Nature’s onward march to better itself

In 2020, Scuttlebutt editor Craig Leweck observed how sailing gear development was impacting participation:

“When we look at sails, cordage, electronics, and hardware, everything has contributed to an increase in performance, but an increase in cost too. At some point people walk away for an alternative recreation, and for those that pull out the credit card to buy the better sailing stuff, they are all even again, having about the same amount of fun, but for more money.”

Protecting the herd from the wolves has resistance, with this report by Brian Eiland:

Twenty-five years ago, I was a younger fellow aspiring to become a sailing yacht designer. I was particularly interested in ocean going, cruising boats. I would devour every reference I could find on what made sailboats work.

With keen interest, I followed new developments on the racing circuits, believing that this was the incubator of fresh new ideas to speed our progress across the seas. Surely this breeding ground would bring significant evolution to the sport of sailing and the art of designing.

“Au contraire” – I became disillusioned so soon.

Bruce King’s fantastic twin, asymmetrical, bilgeboard development, disappeared in little over a year. Professor Jerry Milgrams cat-ketches were afforded a similar welcome. Truely different sail rig innovations were totally discouraged, and numerous other design innovations were “rated” out of existence by handicap racing rules.

Ocean going boats were not being designed to “mother-ocean’s rules” but rather to some arbitrary, man-created, racer/cruiser rule.

No thanks, let me look elsewhere. A group out of England, the Amateur Yacht Research Society came to my attention. A relatively new group of multihull enthusiasts and their new publication, “Multihulls Magazine”, also caught my attention.

Here were some sources of true experimentation, innovation, and creativity; and subsequent evolution of the art of sailing, unbridled by handicap rules. Today, look at the French and their fantastic ocean racing boats – both mono- and multi-hull. Exciting innovation.

Evolution is nature’s onward march to better itself by slowly rejecting less efficient characteristics of the whole, and either replacing them with more efficient offspring, and/or redefining the whole as an entity. But change comes so slow in traditional sailing.

Look how long it took the traditionalist to adopt the fully battened mainsail that multihulls have long been exploiting for the better part of 25 years. Did they just resist acknowledging it because it was foreign to them, or was it the handicap rules? I suspect both, but there is no doubt to its superiority; ah evolution!