Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The hard life on the rental beach

I've never worked at renting out sailboats, in fact I've never rented a sailboat. But I imagine most days on the rental beach, the conversation goes like this;

Sun-bleached blonde rental dude, "How much sailing have you done?"
Pasty white Northern dude, "Oh I sail all the time back at home!"

And then the rental dude watches the pasty white Northern dude flail away just off the beach; in irons, out of irons, heeled over, in irons, maybe a capsize, and the rental dude gets in the motor skiff and hauls him in.

The caption for the following video says it all;
"This is one of our clients who went sailing with a GoPro on his head. He capsized and lost the GoPro, now, three months later we found it. This is his story..."


Can you sail? from Simon kearns on Vimeo.

I sense some real trepidation when watching the body language of the girlfriend/wife (anytime a person plunks down in a corner of the boat and rigidly holds that position = "I don't know about this" which is an astute observation given the sailing skills of her skipper). I fear this incident has put her off sailing forever.
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4 comments:

  1. dorymanJanuary 11, 2012 at 10:32 AM

    I guess he didn't drown, which is what it looks like.

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  2. TillermanJanuary 11, 2012 at 10:37 AM

    I have rented boats and been to resorts where boat "rental" is included in the package. I hope I don't sound arrogant when I say that I often have the reverse experience.


    Sun-bleached blonde rental dude, "Have you sailed a Laser before? It's really windy out there today."

    Pasty white Northern dude (me) looking at the wind and seeing about 12-15 knots, wants to say "I've been sailing Lasers since about 10 years before you were born and have sailed world championships in winds about twice as strong as this and in waves taller than you."

    But usually pasty white northern dude (me) says something like, "Um. Yes. I've done a bit of Laser sailing before. I think I'll be OK."

    ReplyDelete
  3. JoeJanuary 11, 2012 at 12:55 PM

    That was awesome. Funny thing, back when I taught beginning dinghy sailing, I would cringe whenever a sun-bleached blonde guy from Florida would tell me that he really knew how to sail but needed to take the class because a person in the office didn't believe him. "I sailed Hobies in Florida." (this happened with about 10 different Floridians named Todd) None of them knew a thing about sailing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Simon KearnsJanuary 12, 2012 at 8:04 AM

    Really glad that you found my video! This was a fun day at our beach!!!

    ReplyDelete