Natural Helmsman?

The conclusion of this article is that there is no such thing as a natural helmsman, while everything in life is learned, some people seem to have learned very well.

Loki’s helmsman Gordon Maguire is one of the best in the business. He has a

feel for driving a boat that allows him to react to changes in boat speed

instantly, long before the instruments tell him the Reichel Pugh 62 has

slowed that fraction of a knot.

There is no substitute for feel, he says. “The information from the

instruments is all historical. It takes four to five seconds for the

instruments to do the calculations from when the cause of the drop in speed

occurred. People who drive on the instruments are always four or five

seconds behind. They are reactive and the boat is slow. The brain is so much

faster at processing all the information coming in at once than the onboard

computers.

“Reacting early is as important going down wind as up. People tend to get

carried away as the boat accelerates down a wave, but you should already be

looking at the exit and how you will catch the next wave. I never look at

the dials going down wind.”

Maguire says that another problem with focussing too much on the dials is

that they are more likely to engage the front half of the brain, and the key

to driving fast is the subconscious.

“You have to get the intellect out of the way. We drive for long stretches

at a time but doing very precise things over and over. If you consciously

concentrated for that long you would go mad in half an hour. I switch my

mind off. I am not really concentrating. Sometimes I don’t know what has

happened in the last 30 minutes.

“It is like driving a car through an intersection that you go through all

the time. When you are through it you think, was there a green light? Did I

just drive through a red light? But subconsciously you saw a green light and

you did what you usually do without thinking.”

Yet while it is all about feeling the boat under you, Maguire doesn’t

believe that there is any such thing as a natural boat driver.

“Steering a yacht is totally unnatural, just like it is totally unnatural to

hit a golf ball. It is only natural if you practice teeing off thousands of

times. After a hundred thousand miles you know a boat is going to slow down

when it hits a wave and what to do about it.” — Read on:

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