Command at sea and why it is serious

Stuart Greenfield, a RYA Yachtmaster and racing coach, offers a reminder that command at sea is serious:

There is a group that goes by the name The Foredeck Union. You may have encountered them online — a loose, self-appointed brotherhood of bowmen, pitmen, and mastmen who share a particular world view: that the people who do the actual work on a racing yacht are a different species from the people who stand at the back talking strategy.

Their memes are good. Their grievances are real. And their existence is funnier, and more historically loaded, than most of the afterguard will ever admit.

The boat goes forward. The people who make that happen are at the front. The people who take the credit are at the back. This arrangement is very old.

How old? Try the summer of 1930, on the Solent. King George V is at the helm of his beloved racing cutter Britannia, a black-hulled, 102-foot beauty that had been his father’s yacht before it was his, and which he had personally revived for racing a decade earlier.

Around him on the aft deck — the afterguard, in the language of the day — stood the gentlemen of the Royal Yacht Squadron. Forward of the mast, working the sails, the halyards, the headsails in whatever weather the Solent chose to deliver, were the professionals. Paid hands. Men who knew how to sail because sailing was their trade — fishermen in the winter, racing crew in the summer, hired for their muscle and their skill and generally not consulted about tactics. – Full report