News & Views for Southern Sailors - Southwinds Magazine

Bubba Clears Up Youth Sailing ConundrumIt appears, at least from the news stories thathave been circulating in the sailing media forsome time, that younger sailors are notgravitating to the sport—a sport for life—inthe quantity of years gone by, when youngstersonce approached sailing as if it was theHoly Grail.Back in the olden days, junior sailingwas the door that led to tony social contacts,a coterie of friends who made you part of their augustgroup because you sailed, gorgeous girls from moneyedfamilies, yacht club memberships in places like Greenwichand Larchmont, possible Ivy League college opportunitiesand, if you were really good, your name eventually gotplaced on the letterhead of a New York law firm or the doorto a corner office in a building on Wall Street.If you made the right contacts and sailed well enough,you got to know people like Olin Stephens, BriggsCunningham, Bob Mosbacher, Sam Merrick, Joe Jessup, BillFicker and other men whose yachting and social credentialswere as unimpeachable as bullion from the U.S. Mint.These days, apparently, the growth of sailing as a sportis suffering from a case of the slows. Certainly, today’syouth has far more distractions to deal with than theirgrandfathers did. Some of them are electronic. Kids todayare hooked on text messaging as low-life junkies used toget brought to the dungeons of mortality by awful stuff likeheroin. Text messaging is legal. Crystal meth, on the otherhand, is not, but it’s out there and as available as an iPhone.All you need is money and a need. Someone will help youalong the road to perdition for a small profit.The subject of sailors who are young enough to take upthe sport and eventually become good at it, if they have theskills, smarts, coaching and the will, was on the mind oflive-alone, live-aboard sailor Bubba Whartz as we bothsipped beers at The Blue Moon Bar one afternoon thisspring, when the weather was warmer than we had wantedand the funky darkness of The BlueMoon seemed preferable to the abundanceof scalding sunlight outside.The light and the heat got me tothinking about the summer seasonhere in Florida when senior citizensand members of the AARP regularly getinto fistfights and duels with furledumbrellas (touché!) over shaded parking places.“The sort of universal buzz, Bubba,” I said to the liveaboard,live-alone sailor and skipper of the ferro-cementsloop Right Guard, “is that young people are turning awayfrom youth sailing these days like Muslims at a pig roast.”“Yeah, I’ve heard that, too.” Bubba replied. “Some saythere are too many choices in other areas. Some guys areinto computers now. They never get sunburned. The winddoesn’t die on them and leave them sitting still on a pondwhose surface looks as glassy as a mirror. Older guys getinto cars, or start dreaming of them at about age 14. Theyhave a need for speed. Sailing isn’t their avenue, theirvenue. Fifty years ago we didn’t have skateboards, go-carts,snowboards, text messaging, cell phones, parents whopicked you up at the school bus stop so you didn’t have towalk three blocks to your home, movies aimed at teenagers,MP3 players and ear buds. There were far fewer distractionsback then. Nowadays, there‘s serious competition for theattention of American youth, a collective group not knownfor having the longest attention span in the world.”“Then you are saying that youth sailing is in a world of hurt?”“I never said that,” Bubba grumped.“You intimated it,” I replied.“If I get intimate with someone, they’ll know it,” Bubbacrowed. Our discussion had veered off the tracks like a longtrain of coal cars with a broken braking system on a downhillgrade. Conversationally, this was “The Wreck of the Old 97.”“Look, Bubba,” I protested, “I’m not going to debatesemantics with you. It seems sailing is not attracting the minor12 May 2012 SOUTHWINDS www.southwindsmagazine.com