On Mar 1, 5:43 am, wrote:
What do you "unlearn"?
For some racing sailors, it's difficult to relax while cruising but my
observations seem to indicate that it's a personality issue, those
individuals find it difficult to relax *any*where.

Well, attitude is certainly an issue. Some people will like cruising
who don't like racing and the reverse and some will like both...
Racing and cruising are very different. But I wasn't really thinking
about attitude as such. At least in my case the majority of my racing
was done a few hours at a time in the day with the occasional week or
10 days of day races and an an occasional fully crewed long distance
race. When I jumped into cruising full time my fist leg was from
Brisbane to Noumea and my second was Noumea to Opua. While those
aren't particularly long passages by Pacific standards they are
marathons by racing standards. Moreover, I undertook them with just
my girlfriend who was a novice sailor. Just in terms of the sailing,
the mistakes I made on those legs were a result of applying a
sprinter's skill set to a marathon. I won't bore you all with the
gory details but on the first leg I shrimped the kite and on the
second I averaged more than eleven (yes 11) sail changes a day.
Needless to say, my wallet, my psyche and my body all suffered a lot.
While I still set outboard sheets and barberhaulers and run the kite
on a fairly regular basis, as a result of those first two legs I
retrained myself in some pretty fundamental ways. Tweaking is fine
when it amuses, but pace and rhythm are key to passage making. The
pace and rhythm that were engraved in my brain as "sailing" from day
racing weren't just inappropriate to the kind of long distance
cruising that I took up, they were downright dangerous. And it is
that that I am thinking of when I say I had to "unlearn" racing.
There's also a bunch of stuff that I never learned or only thought I
knew from racing that I think are important to safe and enjoyable
cruising. That's a story for another day. But, IMO, the intersection
of day racing skills and long distance cruising skills isn't all that
big...

-- Tom.