Enoch’s Thoughts

In the 5 years I’ve been sailing, I have thought of at least a dozen sailing situations which could serve as life lessons. Here’s one that struck me recently.

Like any discipline, sailing has its own collection of unique terminology, much of it going back centuries. For example, what looks like a “rope” to a landlubber might be a sheet, a halyard, a rode, or a line. A ship, of course, has a port side and a starboard side, a bow and a stern.

Since sailing craft are powered by wind, there are many terms to describe wind and wind direction. The side of a boat that the wind is blowing toward is, naturally, the windward side. Not so obviously, the other side is the leeward side. Even less obvious is the pronunciation: loo’-erd.

Lee shore

Generally leeward implies calm and peaceful, but there is a notable exception. Historically, the term “lee shore” struck fear into the heart of a sailor. A lee shore is on the leeward side of the boat. That means that the wind is blowing the boat directly toward shore. This is not a good thing.

If a skilled crew realizes the situation soon enough, and the boat is nimble enough, they can sail the boat at an angle into the wind, tacking back and forth, pulling away from the shore slightly with each tack. In his great Master and Commander sailing series, Patrick O’Brian calls this “clawing off the lee shore.”

Another option for dealing with a lee shore is simply to anchor securely and wait until the wind shifts. Of course, anchoring itself has challenges, particularly under a stressful condition, such as being blown toward a lee shore.

Grounded

The worst outcome is for the boat to ground itself on the lee shore. Now wind direction, wind speed, tides and tidal currents all conspire to make freeing a grounded ship very challenging.

One way of freeing a grounded ship is physically pull it off of the grounding shore. A heavy rope called a hawser is attached to a fixed object farther off shore. Ideally another ship, firmly anchored, is used.

In the absence of another ship, an anchor may be placed in small ship’s boat to be rowed off shore, where the anchor is firmly secured on the sea floor. Then the hawser or anchor line is pulled from on board the grounded ship, as it tries to free itself, usually with a powered reel called a windlass.

The term for this latter process is “kedging” or “kedging off.” A generic way to describe it might be to say that an immobile entity (e.g., a ship) can be freed by the assistance of another vessel.

Kedging partner

My spouse discovered an analogous use of “kedging” in a book she read recently. The chapter was about exercise, and how to motivate yourself. The notion of kedging in this context is similar to having an exercise partner, or someone else to whom you are accountable, but it seems to me that it’s a little different. There’s no explicit cajoling or intentional motivational involved. It’s more subtle. If one of us doesn’t feel like exercising, but the other does, the exerciser serves as a positive form of encouragement. We each have different exercise and motivational cycles, so we don’t always exercise at the same time, nor do we do the same exercise. But we both succumb to the “I don’t want to do it right now” syndrome. I guess we are immune to traditional motivation tactics, having seen most of them many times over, but the simple fact that the other person is finding time to work out is encouraging to the “lazy” one, which, admittedly, is usually me.

Not only does it work for exercise, but we have we have also applied it to other endeavours, such as eating right, working in the yard, cleaning up the house, all sorts of tasks where extra motivation is sometimes (often, in my case) needed.

I think for different people at different stages of life, different ways of avoiding the lee shore may be appropriate. If you are foresighted, you’ll see it coming and can steer around it. If you are nimble, you can claw yourself off of it. If you are patient, anchor and wait for the wind to change. But if you are fortunate enough to find a kedging partner, you are blessed indeed.

The image is the USS Chesapeake, by F Muller, from the Navy Art Collection, via Wikimedia Commons. Quoting from Wikimedia, “This image is a work of a sailor or employee of the U.S. Navy, taken or made during the course of the person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.”