The sailing life

Hanging around yacht clubs you generally come across two groups of people, sailors who like cruising and sailors who like racing, I fall into the later group. Racing can then be broken into dingy racing and cruisers, I began in performance dingies before moving onto the larger cruisers. Racing cruisers can be identified as onshore racing and offshore racing; I fall into the onshore racing category but would love to graduate into offshore racing, that however is a time luxury I can not afford at the moment.

I was formerly a member of a sailing club before graduating onto a yacht club, I loved racing performance dingies as a young guy but as I move into my late fourties approaching fifty years of age, I need to rethink dingy sailing. The advantage of the bigger boats is you don't need to work so hard, you are not hanging over the side by toestraps or providing counterbalance by hanging from a trapeze wire.

This is balanced by the need to sometimes scale the mast of the larger boat suspended by a bosun's seat to retrieve a halyard or free a jammed block. I wouldn't swap the sailing life; you need to work hard, save well, spend your spare cash well and enjoy you leisure time - I wouldn't swap my sailing life.