff-rigged Drascombe lugger with lovely tan-bark sails. The two boats tucked behind Sand Island for the night, anchoring in a lagoon with a sandy beach, submerged forests, and towering cliffs on either side. Amazingly, we had this sublime anchorage to ourselves. The kayaks came out, and we explored the hidden recesses of the jungle. We rafted up for a potluck sushi dinner, then drifted apart for slumber. A nearly full moon rose over Larch Mountain, drowning the stars. This is actually somewhat … pleasant, I thought to myself. Maybe there is more to do with sailboats than just race them around the buoys.
The next morning was the Fourth of July, and we were awakened by three sportboats full of young men, beer and fireworks roaring up to our private beach. We beat a hasty retreat into the heart of the Gorge. A brisk westerly wind against the three-knot current had Gaelan and I casting longing glances at the spinnaker bag, then glowering looks over at Dauntless, who was taking advantage of her shallow draft and higher sail area/displacement ratio to slip ahead of us in the eddies. But now Deedie felt the stirrings of a strange emotion: an irritation at the sight of another boat’s transom, an ungovernable urge to overtake that boat and sink it below the horizon. Doing that would be somewhat…pleasant, she thought to herself.
“What do you all think about hoisting the spinnaker?” Deedie finally asked. Joie and Loki howled, but the vote was now 3-2 in favor of shifting into boogie. Up flew the chute, Deedie at the helm, yours truly on trim, Gaelan on the foredeck, and Joie and Loki acting as grumpy, moveable ballast. The wind increased, and we rocketed upriver, punching through the growing chop and occasionally surfing off the swells. Deedie realized, with a shock, that sailing fast was fun. Recalling tricks she had learned in her spinnaker class, Deedie began issuing crisp orders to her crew, demanding better trim, faster gybes, and increasingly subtle weight distributions. Gaelan and I hopped around like possessed beings in response to her whipcrack commands, while Loki’s mournful cries echoed off the cliffs. Sensing the threat, Dauntless had gone deep into her sail locker: jib, flying jib, staysail, main, mizzen, main topsail, a gollywobbler, even main and mizzen studdingsails poled out on a boat hook and a deck brush. To no avail against a well-trimmed symmetrical spinnaker on tall Bermuda rig, dead down wind. As Nausicaä pulled even, and then inched ahead, Deedie took one hand off the straining tiller to salute a worthy foe. If this is racing, she said to herself, it isn’t half bad.
The two boats met up again at the Beacon Rock anchorage, which, unbelievably, was empty of other boats. After kayaking, hiking, and another excellent supper, we spent a moonlit night at what seemed our own private dock beneath the towering monolith. In the distance was the faint crackle of fireworks, but the stars and moon were far more splendid to us than the pathetic flashes and mutterings of mankind.
That night, I confessed to Deedie that cruising was perhaps not a complete waste of time; she admitted that racing sailboats did not entirely suck, and there we decided to leave it. Sometimes in a marriage—as in sailing—it is the things left unsaid that say the most.

The wife sobbed quietly into a kleenex. “It started out so innocently,” she confessed to the divorce lawyer. “At first, it was once a week, but then he started wanting more.”

The lawyer clucked sympathetically, covertly checking her watch and wondering how many times she had heard the same story, of men behaving badly.

“Soon it was twice a week, sometimes three,” the wife continued. “He began subscribing to magazines with pictures of beautiful . . .” She choked back a sob. “And then—he found her in a Craigslist ad.” The lawyer shook her head with secret satisfaction, mentally adding an extra zero to the usual retainer.

“Let me guess,” the lawyer asked sarcastically, “He starting buying her expensive items.”

The wife looked startled. “How did you know? Yes, he tried to hide it, but every month the credit card statement had hundreds of dollars in charges at West Marine.” She plunged on. “But the worst part is when he would come home from a night out with her, stinking of beer and bilge water, and boast that he had . . . spliced her mainbrace.” She shuddered. “I don’t know what that means, and I don’t want to know. He kept urging me to go out with them together to… to…wherever they go on Tuesday and Thursday nights.” (“That’s disgusting,” the lawyer murmured.) “He wanted me to do things I’m sure no self-respecting woman would do, to ‘trim the jib’ as he put it. At last I told him he had to choose between his family and her, and now . . . here I am.” The long-suffering wife buried her face in her hands.

At that precise moment her husband was at the helm of his beloved sailboat, approaching the windward mark, tight on the starboard layline. The bow of his boat edged past the stern of the boat ahead. “Overlap!” he screamed, trying to squeeze between the mark and the line of boats trying to round it. Grudgingly, the outside boat made room. “Hoist the thing-a-ma-jiggy!” he screamed at his crew as they rounded the mark. The spinnaker flew out of its bag and promptly wrapped itself around the forestay, leaving the boat bobbing helplessly. The rest of the fleet popped their chutes and headed downwind for the finish. “Aaaaaah!” screamed the skipper to no one in particular, “Last place, again!”

* * * * * * * * *

It’s an all-too-familiar story. The man-boy who loves to race, the woman who doesn’t understand, and the boat that comes between them.

And it begs the question: Why do we race? To many sailors of the male persuasion, this is not a serious question. Their answer, to the extent they think about it, is a simple syllogism: (1) our manly forebears hunted mastodon during the ice-ages; (2) there are no more mastodon for us to hunt; (3) therefore, we race sailboats. Logical as this argument seems, most academic scholars find it unpersuasive. For one thing, it fails to account for the established fact that many sailors of the female persuasion also like to race, despite no known connection to mastodon hunting. Indeed, these days the racer in the family is often the female partner, with the male partner sitting at home watching NASCAR or whatever it is that men who don’t race sailboats do with their spare time. With a slight change in pronouns, the above divorce-court story would still ring true.

But this brings us no closer to answering the question: why do we race? For mysterious reasons, some people like to race sailboats, and some people (ok, the vast majority of the seven billion people on planet earth) do not. How can nearly seven billion people be so wrong? Or—now, here’s a crazy thought—maybe sailboat racers have got it wrong. Maybe people who race sailboats are like the mastodon: hairy, dim-witted and doomed to extinction.

Let’s try to examine sailboat racing objectively, rationally, without the accumulated glamour and sentiment, and try to understand whether sailboat racers are truly mental defectives, or merely thundering idiots.

Possession of a sailboat is, of course, the sine qua non of sailboat racing. Right out of the box we’ve stumbled on the crux of the problem. Sailboats are concave vessels of fiberglass and steel, into which the hapless owner pours money until the boat sinks or the owner goes bankrupt, whichever comes first. Owning a racing sailboat is even more fiscally insane, because to stay competitive the owner must hire NASA engineers to construct space-age carbon spars and high tech sails. Due to a nationwide shortage of useful idiots willing to buy racing sailboats, entire social ecosystems evolve around those few individuals deep-pocketed and/or clueless enough to buy one. As soon as the proud new owner docks his carbon-fiber beauty, a cloud of parasites will descend, parasites who know it is far better to sail OPB (Other People’s Boats) than to commit the financial suicide of raceboat ownership. Each week these smiling leeches show up, beer in hand, ready to line the rail or heave on a halyard in a pathetic attempt to live the sailing life without actually owning a sailboat. And each week, the desperate owner—on the verge of bankruptcy and a mental breakdown—abuses the crew in a spectacular tirade of invective, audible on both banks of the Columbia River. This sick, co-dependent relationship is considered the norm in the game of sailboat racing.

But what exactly is the “game” of sailboat racing? Let’s observe it step by step. Every race begins the same, with a bunch of sailboats milling randomly around behind the start line—like paramecium in a petri dish—trying not to crash into each other. A five-minute clock is running. Just seconds before the five-minute horn sounds, the racers charge the start line. One boat crosses the start line in the lead. Aaannd … that’s it. The race is over, for all practical purposes. The winner of 99.9% of all sailboat races is the boat that first crosses the start line. The rest of the race consists of simply chasing the leader, hoping against hope that the sheriff’s deputies will repossess the leader’s heavily mortgaged boat before it crosses the finish line.

At this point, on the first windward leg, the unbiased observer will recognize a glaring flaw in the game of sailboat racing. Namely, sailboats are powered by the wind. Wind is a notoriously unreliable element, constantly shifting direction and velocity, and frequently disappearing entirely, or blowing precisely from the direction toward which one wishes to go. Indeed, it seems as if race committees go out of their way to set courses against the wind, which requires slow and laborious tacking back and forth. It is actually considered good form for race committees to set the course square to the wind, which means at some point a direct downwind run, the slowest possible point of sail. What kind of crazy sport organizes itself around the concept of going as slow as possible?

And going where, exactly? Mostly in arbitrary circles. The race course is divided into several legs by marks, or orange balloons floating on the water, which the boats must round in a certain order. Fundamentally, a sailboat race consists of following the leader around a series of orange balloons, while trying to avoid repossession of your boat by sheriff’s deputies. Except for the threat of repossession, this is the essentially same game of follow-the-leader that six-year olds play in the school yard.

But at least going upwind seems fast, due to the mystery of apparent wind. After rounding the first or windward mark the boats deploy their spinnakers—large, temperamental, difficult-to-control downwind sails—and begin the downwind run (usually accompanied by renewed streams of invective from the skipper, discussing the ancestors of the OPB that just botched the spinnaker launch). Because most downwind runs on the river are against the current, the progress upstream is excruciatingly slow, despite the extra sail area and the occasional excitement of a death roll as a gust comes through. Even the most geriatric spectator could walk faster over the ground than most non-planing keelboats can sail upstream against the current. Actually, a geriatric spectator would probably expire of old age before the first boat reached the leeward mark. Of course, this presumes that sailboat racing has spectators, which it doesn’t outside the America’s Cup, because it is too damn slow and boring to watch.

At long, long last, the leader will round the leeward mark and cross the finish line, while the rest of the fleet, deeply humiliated, engages in a bitter Darwinian struggle to avoid being the boat that is DFL (dead frickin last). Then all teams head back to the docks, the euphoric winner to collect a little plastic trophy, the envious losers to applaud with gritted teeth. And then both winners and losers proceed to consume massive quantities of beer.

And here, maybe, is one answer to why we race. After consuming enough beer, it is possible to forget the miserable race performance, the pending boat foreclosure, the spouse at home checking his/her watch, the cubicle waiting for you at work tomorrow. By the end of the night, we racers have piled into the winner’s cockpit, and are sitting with arms around each other’s shoulders, singing songs, and telling outrageous lies about what great sailors we are. The differences that divide us—owners/OPBs, women/men, winners/losers, republicans/democrats/libertarians/rastafarians—all seem to disappear. We are simply sailors. And for reasons that defy rational explanation, this simple fact makes us very happy.

Tomorrow will come, with its bills to pay, bosses to placate, diapers to change, marriages to save. Someday, even all that will be gone, and we will exist only in memories and fading trophies on the wall. But tonight we are with our friends and competitors, sailors all, drinking a last beer and singing a last song.

To summarize our observations: sailboat racing is a fiscally ruinous, sado-masochistic exercise in prolonged tedium, punctuated at long intervals by death rolls, t-bonings, and other moments of extreme terror. It causes grown men and women to regress into six-year-olds, playing a slightly more complex version of follow-the-leader around the buoys. And yet—despite all that—sailboat racers return week after week, month after month, year and year, devoting enormous amounts of time, money, energy and passion to the sport we love. It makes no sense, and yet in this crazy world nothing else seems to make as much sense.

So why do we race? Perhaps there is no universally satisfying answer, but here is a plausible one: We love sailboat racing because it makes us regress into six-year olds. At that age, we are keenly alive, possessed of a sense of wonder, and utterly fearless. Nothing seems more important than those games we play in the schoolyard, with trusted friends and the bitter enemies of the moment. The entire world feels bright and glowing with promise, the wind is at our backs, and we know that we are beginning a long voyage with our friends toward unknown shores. As adults, is there anything that we won’t do to keep that feeling alive in our hearts? In sailboat racing, we remember that feeling. We feel it as the boats charge the start line, in a well-executed tack, in a crowded mark rounding, in a critical spinnaker gybe, in a tight finish, in the camaraderie of the cockpit. We are intensely alive in the moment, and we ask for nothing more.

* * * * * * * *

The sailor returns home from the race, and tiptoes upstairs to check on the children. Her six-year-old is still awake, and asks sleepily, “Mommy, when can I go racing with you?” An answer is murmured, and the blanket retucked. Her husband is reading in bed, and he places a bookmark into a well-thumbed copy of Racing Tactics, as his wife turns out the light and slips into bed.

“Good race?” he asks.

She smiles happily in the dark. “Is there any other kind?”