Women have long complained about how the world is dominated by men. To most men, meanwhile, it is perfectly obvious that modern civilization is little more than a plot to make women comfortable.
The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. If it were true, as men aver, that it is women who rule the world, such atrocities as NFL football, pornography, and the Three Stooges clearly would not exist. On the other hand, if men really ruled the world, as women insist, society no doubt would be organized very differently. All the women and children would live in villages. All the men, meanwhile, would live in nomad biker gangs, roaming the planet at will. Every time a gang arrived in a village, the men would impregnate the women, fix anything that was broken, and then move on.
For many centuries, the sea was the one venue in which men might more or less realize this ideal existence. Substitute the term “port” for “village” and “sailing ship” for “nomad biker gang,” and you will quickly grasp the parallel.
Even today, many would argue, sailing is very much a man’s game. The common platitude is that women enjoy the sailing scene; i.e., they like hanging out and socializing on boats that are stationary. But they don’t really enjoy sailing itself, i.e., the bit where you get water sprayed all over you while feeling horribly seasick.
As fun as it is to annoy women by saying such things, the fact is it really isn’t true. The likes of Dawn Riley, Isabelle Autissier, Ellen MacArthur, and many others besides, have clearly demonstrated that women can excel at sailing. For example, one of the truly amazing things about singlehanded ocean racing is that it is an extremely demanding physical sport in which men and women compete equally. Indeed, I believe it may be the only sport like this. And this is possible, I think, because it is a sport in which brute strength provides only a relatively slight advantage. Over the long run, sheer endurance, will power, and ingenuity count for much more, and these are traits women and men share equally.
On the other hand, it is also true, when trolling amongst the ranks of common cruising couples, that one most often finds it is the man who is genuinely interested in sailing, while the woman is the one who has somehow been persuaded to come along for the ride.
Ironically, it is this last fact that probably has most influenced the development of the sport. The effect is most clearly seen in the realm of boat design. It used to be that a well-designed sailboat was quite narrow and had rather minimal living accommodations. The galley might consist of a crude gimballed one-burner sea stove on which cans of gruel could be efficiently heated. The head was a cedar bucket. The berths were narrow and confining. The cabin itself was exceedingly cramped, and its inhabitants were constantly falling and/or stepping on one other. Not suprisingly, relatively few women were ever lured aboard vessels such as these.
Slowly, by degrees, the situation has improved. Step aboard most modern production sailboats and you will find they are eminently habitable. For starters, they are much wider (hence much bigger inside) than boats of the past. Often there is a large owner’s stateroom with a queen-size island double berth, commodious hanging lockers, a vanity perhaps, and a fully appointed head with a separate shower stall. Midships you will find a spacious galley, replete with all (or most) modern amenities, plus a comfortable saloon, and forward (or aft, depending on the design) you will find yet another comfortable stateroom (or two), with its own head, for guests and/or children. Men have been much more successful convincing women they might like to go sailing on boats like these, and this, I think, has been an important factor in the growth of sailing, particularly cruising, over the years.
Some purists, however, have objected to these trends. Sailing, they claim, is all about being miserable, and if the women don’t like it, they can just stuff it. Many men like this, of course, aspire to live in nomad biker gangs. Some of their complaints, however, do have merits.
For in certain respects, modern designs do not perform as well as older ones. A wide flat stern that can easily accommodate a spacious aft cabin, for example, will help you go faster when surfing off the wind, but will only hurt you in other circumstances, particularly when beating to weather in a strong breeze. It used to be that being able to comfortably beat off a lee shore in high winds was considered an absolute prerequisite for any “real” cruising sailboat. Spacious accommodations may now be considered just as important, but there are still just as many lee shores out there as there used to be.
One of my personal pet peeves is found in the modern saloon. Too often these days these fall prey to what I call CSLS (Curved Settee and Love Seat) disease. A curved settee opposite a pair of love seats may look sexy at the boat show, and may help convince your wife that buying a new boat is a fantastic idea, but in a seaway they look like nothing but misery.
Given that the most comfortable place to sleep in any boat at sea is amidships, long straight settees should always be the rule in any serious sailboat’s saloon. The other big problem with modern saloons, ironically, is how wide open and spacious they are. Those guys in the old narrow boats might have been falling all over each other, but at least they never fell far. Lose your footing in a modern saloon while a boat is well heeled and you may well fall quite a long ways–and may easily break something in the bargain.
Not that we should give in to the purists and return to the days of celibate discomfort. Some claim we can solve all that is wrong with modern boat design by simply banning women from boat shows. That may be true, but it won’t do the sport any good. Far better to keep the women aboard, and the men happy, by seeking reasonable compromises. There are, in fact, many designs out there that judiciously balance the competing demands of comfort and seakindliness. If we educate ourselves and favor such boats, there will only be more of them.
The other area where women have had a tremendous impact is, of course, in the realm of systems. These have no effect on a boat’s sailing ability (except so far as they may increase a boat’s total loaded displacement), or on crew safety, but they can greatly improve a boat’s livability. Amenities such as watermakers, pressure showers, propane stoves, and refrigeration go a long ways toward making an execrable hovel of a boat into a very viable vacation home. The downside, of course, is that they cost a lot of money and are difficult to maintain. But any man who isn’t willing to suffer such burdens to keep himself in civilized female company has only himself to blame if he ends up as a lonely singlehander.
The essential dynamic of this reality has always been most precisely defined in my own mind by a cruising couple I met several years ago while sailing in the Bahamas. His name was Leo. He was an avid sailor who could not abide not having a boat in his life. Her name was Judy, and she was a typical suburban housewife.
As Leo once explained it to me: “Judy told me she wouldn’t go cruising with me unless she had air conditioning, wall-to-wall carpeting, a washer/drier, and a dishwasher. So I put all those things on the boat, and we’ve been happy ever since.”
Of course, it took a lot of power to run all that stuff. Twice a day Leo had to run a large generator to keep everything going, and whenever he started it up, he’d shout: “Honey, quick! Turn everything on! We can’t waste all this wonderful electricity!”
Judy always complained bitterly about the racket. But Leo only smiled and cheerfully savored each offending decibel.
