On Mar 1, 5:37 pm, wrote:
... Hmmm.... please don't take this as an insult, because I don't mean it
to be... but your racing did not teach you to prioritize wisely.
"Getting there" is a goal for both cruising & racing, but the effort/
reward ratio is very different.

Ha! Racing taught me to win. For the racer it may be that winning
isn't everything, but losing is worse than nothing. Yes, you've gotta
finish to win and you'll note I finished those passages and quickly.
By racing standards I prioritized just fine. I've never head a racer
talk about effort/reward ratios, but if I did it would just make the
racer in me salivate. We eat the weak ones.

IMO, the intersection
of day racing skills and long distance cruising skills isn't all that
big...

Day racing not so much; however I will say again that it's easy to see
the difference in skills between racers & cruisers when watching them
maneuver in close quarters (which is a pretty big part of cruising).

A big part of cruising? Depends, I suppose. I'm a sailing addict and
I take my cruiser out day sailing and push her a bit and I take some
pride in my sailing as such. However, cruising as I practice it is
about 10% sailing and 90% hanging on the anchor... I sail more than
most cruisers I know. Maneuvering in close quarters under sail is a
pretty rare event for the typical world cruiser. Maybe it's different
for you... I get the feeling that we are talking about very different
kinds of cruising. When I was a teenager I occasionally made off with
my fathers old engineless Tartan 27 for a weekend of cruising on Lake
Ontario. I sailed it single handed on and off docks and moorings as a
matter of course. In that kind of cruising small boat handling skills
learned racing do get exercised. But that kind of sailing, neat
though it can be, is only a very small part of the universe of
cruising.

And point-to-point racing, whether in the ocean or in sheltered
waters, is essentially the same as cruising except that risk/effort/
reward priorities are different...

No. I think that's just plain wrong within the context of long range
ocean cruising. The passage making is the smallest part of the
cruising for most of us.

-- Tom.