I learned to race first and am now learning to cruise. And I’m glad I learned in that order. Cruising has a very specific set of skills that you’ll never learn racing. That stuff will be obvious and if you want to cruise, you’ll learn those skills.

But what is not obvious to cruisers is that racing teaches you how to handle your boat in many different and difficult conditions, with confidence. When you race you have to go from a specific place to another specific place and you don’t get to pick the weather. You’re often pushing your boat and are in high stress situations.

Often, cruisers will go out, when it’s nice, and turn on the motor when they can’t make their boat go the way they want it to go.

So, what happens when you’re out sailing and an unexpected storm rolls in? Because if you sail enough, especially offshore, it 100% without a doubt will happen. I’d honestly be pretty comfortable handling the boat through all but the worst weather, boat breaking weather. And even that, I would be confident in my safety gear and ability to contact support for a rescue. Because all of that is drilled into you as a seasoned racer. And I’ve been through some bad weather on the race course. I’ve had to make my boat go upwind in horrible sea state for hours on end while my crew is throwing up from sea sickness.

There are multiple occasions on which I’ve turned down sailing with cruisers because I just don’t trust that they have the skills or equipment to keep me safe should things go sideways.

Agreed. I used to race on a one design 34ft boats (steward 34s for the kiwis here). For the Thursday night rum racing they always casually divided up sailors amongst all the available boats and therefore the yacht squadron would refer people in town to them. So naturally we got a lot of cruisers on there around the world trips who wanted to try out racing. The most striking was the lack of urgency. Even though many were quite experienced sailors they were often worse than people who never sailed before. The newbies could be told to which as if your life depends on it and they would go full out, some of the cruisers not so much.

Yup - realised the knife wasn’t for show when we were out of control with a knotted spinnaker halyard headed for some rocks.