Sometime in 2006 I was in the middle of building my first house. The girl I was dating at the time was a sailor of sorts. At some point in that very brief (but apparently pivotal) relationship, we were having a conversation about big boat sailing and working on boats. She made an off-hand comment “Hey we should go do that” (captain mate team sort of thing). Honestly, I didn’t even know what that meant.
I was ankle deep standing on my head in the middle of a dung pile called overwhelm. (aka the DIY house building process) The thought and reality of captaining a boat seemed light years away (I don’t know what a light-year is, but I’ve heard it quite a long time). Clearly the thing to do was research and schedule a captains course in the St Martin! (I blame the girl, but it seems to have worked out so I’ll let it go.)
I was living in the house I was building so I scheduled the sheetrockers during the 3 week trip to the Caribbean since I would have needed to vacate anyway. I attended Maritime School of the West Indies and it was a 3 week very intensive set of courses - We did our suited fire training on one of the old work boats used in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and the exam included a 7 day practical on a Beneteau 50. I was the only one able to pick up a mooring under sail, get thrown a double man overboard, and navigate us around the island at night, under sail, with no instruments.
in particular… err …I’m particular
Sorry for the apparent braggery (is that a word?), but it is for a point… In those moments of training and exam taking I began to formulate what type of captain I wanted to be: detailed, and incredibly particular about how things are done on a boat. Both for safety and the sheer joy of complex processes going smoothly. I think the instructor picked up on that and took pleasure in piling on the challenges.
what’s next?
Fast forward to running a charter business and passing on that passion for detail to captains I am training. I produce training videos for them, and am incredibly explicit in how and why we do things. I have a droning catch phrase when dealing with line handling “Everything we do with a line, should set us up for the next thing we will do with it”. (want a sample? check out our training videos here).
As I prepare to produce the next video: How to Flake and Heave a Line I revisit how many hundreds of times I have flaked a line on the rail or on the deck in preparation for having it run freely. It is probably the ultimate embodiment of the concept that “Everything we do with a line, should set us up for the next thing we will do with it”.
Well… as it turns out, in historical nautical terminology flaking a line so it can run free may actually be called faking or faking down a line! - Here’s a good article on it if you don’t believe me.
If you saw the last blog and watched Tim Minchin’s video you would have picked up his assertion that while opinions are like A**holes in one way, they differ significantly in another way; “They should be regularly and thoroughly examined.”
I am detailed and very particular. So in the effort of teaching, it is easy to get caught up in feeling like I actually know things. (philosophy warning). , I am reminded that it is all opinion and maybe maybe there’s a metaphor/philosophy for life in this process, and here it is: Be careful what you think you know. Teach from experience but be open to new or even new-old information. A week ago I was ready to start recording my line flaking video with my usual emphatic confidence, because I knew how to flake a line, but as it turns out…
