To the uninitiated, sailing can be a confusing set of line pulling rituals with little apparent cause and effect. A good teacher can save seasons of floundering.

At the end of the dock, like a new face in the classroom, sits a new boat. Well, maybe not new in terms of fresh-from-the-factory type new, but new as in new-to-your-marina new. Later, a new face on the pier. Two and two still make four, so it isn’t hard to figure out, and yup, there goes the new owner to the new boat. After giving the guy enough time to get comfortable, you saunter to the end of the dock and introduce yourself. After a few pleasantries, you start to get a little more information. Yup, just bought the boat, and nope, hasn’t had time to learn that much about her. The next bit of information, you could almost see coming. No, this is his first boat and he has never sailed in his life.

And there it sits. You force yourself to shut up and turn the conversation back to the boat and the systems, and other important things, but the “never sailed in his life” is right there, in the front of your brain. After you are back onboard your own boat, you start thinking back to the time when you had said the very same thing. There are several ways that people come to learn how to sail. Of course, the best way to learn is to take a sailing course with a qualified instructor, and get certified--by far the safest and most time efficient way to do it. I would also hazard a guess that it is not the most common way people learn. If you are just getting into sailing, please, let me be the first to encourage you save some floundering and enroll in a class.

I, however, am very bad at taking my own good advice. As a result, and because we happened to be on an inland lake when we started sailing, there was nothing to do but go to the local library, rent the tapes, read the books, scan the Internet, and get a copy of the Coast Guard requirements when we went to register the boat. Oh, there were dozens of folks that offered to go out and teach us how to sail, but somehow they never showed up when the time came to it. In desperation, we ventured forth on our own. If there is something more dismal than dismal failure, I have that first sail as an example. It took us three tries on three different days to get ourselves moving and finally, when we were seriously considering just parking our boat at the dock and making her a cabin on the lake, a friend came over with a couple hours to spend, and we set out. Luckily, our “methods” and what we should have been doing were not on completely opposite ends of the spectrum, and we gained self assuredness from having him verify most of what we had done, and only slightly tweak some of the rest. Since then we have moved from a small lake in Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico and put quite a few miles under our three successively larger keels. Do I consider myself an expert sailor? Hell, no! It never fails that whenever I start feeling cocky about my abilities, old Neptune finds a way to tap me on the shoulder.

I do, however, know that I know more than the guy down near the end of the pier with the “new” boat. If you are reading this, there is an odds-on probability that you do, too. The real question is; what to do with that knowledge disparity? Boiled down, there are three possible responses. They are Passive Negative, Active Negative, or Active Positive. I am sure that somebody is saying right now, “Well, what about Passive Positive?” I hold that there is no such thing.

First, Passive Negative. Sitting in your cockpit, you watch as this poor, unguided optimist (with or without the help of an equally clueless first mate) try with varying degrees of success or failure to get the boat away from the dock and headed to open water. Maybe you shake your head, maybe you chuckle, but you just thank your lucky stars that you still have your gelcoat intact and you aren’t going to be anywhere near where he is going to be for the rest of the day. Later, as you are sailing, you see him over too close to the shallows, performing a tack with all the fluidity and grace of an elephant in a tutu. You don’t really mean to do it but you just can’t help but laugh. You point him out to your shipmates and they join in the guffaws. Across the water, the newbie looks at the sleek sailboat gliding by and sees the crew pointing and laughing. At him. Still later, while you are enjoying a cold one while recounting the great sail you just returned from, your mainsail neatly flaked and your lines perfectly made up, you see this poor, hapless soul trying to navigate his boat back into his slip. He bounces off a piling, rebounds off the dock, and nearly goes swimming as he vaults to the dock to grab his lines. The Keystone Kops have nothing on this show! Chuckling, you turn to your buddies and mention that you have seen better landings from a dead seagull. You really didn’t realize your voice carried that far.

An observer’s smugness can be felt for miles and have lasting karmic implications. A better bet is a hands-on approach that explains why sailboats behave the way they do.

KNOW YE THIS! The existential powers-that-be take a dim view of this almost quiet self superiority bathing, so the next time you have friends over to impress, there will be an errant gust of wind just waiting for your “flawless docking”.

Then there is Active Negative. “Oh, no… there he goes again.” This time, the wind is carrying his stern precariously close to your boat. You have to protect your investment, so you loudly announce that his feeble attempt at undocking is going to cost him dearly if he smashes into you! Grabbing a boathook you give his stern a hearty push to fend him off, even though he had stopped moving towards you. Heck, you had to go get the boathook, you might as well use it! For that matter, he needs to learn to drive that damn boat of his, you were just giving him a little more incentive! Later, as you are motoring out of the marina, you see our new sailor, dead in the water, trying to raise his mainsail. The boat is beam to the wind and he is flogging like a blanket on a clothesline. Worst of all is that he is blowing right across your present course. Doesn’t this guy have the brains to know you have to be pointed into the wind to raise a sail, and for that matter, why is there nobody in the cockpit steering the thing? This is just too much. To avoid this idiot, you power up and steer upwind of him, going just a little too fast and maybe a little too close. You can hardly be held responsible for your wake nearly knocking him off the boat since he didn’t have the boom under control. At least you were nice enough to point out to him (and everybody else within a quarter mile earshot) that only an idiot would try to put up a sail right where everybody else (you) was having to navigate! After your pleasant sail, you get all your friends together to stand on the dock to watch this fool come crashing into his slip. Laughing and joking at his misfortunes, you explain in a loud voice, all the things he is doing wrong.

Now for all of you that wondered about Passive Positive, an explanation. I can happily say that I survived the ‘60s with a few of my memory cells intact. I remember one of the mantras from that day saying something to the effect that if you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem. This is one of those examples that bring that mantra back with a resounding reality thud. Assume for a moment that you are the newbie. You look down the pier as you are bouncing from piling to piling on your way out. All you see are smiling faces and hearty waves. Hmmm… guess everybody does it like that. Later, as you are trying to make the pointy end move so the sail goes from one side to the other, you see a boat do the same maneuver with what looks like effortless efficiency. “I must be the biggest dope that ever thought he could sail if I screw something that easy up this badly,” you think to yourself. After the bow bounces off the dock for the fourth time in as many tries and you nearly herniated yourself getting to the pier to retrieve a dock line before the boat floats back out into the bay, you see people nodding and smiling like so many bobblehead dolls. You just want to go down inside your boat and hide for the rest of the day, but instead you force yourself to go to the club. Inside you are greeted by a throng of people that inform you that you are not the only person that had to bounce off a dock or flub your way through a tack. So now you know that everyone WAS watching you, and that they think you are an idiot, albeit the latest in a long line of idiots. They might be laughing with you, but they are still laughing. From the newbies perspective, Passive Positive sure looks an awful lot like Passive Negative.

Helping new sailors means more smiles all around, on the dock and on the water.

So, on to Active Positive. What’s in it for you? I’ll come back to that in a moment. The first thing that should go into this person’s head is an appreciation for his boat and its systems. If you have a boat like the newbie’s, great. If not, wing it. Help him out by starting off with a congratulations and focusing on the positive saying something like “Hey, good standing rigging! You see how all those wires are holding up the mast? That one there is called….” And off you go. Pretty soon, the two of you are crawling around the engine compartment discussing the finer points of what a shaft seal is and how to adjust it. In just a few minutes you have become both this guy’s newest friend and the most knowledgeable sailor in his world. Yes, he will come to you for advice and maybe a hand as he learns by experience all the ins and outs of a sailboat and it will probably impinge on your hectic schedule, but the more he knows the safer he and his boat become. Now comes the part about getting it to move. It is tempting at this point to take the new guy on your boat and show him how you do it. Don’t do it! He’s trying to learn HIS boat, remember? Ask him if he minds if you try steering it in and out of the dock a couple times. Nothing is worse than giving advice (slightly louder and more exasperated each time) over and over only to find out that it actually is the boat and not the technique that is preventing your student from performing this most mundane of tasks. After you are sure you can do it, show him how it is done. Then let him tack, jibe and dock, while you talk him through it. Finally, stand back and watch, letting him know that if he has any questions, you are right there to answer them. After he has gotten it down, tell him about all the things that can make the task more complex, like a cross wind, or a strong current, or the dozen or so other things that can and will go wrong. Remember, you are trying to prepare him, not scare the bejabbers out of him.

Remember how you wished you had been taught to sail? Calm day, light wind, and someone who would tell you as well as show you? Try being the old salt you wished you had had. Let him try, let him succeed and even let him make a mistake or two so he will see that mistakes are not the end of the world. Slowly but surely, become rail meat until you sense that he is ready to solo, then let him go. Be around so he can ask questions after that, but remember that it is HIS learning curve, not yours. When he comes in, be there to toss him a line or walk in his bow. He will be very appreciative and will probably go through a litany of all the great new things he has been doing. It’s always great to have somebody to brag to, especially if they know what you are talking about.

Now for the “What’s in it for me?” part. First, you get to be the “smart friend” that he tells everybody about. Second, you will know that there is somebody else out there on the water that knows what they are doing. Third, you can bank on somebody being there to help you handle lines when that gale suddenly hits as you are sliding back into your slip. And fourth, there is that warm glow of self-satisfaction you will feel for actually being helpful to another human being. The best way to learn something is to teach it. You have to know something inside and out to be able to tell somebody else how it works or how it is done. Helping the new guy is a great way to give yourself a refresher course on something that is becoming such second nature that you don’t really think about what you are doing anymore. And you get all that for just investing a few hours in turning the Newbie into the Dockmate. Not to mention the free beer…