Race Skippers Meeting Courtesy By Morgan Stinemetz
Hey, guys, let’s just touch on common courtesy for a few minutes. It won’t take long. It will be painless, I promise. If you don’t race, you don’t need to read any further. This is about racing.
W
ell, actually, it’s about before the racing ever starts. It’s about the skippers’ meeting. Remember the last one you attended and could make any sense of? I cannot. Here we are at a regatta that we have paid good money to enter and the skippers’ meeting is a buzz of extraneous noise. Here we are at a regatta we hopefully have well prepared our boats for, and the person who is welcoming us to the regatta, with the aid of a microphone no less, cannot be heard over the inconsiderate conversations sailors are having with each other. Here we are, having budgeted the time to attend a mandatory part of the regatta, and we have not one clue what anyone in charge has said, is saying or will say. Two things need to happen. Either skippers’ meetings need to be curtailed or we, the racing sailors and the racing crews, need to learn to shut up. I prefer the latter. If you cannot shut up, don’t come to the skippers’ meeting. Stay away so that you will not inconvenience the rest of the sailors. Stay away so that you will not demonstrate rude behavior to the volunteers on the race committee who have worked their butts off, come long distances on their own dime and put in countless hours of free time so that
your regatta will come off without a hitch. Stay away so that when anything important is covered at the skippers’ meeting, you won’t be there to recognize it. If you won’t listen, don’t show up; there’s no need to. Most yacht clubs are big enough and have more than one bar, so you and your garrulous buddies can just go some place else to talk about whatever it is that is so important that you’ll inconsiderately override what race officials are trying to get across to people who have taken their own time to come to the meeting. These racers believe the meeting is for a purpose other than general conversation between racers. These people are there to acquire some information that will make the upcoming race more enjoyable or more competitive. The speakers could be dispensing important safety information that no one can understand because of the noise level. If you are talking when you should be listening, then you’ll never know. What
is worse, the people standing next to you will never know either. Usually, there’s a free keg at the skippers’ meeting. It’s a nice touch. It says, “Welcome. Have a good time.” It would be interesting to leave the tapping of the free keg up to the regatta chairman, depending on the amount of courtesy he or she received from the crowd during the skippers’ meeting. No courtesy, no beer. If a quiet and attentive group of sailors made the announcements easy, then a ceremonial tapping of the keg would follow. If there is one thing that will make sailors police their own kind, restore order to what has become pre-race anarchy, it is the grim specter of having a full keg of beer sitting right out there in front, beads of condensation rolling down its sides like drops of liquid silver, and the possibility of having none of that golden nectar flow from the keg into a 16-ounce cup because the skippers’ meeting was unruly. I think that the universal, internal order that would immediately come to skippers’ meetings when presented with such a challenge would make members of Hitler’s Gestapo look like Camp Fire Girls. Of course, regatta officials would have to get the skippers’ meeting off on time, keep it short and to the point, answer any questions intelligently and succinctly and then pronounce the tap. If the sailors deserved it. This plan is flawless.