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Exactly right. I’ve known from when I started sailing 35 years ago that I was a racer.

Sailboat racing is amazing; it’s this incredibly complex exercise involving physical boat handling skills, teamwork, leadership, communication (in a jargon that itself takes a year to internalize), as well as physics, geometry, meteorology, and minute observation of effects (that dark patch on the water or the flutter of a telltale). All of this feeds into strategic decisions on where to position your boat and tactical decisions of how to do so.

It looks crazy boring from the outside but if you get into it, it’s an activity that is intensely mental as well as physical and requires a very broad set of skills.

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adriand 4 days ago | parent [-]

That sounds like so much fun. How much of a demand does it place on you physically, ie how fit do you need to be to do it well?

	▲	neom 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I started sailing in high school and I was fat and out of shape but I was good and I was told I could have been very good. The joy of sailboat racing as the comment above made very clear, it's a brain game. If you're interested you can learn to sail, and race, pretty much anywhere with water, most places have some club or group that is racing Lasers, it's a good place to learn, how fit you need to be depends how far you want to go but it's not the primary factor in being good as far as I can tell (I'm an ok sailor these days, but some of the folks in here are clearly very good).
	▲	OldManAndTheCpp 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Counterintuitively, the bigger the boat the less the fitness requirement. Small boats (dinghies) require crew weight in certain places (“hiking” as far out to windward as possible) and have less mechanical advantage in the boat systems. Larger boats, the forces scale out of the human range quickly and the crew relies on winches and pulleys to move the sails.