Competetive spirit

Slow_boat

Slow_boat

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In Sailing today there is a letter from a chap basically saying that we need to inject more of a competative spirit into youngsters to get them to take up sailing.

Personally, I hate racing and competative sport and would never have taken to sailing if that was the prevailing attitude when I was a kid.

What does the furum think?

p.s. I apologise for spelling and grammer, I've got varifocals for the first time and they take some getting used to!
 
When we were kids you should have seen the rowing races.

Pretty bloody affairs - but great fun.

Donald
 
I think it's a general point rather than just sailing. Kids are brought up today in this namby pamby atmosphere which says they are not going to run races on the sports field because some poor little fat kid is going to loose and be psychologically damaged. What they should be taught is that life isn't fair and it's a very competitive world. So if you want to be a winner, slim down, get fit, and try harder!
 
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What they should be taught is that life isn't fair and it's a very competitive world. So if you want to be a winner, slim down, get fit, and try harder!

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I couldnt agree more
 
When I first started sailing at school, because it was the games afternoon it had to be a competitive sport (none of this namby pamby everyone is equal bull in those days!)

However, me and my mate Dave had no inclination for racing so we used to quietly drop off the back of the pack somewhere up near the top mark and spend the rest of the afternoon pottering around the shoreline of the reservoir. Often, we'd be enjoying ourselves so much that we'd forget the time and have to be ordered back in by an irate games master who'd come looking for us in the rescue boat!

Happy happy days!

My comptetive sailing record reads "last, DNF, DNF, last DNF, last ..... {and so on} last, DNF, FIRST!

The first was the East Midlands Inter-Schools Sailing Championship Mirror class in, oh, around 1975, 76 ish (Hmm, can't have been 76, there wasn't any water! Might have been 77 then) when I was crewed with the extremely competent, very competitive and all round nice chap (except when on the water!!) Graham Bailey who, I believe, later went on to skipper big stuff. I just sat there up front and did exactly what I was told and watched in utter amazement as we thoroughly trounced the opposition in all four races. Very satisfying too although I couldn't claim the least bit of credit for it.

The funniest bit was that after we'd won three races comfortably and therefore the cup (being allowed to drop one race) the organisers from some of the other schools wanted us to pull out of the fourth race to give someone else a chance. Graham wasn't having any of that and he was sufficiently irritated by it to start really trying and in the fourth race we lapped the entire flippin' field!!!
 
Yep, can't stand the bad manners that so often goes with competition. Agree with MagnaCarta it is a sense of adventure that I would most like to see fostered. Nothing wrong with racing tho, if the attitude is right. Sad that with political correctness, and Health and Safety, we are bugered both ends.
 
Aye, adventure is the thing.

Kids do want competition, but alas not the sporting type. Round here, the kids want to be 'most respected' by their peers, which means wearing over priced brands, having the latest phone, PSP etc etc. The trouble is, they get thousands of advertising messages a day, telling them that they can't be content unless they purchase x, y and z. And they believe it all.

What sailing can teach these kids is that if you're warm, dry, fed, and out of immediate danger, life is sweet!
 
For 40 years I considered myself to be uncompetitive, even though I competed in surf competitions. These were really just an excuse for meeting friends, having a good time on the water and a few beers in the evening. On non-surfing weekends I sailed various dinghies in races but never took it very seriously.

Then I discovered catamarans! Within a year I gave up surfing, raced every week and later graduated to Nationals, Europeans and Worlds. From there my sailing horizons broadened and I took up cruising. Without the competition I would never have bought a cruising boat and would have missed out on one of the greatest and most rewarding of activities.

I think many children can be inspired by competition but it is necessary to find the right activity. Not that I was a child, perhaps I'm just a late developer.
 
Nothing like racing to sharpen skills - you need to gybe a spinnaker at a mark with boats round you to know how to cope with a cruising boat. You can cruise all your life if you like, but I've never sailed with anyone who's never raced who was in full sympathy with their boat.

Competitive pleasure I say; who can enjoy him(/her)self the most.
 
What utter bilge!

I used to enter dinghy races (Cherubs, Contender, Moth, Unicorn etc) when I was a kid but rarely finished a race because I enjoyed going fast more than I did trying to beat others. I used to crew Cowes week and the Fastnet but never on a boat where competition was taken to seriously.

It is strange, then, that I have thousands of low stress blue-sea miles with no major breakages, whereas sailing with competative people is so stressful and full of potential danger that I just don't do it any more.

My brother still races and breaks gear on a regular basis. His reasoning is that you must press to the limit to win.

I regard that as being un-seamanlike and dangerous.

A racer will carry sail for the lulls and hope to spill wind in the squalls whereas a cruiser is more likely to carry sail to suit the squalls and make tea in the lulls.
 
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